Part 18

This credulity begins, like charity, at home. Whenever a war breaks out, there is much talk of the disingenuousness of “enemy” writers; but the sophisms which are really perilous to each country are those of native growth--those which lurk deep in the minds of its own people, ready, when the season summons them, to spring up to what Sydney Smith called “the full bloom of their imbecility.” That egregious maxim, _si vis pacem para bellum_, “If you wish for peace, prepare for war,” is now somewhat discredited; but it did its “bit” in causing the war, and after a temporary retirement will doubtless be brought forward again when circumstances are more favourable. It is perhaps as silly a saying as any invented by the folly of man. Imagine a ward of lunatics, who, having got their keepers under lock and key by a reversal of position such as that described in one of Poe’s fantastic stories, should proceed to safeguard peace by arming themselves with pokers and legs of tables. For a time this adoption of the _para bellum_ principle might postpone hostilities; but even lunatics would be wasting time and temper in thus standing idly arrayed, and it is certain that sooner or later that madhouse would realize its Armageddon. For opportunity in the long run begets action; and whether you put a poker into a lunatic’s hand, or a sword into a soldier’s, the result will eventually be the same.

Or perhaps we are told that war is “a great natural outburst,” mysterious in its origin, beyond human control: the creed expressed in Wordsworth’s famous assertion that carnage is “God’s daughter.” Could any superstition be grosser? There is nothing mysterious or cataclysmic in the outbreak of modern wars. Antipathies and rivalries of nations there are, as of individuals, and of course if these are cherished they will burst into flame; but it is equally true that if they are wisely discountenanced and repressed they will finally subside. We do not excuse an individual who pleads his jealousy, his passion, his thirst for revenge as a reason for committing an assault, though personal crime is just as much an “outbreak” as war is. There seems to be an idea that when such passions exist it is better for them to “come out.” On the contrary, the only hope for mankind is that such savage survivals should _not_ come out, but that “the ape and tiger” should be steadily repressed until they die.

But “_this_ war was justifiable.” In every nation the belief prevails that, though war in general is to be deprecated, any particular contest in which they may be engaged is righteous, inevitable, one of pure self-defence, in their own words, “forced on us.” Even if this were true, in some instances, in bygone years when international relations were less complex, and when it was possible for two countries to quarrel and “fight it out,” like schoolboys, without inflicting any widespread injury upon others, it is wholly different now; for the calamity caused by a modern war is so great that it hardly matters, to the world at large, who, in schoolboy phrase, “began it.” It takes two to make a quarrel; and the two are jointly responsible for the disaster that their quarrel entails upon mankind.

The more one looks into these fallacies about fighting--and their number is legion--one is compelled to believe that the spirit which chiefly underlies the tendencies to war, apart from the direct incentive of commercial greed, is one of Fear. Hatred is more obvious, but it is fear which is at the bottom of the hatred. This alone can account for the extraordinary shortsightedness with which all freedom, both of speech and of action, is trampled on, when a war is once commenced. In such circumstances, society at once reverts, in its panic alarm for its own safety, to what may be called the Ethics of the Pack. Of all the absurd charges levelled against those objectors to military service who refused to sacrifice their own principles to other persons’ ideas of patriotism, the quaintest was that of “cowardice”; for, with all respect to the very real physical bravery of those who fought, it must be said that the highest courage shown during the war was that of the persons who were denounced and ridiculed as cravens. It was a moment when it required much more boldness to object than to consent; one of those crises to which the famous lines of Marvell are applicable:

When the sword glitters o’er the judge’s head, And fear has coward churchmen silencéd, Then is the poet’s time; ’tis then he draws, And single fights forsaken virtue’s cause.

The despised “Conchie” was, in truth, the hero and poet of the occasion.

Again, it must be owing to fear, above all other impulses, that when a war is over, the conquerors, instead of offering generous terms--a course which would be at least as much to their own advantage as to that of the vanquished--enforce hard and ruinous conditions which rob them of a permanent peace. This they do from what Leigh Hunt calls

The consciousness of strength in enemies, Who must be strain’d upon, or else they rise.

It was this that caused the Germans, fifty years ago, to dictate at Paris those shameful terms which have now been their own undoing; and it was this which caused the French, in their hour of victory, to imitate the worst blunders of their enemies.

We are but a world of savages, or we should see that in international as in personal affairs generosity is much more mighty than vengeance. Some years before the war there appeared in the _Daily News_ an article by its Paris correspondent, the late Mr. J. F. Macdonald, which even at the time was very impressive, and which now, as one looks back over the horrors of the war, has still greater and more melancholy significance. He called it “A Dream.” He pointed out that the sole obstacle to a friendly relationship between France and Germany, and the chief peril to European peace, was the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine.

