Part 9

And yet it is less than fair to make this distinction between men and their lagging cousins of the tree-tops. Not monkeys too abruptly promoted to be men but men come too abruptly into wealth—that is the analogy. Thinking in terms of the long history of the race, look what happened. Never before, to put it broadly, had men been warm enough except in those regions of the earth where the sun warmed them; now they dug up mountains of coal and drew off rivers of oil and fashioned whole atmospheres of gas for fuel; and with these, besides warming themselves, they made such tools and weapons as had not even been dreamed of. Never before, still to put it broadly, had men had food enough; now they discovered how to coax unprecedented crops out of the soil and how to breed new armies of beasts to be devoured and how to catch what the depths of forests and oceans had hitherto denied them and how to create all sorts of novel foods by manufacture. Never before had men, except in dangerous, communal migrations, moved much from their native places; now they made vehicles and ships to go like the wind and in time took to the wind itself for their trafficking until restless tides of human life flowed here and there over the surface of the earth as if men and nations had no such things as homes. Long naked, they covered themselves with preposterous garments and strutted up and down; long hungry, they stuffed their bellies till they were sick with surfeit; long home-bound, they ran wild till they were lost.

Meanwhile their minds could not keep pace with this enormous increase of their goods. Their ancestors, it may be guessed, had taken centuries to accustom themselves to the use of fire and of the successive machines they had invented; they had taken centuries to find out those parts of the earth they knew. In the last age such processes were accelerated to a dash and a scramble. Things poured in upon minds and overwhelmed them. The century in retrospect has a bewildered look, like a baby at a circus: some art which it could hardly comprehend had brought a universe into a tumbling, twisting focus and the century’s head ached with the effort to find a meaning in it. To vertigo succeeded what was probably an actual madness of the race—but a madness with the least possible method. Everywhere a wild activity occupied the faculties of those who followed affairs; and—though the finest intelligences dissented—among the sophists who encouraged such activity was an even greater frenzy of bewilderment.

Call what happened the corruption of comfort. Men had so long been cold and starved and isolated that they clutched at the chance to wrest every advantage from stubborn nature, and they clutched it faster than they could put it to sound uses. Discomfort was one of the penalties of their madness. Nerves in the loud din of the new age learned new agonies. Confusions grew and desperations thrived till the whole earth was on a tension out of which anything might develop. What did develop was the war which wrapped the world in horror. To ascribe it to this or that particular cause or guilt is to see it in terms too small. The race of man was gorged and could not digest its meal; it was drunk and could not control its motions; it was mad and could not understand its course. In the long run the observer of mankind must look back upon the last age as one of the several moments in the history of the race when it has blundered into mania and cruelly hurt itself before it could find its head again.

The race is very old and it doubtless has many aeons still to live before the cooling of the planet sends it back to its aboriginal state. Nor is there use or sense in imagining that the race might return to the simpler conditions that existed before the era of superfluous things. Things are. Hope must be seen to lie in the direction of their assimilation by the human mind. Here and there different prophets insist that the mind is on the verge of some discovery as large as Columbus’s which will establish a truer balance between it and the matter which now outweighs it. But why put trust in miracles? The madness of the age is more likely to subside gradually, under quiet counsels, as the debauch wears out its influence. Slowly the mind must lift its faith in itself up above its temporary obsession with mere things. It must learn to hold and master all of them which are capable of being held and mastered. It must become accustomed to live among the rest of them as a mountaineer becomes accustomed to live in the city streets after the panic which overcomes him when first he enters them from the high silences and pure outlooks of his native hills.

“GOD IS NOT DEAD OF OLD AGE”

It is a pleasant literary speculation, and not without its moral bearings, to inquire whether the disorder and discontent and chaos now ominous among men may not arise from the fact that the world has grown too large for us to manage—like a lion cub which can no longer be played with or like another mechanical monster which indeed we have created but which refuses to do our bidding any longer. A man of affairs, a financier certainly not acclimated to philosophic despair and certainly accustomed to govern wherever his hand turns, lately ventured such an explanation. It may be, he said, that there is no solution which our reason can arrive at. We look about us for authentic leaders and see none; we pass in review hundreds of counsels but find none that seem in all ways to suit—unless we are doctrinaires; assuredly of all the schemes we have tried no one has been successful. By what right do we assume that some such device for salvation exists? Plagues have come before for which there was no cure. Our crisis may be one of them. It may be that the day of solutions is over. H. G. Wells would have us search history to find our future there—or at least some track pointing to a future we can reasonably confide in. But perhaps he was just as near the truth in his younger scientific days when he gave us vivid pictures of men who travelled beyond the known areas of our kind, no longer the engineers of their own destiny but drifting about at the convenience of fate. We think of Anatole France, voluptuously contemplating the age when our earth shall have grown too cold for human habitation and men have gradually died away among the ice hummocks of a universal frozen sea. Or, bitterest of all, we remember Thomas Hardy’s fancy of the delegate sent up to God to ask about the direful state of the planet, only to learn that God had utterly forgotten us and but dimly recollects that He had made us so long ago and had meant to destroy His experiment when He saw how contemptible it was. Beyond Hardy on that path of reflection lies merely such madness as drove Swift to his Yahoos and Houyhnhnms. And if we dare the path the only escapes from madness are some Asiatic discipline of the will to the peace of acquiescence or some sleek optimism shutting its eyes to all the evidences of horror and chattering and eating and wooing merrily among them.

