My dear Roch,
Ever since you read "SONIA" in manuscript, you have been the book's most
generous critic. May I mark my gratitude for this and for a friendship
older than "SONIA" by dedicating its successor to you? Perhaps you
remember openly doubting whether in fact the spiritual shock of war
could so change and steady Sonia as to make her a fitting wife for any
man, O'Rane most of all; you may recollect my confessing that such a
marriage of hysterical impulse contained the seeds of instant disaster.
Sequels are admittedly failures, but I look on this book less as a
sequel than as an epilogue or footnote. Sonia was not to know happiness
until she had suffered, and the sacrifice in the early days of war was
to many a new and heady self-indulgence. It is the length of the war,
the sickening repetition of one well-placed blow after another on the
same bruised flesh that has tested the survivors. After a year of war
O'Rane could have mustered many followers, when he murmured to himself,
"I--all of us who were out there--have seen it. We can't forget. The
courage, the cold, heart-breaking courage ... and the smile on a dying
man's face.... We must never let it be forgotten, we've earned the
right. As long as a drunkard kicks his wife, or a child goes hungry, or
a woman is driven through shame to disease and death.... Is it a great
thing to ask? To demand of England to remember that the criminals and
loafers and prostitutes are somebody's children, mothers and sisters?
And that we've all been saved by a miracle of suffering? Is that too
great a strain on our chivalry? I'll go out if need be, but--but _must_
we stand at street corners to tell what we've seen? To ask the
bystanders--and ourselves--whether we went to war to preserve the right
of inflicting pain?"
After four years of war do you find many traces of O'Rane's crusading
spirit? Loring, he and a thousand others intrigued and pulled wires to
be sent out before their turn; since they lost their lives or eyes or
limbs, we have seen their places filled by men who were first jeered and
shamed, later pricked and driven into the army, under the amused gaze of
their more fortunate fellows who had intrigued and pulled wires to be
kept at home! We have watched conscience being made a penal offence and
persecution exalted into patriotism. We have seen self-denial, like
self-sacrifice, made statutory; and the comprehensive plea of war has
excused the recrudescence of that feverish licence which many of us
superstitiously felt the war had been sent to end. Financially, morally
and politically we were living on the last few hundreds of our capital.
And in public life the war stepped in where honour feared to tread.
I dedicate this book to you in sympathy, because we would both
recapture, if we could, O'Rane's first fine careless rapture. But there
is little permanence in collective moral upheavals; action and reaction
are equal and opposite, and the same violence which transformed the
world in 1914 has hastened the return to pre-1914 conditions. The House
of Commons, as you know it, and the society outside the House of
Commons, as I know it, are not going to legislate a new world into
existence in the spirit of the Constituent Assembly. We have worked,
like old Bertrand Oakleigh, through the phases of extravagant hope and
premature pessimism; we are tired and dispirited, chiefly anxious to end
the strain, glad if we can curtail the slaughter, though we are growing
used to this, but concerned more for securing the peace of the world in
our lifetime than for declaring any other dividend on the lives which
have been expended. "We shall be dazed and bruised before an end is
made, laddie, staggering like drunken men," as Dr. Burgess prophesied
in "SONIA," "Peradventure, if ye speak of the Promised Land, men will
arise and stone you with stones, saying, 'Would to God we had died by
the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots,
and when we did eat bread to the full.' I am an old man, laddie, and old
men and weary men, broken with the cares of this life, are fain to go
back to the things they know."
What is left to those who are weak or obstinate enough to feel that the
things they know are capable of improvement and that man is essentially
perfectible? If a collective revival flicker to smoking extinction, can
you attain the same results from the aggregate of individual efforts?
O'Rane, you will find, tries both extremes.
Always cordially yours,
STEPHEN McKENNA.
Lincoln's Inn, 1918.