“During my fifteen years’ residence in France I have often dreamt a dream--so audacious, so quixotic, so startling, that I can hardly put it down on paper. It was that the German Emperor restored the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine to France.... What a thrill throughout the world, what a heroic and imperishable place in history for the German Emperor, were the centenary of Waterloo to be commemorated by the generous, the magnificent release of Alsace-Lorraine.”

A dream, indeed, and of a kind which at present flits through the ivory gate; but a true dream in the sense that it conveyed a great psychological fact, and of the sort which will yet have to be fulfilled, if ever the world is to become a fit place for civilized beings--not to mention “heroes”--to dwell in.

But let us return to realities and to the Cave-Man. However irrational the Hatred which surged up in so many hearts, it nevertheless had power to trample every humane principle under foot. That gorilla-like visage which looked out at us from numbers of human faces meant that our humanitarian cause, if not killed or mortally injured by the war-spirit, was at least, in military parlance, “interned.” What we were advocating was a more sympathetic conduct of life with regard to both our human and our non-human fellow-beings, and what we mainly relied on, and aimed at developing by the aid of reason, was the compassionate instinct which cannot view any suffering unmoved. We had advanced to a point where some sort of reprobation, however inadequate, was beginning to be felt for certain barbarous practices; and though we could not claim to have done more than curb the ferocious spirit of cruelty that had come down to us from the past, it was at least some satisfaction that limits were beginning to be imposed on it. What result, then, was inevitable, when, in a considerable area of the world, all such ethical restrictions were suddenly and completely withdrawn, and mankind was exhorted to take a deep draught of aboriginal savagery?

Terrible as are the wrongs that countless human beings have to suffer, when great military despotisms are adjusting by the sword their “balance of power,” and exhibiting their entire lack of balance of mind, still more terrible are the cruelties inflicted on the innocent non-human races whose fate it is to be involved in the internecine battles of men. In a message addressed to the German people, the Kaiser was reported to have said: “We shall resist to the last breath of man and of horse.” As if the horse could enjoy the comforts of “patriotism,” and were not ruthlessly sacrificed, like a mere machine, for a quarrel in which he had neither lot nor part! More suffering is caused to animals in a day of war than in a year of peace; and so long as wars last it is idle to suppose that a humane treatment of animals can be secured. Do the opponents of blood-sports, of butchery, of vivisection, wonder at the obstinate continuance of those evils? Let them consider what goes on (blessed by bishops) in warfare, and they need not wonder any more.

“Do men gather figs from thistles?” It seemed as if some of our sages expected men to do so, if one might judge from the anticipations of a regenerated Europe that was to arise after the close of the war! Already we see the vanity of such prophesyings--of making a sanguinary struggle the foundation of idealistic hopes. Not all the wisdom of all the prophets can alter the fact that like breeds like, that savage methods perpetuate savage methods, that evil cannot be suppressed by evil, nor one kind of militarism extinguished by another kind of militarism. Hell, we say, is paved with good intentions; but those who assumed that the converse was true, and that the pathway of their good intentions could be paved with hell, have been woefully disillusioned by the event.

There is a too easy and sanguine expectation of “good coming out of evil.” People talked as if Armageddon would naturally be followed by the millennium. But history shows that modern wars leave periods of exhaustion and repression. “Reconstruction” is a phrase now much in vogue, but reconstruction is not progress. If two neighbouring families, or several families, quarrel and pull down each others’ houses, there will certainly have to be “reconstruction”; but it will be a long time before they are even as well off as they were before. So it is with nations. The question is: Does war quicken men’s sympathies or deaden them? To some extent, both, according to the difference in their temperaments; but it is to be feared that those who are quickened by experience of war to hatred of war are but a small minority, compared with those who are rendered more callous.

One great obstacle to the discontinuance of bloodshed is the incorrigible sentimentality with which war has always been regarded by mankind. “Who was it,” exclaimed the poet Tibullus, “that first invented the dreadful sword? How savage, how truly steel-hearted was he!” But surely the reproach is less deserved by the early barbarian who had the ingenuity to discover an improved method of destruction than by the so-called civilized persons who, for the sake of lucre, prolong such inventions long after the date when they should have been abandoned. “War is hell,” men say, and continue to accept it as inevitable. But if war is hell, who but men themselves are the fiends that people it?

