Part 7
The Renaissance gave itself unreservedly to all the pleasures that could be extracted from the business of living, though there was no lack of troubles to damp its zeal. It is interesting and instructive to read the history of a great Italian lady, typical of her day, Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua. She was learned, adroit, able, estimable, and mistress of herself though duchies fell. She danced serenely at the ball given by the French King at Milan, after he had ousted her brother-in-law, the Duke Ludovico, and sent him to die a prisoner at Loches. When Cæsar Borgia snatched Urbino, she improved the occasion by promptly begging from him two beautiful statues which she had always coveted, and which had been the most treasured possessions of Duke Guidobaldo, her relative, and the husband of her dearest friend. A chilly heart had Isabella when others came to grief, but a stout one when disaster faced her way. If the men and women who lived through those highly coloured, harshly governed days had fretted too persistently over the misfortunes of others, or had spent their time questioning the moral intelligibility of life, the Renaissance would have failed of its fruition, and the world would be a less engaging place for us to live in now.
There is a discontent which is profoundly stimulating, and there is a discontent which is more wearisome than complacency. Both spring from a consciousness that the time is out of joint, and both have a modern background of nerves. “The Education of Henry Adams” and the “Diaries” of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt are cases in point. Blunt’s quarrel was with his country, his world, his fellow creatures and his God--a broad field of dissatisfaction, which was yet too narrow to embrace himself. Nowhere does he give any token of even a moderate self-distrust. Britain is an “engine of evil,” because his party is out of power. “Americans” (in 1900) “are spending fifty millions a year in slaughtering the Filipinos”--a crude estimate of work and cost. “The Press is the most complete engine ever invented for the concealment of historic truth.” “Patriotism is the virtue of nations in decay.” “The whole white race is revelling openly in violence, as though it had never pretended to be Christian. God’s equal curse be on them all.”
“The whole white race,” be it observed. For a time Blunt dreamed fond dreams of yellow and brown and black supremacy. Europe’s civilization he esteemed a failure. Christianity had not come up to his expectations. There remained the civilization of the East, and Mohammedanism--an amended Mohammedanism, innocent of sensuality and averse to bloodshed. Filled with this happy hope, the Englishman set off from Cairo to seek religion in the desert.
Siwah gave him a rude reception. Ragged tribes, ardent but unregenerate followers of the Prophet, pulled down his tents, pillaged his luggage, robbed his servants, and knocked him rudely about. Blunt’s rage at this treatment was like the rage of “Punch’s” vegetarian who is chased by a bull. “There is no hope to be found in Islam, and I shall go no further,” is his conclusion. “The less religion in the world, perhaps the better.”
Humanity and its creeds being thus disposed of, there remained only the animals to contemplate with satisfaction. “Three quarters of man’s misery,” says the diary, “comes from pretending to be what he is not, a separate creation, superior to that of the beasts and birds, when in reality they are wiser than we are, and infinitely happier.”
This is the kind of thing Walt Whitman used now and then to say, though neither he nor Sir Wilfrid knew any more about the happiness of beasts and birds than do the rest of us. But that brave old hopeful, Whitman, would have laughed his loudest over Blunt’s final analysis of the situation: “All the world would be a paradise in twenty years if man could be shut out.” A paradise already imaged by Lord Holland and the poet Gray:
“Owls would have hooted in Saint Peter’s choir, And foxes stunk and littered in Saint Paul’s.”
To turn from these pages of pettish and puerile complaint to the deep-seated discontent of Henry Adams is to reënter the world of the intellect. Mark Pattison confessed that he could not take a train without thinking how much better the time-table might have been planned. It was an unhappy twist of mind; but the Rector of Lincoln utilized his obtrusive critical faculties by applying them to his own labours, and scourging himself to greater effort. So did Henry Adams, though even the greater effort left him profoundly dissatisfied. He was unelated by success, and he could not reconcile himself to that degree of failure which is the common portion of mankind. His criticisms are lucid, balanced, enlightening, and occasionally prophetic, as when he comments on the Irishman’s political passion for obstructing even himself, and on the perilous race-inertia of Russia. “Could inertia on such a scale be broken up, or take new scale?” he asks dismayed; and we read the answer to-day. A minority ruling with iron hand; a majority accepting what comes to them, as they accept day and night and the seasons.
