Part 2

An Age of Force followed the final subjugation of Nature. The dynamo replaced the steam-engine, radiant energy revealed the hidden secrets of matter, to the conquest of the earth was added the control of the air and the mastery of the deep. Nor was it only an Age of Force. Never before had man done so much for his brother, the victory over the powers of Nature meant also glorious victories of peace; pestilences were checked, the cry of the poor became articulate, and to help the life of the submerged half became a sacred duty of the other. How full we were of the pride of life! In 1910 at Edinburgh I ended an address on "Man's Redemption of Man" with the well-known lines of Shelley beginning, "Happiness and Science dawn though late upon the earth." And now, having survived the greatest war in history, and a great victory, with the wreckage of mediæval autonomy to clear up, our fears are lest we may fail to control the fretful forces of Caliban, and our hopes are to rebuild Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land.

Never before in its long evolution has the race realized its full capacity. Our fathers have told us, and we ourselves have known, of glorious sacrifices; but the past four years have exhausted in every direction the possibilities of human effort. And, as usual, among the nations the chief burden has fallen on that weary Titan, the Motherland,

"Bearing on shoulders immense, Atlantean, the load Well-nigh not to be borne Of the too vast orb of her fate."

Not alone did she furnish the sinews of war, but she developed a spirit that made defeat impossible.

No wonder war has advocates, to plead the heroic clash of ideals, the purging of a nation's dross in the fire of suffering and sacrifice, and the welding in one great purpose of a scattered people. Even Montaigne, sanest of men, called it "the greatest and most magnificent of human actions"; and the glamours of its pride, pomp, and circumstance still captivate. But there are other sides which we should face without shrinking. Why dwell on the horrors such as we doctors and nurses have had to see? Enough to say that war blasts the soul, and in this great conflict the finer sense of humanity has been shocked to paralysis by the helplessness of our civilization and the futility of our religion to stem a wave of primitive barbarism. Black as are the written and unwritten pages of history, the concentrated and prolonged martyrdom surpasses anything man has yet had to endure. What a shock to the proud and mealy-mouthed Victorian who had begun to trust that Love was creation's final law, forgetting that Egypt and Babylon are our contemporaries and of yesterday in comparison with the hundreds of thousands of years since the cave-dwellers left their records on walls and bones. In the mystic shadow of the Golden Bough, and swayed by the emotions of our savage ancestors, we stand aghast at the revelation of the depth and ferocity of primal passions which reveal the unchangeableness of human nature.

When the wild beast of Plato's dream becomes a waking reality, and a herd-emotion of hate sweeps a nation off its feet, the desolation that follows is wider than that in France and Belgium, wider even than the desolation of grief, and something worse--the hardened heart, the lie in the soul--so graphically described in Book II of the "Republic"--that forces us to do accursed things, and even to defend them! I refer to it because, as professors, we have been accused of sinning against the light. Of course we have. Over us, too, the wave swept, but I protest against the selection of us for special blame. The other day, in an address on "The Comradeship of Letters" at Turin, President Wilson is reported to have said: "It is one of the great griefs of this war that the universities of the Central Empires used the thoughts of science to destroy mankind; it is the duty of the universities of these states to redeem science from this disgrace and to show that the pulse of humanity beats in the classroom, and that there are sought out not the secrets of death but the secrets of life." A pious and worthy wish! But once in war a nation mobilizes every energy, and to say that science has been prostituted in discovering means of butchery is to misunderstand the situation. Slaughter, wholesale and unrestricted, is what is sought, and to accomplish this the discoveries of the sainted Faraday and of the gentle Dalton are utilized to the full, and to their several nations scientific men render this service freely, if not gladly. That the mental attitude engendered by science is apt to lead to a gross materialism is a vulgar error. Scientific men, in mufti or in uniform, are not more brutal than their fellows, and the utilization of their discoveries in warfare should not be a greater reproach to them than is our joyous acceptance of their success.