In like manner the outbreak of war is often called “a relapse into barbarism,” but rather it is a proof that we have never emerged from barbarism at all; and the knowledge of that fact is the only rational solace that can be found, when we see the chief nations of Europe flying at each other’s throats. For if this were a civilized age, the prospect would be without hope; but seeing that we are not civilized--that as yet we have only distant glimpses of civilization--we can still have faith in the future. For the present, looking at the hideous lessons of the war, we must admit that the growth of a humaner sentiment has been indefinitely retarded. We cannot advance at the same time on the path of militarism and of humaneness: we shall have to make up our minds, when the fit of savagery has spent itself, which of the two diverging paths we are to follow. And the moral of the war for social reformers will perhaps be this: that it is not sufficient to condemn the barbarities of warfare alone, as our pacifists have too often done. The civilized spirit can only be developed by a consistent protest against all forms of cruelty and oppression; it is only by cultivating a whole-minded reverence for the rights of all our fellow-beings that we shall rid ourselves of that inheritance of selfish callousness of which the militarist and imperialist mania is a part.[44]

Is it not time that we sent the Cave-Man back to his den--henceforth to be his sepulchre--and buried for ever that infernal spirit of Hatred which he brought with him from the pit?

XVI

POETRY OF DEATH AND LOVE

And Death and Love are yet contending for their prey. SHELLEY.

To look back over a long stretch of years, or to re-read the annals of a Society with which one has been closely associated, is to be reminded of the loss of many cherished comrades and friends. During the past decade, especially, there are few households that have not become more intimately associated with Death; but even in this matter, it would seem, the war, far from “making men think,” has thrown them back more and more on the ancient substitutes for thought, and on consolations which only console when they are quite uncritically accepted.

For though the ceaseless conflict between death and love has brought to the aid of mankind in this age, as in all ages, a host of comforters who, whether by religion or by philosophy, have made light of the terrors of the grave, they have as yet failed to supply the solace for which mankind has long looked and is still looking. They profess to remove “the sting of death,” but leave its real bitterness--the sundering of lover from lover, friend from friend--unmitigated and untouched.

Death is the eternal foe of love; and it is just because it is the foe of love, not only because it is the foe of life, that it is properly and naturally dreaded. Its sting lies not in the mortality, but in the separation. A lover, a friend, a relative, grieves, not because the loved one is mortal, still less because he himself is mortal, but because they two will meet no more in the relation in which they have stood to each other.

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead. They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed. I wept as I remembered how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.

It is useless to surmise, or to assert, that the spirit passes, after death, into other spheres of activity or of happiness; for, even if there were proof of this, it would in no way lessen the grief of those who are bereaved of the actual. It was long ago pointed out by Lucretius that even a renewed physical life would in any case be so different from the present life that it could not be justly regarded as in any true sense a continuance of it:

Nor yet, if time our scattered dust re-blend, And after death upbuild the flesh again-- Yea, and our light of life arise re-lit-- Can such new birth concern the Self one whit, When once dark death has severed memory’s chain?[45]

In like manner a future spiritual life could never compensate for the severance of love in _this_ life; for it is of the very essence of love to desire, not similar things, nor as good things, nor even better things, but the same things. As Richard Jefferies wrote: “I do not want change; I want the same old and loved things, the same wild flowers, the same trees and soft ash-green: the turtle-doves, the blackbirds, ... and I want them in the same place.”

And what is true of the nature-lover is not less true of the human-lover, be he parent, or brother, or husband, or friend. It is not a solace but a mockery of such passionate affection to assert that it can be compensated for its disruption in the present by a new but changed condition in the future. A recognition of this truth may be seen in Thomas Hardy’s poem, “He Prefers Her Earthly”:

... Well, shall I say it plain? I would not have you thus and there, But still would grieve on, missing you, still feature You as the one you were.

But this, it may be said, is to set love in rebellion against not death only, but the very laws of life. There is truth in such censure; and wisest is he who can so reconcile his longings with his destiny as to know enough of the sweetness of love without too much of the bitterness of regret. Perhaps, in some fairer society of a future age, when love is more generally shared, the sting of death will be less acute; but what centuries have yet to pass before that “Golden City” of which John Barlas sang can be realized?

There gorgeous Plato’s spirit Hangs brooding like a dove, And all men born inherit Love free as gods above; There each one is to other A sister or a brother, A father or a mother, A lover or a love.

