exports and imports in money. I remember it as if it were yesterday....
Old Smugs—a hot New Imperialist—new then....
“Then what is history but a long struggle of men to find peace and
safety, and how they have been prevented by baseness and greed and
folly? Is that right? No, folly and baseness—and hate.... Hate
certainly.... All history is one dramatic story, of man blundering his
way from the lonely ape to the world commonwealth. All history is each
man’s adventure. But what teacher makes history much more than a
dwarfish twaddle about boundaries and kings and wars? Dwarfish twaddle.
History! It went nowhere. It did nothing. Was there ever anything more
like a crowd of people getting into an omnibus without wheels than the
History Schools at Oxford? Or your History Tripos?”... Oswald repeated
his image and saw that it was good....
“What is the teaching of a language again but teaching the knowledge of
another people—an exposition of the soul of another people—a work of
union?... But you see what I mean by all this; this idea of a great
world of co-operating peoples; it is not just a diplomatic scheme, not
something far off that Foreign Offices are doing; it is an idea that
must revolutionize the lessons of a child in the nursery and alter the
maps upon every schoolroom wall. And frame our lives altogether. Or be
nothing. The World Peace. To that we all belong. I have a fancy— As
though this idea had been hovering over the world, unsubstantial, unable
to exist—until all this blood-letting, this torment and disaster gave it
a body....
“What I am saying to you the University ought to have said to you.
“Instead of Universities”—he sought for a phrase and produced one that
against the nocturnal dark seemed brilliant and luminous. “Instead of
the University _passant regardant_, we want the University militant. We
want Universities all round and about the world, associated, working to
a common end, drawing together all the best minds and the finest wills,
a myriad of multi-coloured threads, into one common web of a world
civilization.”
§ 7
Also that night Oswald made a discourse upon the English.
“Yours is a great inheritance, Joan and Peter,” he said to the darkness.
“You are young; that is a great thing in itself. The world cries out now
for the young to enter into possession. And also—do you ever think of
it?—you are English, Joan and Peter....
“Let me say something to you before we have done, something out of my
heart. Have I ever canted patriotism to you? No! Am I an aggressive
Imperialist? Am I not a Home Ruler? For Ireland. For India. The best
years of my life have been spent in saving black men from white—and
mostly those white men were of our persuasion, men of the buccaneer
strain, on the loot. But now that we three are here together with no one
else to hear us, I will confess. I tell you there is no race and no
tradition in the whole world that I would change for my English race and
tradition. I do not mean the brief tradition of this little Buckingham
Palace and Westminster system here that began yesterday and will end
tomorrow, I mean the great tradition of the English that is spread all
over the earth, the tradition of Shakespeare and Milton, of Newton and
Bacon, of Runnymede and Agincourt, the tradition of the men who speak
fairly and act fairly, without harshness and without fear, who face
whatever odds there are against them and take no account of Kings. It is
in Washington and New York and Christchurch and Sydney, just as much as
it is in Pelham Ford.... Well, upon us more than upon any other single
people rests now for a time the burthen of human destiny. Upon us and
France. France is the spear head but we are the shaft. If we fail,
mankind may fail. We English have made the greatest empire that the
world has ever seen; across the Atlantic we have also made the greatest
republic. And these are but phases in our task. The better part of our
work still lies before us. The weight is on us now. It was Milton who
wrote long ago that when God wanted some task of peculiar difficulty to
be done he turned to his Englishmen. And he turns to us today. Old
Milton saw English shine clear and great for a time and then pass into
the darkness.... He didn’t lose his faith.... Church and crown are no
part of the real England which we inherit....
“We have no reason to be ashamed of our race and country, Joan and
Peter, for all the confusion and blundering of these last years. Our
generals and politicians have missed opportunity after opportunity. I
cannot talk yet of such things.... The blunderings.... The slackness....
