of my remarks, what America is, Europe is becoming. We, who sit here,
with the exception, of course, of Wilson, represent the Past, not the
Future. Politicians, professors, lawyers, doctors, no matter what our
calling, our judgments are determined by the old scale of values.
Intellect, Beauty, Emotion, these are the things we count precious; to
wealth and to progress we are indifferent, save as conducing to these.
And thus, like the speakers who preceded me, we venture to criticize
and doubt, where the modern man, American or European, simply and
wholeheartedly accepts. For this it would be idle for us to blame
ourselves, idle even to regret; we should simply and objectively note
that we are out of court. All that we say may be true, but it is
irrelevant. 'True,' says the man of the Future, 'we have no religion,
literature, or art; we don't know whence we come, nor whither we go;
but, what is more important, we don't care. What we do know is, that
we are moving faster than any one ever moved before; and that there is
every chance of our moving faster and faster. To inquire "whither" is
the one thing that we recognize as blasphemous. The principle of the
Universe is Acceleration, and we are its exponents; what is not
accelerated will be extinguished; and if we cannot answer ultimate
questions, that is the less to be regretted in that, a few centuries
hence, there will be nobody left to ask them.'
"Such is the attitude which I believe to be that of the Future, both in
the West and in the East. I do not pretend to sympathize with it; but
my perception of it gives a peculiar piquancy to my own position. I
rejoice that I was born at the end of an epoch; that I stand as it were
at the summit, just before the plunge into the valley below; and
looking back, survey and summarize in a glance the ages that are past.
I rejoice that my friends are Socrates and Plato, Dante, Michelangelo,
Goethe instead of Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Pierpont Morgan. I rejoice that
I belong to an effete country; and that I sit at table with almost the
last representatives of the culture, the learning and the ideals of
centuries of civilization. I prefer the tradition of the Past to that
of the Future; I value it the more for its contrast with that which is
to come; and I am the more at ease inasmuch as I feel myself divested
of all responsibility towards generations whose ideals and standards I
am unable to appreciate.
"All this shows, of course, merely that I am not one of the people so
aptly described by Wilson as the 'new generation.' But I flatter
myself that my intellectual apprehension is not coloured by the
circumstances of my own case, and that I have given you a clear and
objective picture of what it is that really constitutes progress. And
with that proud consciousness in my mind, I resume my seat."
THE conclusion of this speech was greeted with a hubbub of laughter,
approval, and protest confusedly mixed; in the midst of which it
occurred to me that I would select Audubon as the next speaker. My
reason was that Ellis, as I thought, under cover of an extravagant fit
of spleen, had made rather a formidable attack on the doctrine of
progress as commonly understood by social reformers. He had given us,
as it were, the first notes of the Negative. But Audubon, I knew,
would play the tune through to the end; and I thought we might as well
have it all, and have it before it should be too late for the possible
correctives of other speakers. Audubon was engaged in some occupation
in the city, and how he came to be a member of our society I cannot
tell; for he professed an uncompromising aversion to all speculation.
He was, however, a regular attendant and spoke well, though always in
the sense that there was nothing worth speaking about. On this
occasion he displayed, as usual, some reluctance to get on to his feet;
and even when he was overruled began, characteristically, with a
protest.
"I don't see why it should be a rule that everybody must speak. I
believe I have said something of the kind before"--but here he was
interrupted by a general exclamation that he had said it much too
often; whereupon he dropped the subject, but maintained his tone of
protest. "You don't understand," he went on, "what a difficult
position I am in, especially in a discussion of this kind. My
standpoint is radically different from that of the rest of you; and
anything I say is bound to be out of key. You're all playing what you
think to be the game of life, and playing it willingly. But I play
only under compulsion; if you call it playing, when one is hounded out
to field in all weathers without ever having a chance of an innings.
Or, rather, the game's more like tennis than cricket, and we're the
little boys who pick up the balls--and that, in my opinion, is a damned
humiliating occupation. And surely you must all really think so too!