If there is not an understatement in the five hundred pages of the “Education,” which thereby loses the power of persuasion, there is everywhere an appeal to man’s austere equity and disciplined reason. Adams was not in love with reason. He said that the mind resorted to it for want of training, and he admitted that he had never met a perfectly trained mind. But it was the very essence of reason which made him see that friends were good to him, and the world not unkind; that the loveliness of the country about Washington gave him pleasure, even when he found “a personal grief in every tree”; and that a self-respecting man refrains from finding wordy fault with the conditions under which he lives. He did not believe, with Wordsworth, that nature is a holy and beneficent thing, or with Blake, that nature is a wicked and malevolent thing; but he knew better than to put up a quarrel with an invincible antagonist. He erred in supposing that other thoughtful men were as discontented as he was, or that disgust with the methods of Congress corroded their hours of leisure; but he expressed clearly and with moderation his unwillingness to cherish “complete and archaic deceits,” or to live in a world of illusions. His summing up is the summing up of another austere and uncompromising thinker, Santayana, when confronted by the same problem: “A spirit with any honour is not willing to live except in its own way; a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.”
As our eagerness and our reluctance are not controlling factors in the situation, it is unwise to stress them too heavily. Yet we must think, at least some of us must; and it is well to think out as clearly as we can, not the relative advantages of content and discontent--a question which briskly answers itself--but the relative rightness. Emerson believed in the essential goodness of life, in the admirable law of compensation. Santayana believes that life has evil for its condition, and is for that reason profoundly sad and equivocal. He sees in the sensuous enjoyment of the Greek, the industrial optimism of the American, only a “thin disguise for despair.” Yet Emerson and Santayana reach the same general conclusion. The first says that hours of sanity and consideration come to communities as to individuals, “when the truth is seen, and the martyrs are justified”; the second that “people in all ages sometimes achieve what they have set their hearts on,” and that, if our will and conduct were better disciplined, “contentment would be more frequent and more massive.”
It is hard to think of these years of grace as a chosen period of sanity and consideration; and the hearts of the Turk and the Muscovite are set on things which do not make for the massive contentment of the world. The orderly processes of civilization have been so wrenched and shattered that readjustment is blocked at some point in every land, in our own no less than in others. There are those who say that the World War went beyond the bounds of human endurance; and that the peculiar horror engendered by indecent methods of attack--poison-gases, high explosives and corrosive fluids--has dimmed the faith and broken the spirit of men. But Attila managed to turn a fair proportion of the civilized world into wasteland, with only man-power as a destructive force. Europe to-day is by comparison unscathed, and there are kinsfolk dwelling upon peaceful continents to whom she may legitimately call for aid.
Legitimately, unless our content is like the content extolled by Little Ann’s mother; unless our shoes and stockings are indicative of God’s meaningless partiality, and unless the contemplation of our neighbour’s bleeding feet enhances our pious satisfaction. “I doubt,” says Mr. Wells sourly, “if it would make any very serious difference for some time in the ordinary daily life of Kansas City, if all Europe were reduced to a desert in the next five years.” Why Kansas City should have been chosen as the symbol of unconcern, I do not know; but space has a deadening influence on pity as on fear. The farther we travel from the Atlantic coast, the more tepid is the sympathy for injured France. The farther we travel from the Pacific coast, the fainter is the prejudice against Japan.
It may be possible to construct a state in which men will be content with their own lot, if they be reasonable, and with their neighbours’ lot, if they be generous. It is manifestly impossible to construct a world on this principle. Therefore there will always be a latent grief in the nobler part of man’s soul. Therefore there will always be a content as impious as the discontent from which Pope prayed to be absolved.
The unbroken cheerfulness, no less than the personal neatness, of the British prisoners in the World War astounded the more temperamental Germans. Long, long ago it was said of England: “Even our condemned persons doe goe cheerfullie to their deths, for our nature is free, stout, hautie, prodigal of life and blood.” This heroic strain, tempered to an endurance which is free from the waste of emotionalism, produces the outward semblance and the inward self-respect of a content which circumstances render impossible. It keeps the soul of man immune from whatever degradation his body may be suffering. It saves the land that bred him from the stigma of defeat. It is remotely and humanly akin to the tranquillity of the great Apostle in a Roman prison. It is wholly alien to the sin of smugness which has crept in among the domestic virtues, and rendered them more distasteful than ever to austere thinkers, and to those lonely, generous souls who starve in the midst of plenty.
There is a curious and suggestive paragraph in Mr. Chesterton’s volume of loose ends, entitled “What I Saw in America.” It arrests our attention because, for once, the writer seems to be groping for a thought instead of juggling with one. He recognizes a keen and charming quality in American women, and is disturbed because he also recognizes a recoil from it in his own spirit. This is manifestly perplexing. “To complain of people for being brave and bright and kind and intelligent may not unreasonably appear unreasonable. And yet there is something in the background that can be expressed only by a symbol; something that is not shallowness, but a neglect of the subconscious, and the vaguer and slower impulses; something that can be missed amid all that laughter and light, under those starry candelabra of the ideals of the happy virtues. Sometimes it came over me in a wordless wave that I should like to see a sulky woman. How she would walk in beauty like the night, and reveal more silent spaces full of older stars! These things cannot be conveyed in their delicate proportion, even in the most large and elusive terms.”