Hanoverian England with its indolence, its dulness, its economic
uncleanness, its canting individualism, its contempt for science and
system, has been an England darkened, an England astray——. Young England
has had to pay at last for all those wasted years—and has paid.... My
God! the men we have expended already in fighting these Germans, the
brave, beautiful men, the jesting common men, the fresh boys, so
cheerful and kind and gallant!... And the happiness that has died! And
the shame of following after clumsy, mean leadership in the sight of all
the world!... But there rests no stain on our blood. For our people here
and for the Americans this has been a war of honour. We did not come
into this war for sordid or narrow ends. Our politicians when they made
base treaties had to hide them from our people.... Even in the face of
the vilest outrages, even now the English keep a balanced justice and
will not hate the German common men for things they have been forced to
do. Yesterday I saw the German prisoners who work at Stanton getting
into the train and joking with their guard. They looked well fed and
healthy and uncowed. One carried a bunch of primroses. No one has an ill
word for these men on all the countryside.... Does any other people in
the world treat prisoners as we treat them?...
“Well, the time has come for our people now to go on from Empire and
from Monroe doctrine, great as these ideas have been, to something still
greater; the time has come for us to hold out our hands to every man in
the world who is ready for a disciplined freedom. The German has dreamt
of setting up a Cæsar over the whole world. Against that we now set up a
disciplined world freedom. For ourselves and all mankind....
“Joan and Peter, that is what I have been coming to in all this
wandering discourse. Yours is a great inheritance. You and your
generation have to renew and justify England in a new world. You have to
link us again in a common purpose with our kind everywhere. You have to
rescue our destinies, the destinies of the world, from these stale
quarrels; you have to take the world out of the hands of these weary and
worn men, these old and oldish men, these men who can learn no more. You
have to reach back and touch the England of Shakespeare, Milton,
Raleigh, and Blake—and that means you have to go forward. You have to
take up the English tradition as it was before church and court and a
base imperialism perverted it. You have to become political. Now. You
have to become responsible. Now. You have to create. Now. You, with your
fresh vision, with the lessons you have learnt still burning bright in
your minds, you have to remake the world. Listen when the old men tell
you facts, for very often they know. Listen when they reason, they will
teach you many twists and turns. But when they dogmatize, when they
still want to rule unquestioned, and, above all, when they say
’_impossible_,’ even when they say ’_wait—be dilatory and discreet_,’
push them aside. Their minds squat crippled beside dead traditions....
That England of the Victorian old men, and its empire and its honours
and its court and precedences, it is all a dead body now, it has died as
the war has gone on, and it has to be buried out of our way lest it
corrupt you and all the world again....”
§ 8
We underrate the disposition of youth to think for itself.
Oswald set himself to deliver this Valediction of his after dinner on
Friday evening....
Joan was hesitating between a game of Demon Patience with Peter—in which
she always played thirteen to his eleven and usually won in spite of the
handicap—and an inclination for Bach’s _Passacaglia_ upon the pianola in
the study. Peter expressed himself ready for whatever she chose; he
would play D.P. or read _Moll Flanders_—he had just discovered the
delight of that greatest of all eighteenth century novels. He was
sitting on the couch in the library and Joan was standing upon the
hearthrug, regarding him thoughtfully, when Oswald came in. He stopped
to hear what Peter was saying, with his one eye intent on Joan’s pretty
gravity.
“No,” he interrupted. “This is my evening.
“You see,” he said, coming up to the fire; “I want to talk to you young
people. I want to know some things—— I want to know what you make of
life.... I want ... an exchange of views.”
He stood with his back to the fire and smiled at Joan’s grave face close
to his own. “I’ve got to talk to you,” he said, “very seriously. It’s
necessary.”
Having paralysed them by this preface he sat down in his deep armchair,
pulled it an inch or so towards the fire, and leaning forward, with his
eye on the spitting coals, began.
“I wish I could talk better, Joan and Peter.... I know I’ve never been a
good talker—it’s been rather a loss between us all. And now
particularly.... I want to talk.... You must let me get it out in my own
way....
“You see,” he went on after a moment or so to rally his forces, “I’ve
been your guardian, I’ve had your education and your affairs in my
hands, for fifteen years. So far as the affairs go, Sycamore, you know——
We won’t go into that. That’s all plain sailing. But it’s the education
I want to talk about—and your future. You are now both of age. Well
past. You’re on the verge of twenty-five, Peter—in a month or so. You’re
both off now—housekeeping. You’re dropping the pilot. It’s high time, I
suppose....”