What a change of heart after the appalling experience of the first gassing in 1915! Nothing more piteously horrible than the sufferings of the victims has ever been seen in warfare.[2] Surely we could not sink to such barbarity! Is thy servant a dog? But martial expediency soon compelled the Allies to enlist the resources of chemistry; the instruction of our enemies was soon bettered, and before the Armistice there were developments in technique and destructive force that would have delighted Nisroch, who first invented aerial "machinations to plague the sons of men." A group of medical men representing the chief universities and medical bodies of the United Kingdom was innocent enough to suggest that such an unclean weapon--the use of lethal gases, "condemning its victims to death by long-drawn-out torture," and with infinite possibilities for its further development--should be forever abolished. "Steeped in folly by theories and prepossessions," failure to read the "lessons of war which should have sufficed to convince a beetle"--such were among the newspaper comments; and in other ways we were given to understand that our interference in such matters was most untimely. All the same, it is gratifying to see that the suggestion has been adopted at the Peace Congress.

[2] I am sorry to have seen Sargent's picture "Gassed" in this year's Academy. It haunts the mind like a nightmare.

With what a howl of righteous indignation the slaughter of our innocent women and children by the bombing of open towns was received! It was a dirty and bloody business, worthy of the Oxydracians by means of Levin-bolts and Thunders and more horrible, more frightful, more diabolical, maiming, breaking, tearing, and slaying more folk and confounding men's senses and throwing down more walls than would a hundred thunderbolts.[3]

[3] Rabelais, Book IV, ch. LXI.

Against reprisals there was at first a strong feeling. Early in 1916 I wrote to the "Times": "The cry for reprisals illustrates the exquisitely hellish state of mind into which war plunges even sensible men. Not a pacifist, but a 'last-ditcher,' yet I refuse to believe that as a nation, how bitter soever the provocation, we shall stain our hands in the blood of the innocent. In this matter let us be free from bloodguiltiness, and let not the undying reproach of humanity rest on us as on the Germans." Two years changed me into an ordinary barbarian. A detailed tally of civilians killed by our airmen has not, I believe, been published, but the total figures quoted are not far behind the German.

Could a poll have been taken a week before the Armistice as to the moral justification of the bombing of Berlin--for which we were ready--how we should have howled at the proposer of any doubt! And many Jonahs were displeased that a city greater than Nineveh, with more than the threescore and ten thousand who knew not the right hand from the left, had been spared. We may deplore the necessity and lament, as did a certain great personage:

"... Yet public reason just-- Honour and empire with revenge enlarged ... compels me now To do what else, though damned, I should abhor."

All the same, we considered ourselves "Christians of the best edition, all picked and culled," and the churches remained open, prayers rose to Jehovah, many of whose priests--even his bishops!--were in khaki, and quit themselves like men--yes, and scores died the death of heroes! Into such hells of inconsistency does war plunge the best of us!

Learning--new or old--seems a vain thing to save a nation, but possibly, as a set-off, science, as represented by cellulose and sulphuric acid, may yet prove the best bulwark of civilization! In his "History of the Origin of Medicine,"[4] Lettsom maintains that the invention of firearms has done more to prevent the destruction of the human species than any other discovery; he says: "Invention and discernment of mind have made it possible to reverse the ancient maxim that strength has always prevailed over wisdom." Science alone may prevent a repetition of the story of Egypt, of Babylonia, of Greece, and of Rome. The suggestion seems brazen effrontery when we have not even given the world the equivalent of the _Pax Romana_! Ah! what a picture of self-satisfied happiness in Plutarch! One envies that placid life in the midst of the only great peace the world has known, spanning a period of more than two hundred years. And he could say, "No tumults, no civil sedition, no tyrannies, no pestilences nor calamities depopulating Greece, no epidemic disease needing powerful and choice drugs and medicines"; though as a Delphic priest there is a pathetic lament that the Pythian priestess has now only commonplace questions to deal with.[5] Surely those cultivated men of his circle must have felt that their house could never be removed. Has Science reached such control over Nature that she will enable our civilization to escape the law of the Ephesian, written on all known records--_panta rei_? Perhaps so, now that material civilization is world-wide; cataclysmic forces, powerful enough in centres of origin, may weaken as they pass out in circles. Let this be our hope in the present crisis. At any rate, in the free democracies in which Demos with safety says "_L'État c'est moi_," it has yet to be determined whether Science, as the embodiment of a mechanical force, can rule without invoking ruin. Two things are clear: there must be a very different civilization or there will be no civilization at all; and the other is that neither the old religion combined with the old learning, nor both with the new science, suffice to save a nation bent on self-destruction. The suicide of Germany, the outstanding fact of the war, followed an outburst of national megalomania. For she had religion--it may shock some of you to hear! I mean the people, not the writers or the thinkers, but the people for whom Luther lived and Huss died. Of the two devotional ceremonies which stand supreme in my memory, one was a service in the Dom, Berlin, in which "not the great nor well bespoke, but the mere uncounted folk" sang Luther's great hymn "_Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott._"[6] With the Humanities Germany never broke, and the proportion of students in her schools and universities who studied Greek and Latin has been higher than in any other country. You know better than I the innumerable classical studies of her scholars. In classical learning relating to science and medicine she simply had the field; for one scholar in other countries she had a dozen, and the monopoly of journals relating to the history of these subjects. And she had science, and led the world in the application of the products of the laboratory to the uses of every-day life--in commerce, in the arts, and in war. Withal, like Jeshurun, she waxed fat; and did ever such pride go before such destruction? What a tragedy that the successors of Virchow and Traube and Helmholtz and Billroth should have made her a byword among the nations! "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds!"