Of course, you don't like to admit it. Nobody does. In the pulpit, in
the press, in conversation, even, there's a conspiracy of silence and
bluff. It's only in rare moments, when a few men get together in the
smoking-room, that the truth comes out. But when it does come out it's
always the same refrain, 'cui bono, cui bono?' I don't take much
account of myself; but, if there is one thing of which I am proud, it
is that I have never let myself be duped. From the earliest days I can
remember I realized what the nature of this world really is. And all
experience has confirmed that first intuition. That other people don't
seem to have it, too, is a source of constant amazement to me. But
really, and without wishing to be arrogant, I believe the reason is
that they choose to be duped and I don't. They intend, at all costs,
to be happy, or interested, or whatever it is that they prefer to call
it. And I don't say they are not wise in their generation. But I'm
not made like that; I just see things as they are; and I see that
they're very bad--a point in which I differ from the Creator.
"Well, now, to come to to-night's discussion, and my attitude towards
it. You have assumed throughout, as, of course, you were bound to do,
that things are worth while. But if they aren't, what becomes of all
your aims, all your views, all your problems and disputes? The basis
on which you are all agreed, however much you may differ in detail, is
that things can be made better, and that it's worth while to make them
so. But if one denies both propositions, what happens to the
superstructure? And I do deny them; and not only that, but I can't
conceive how anyone ever came to accept them. Surely, if one didn't
approach the question with an irrational bias towards optimism, one
would never imagine that there is such a thing as progress in anything
that really matters. Or are even we here impressed by such silly and
irrelevant facts as telephones and motor-cars? Ellis, I should think,
has said enough to dispel that kind of illusion; and I don't want to
labour a tedious point. If we are to look for progress at all we must
look for it, I suppose, in men. And I have never seen any evidence
that men are generally better than they used to be; on the contrary, I
think there is evidence that they are worse. But anyhow, even granting
that we could make things a bit better, what would be the use of doing
it in a world like this? If the whole structure of the universe is
bad, what's the good of fiddling with the details? You might as well
waste your time in decorating the saloon of a sinking ship. Granting
that you can improve the distribution of property, and raise the
standard of health and intelligence and all the rest of it, granting
you could to-morrow introduce your socialist state, or your liberal
state, or your anarchical co-operation, or whatever the plan may
be--how would you be better off in anything that matters? The main
governing facts would be unaltered. Men, for example, would still be
born, without being asked whether they want it or no. And that alone,
to my mind, is enough to condemn the whole business. I can't think how
it is that people don't resent more than they do the mere insult to
their self-respect involved in such a situation. Nothing can cure it,
nothing can improve it. It's a fundamental condition of life.
"If that were all it would be bad enough. But that's only the
beginning. For the world into which we are thus ignominiously flung
turns out to be incalculable and irrational. There are, of course, I
know, what are called the laws of nature. But I--to tell the honest
truth--I don't believe in them. I mean, I see no reason to suppose
that the sun will rise to-morrow, or that the seasons will continue to
observe their course, or that any of our most certain expectations will
be fulfilled in the future as they have been in the past. We import
into the universe our own prejudice in favour of order; and the
universe, I admit, up to a point appears to conform to it. But I don't
trust the conformity. Too many evidences abound of frivolous and
incalculable caprice. Why should not the appearance of order be but
one caprice the more, or even a crowning device of calculated malice?
And anyhow, the things that most concern us, tempests, epidemics,
accidents, from the catastrophe of birth to the deliverance of death,
we have no power to foresee or to forestall. Yet, in face of all this,
borne home to us every hour of every day, we cling to the creed of
universal law; and on the flux of chaos write our 'credo quia
impossibile.'
"Well, that is a heresy of mine I have never found anyone to share.
But no matter. My case is so strong I can afford to give it away point
by point. Granting then, that there were order in the universe, how
does that make it any better? Does it not rather make it worse, if the
order is such as to produce evil? And how great that evil is I need
not insist. For it has been presupposed in everything that has been
said to-night. If it were a satisfactory world you wouldn't all be
wanting to alter it. Still, you may say--people always do--'if there
is evil there is also good.' But it is just the things people call
good, even more than those they admit to be evil, that make me despair
of the world. How anyone with self-respect can accept, and accept
thankfully, the sort of things people do accept is to me a standing
mystery. It is surely the greatest triumph achieved by the Power that
made the universe that every week there gather into the churches
congregations of victims to recite their gratitude for 'their creation,
preservation, and all the blessings of this life.' The blessings!