Joan glanced at Peter, and then sank noiselessly into a crouching
attitude close to Oswald’s knee. He paused to stroke her hair.
“I’ve been trying to get you all that I could get you.... Education....
I’ve had to blunder and experiment. I ought to tell you what I’ve aimed
at and what I’ve done, take stock with you of the world I’ve educated
you for and the part you’re going to play in it. Take stock.... It’s
been a badly planned undertaking, I know. But then it’s such a
surprising and unexpected world. All the time I’ve been learning, and
most things I’ve learnt more or less too late to use the knowledge
properly....”
He paused.
Peter looked at his guardian and said nothing. Oswald patted the head at
his knee in return for a caress. It was an evasive, even apologetic pat,
for he did not want to be distracted by affection just then.
“This war has altered the whole world,” he went on. “Life has become
stark and intense, and when I took this on—when I took up the task of
educating you—our world here seemed the most wrapped up and comfortable
and secure world you can possibly imagine. Comfortable to the pitch of
stuffiness. Most English people didn’t trouble a bit about the shape of
human life; they thought it was—well, rather like a heap of down
cushions. For them it was. For most of Europe and America.... They
thought it was all right and perfectly safe—if only you didn’t bother.
And education had lost its way. Yes. That puts the case. _Education had
lost its way._”
Oswald paused again. He fixed his one eye firmly on a glowing cavity in
the fire, as though that contained the very gist of his thoughts.
“What is education up to?” he asked. “What is education?”...
Thereupon of course he ought to have gone on to the passage beginning,
“Consider this beast we are, this thing man!” as he had already
rehearsed it overnight. But Peter had not learnt his part properly.
“I suppose it’s fitting the square natural man into the round hole of
civilized life,” Peter threw out.
This reply greatly disconcerted Oswald. “Exactly,” he said, and was for
some moments at a loss.
“Yes,” he said, rallying. “But what is civilized life?”
“Oh!... Creative activities in an atmosphere of helpful goodwill,” Peter
tried in the brief pause that followed.
Oswald had a disagreeable feeling that he was getting to the end of his
discourse before he delivered its beginning. “Yes,” he said again. “Yes.
But for that you must have a political form.”
“The World State,” said Peter.
“The League of Free Nations,” said Oswald, “to enforce Peace throughout
the earth.”
The next remark that came from Peter was still more unexpected and
embarrassing.
“Peace is nothing,” said Peter.
Oswald turned his red eye upon his ward, in profound amazement.
Did they differ fundamentally in their idea of the human future?
“Peace, my dear Peter, is everything,” he protested.
“But, sir, it’s nothing more than the absence of war. It’s a negative.
In itself it’s—vacuum. You can’t live in a vacuum.”
“But I mean an active peace.”
“That would be something more than peace. War is an activity. Peace is
not. If you take war out of the world, you must have some other
activity.”
“But doesn’t the organization of the World Peace in itself constitute an
activity?”
“That would be a diminishing activity, sir. Like a man getting himself
morphia and taking it and going to sleep. A World Peace would release
energy, and as the energy was released, if the end were merely peace,
there would be less need for it. Until things exploded.”
Great portions of Oswald’s Valediction broke away and vanished for ever
into the limbo of unspoken discourses.
“But would you have war go on, Peter?”
“Not in its present form. But struggle and unification, which is the end
sought in all struggles, must go on in some form, sir,” said Peter,
“while life goes on. We have to get the World State and put an end to
war. I agree. But the real question is what are you going to do with our
Peace? What struggle is to take the place of war? What is mankind going
to _do_? Most wars have come about hitherto because somebody was bored.
Do you remember how bored we all were in 1914? And the rotten way we
were all going on then? A World State or a League of Nations with
nothing to do but to keep the peace will bore men intolerably.... That’s
what I like about the Germans.”
“What you _like_ about the Germans!” Oswald cried in horror.
“They _did_ get a move on, sir,” said Peter.
“We don’t want a preventive League of Nations,” Peter expanded. “It’s
got to be creative or nothing. Or else we shall be in a sort of
perpetual Coronation year—with nothing doing on account of the
processions. Horrible!”