[4] 1778, p. 30.

[5] "Why the Pythian Priestess," etc. (Plutarch's _Morals_, vol. III, p. 100, Goodwin's edition).

[6] And the other, how different! The crowded Blue Mosque of Cairo, and the crowded streets with the thousands of kneeling Moslems awaiting the cry of the muezzin from the tower.

II

So much preliminary to the business before us, to meet changed conditions as practical men, with the reinforcement born of hope or with the strong resolution of despair.

For what does this Association stand? What are these classical interests that you represent? Take a familiar simile. By a very simple trick, you remember, did Empedocles give Menippus in the moon-halt--the first stage of his memorable trip--such long and clear vision that he saw the tribes of men like a nest of ants, a seething mass going to and fro at their different tasks. Of the function of the classical members in this myrmecic community there can be no question. Neither warriors, nor slaves, nor neuters, you live in a well-protected social environment, heretofore free from enemies, and have been well taken care of. I hate to speak of you as larvæ, but as such you perform a duty of the greatest import in this trophidium stage of your existence. Let me explain. From earliest days much attention has been paid by naturalists to the incredible affection "--incredible [Greek: storgê]," Swammerdam calls it--which ants display in feeding, licking, and attending the larvæ. Disturb a nest, and the chief care is to take them to a place of safety. This attention is what our symphilic community--to use a biological term--bestows on you. So intensely altruistic, apparently, is this behaviour, that for the very word "[Greek: storgê]," which expresses the tenderest of all feelings, there is a difficulty in finding an equivalent; indeed, Gilbert White used it almost as an English word. The truth is really very different.

It has been shown that the nursing function--or instinct--is really trophallactic. In the case of the ant the nurse places the larva on its back, and the broad ventral surface serves as a trough for the food, often predigested. The skill and devotion with which this is done are among the wonders in the life of the insect to which moralists have never tired of urging a visit. But listen to the sequel! The larva is provided with a pair of rich honey-bags in the shape of salivary glands, big exudatoria from which is discharged an ambrosia greedily lapped up by the nurse, who with this considers herself well paid for her care. In the same manner, when the assiduous V.A.D. wasp distributes food to the larvæ, the heads of which eagerly protrude from their cells, she must be paid by a draught of nectar from their exudatoria, while if it is not forthcoming the wasp seizes the head of the larva in her mandibles and jams it back into its cell and compels it to pay up. The lazy males will play the same game and even steal the much-sought liquid without any compensatory gift of nourishment.[7]

[7] Professor Wheeler in _Proceedings of Amer. Phil. Soc._, vol. LVII, no. 4, 1918.

What does the community at large, so careful of your comforts, expect from you? Surely the honey-dew and the milk of paradise secreted from your classical exudatoria, which we lap up greedily in recensions, monographs, commentaries, histories, translations, and brochures. Among academic larvæ you have for centuries absorbed the almost undivided interest of the nest, and not without reason, for the very life of the workers depends on the hormones you secrete. Though small in number, your group has an enormous kinetic value, like our endocrine organs. For man's body, too, is a humming hive of working cells, each with its specific function, all under central control of the brain and heart, and all dependent on materials called hormones (secreted by small, even insignificant-looking structures) which lubricate the wheels of life. For example, remove the thyroid gland just below the Adam's apple, and you deprive man of the lubricants which enable his thought-engines to work--it is as if you cut off the oil-supply of a motor--and gradually the stored acquisitions of his mind cease to be available, and within a year he sinks into dementia. The normal processes of the skin cease, the hair falls, the features bloat, and the paragon of animals is transformed into a shapeless caricature of humanity. These essential lubricators, of which a number are now known, are called hormones--you will recognize from its derivation how appropriate is the term.