What are they? Money? Success? Reputation? I don't profess, myself,
to be anything better than a man of the world; but that those things
should be valued as they are by men of the world is a thing that passes
my understanding. 'Well, but,' says the moralist, 'there's always duty
and work.' But what is the value of work if there's nothing worth
working for? 'Ah, but,' says the poet, 'there's beauty and love.' But
the beauty and love he seeks is something he never finds. What he
grasps is the shadow, not the thing. And even the shadow flits past
and eludes him on the stream of time.
"And just there is the final demonstration of the malignity of the
scheme of things. Time itself works against us. The moments that are
evil it eternalizes; the moments that might be good it hurries to
annihilation. All that is most precious is most precarious. Vainly do
we cry to the moment: 'Verweile doch, du bist so schoen!' Only the
heavy hours are heavy-footed. The winged Psyche, even at the moment of
birth, is sick with the pangs of dissolution.
"These, surely, are facts, not imaginations. Why, then, is it that men
refuse to look them in the face? Or, if they do, turn at once away to
construct some other kind of world? For that is the most extraordinary
thing of all, that men invent systems, and that those systems are
optimistic. It is as though they said: 'Things must be good. But as
they obviously are not good, they must really be other than they are.'
And hence these extraordinary doctrines, so pitiful, so pathetic, so
absurd, of the eternal good God who made this bad world, of the
Absolute whose only manifestation is the Relative, of the Real which
has so much less reality than the Phenomenal. Or, if all that be
rejected, we transfer our heaven from eternity to time, and project
into the future the perfection we miss in the present or in the past.
'True,' we say, 'a bad world! but then how good it will be!' And with
that illusion generation after generation take up their burden and
march, because beyond the wilderness there must be a Promised Land into
which some day some creatures unknown will enter. As though the evil
of the past could be redeemed by any achievement of the future, or the
perfection of one make up for the irremediable failure of another!
"Such ideas have only to be stated for their absurdity to be palpable.
Yet none the less they hold men. Why? I cannot tell. I only know
that they do not and cannot hold me; that I look like a stranger from
another world upon the business of this one; that I am among you, but
not of you; that your motives and aims to me are utterly
unintelligible; that you can give no account of them to which I can
attach any sense; that I have no clue to the enigma you seem so lightly
to solve by your religion, your philosophy, your science; that your
hopes are not mine, your ambitions not mine, your principles not mine;
that I am shipwrecked, and see around me none but are shipwrecked too;
yet, that these, as they cling to their spars, call them good ships and
true, speak bravely of the harbour to which they are prosperously
sailing, and even as they are engulfed, with their last breath, cry,
'lo, we are arrived, and our friends are waiting on the quay!' Who,
under these circumstances is mad? Is it I? Is it you? I can only
drift and wait. It may be that beyond these waters there is a harbour
and a shore. But I cannot steer for it, for I have no rudder, no
compass, no chart. You say you have. Go on, then, but do not call to
me. I must sink or swim alone. And the best for which I can hope is
speedily to be lost in the silent gulf of oblivion."
OFTEN as I had heard Audubon express these sentiments before, I had
never known him to reveal so freely and so passionately the innermost
bitterness of his soul. There was, no doubt, something in the
circumstances of the time and place that prompted him to this personal
note. For it was now the darkest and stillest hour of the night; and
we sat in the dim starlight, hardly seeing one another, so that it
seemed possible to say, as behind a veil, things that otherwise it
would have been natural to suppress. A long silence followed Audubon's
last words. They went home, I dare say to many of us more than we
should have cared to confess. And I felt some difficulty whom to
choose of the few who had not yet spoken, so as to avoid, as far as
possible, a tone that would jar upon our mood. Finally, I selected
Coryat, the poet, knowing he was incapable of a false note, and hoping
he might perhaps begin to pull us, as it were, up out of the pit into
which we had slipped. He responded from the darkness, with the
hesitation and incoherence which, in him, I have always found so
charming.