For a little while Oswald made no reply. He could not recall a single
sentence of the lost Valediction that was at all appropriate here, and
he was put out and distressed beyond measure that Peter could find
anything to “like” about the Germans.
“A World Peace for its own sake is impossible,” Peter went on. “The Old
Experimenter would certainly put a spoke into that wheel.”
“Who is the Old Experimenter?” asked Oswald.
“He’s a sort of God I have,” said Peter. “Something between theology and
a fairy tale. I dreamt about him. When I was delirious. He doesn’t rule
the world or anything of that sort, because he doesn’t want to, but he
keeps on dropping new things into it. To see what happens. Like a man
setting himself problems to work out in his head. He lives in a little
out-of-the-way office. That’s the idea.”
“You haven’t told me about him,” said Joan.
“I shall some day,” said Peter. “When I feel so disposed....”
“This is very disconcerting,” said Oswald, much perplexed. He scowled at
the fire before him. “But you do realize the need there is for some form
of world state and some ending of war? Unless mankind is to destroy
itself altogether.”
“Certainly, sir,” said Peter. “But we aren’t going to do that on a peace
proposition simply. It’s got to be a positive proposal. You know, sir——”
“I wish you’d call me Nobby,” said Oswald.
“It’s a vice contracted in the army, this Sir-ing,” said Peter. “It’s
Nobby in my mind, anyhow. But you see, I’ve got a kind of habit, at
night and odd times, of thinking over my little misadventure with that
balloon and my scrap with von Papen. They are my stock dreams, with
extra details worked in, nasty details some of them ... and then I wake
up and think about them. I think over the parachute affair more than the
fight, because it lasted longer and I wasn’t so active. I felt it more.
Especially being shot in the legs.... That sort of dream when you float
helpless.... But the thing that impresses me most in reflecting on those
little experiences is the limitless amount of intelligence that expended
itself on such jobs as breaking my wrist, splintering my shoulder-blade
and smashing up my leg. The amount of ingenuity and good workmanship in
my instruments and the fittings of my basket, for example, was
extraordinary, having regard to the fact that it was just one small item
in an artillery system for blowing Germans to red rags. And the stuff
and intelligence they were putting up against me, that too was
wonderful; the way the whole problem had been thought out, the special
clock fuse and so on. Well, my point is that the chap who made that
equipment wasn’t particularly interested in killing me, and that the
chaps who made my outfit weren’t particularly keen on the slaughter of
Germans. But they had nothing else to do. They were brought up in a
pointless world. They were caught by a vulgar quarrel. What did they
care for the Kaiser? Old ass! What they were interested in was making
the things....”
Peter became very earnest in his manner. “No peace, as we have known
peace hitherto, offers such opportunities for good inventive work as war
does. That’s my point, Nobby. There’s no comparison between the
excitement and the endless problems of making a real, live, efficient
submarine, for example, that has to meet and escape the intensest risks,
and the occupation of designing a great, big, safe, upholstered liner in
which fat swindlers can cross the Atlantic without being seasick. War
tempts imaginative, restless people, and a stagnant peace bores them.
And you’ve got to reckon with intelligence and imagination in this
world, Nobby, more than anything. They aren’t strong enough to control
perhaps, but they will certainly upset. Inventive, restless men are the
particular instruments of my Old Experimenter. He prefers them now to
plague, pestilence, famine, flood and earthquake. They are more delicate
instruments. And more efficient. And they won’t _stand_ a passive peace.
Under no circumstances can you hope to induce the chap who contrived the
clock fuse and the chap who worked out my gas bag or the chap with a new
aeroplane gadget, and me—me, too—to stop cerebrating and making our
damndest just in order to sit about safely in meadows joining up daisy
chains—like a beastly lot of figures by Walter Crane. The Old
Experimenter finds some mischief still for idle brains to do. He insists
on it. That’s fundamental to the scheme of things.”
“But that’s no reason,” interrupted Oswald, “why you and the inventors
who were behind you, and the Germans who made and loaded and fired that
shell, shouldn’t all get together to do something that will grow and
endure. Instead of killing one another.”
“Ah, that’s it!” said Peter. “But the word for that isn’t Peace.”
“Then what is the word for it?”