Meantime it would almost seem that to the religious folk who assume a perpetuity of individual life, the thought of death sometimes becomes less solemn, less sacred, than it is to those who have no supernatural beliefs. The easy assurance of immortality to which friends who are writing letters of condolence to a mourner too often have recourse, is usually a sign less of sympathy than of the lack of it; for it is not sympathetic to repeat ancient formulas in face of a present and very real grief; indeed, it is in many cases an impertinence, when it is done without any regard to the views of the person to whom such solace is addressed. Among the professional ghouls who watch the death-notices in the papers, none, perhaps, are more callous--not even the would-be buyers of old clothes or artificial teeth--than the pious busybodies who intrude on homes of sorrow with their vacant tracts and booklets. Nay, worse: nowadays mourners are lucky if some spiritist acquaintance does not have a beatific vision of the lost one; for the dead seem to be regarded as a lawful prey by any one who sees visions and dreams dreams, and who is determined to call them as witnesses that there is no reality in the most stringent ordinances of nature:

Stern law of every mortal lot; Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear, And builds himself I know not what Of second life I know not where.

With much appropriateness did Matthew Arnold introduce his trenchant rebuke of human arrogance into a poem on the grave of a dog; for mankind has neither right nor reason to presume for itself an hereafter which it denies to humbler fellow-beings who share at least the ability to suffer and to love. Can any one, not a mere barbarian, who has watched the death of an animal whom he loved, and by whom he was himself loved with that faithful affection which is never withheld when it is merited, dare to doubt that the conditions of life and death are essentially the same for human and for non-human? Is an animal’s death one whit less poignant in remembrance than that of one’s dearest human friend? Must it not remain with us as ineffaceably?

That individual love should resent the thraldom of death may be unreasonable; but it is useless to ignore the fact of such resentment, or to proffer consolations which can neither convince nor console. From the earliest times the poets, above all others, have borne witness to love’s protest. Perhaps the most moving lyric in Roman literature is that short elegy written by Catullus at his brother’s grave, full of a deep passion which can hardly be conveyed in another tongue.

Borne far o’er many lands, o’er many seas, On this sad service, brother, have I sped, To proffer thee death’s last solemnities, And greet, though words be vain, the silent dead: For thou art lost, so cruel fate decrees; Ah, brother, from my sight untimely fled! Yet take these gifts, ordained in bygone years For mournful dues when funeral rites befell; Take them, all streaming with a brother’s tears: And thus, for evermore--hail and farewell!

A similar cry is heard in that famous passage of Virgil, where the bereaved Orpheus refuses to be comforted for the loss of his Eurydice. And nearly two thousand years later we find Wordsworth, a Christian poet, echoing the same lamentation:

... When I stood forlorn, Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more; That neither present time, nor years unborn, Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

Mark the reference to “years unborn.” Wordsworth was a believer in immortality; but immortality itself cannot restore what is past and gone. All the sages and seers and prophets, that have given mankind the benefit of their wisdom since the world began, have so far failed to provide the least crumb of comfort for the ravages of death, or to explain why love should be for ever built up to be for ever overthrown, and why union should always be followed by disseverance.

There may, of course, be a solution of this tragedy hereafter to be discovered by mankind; all that we know is that, as yet, no human being has found the clue to the mystery, or, if he has found it, has vouchsafed the knowledge to his fellow-mortals. For we must dismiss as idle the assertion that such things cannot be communicated in words. Anything that is apprehended by the mind can be expressed by the mouth--not adequately, perhaps, yet still, in some measure, expressed--and the reason why this greatest of secrets has never been conveyed is that, as yet, it has never been apprehended.

It is, doubtless, this lack of any real knowledge, of any genuine consolation, that drives mankind to seek refuge in the more primitive superstitions. Something more definite, more tangible, is not unnaturally desired; and therefore men turn to the assurances of what is called spiritualism--the refusal to believe that death, in the accepted sense, has taken place at all. This creed is at least free from the vagueness of the ordinary religious view of death. It is small comfort to be told that a lost friend is sitting transfigured, harp in hand, in some skiey mansion of the blest; but it might mitigate the bereavement of some mourners (not all) to converse with their lost one, and to learn that he exists in much the same manner, and with the same affections as before. Some who “prefer him earthly” are less likely to be disappointed in spiritualism than in any other philosophy; the danger is rather that they should find him _too_ earthly--enjoying a cigarette, perhaps, as in a case mentioned in recent revelations of the spirit-life. This is literalness with a vengeance; but however ludicrous and incredible it may be, it is not--from the comforter’s point of view--meaningless; whereas it _is_ unmeaning to tell a mourner that the loved one is not lost, to him, when the whole environment and fabric of their love are shattered and destroyed.