I am sitting under tall trees, with a great wind boiling like surf about
the tops of them, so that their living load of leaves rocks and roars in
something that is at once exultation and agony. I feel, in fact, as if
I were actually sitting at the bottom of the sea among mere anchors and
ropes, while over my head and over the green twilight of water sounded
the everlasting rush of waves and the toil and crash and shipwreck of
tremendous ships. The wind tugs at the trees as if it might pluck
them root and all out of the earth like tufts of grass. Or, to try yet
another desperate figure of speech for this unspeakable energy, the
trees are straining and tearing and lashing as if they were a tribe of
dragons each tied by the tail.
As I look at these top-heavy giants tortured by an invisible and violent
witchcraft, a phrase comes back into my mind. I remember a little boy of
my acquaintance who was once walking in Battersea Park under just such
torn skies and tossing trees. He did not like the wind at all; it blew
in his face too much; it made him shut his eyes; and it blew off his
hat, of which he was very proud. He was, as far as I remember, about
four. After complaining repeatedly of the atmospheric unrest, he said at
last to his mother, “Well, why don’t you take away the trees, and then
it wouldn’t wind.”
Nothing could be more intelligent or natural than this mistake. Any
one looking for the first time at the trees might fancy that they were
indeed vast and titanic fans, which by their mere waving agitated the
air around them for miles. Nothing, I say, could be more human and
excusable than the belief that it is the trees which make the wind.
Indeed, the belief is so human and excusable that it is, as a matter
of fact, the belief of about ninety-nine out of a hundred of the
philosophers, reformers, sociologists, and politicians of the great age
in which we live. My small friend was, in fact, very like the principal
modern thinkers; only much nicer.
.....
In the little apologue or parable which he has thus the honour of
inventing, the trees stand for all visible things and the wind for the
invisible. The wind is the spirit which bloweth where it listeth; the
trees are the material things of the world which are blown where the
spirit lists. The wind is philosophy, religion, revolution; the trees
are cities and civilisations. We only know that there is a wind because
the trees on some distant hill suddenly go mad. We only know that there
is a real revolution because all the chimney-pots go mad on the whole
skyline of the city.
Just as the ragged outline of a tree grows suddenly more ragged and
rises into fantastic crests or tattered tails, so the human city rises
under the wind of the spirit into toppling temples or sudden spires. No
man has ever seen a revolution. Mobs pouring through the palaces, blood
pouring down the gutters, the guillotine lifted higher than the throne,
a prison in ruins, a people in arms--these things are not revolution,
but the results of revolution.
You cannot see a wind; you can only see that there is a wind. So,
also, you cannot see a revolution; you can only see that there is a
revolution. And there never has been in the history of the world a real
revolution, brutally active and decisive, which was not preceded by
unrest and new dogma in the reign of invisible things. All revolutions
began by being abstract. Most revolutions began by being quite
pedantically abstract.
The wind is up above the world before a twig on the tree has moved. So
there must always be a battle in the sky before there is a battle on the
earth. Since it is lawful to pray for the coming of the kingdom, it is
lawful also to pray for the coming of the revolution that shall restore
the kingdom. It is lawful to hope to hear the wind of Heaven in the
trees. It is lawful to pray “Thine anger come on earth as it is in
Heaven.”
.....
The great human dogma, then, is that the wind moves the trees. The great
human heresy is that the trees move the wind. When people begin to
say that the material circumstances have alone created the moral
circumstances, then they have prevented all possibility of serious
change. For if my circumstances have made me wholly stupid, how can I be
certain even that I am right in altering those circumstances?
The man who represents all thought as an accident of environment is
simply smashing and discrediting all his own thoughts--including
that one. To treat the human mind as having an ultimate authority is
necessary to any kind of thinking, even free thinking. And nothing will
ever be reformed in this age or country unless we realise that the moral
fact comes first.
For example, most of us, I suppose, have seen in print and heard in
debating clubs an endless discussion that goes on between Socialists and
total abstainers. The latter say that drink leads to poverty; the former
say that poverty leads to drink. I can only wonder at their either of
them being content with such simple physical explanations. Surely it
is obvious that the thing which among the English proletariat leads to
poverty is the same as the thing which leads to drink; the absence
of strong civic dignity, the absence of an instinct that resists
degradation.
When you have discovered why enormous English estates were not long
ago cut up into small holdings like the land of France, you will have
discovered why the Englishman is more drunken than the Frenchman.
The Englishman, among his million delightful virtues, really has this
quality, which may strictly be called “hand to mouth,” because under
its influence a man’s hand automatically seeks his own mouth, instead of
seeking (as it sometimes should do) his oppressor’s nose. And a man who
says that the English inequality in land is due only to economic causes,
or that the drunkenness of England is due only to economic causes, is
saying something so absurd that he cannot really have thought what he
was saying.
Yet things quite as preposterous as this are said and written under the
influence of that great spectacle of babyish helplessness, the economic
theory of history. We have people who represent that all great historic
motives were economic, and then have to howl at the top of their voices
in order to induce the modern democracy to act on economic motives. The
extreme Marxian politicians in England exhibit themselves as a small,
heroic minority, trying vainly to induce the world to do what, according
to their theory, the world always does. The truth is, of course, that
there will be a social revolution the moment the thing has ceased to be
purely economic. You can never have a revolution in order to establish a
democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
.....
I get up from under the trees, for the wind and the slight rain have
ceased. The trees stand up like golden pillars in a clear sunlight.
The tossing of the trees and the blowing of the wind have ceased
simultaneously. So I suppose there are still modern philosophers who
will maintain that the trees make the wind.