“I don’t know,” said Peter. “The Great Game, perhaps.”
“And where does it take you?”
Peter threw out his hands. “It’s an exploration,” he said. “It will take
man to the centre of the earth; it will take him to the ends of space,
between the atoms and among the stars. How can we tell beforehand? You
must have faith. But of one thing I am sure, that man cannot stagnate.
It is forbidden. It is the uttermost sin. Why, the Old Man will come out
of his office himself to prevent it! This war and all the blood and loss
of it is because the new things are entangled among old and dead things,
worn-out and silly things, and we’ve not had the vigour to get them
free. Old idiot nationality, national conceit—expanding to imperialism,
nationality in a state of megalomania, has been allowed to get hold of
the knife that was meant for a sane generation to carve out a new world
with. Heaven send he cuts his own throat this time! Or else there may be
a next time.... I’m all for the one world state, and the end of flags
and kings and custom houses. But I have my doubts of all this talk of
making the world safe—safe for democracy. I want the world made one for
the adventure of mankind, which is quite another story. I have been in
the world now, Nobby, for five-and-twenty years, and I am only beginning
to suspect the wonder and beauty of the things we men might know and do.
If only we could get our eyes and hands free of the old inheritance.
What has mankind done yet to boast about? I despise human
history—because I believe in God. Not the God you don’t approve of,
Nobby, but in my Old Experimenter, whom I confess I don’t begin to
understand, and in the far-off, eternal scheme he hides from us and
which he means us to develop age by age. Oh! I don’t understand him, I
don’t begin to explain him; he’s just a figure for what I feel is the
reality. But he is right, he is wonderful. And instead of just muddling
about over the surface of his universe, we have to get into the
understanding of it to the very limits of our ability, to live our
utmost and do the intensest best we can.”
“Yes,” said Oswald; “yes.” This was after his own heart, and yet it did
not run along the lines of the Valedictory that had flowered with such
Corinthian richness overnight. He had been thinking then of world peace;
what Peter was driving at now was a world purpose; but weren’t the two
after all the same thing? He sat with his one eye reflecting the red
light of the fire, and the phrases that had come in such generous
abundance overnight now refused to come at all.
Peter, on the couch, continued to think aloud.
“Making the world safe for democracy,” said Peter. “That isn’t quite it.
If democracy means that any man may help who can, that school and
university will give every man and woman the fairest chance, the most
generous inducement to help, to do the thing he can best do under the
best conditions, then, _Yes_; but if democracy means getting up a riot
and boycott among the stupid and lazy and illiterate whenever anything
is doing, then I say _No_! Every human being has got to work, has got to
take part. If our laws and organization don’t insist upon that, the Old
Experimenter will. So long as the world is ruled by stale ideas and lazy
ideas, he is determined that it shall flounder from war to war. Now what
does this democracy mean? Does it mean a crowd of primitive brutes
howling down progress and organization? because if it does, I want to be
in the machine-gun section. When you talk of education, Nobby, you think
of highly educated people, of a nation instructed through and through.
But what of democracy in Russia, where you have a naturally clever
people in a state of peasant ignorance—who can’t even read? Until the
schoolmaster has talked to every one for ten or twelve years, can you
have what President Wilson thinks of as democracy at all?”
“Now there you meet me,” said Oswald. “That is the idea I have been
trying to get at with you.” And for some minutes the palatial dimensions
of the lost Valedictory loomed out. Where he had said “peace” overnight,
however, he now said progress.
But the young man on the couch was much too keenly interested to make a
good audience. When presently Oswald propounded his theory that all the
great world religions were on the side of this World Republic that he
and Peter desired, Peter demurred.
“But is that true of Catholicism for instance?” said Peter.
Oswald quoted, “I am the Vine and ye are the Branches.”
“Yes,” said Peter. “But look at the Church itself. Don’t look at the
formula but at the practice and the daily teaching. Is it truly a
growing Vine?” The reality of Catholicism, Peter argued, was a
traditional, sacramental religion, a narrow fetish religion with a
specialized priest, it was concerned primarily with another world, it
set its face against any conception of a scheme of progress in this
world apart from its legend of the sacrifice of the Mass.