"I don't know," he began, "of course--well, yes, it may be all very
bad--at least for some people. But I don't believe it is. And I doubt
whether Audubon really--well, I oughtn't to say that, I suppose. But
anyhow, I'm sure most people don't agree with him. At any rate, for my
part, I find life extraordinarily good, just as it is, not mine only, I
mean, but everybody's; well, except Audubon's, I suppose I ought to
say, and even he, perhaps finds it rather good to be able to find it so
bad. But I'm not going to argue with him, because I know it's no use.
Its all the other people I want to quarrel with--except Ellis, who has
I believe some idea of the things that really count. But I don't think
Allison has, or Wilson, or most of the people who talk about progress.
Because, if you project, so to speak, all your goods into the future,
that shows that you don't appreciate those that belong to life just as
it is and wherever it is. And there must, I am sure, be something
wrong about a view that makes the past and the present merely a means
to the future. It's as though one were to take a bottle and turn it
upside down, emptying the wine out without noticing it; and then plan
how tremendously one will improve the shape of the bottle. Well, I'm
not interested in the shape of bottles. And I am interested in wine.
And--which is the point--I know that the wine is always there. It was
there in the past, it's here in the present, and it will be there in
the future; yes, in spite of you all!" He flung this out with a kind
of defiance that made us laugh. Whereupon he paused, as if he had done
something indiscreet, and then after looking in vain for a bridge to
take him across to his next starting-place, decided, as it seemed, to
jump, and went on as follows: "There's Wilson, for instance, tells us
that the new generation have no use for--I don't know that he used that
dreadful phrase, but that's what he meant--that they have 'no use for'
the Greeks, or the Romans, or the Middle Ages, or the eighteenth
century, or anything but themselves. Well, I can only say I'm very
sorry for them, and very glad I'm not one of them. Why, just think of
the extraordinary obliquity, or rather blindness of it! Because you
don't agree with Plato, or Marcus Aurelius, or Saint Francis, you think
they're only fit for the ash-heap. You might as well say you wouldn't
drink any wine except what was made to-day! The literature and art of
the past can never be dead. It's the flask where the geni of life is
imprisoned; you've only to open it and the life is yours. And what
life! That it's different from ours is just its merit. I don't mean
that it's necessarily better; but it preserves for us the things we
have dropped out. Because we, no more than the men of the past,
exhaust all the possibilities. The whole wonderful drama of life is
unfolded in time, and we of this century are only one scene of it; not
the most passionate either or the most absorbing. As actors, of
course, we're concerned only with this scene. But the curious thing
is, we're spectators, too, or can be if we like. And from the
spectator's point of view, many of the episodes in the past are much
more interesting, if not more important, than those of the present. I
mean, it seems to me so stupid--I oughtn't to say stupid, I suppose,
because of course you aren't exactly----" Whereat we laughed again,
and he pulled himself up. "What I mean is, that to take the philosophy
or the religion of the past and put it into your laboratory and test it
for truth, and throw it away if it doesn't answer the test, is to
misconceive the whole value and meaning of it. The real question is,
What extraordinary, fascinating, tragic or comic life went to produce
this precious specimen? What new revelation does it give of the
possibilities of the world? That's how you look at it, if you have the
sense of life. You feel after life everywhere. You love it when you
touch it. You ask it no questions about being good or bad. It just
is, and you are akin to it. Fancy, for instance, a man being able to
walk through the British Museum and pass the frieze of the Parthenon,
and say he has no use for it! And why? Because, I suppose, we don't
dress like that now, and can't ride horses bareback. Well, so much the
worse for us! But just think. There shrieking from the wall--no, I
ought to say singing with the voice of angels--is the spirit of life in
its loveliest, strongest, divinest incarnation, saying 'love me,
understand me, be like me!' And the new generation passes by with its
nose in the air sniffing, 'No! You're played out! You didn't know
science. And you didn't produce four children a-piece, as we mean to.