Now, the men of your guild secrete materials which do for society at large what the thyroid gland does for the individual. The Humanities are the hormones. Our friend Mr. P. S. Allen read before this Association a most suggestive paper on the historical evolution of the word "Humanism." I like to think of the pleasant-flavoured word as embracing all the knowledge of the ancient classical world--what man knew of nature as well as what he knew of himself. Let us see what this university means by the _Literæ Humaniores_. The "Greats" papers for the past decade make interesting study. With singular uniformity there is diversity enough to bear high tribute to the ingenuity of the examiners. But, comparing the subjects in 1918 with those in the first printed papers of the school in 1831, one is surprised to find them the same--practically no change in the eighty-seven years! Compare them, again, with the subjects given in John Napleton's "Considerations" in 1773--no change! and with the help of Rashdall we may trace the story of the studies in arts, only to find that as far back as 1267, with different names sometimes, they have been through all the centuries essentially the same--Greek and Latin authors, logic, rhetoric, grammar, and the philosophies, natural, moral, and metaphysical--practically the seven liberal arts for which, as you may see by the names over the doors, Bodley's building provided accommodation. Why this invariableness in an ever-turning world? One of the marvels, so commonplace that it has ceased to be marvellous, is the deep rooting of our civilization in the soil of Greece and Rome--much of our dogmatic religion, practically all the philosophies, the models of our literature, the ideals of our democratic freedom, the fine and the technical arts, the fundamentals of science, and the basis of our law. The Humanities bring the student into contact with the master minds who gave us these things--with the dead who never die, with those immortal lives "not of now nor of yesterday, but which always were."

As true to-day as in the fifth century B.C. the name of Hellas stands no longer for the name of a race, but as the name of knowledge; or, as more tersely put by Maine, "Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves [intellectually, he means] in this world that is not Greek in origin." Man's anabasis from the old priest-ridden civilizations of the East began when "the light of reason lighted up all things," with which saying Anaxagoras expressed our modern outlook on life.

The Humanities have been a subject of criticism in two directions. Their overwhelming prominence, it is claimed, prevents the development of learning in other and more useful directions; and the method of teaching is said to be antiquated and out of touch with the present needs. They control the academic life of Oxford. An analysis of the Register for 1919 shows that of the 257 men comprising the Heads and Fellows of the twenty-three colleges (including St. Edmund's Hall), only fifty-one are scientific, including the mathematicians.

It is not very polite, perhaps, to suggest that as transmitters and interpreters they should not bulk quite so large in a modern university. 'Twas all very well

"... in days when wits were fresh and clear And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames--"

in those happy days when it was felt that all knowledge had been garnered by those divine men of old time, that there was nothing left but to enjoy the good things harvested by such universal providers as Isidore, Rabanus Maurus, and Vincent of Beauvais, and those stronger dishes served by such artists as Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas--delicious blends of such skill that only the palate of an Apicius could separate Greek, Patristic, and Arabian savours.

It is not the dominance, but the unequal dominance that is a cause of just complaint. As to methods of teaching--by their fruits ye shall know them. The product of "Greats" needs no description in this place. Many deny the art to find the mind's construction in the face, but surely not the possibility of diagnosing at a glance a "first in Greats"! Only in him is seen that altogether superior expression, that self-consciousness of having reached life's goal, of having, in that pickled sentence of Dean Gaisford's Christmas sermon, done something "that not only elevates above the common herd, but leads not unfrequently to positions of considerable emolument." "Many are the wand-bearers, few are the mystics," and a system should not be judged by the exceptions. As a discipline of the mind for the few, the system should not be touched, and we should be ready to sacrifice a holocaust of undergraduates every year to produce in each generation a scholar of the type of, say, Ingram Bywater. 'Tis Nature's method--does it not cost some thousands of eggs and fry to produce one salmon?