Baudelaire has conveyed them measurably in four words:
“Sois belle! Sois triste!”
Yet neither “sulky” nor “triste” is an adjective suggesting with perfect felicity the undercurrent of discontent which lends worth to courage and charm to intelligence. Back of all our lives is the sombre setting of a world ill at ease, and beset by perils. Darkening all our days is the gathering cloud of ill-will, the ugly hatred of man for man, which is the perpetual threat to progress. We Americans may not be so invincibly optimistic as our critics think us, and we may not yet be “speeding” down the road to destruction, as our critics painfully foretell; but we are part of an endangered civilization, and cannot hold up our end, unsupported by Europe. An American woman, cautiously investing her money in government bonds, said to her man of business: “These at least are perfectly secure?” “I should not say that,” was the guarded reply; “but they will be the last things to go.”
A few years ago there was a period that saw the workingmen and working-women of the United States engaged in three hundred and sixty-five strikes--one for every day of the year--and all of them on at once. Something seems lacking in the equity of our industrial life. The “Current History” of the New York “Times” is responsible for the statement that eighty-five thousand men and women met their deaths by violence in the United States during the past decade. Something seems lacking in our programme of peace.
Can it be that Mr. Wells is right when he says that the American believes in peace, but feels under no passionate urgency to organize it? Does our notable indifference to the history of the past mean that we are unconcerned about the history of the present? Two things are sure. We cannot be nobly content with our own prosperity, unless its service to the world is made manifest; grace before meat is not enough to bless the food we eat. And we cannot be nobly content with our unbroken strength, with the sublimity of size and numbers, unless there is something correspondingly sublime in our leadership of the wounded nations. Our allies, who saved us and whom we saved, face the immediate menace of poverty and assault. They face it with a slowly gathered courage which we honour to-day, and may be compelled to emulate to-morrow. “The fact that fear is rational,” says Mr. Brownell, “is what makes fortitude divine.”
Allies
“Friendship between princes,” observed the wise Philippe de Commines, “is not of long duration.” He would have said as much of friendship between republics, had he ever conceived of representative government. What he knew was that the friendships of men, built on affection and esteem, outlast time; and that the friendships of nations, built on common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests, which are always liable to deflection. He had proof, if proof were needed, in the invasion of France by Edward the Fourth under the pressure of an alliance with Charles of Burgundy. It was one of the urbane invasions common to that gentlemanly age. “Before the King of England embarked from Dover, he sent one of his heralds named Garter, a native of Normandy, to the King of France, with a letter of defiance couched in language so elegant and so polite that I can scarcely believe any Englishman wrote it.”
This was a happy beginning, and the end was no less felicitous. When Edward landed in France he found that Louis the Eleventh, who hated fighting, was all for peace; and that the Duke of Burgundy, who generally fought the wrong people at the wrong time, was in no condition for war. Therefore he patched up a profitable truce, and went back to England, a wiser and a richer man, on better terms with his enemy than with his ally. “For where our advantage lies, there also is our heart.”
The peculiar irritation engendered by what Americans discreetly designate as “entangling alliances” was forced upon my perception in early youth, when I read the letters of a British officer engaged in fighting the Ashanti. The war, if it may be so termed, was fought in 1873, and the letters were published in “Blackwood’s Magazine.” The Ashanti had invaded Fantiland, then under a British protectorate, and the troops commanded by Sir Garnet Wolseley were presumably defending their friends. This particular officer expressed his sense of the situation in a fervid hope that when the Ashanti were beaten, as they deserved to be, the English would then come to speedy terms with them, “and drive these brutes of Fanti off the map.”
It is a sentiment which repeats itself in more measured terms on every page of history. The series of “Coalitions” formed against Napoleon were rich in super-comic, no less than in super-tragic elements; and it was well for those statesmen whose reason and whose tempers were so controlled that they were able to perceive the humours of this giant game of pussy-in-the-corner. A mutual fear of France drew the Allies together; a mutual distrust of one another pulled them apart. Sir Gilbert Elliot, afterwards Lord Minto, endeavoured from the beginning to make England understand that Austria would prefer her own interests to the interests of the Coalition, and that it was not unnatural that she should do so. The situation, as he saw it, was something like this:
“Austria: ‘If I am to dance to your tune, you must pay the piper.’
“England: ‘So long as I lead the figure, and you renounce a _pas seul_.’”
Unfortunately the allurements of a _pas seul_ were too strong to be anywhere resisted. Prices grew stiffer and stiffer, armies melted away when the time for action neared. Britain, always victorious at sea, paid out large sums for small returns on land. Her position was briefly summed up by Sir Hugh Elliot--more brilliant and less astute than his brother--at the hostile Court of Prussia. Frederick the Great, overhearing the pious ejaculation with which the Englishman greeted the arrival of a satisfactory dispatch from Sir Eyre Coote, said to him acidly: “I was not aware that God was also one of your allies.” “The only one, Sire, whom we do not finance,” was the lightning retort.