And your education was rhetorical, and your philosophy absurd, and your
vices--oh, unmentionable! No, no, young men! Not for us, thank you!'
And so they stalk on, don't you see them, with their rational costume,
and their rational minds, and their hard little hearts, and the empty
place where their imagination ought to be! Dreadful, dreadful! Or
perhaps they go, say, to Assisi, and Saint Francis comes to talk to
them. And 'Look,' he says, 'what a beautiful world, if you'd only get
rid of your encumbrances! Money, houses, clothes, food, it's all so
much obstruction! Come and see the real thing; come and live with the
life of the soul; burn like a flame, blossom like a flower, flow like a
mountain stream!' 'My dear sir,' they reply, 'you're unclean, impudent
and ignorant! Moreover you're encouraging mendicancy and superstition.
Not to-day, thank you!' And off they go to the Charity Organisation
Committee. It's--it's----" He pulled himself up again, and then went
on more quietly. "Well, one oughtn't to get angry, and I dare say I'm
misrepresenting everybody. Besides, I haven't said exactly what I
wanted to say. I wanted to say--what was it? Oh, yes! that this kind
of attitude is bound up with the idea of progress. It comes of taking
all the value out of the past and present, in order to put it into the
future. And then you _don't_ put it there! You can't! It evaporates
somehow, in the process. Where is it then? Well, I believe it's
always there, in life, and in every kind of life. It's there all the
time, in all the things you condemn. Of course the things really are
bad that you say are bad. But they're so good as well! I mean--well,
the other day I read one of those dreadful articles--at least, of
course they're very useful I suppose--about the condition of the
agricultural labourer. Well, then I took a ride in the country, and
saw it all in its setting and complete, with everything the article had
left out; and it wasn't so bad after all. I don't mean to say it was
all good either, but it was just wonderful. There were great horses
with shaggy fetlocks resting in green fields, and cattle wading in
shallow fords, and streams fringed with willows, and little cheeping
birds among the reeds, and larks and cuckoos and thrushes. And there
were orchards white with blossom, and little gardens in the sun, and
shadows of clouds brushing over the plain. And the much-discussed
labourer was in the midst of all this. And he really wasn't an
incarnate grievance! He was thinking about his horses, or his bread
and cheese, or his children squalling in the road, or his pig and his
cocks and hens. Of course I don't suppose he knew how beautiful
everything was; but I'm sure he had a sort of comfortable feeling of
being a part of it all, of being somehow all right. And he wasn't
worrying about his condition, as you all worry for him. I don't mean
you aren't right to worry, in a way; except that no one ought to worry.
But you oughtn't to suppose it's all a dreadful and intolerable thing,
just because you can imagine something better. That, of course, is
only one case; but I believe it's the same everywhere; yes, even in the
big cities, which, to my taste, look from outside much more repulsive
and terrible. There's a quality in the inevitable facts of life, in
making one's living, and marrying and producing children, in the ending
of one and the beginning of another day, in the uncertainties and fears
and hopes, in the tragedies as well as the comedies, something that
arrests and interests and absorbs, even if it doesn't delight. I'm not
saying people are happy; sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't.
But anyhow they are interested. And life itself is the interest. And
that interest is perennial, and of all ages and all classes. And if
you leave it out you leave out the only thing that counts. That's why
ideals are so empty; just because, I mean, they don't exist. And I
assure you--now I'm going to confess--that often, when I come away from
some meeting or from reading some dreadful article on social reform, I
feel as if I could embrace everything and everyone I come across,
simply for being so good as to exist--the 'bus-drivers, the cabmen, the
shop-keepers, the slum-landlords, the slum-victims, the prostitutes,
the thieves. There they are, anyhow, in their extraordinary setting,
floating on the great river of life, that was and is and will be,
itself its own justification, through whatever country it may flow.
And if you don't realize that--if you have a whole community that
doesn't realize it--then, however happy and comfortable and equitable
and all the rest of it you make your society, you haven't really done
much for them. Their last state may even be worse than the first,
because they will have lost the natural instinctive acceptance of life,
without learning how to accept it on the higher plane.