Along that path lies madness—but we need not take that path. Nor is it a trivial optimism alone that can hold us back. Without doubt too many men and women in the world are too optimistic. After the excessive and artificial strain imposed upon them by the war their spirits have relapsed, their consciences have grown dull, and they have sat down for a vacation among the ruins. This is one of the innumerable prices which mankind pays for the mad luxury of war. But it is still too early to conclude that civilization is a wreck. Civilization is very old, and every new exploration among its ancient monuments makes clear that it is older than we thought before. The Mousterian, the Aurignacian, the Solutrian, the Magdalenian, the Azilian, the Neolithic ages must each have seen in its particular downfall the end of mankind; and yet thousands of years were still to elapse before there followed what we have till recently called the dawn of civilization. The destruction of the great Minoan city of Cnossus, Havelock Ellis maintains, may have been a more memorable event in the history of human affairs than the catastrophe from which we are trying to recover. To certain types of mind a view of history so extensive as this is like a first realization of the vastness of the physical universe. If time is so long and space so wide we are but momentary and infinitesimal insects whom it is scarcely worth any one’s efforts, even our own, to preserve. Yet the advances of civilization have been largely effected through just this enlarging vision of our natures and our cosmic residence. After the first despair, not unlike that of a child strayed from the nursery into a crowd, comes a sense of greater dignity at being part of a structure so vast, a new hopefulness that what has endured from everlasting will still endure. The Spanish peasants have a proverb with which they console themselves when there seems no other consolation: “God is not dead of old age.” In such a saying Sancho Panza touches Aristotle. Aristotle could think of a universe without beginning or end, moving indeed toward no definite point but moving always through successions of being. Less metaphysical, the peasant knows as truly that rain follows sunshine and harvest the time for planting, and that in each new season the old labours come back to be done again.

In the midst of our worst distresses we have need of some such cooling wisdom. It is, of course, the faith of men who have not hoped for too specific a mortal or immortal career. We do not hasten to console the lover who has lost his mistress by telling him that for ages there will still be love and mistresses. We do not hasten to assure the man who has just failed of a fortune that though he is poor the sum of the world’s wealth is still the same. And yet both these things are true. The truth to be remembered is that in the very world where thrive the ardours of the lover and the seeker of his individual fortune, and where tragedy goes with defeat, there exist also such perennial processes as the patience of the grass and the slow healing of time. There is a spacious rule of life which has rarely been formulated but which is probably held by most enlightened men and which better than any other combines ardour with ripeness of reflection—a rule which in effect says that though we should work at our appointed tasks as if everything hung upon success we should afterwards regard each success or failure as something which really does not matter. Thus only can we advance with our fullest power; thus only can we free ourselves from the past when we are done with it, not moaning too loudly over defeat or being too vainly elated by some little victory. To extremists such an attitude will seem a frivolous compromise. It is the solemn hallucination of the hopeful that by ardour and by ardour alone can the world be saved, and that each defeat of each plan he follows will mean disaster. It is the cheerful prejudice of the desperate that in spite of temporary oscillations here and there nothing is really to be gained by ardours, for when they have cooled the world will continue its decreed procession down a road paved with ardours flattened under its solid tread. But between them is that temperate zone where men are continually warmed by the fires that keep mankind alive and yet draw from the long records of civilization the wisdom that shows them how to keep the fire within its bounds, that it may do its work without waste and destruction.

VII. SHORT CUTS

PETIT UP TO THIRTY

From the inquisitive elder Disraeli, Petit the Poet learned that Lope de Vega was a poet from his cradle, and he learned it bitterly, for he was sixteen, and his poetic April lingered. There was great solace in Keats, who had begun to be a poet at an age which gave Petit still two years to falter in. But what of these cradle rhymes of the Spaniard? What of the numerous lispings of Pope to nurse and bottle? What of the spines of satire Bryant put out at three-and-ten, or the _Blossomes_ Cowley bore midway his second decade? And Chatterton!