One more circumstance deserves to be noted as both familiar and consolatory. Napoleon’s most formidable purpose was to empty England’s purse by waging a commercial war. When he forbade her exports to the countries he fancied he controlled, he was promised implicit obedience. In March, 1801, Lord Minto wrote serenely to Lord Grenville: “The trade of England and the necessities of the Continent will find each other out in defiance of prohibitions. Not one of the confederates will be true to the gang, and I have little doubt of our trade penetrating into France itself, and thriving in Paris.”--Which it did.
The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times. The despairing tone of contemporary writers would seem to indicate that the allied nations that fought and won the Great War have fallen from some high pinnacle they never reached to an abysmal depth they have never sounded. When Dean Inge recorded in “The Contemporary Review” his personal conviction that the war had been “a ghastly and unnecessary blunder, which need not have happened, and ought not to have happened,” this casual statement was taken up and repeated on both sides of the Atlantic, after the exasperating fashion in which a Greek chorus takes up and repeats in strophe and antistrophe the most depressing sentiment of the play. And to what purpose? Did any sane man ever doubt that Austria’s brutal ultimatum to Serbia was a ghastly and unnecessary blunder? Did any sane man ever doubt that Germany’s invasion of Belgium was a ghastly and unnecessary blunder? But if Dean Inge or his sympathizers knew of any argument, save that of arms, by which the Central Powers could have been convinced that they were blundering, and persuaded to retrieve their blunder, so that what ought not to have happened need not have happened, it is a pity that this enlightenment was not vouchsafed to an imperilled world.
It is possible for two boys to build up a friendship on the basis of a clean fight. It is possible for two nations to build up a good understanding on the basis of a clean fight. The relations between Great Britain and South Africa constitute a case in point. Germany’s fighting was unclean from start to finish. Therefore, while there are many to feel commiseration for her, there are none to do her honour. The duration of the war has little to do with this strong sentiment of disesteem. Had it lasted four months instead of four years, the deeds done in Belgium and in France would have sterilized the seeds of friendship in the minds of all who remembered them. To an abnormal sense of superiority, Germany added an abnormal lack of humour, which made her regard all resistance as an unjustifiable and unpardonable affront. Her resentment that Belgians should have presumed to defend their country was like the resentment of that famous marauder, the Earl of Cassillis, when Allan Stewart refused to be tortured into signing away his patrimony. “You are the most obstinate man I ever saw to oblige me to use you thus,” said the justly indignant Earl. “I never thought to have treated any one as your stubbornness has made me treat you.”
The emotional ebb-tide which followed the signing of the armistice was too natural to be deplored, save that it gave to obstructionists their chance to decry the matchless heroisms of the war. No people can be heroic over the problem of paying debts out of an empty treasury. Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness. Bargaining is essential to the life of the world; but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process. If it were given to debtors to love their creditors, there would have been no persecution of the Jews. If it were given to creditors to love their debtors, there would be no poverty on earth. That all the nations, now presumably on friendly terms, should be following their own interests would seem to most of us the normal thing it is, if they did not so persistently affect to be amazed and grieved at one another’s behaviour, and if the mischief-makers of every land were not actively engaged in widening breaches into chasms.
It is inevitable and logical that the men who were pacifists when the word had a sinister meaning should heartily detest their countries’ allies who helped them win the war. The English “Nation and Athenæum” wrote of France in 1922 as it might have written--but did not--of Germany in 1914. Poincaré it likened to Shylock, France to a butcher eager for the shambles. “French militarism at work in the Rhineland is a lash to every evil passion.” “Europe is kept in social and political disorder by the sheer selfishness of France.” “There _was_ a France of the mind. Victory killed it, and a long slow renovation of the soul must precede its resurrection.”
Like the ingenuous Mr. Pepys, the “Nation” does “just naturally hate the French,” and takes it hard that the world should persistently regard them as a valuable asset to civilization. The concentrated nationalism which held Verdun now expresses itself in a steely resolution to hold France, and to recover for her out of the wreckage of Europe the material aid of which she stands in need. Coöperation is a good word and a good thing. To a Frenchman it means primarily the interest of his own country. What else does it mean to any of us? Britain’s policy of conciliation, our policy of aloofness, Germany’s bargaining, and Russia’s giant bluff, all have the same significance. “Be not deceived! Nothing is so dear to any creature as his profit,” said Epictetus, who, having stript his own soul bare of desires, was correspondingly ready to forgive the acquisitive instincts of others.