Never mind Pascal and his conic sections, precocious Pliny, or the well-stuffed Hermogenes—monsters, not poets! But to see the years slip by while his own virtues lay still under a cloud of youth was a trial which set Petit brooding full of anger, over the hours he had wasted in play before he had grown conscious of an imperative function. No honourable poet could weigh pleasure against the duty to be great. For all her tricky record, Fortune had never behaved so ill, Petit felt, as when she cheated him of his destiny by fifteen years’ stark ignorance of it. There was some comfort in the excuse which he made to himself, that these more forward poets had beaten him in the race toward the Muses merely because they had had an earlier summons. But this comfort faded when he wondered whether they had not beaten him because their summons had been more genuine than his. Nor could he be much heartened by the spectacle of those who had come later into self-knowledge. Wandering in the wilderness palled no less because of the tribes who shared it with him. The dying, Petit felt, might lie down comforted that patriarchs, kings, even the wise and good, were bedfellows; but the hot thrust of those who looked toward birth wanted none of the cool medicine which encourages death. Those who had to be about Father Apollo’s business had little time for beds.

And yet, strenuous as he was for the bright reward, he gave hours to becoming a specialist in the youth of poets. Like a man sick with some lingering disease, he ransacked annals for cases like his own, mad after a sign which would point to an end of his sullen malady of prose. He could tell you at a question when his poets had assumed the _toga poetica_, from Tennyson, covering his slate with blank verse at six or seven, up through Goldsmith, who scarcely touched pen to verse on the poetical side of thirty, to Cowper, who at fifty, a few cheerful bagatelles aside, had only just begun to be a poet. From this learning of his, more truly a scholar than he knew, Petit took examples, despair, and vindications. When he thought of poets he thought of a thin line marching fierily down through all the ages, endless, quenchless, and himself waiting unsuspected in a prairie village for the tongue of flame which should mark him of their company. When he thought how much he lacked their art and scope, Petit despaired; but whenever despair had a little numbed, he vindicated himself by instancing those who had slept late in the shell.

Thus, year by year, he pushed back the age at which he must come into his powers and fame. By the precedent of Bryant, Petit should have written some new _Thanatopsis_ at seventeen, but he got only heartache from that precedent. With what a thrill, then, he learned that Bryant had made the poem over in riper years. Eighteen was harder for Petit to endure. _Poems by Two Brothers_, Poe’s _Tamerlane_, _The Blessed Damozel_ (unanswerable challenge), drove him ashamed and passionate to his rhyming. But once again he found out a defence. If Pope’s _Ode on Solitude_, written at twelve for lasting honour, was a prank of genius, why not _The Blessed Damozel_? And who would contend with ghosts? Yet he could not remember this assurance when, that year, he found Chatterton’s bitter, proud will, and thought of the career which had led so straight toward it.

Some years were kinder, or at least Petit’s ignorance saved him, for at nineteen and twenty he kept his courage well enough. But twenty-one threatened him to the very teeth. Drake’s _Culprit Fay_ mocked him; Holmes’s _Old Ironsides_ roared at him; Campbell’s _Pleasures of Hope_ enticed him; Milton’s _Nativity_ ode submerged and cowed him. “No, no,” Petit cried, as he read again these resonant strophes, “I will be a minor poet and never strive with Milton.”

Later, by an odd reversal, Petit consoled himself with proofs that the great poet must come slowly to his heights, and he lived for cheerful months on the surpassing badness of Shelley’s work before _Alastor_, fruit of twenty-three.

But the years would not cease, nor would they bring Petit’s summons. At twenty-two he thought of _Götz von Berlichingen_ and thrust his boundary back. Twenty-three taunted him with _Paracelsus_ and _Endymion_ and Milton’s wistful _On his Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty-three_. Petit passed twenty-four sickly conscious of _The Defence of Guenevere_ and _Tamburlaine_ and those cantos of _Childe Harold_ which, already two years out of the pen, made Byron splendid in a night. Keats, by having died glorious at twenty-five, made Petit’s year desolate. To be twenty-six was to remember _The Ancient Mariner_, Collins’s pure _Odes_, and the fair, the fragrant, the unforgettable _Arcadia_. Nor was twenty-seven better: what could Petit’s numbness say to _The Strayed Reveller_, _The Shepheardes’ Calender_, and _Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect_? With twenty-eight, _The Lyrical Ballads_ and _Atalanta in Calydon_ saw his hopes begin a slow decline, which dropped off, the next year, amid contracting ardour, past Johnson’s _London_, Crabbe’s _Village_, Clough’s hospitable _Bothie_, into thirty’s hopeless wilderness. After thirty poets are not made. And Petit was thirty.

Tall Alp after tall Alp behind him, Petit saw before him only a world of foothills. Yet his journey had been passionate. Now the work he had done was dead leaves, his energy all burned grass, his aspirations dust. And dry and bitter in his mouth was the reflection that the summons might have missed his ear while he had watched his fellows. Had zeal overreached him, some hidden jealousy undone him? What grief and rebellion to know himself cause, agent, and penalty of his own ruin! O black decades to come!

Still, Scott found himself at thirty-four.

IN LIEU OF THE LAUREATE

I am so distressed to see that the Poet Laureate has failed to produce an official ode for the British royal wedding that I hardly know whether to rummage through the archives of the Hanoverians for a substitute manufactured for some earlier occasion or to manufacture a new article myself. I think I shall let learning and poetry both serve me with the help of E. K. Broadus’s agreeable new study of “The Laureateship.”

Here, for instance, is a part of what the elegant Henry James Pye, George III’s laureate, wrote when the Princess Charlotta Matilda of England married Prince Frederick William of Stuttgart:

Awhile the frowning Lord of arms Shall yield to gentler Pow’rs the plain; Lo! Britain greets the milder charms Of Cytherea’s reign. Mute is the trumpet’s brazen throat, And the sweet flute’s melodious note Floats on the soft ambrosial gale; The sportive Loves and Graces round, Beating with jocund step the ground, Th’ auspicious nuptials hail! The Muses cease to weave the wreath of war, But hang their roseate flow’rs on Hymen’s golden car!

Or if this seems a shade heroic and a little old-fashioned, here are certain lines of Tennyson on the marriage of Princess Beatrice to Prince Henry of Battenberg:

The Mother weeps At that white funeral of the single life, Her maiden daughter’s marriage; and her tears Are half of pleasure, half of pain—the child Is happy—even in leaving _her_!

And yet that seems to me to have a touch of insinuation about the fun of getting away from the royal mother which I should be the last to intend—though Tennyson cannot have meant it. Let me turn instead to Thomas Warton and his admirable compliments to a king with the same name as that of the present husband of England’s queen:

Lo! the fam’d isle, which hails thy chosen sway, What fertile fields her temperate suns display! Where Property secures the conscious swain, And guards, while Plenty gives, the golden grain.... These are Britannia’s praises. Feign to trace With rapt reflections Freedom’s favourite race! But though the generous isle, in arts and arms Thus stands supreme, in Nature’s choicest charms; Though George and Conquest guard her sea-girt throne One happier blessing still she calls her own—

and that happier blessing was of course the bride.

I find myself coming back to the bride, as one does when mortals are married. Here suddenly the homely muse of one of our republican poets overtakes me:

This George and Mary Windsor must have lots of sense as well as dust, to let their only daughter marry a man who is quite ordinary—a man at least who never had as good a start in life as dad, but is a boy of their own town, grew up there and there settles down. Well, that is how it ought to be, and if he sticks to business he will thrive and prosper till he may stand before kings and queens some day. And what if the new couple have to work and plan and scrimp and save a few years till they make their pile and can put on a better style? If they attempt it nothing loth it will be better for them both. Then hail the bridegroom and the bride! Let the nuptial knot be tied! Whatever others may prefer, her for him and him for her!

“MURDERING BEAUTY”

At the Butirki prison in Moscow, say certain Frenchmen who were formerly there as involuntary guests of the Bolsheviki, there was a beautiful Lettish girl, at about the remorseless age of fifteen, who acted as official executioner, shooting her victims expertly in the back when they had been chosen by lot and led before her. The brawny Jack Ketch of the old tradition had yielded to a mere flapper, “with unerring aim and a lust for blood.”

The French will be French! My mind goes back to some thousands of fine poems and of gallant speeches which have been made by this fine and gallant race upon the theme of “murdering beauty.” What after all is so deadly as a lovely eye? It stabs deep with a glint, slays with a glance, and utterly consumes with a level gaze. There is no armour proof against it. Whenever beauty walks abroad it leaves its path strewn with the wrecks of foolish men who have encountered it. It rises in the morning, like the sun for glory, and kills off a few swains who are outside its casement when first it looks out at the new day. It lisps its dutiful orisons, tastes matutinal nectar, and comes forth to begin its proper business. Walking beside some clear brook it topples one venturer after another into the sympathetic flood. On the smooth enamelled green, where daisies pie the meadow, beauty does its fatal work no less ruthlessly than in secluded arbours or umbrageous grottoes. Then mounted on its favourite courser it takes to the hunt, leaving to others the lighter task of bringing down the boar or catching up with the fox, but itself more deadly among the human quarry who, though hunters, are at last the hunted. Finally twilight, the end of the day, candles, spinet, the dulcimer and the soft recorders, witching sounds and more bewitching silences; but still beauty goes on its conquering course. Not even midnight dims it. When beauty has retired from mortal sight, the lover who had not the luck to come within its range and so be slaughtered, lies disconsolate upon his couch waiting for another day and another chance to dare the killing eyes of beauty.