forests of Central Africa may still harbour some surviving Dinosaur, or
Brontosaur, a gigantic dragon-like monster, half-elephant, half-reptile,
a relic of a far bygone age. The thought is thrilling, though the hope
is probably doomed to disappointment. What is more certain is that not
less marvellous prodigies may be studied, by those naturalists who have
the eyes to see them, much nearer home; for though Africa has been truly
called a wonderful museum, it cannot compare in that respect with the
human mind, a repository that still teems with griffins and gorgons,
centaurs and chimæras, not less real because they are not creatures of
flesh and blood. Two thousand years ago it was shown by the Roman poet
Lucretius that what mortals had to fear was not such fabled pests as the
Nemean lion, the Arcadian boar, or the Cretan bull, but the much more
terrible in-dwelling monsters of the mind. In like manner, it was from
some hidden mental recesses that there emerged that immemorial savage,
the Cave-Man, who, released by the great upheaval of the war, was
sighted by many eye-witnesses, on many occasions, during the
five-years’ carnival of Hatred.[41]
Some day, perhaps, a true history of the war will be written, and it
will then be made plain how such conflict had been rendered all but
inevitable by the ambitious schemes and machinations not of one Empire,
but of several; by the piling up of huge armaments under the pretence of
insuring peace; by the greed of commercialists; and by the spirit of
jealousy and suspicion deliberately created by reckless speakers and
writers on both sides; further, how, when the crisis arrived, the
working-classes in all the nations concerned were bluffed and cajoled
into a contest which to their interests was certain in any event to be
ruinous. Then, the flame once lit, there followed in this country the
clever engineering of enforced military service, rendered possible by
the preceding Registration Act (disguised under the pretence of a quite
different purpose), and by a number of illusory pledges and promises for
the protection of conscientious objectors to warfare. The whole story,
faithfully told, will be a long record of violence and trickery
masquerading as “patriotism”; but what I am concerned with here is less
the war itself than the brutal spirit of hatred and persecution which
the war engendered.
As a single instance of Cave-Man’s ferocity, take the ill-treatment of
“enemy aliens” by non-combatants, who, themselves running no personal
risks, turned their insensate malice against helpless foreigners who had
every claim to a generous nation’s protection. “They are an accursed
race,” said a typical speaker at one of the meetings held in London.
“Intern them all, or rather leave out the _n_, and inter them all. Let
the name ‘German’ be handed down to posterity, and be known to the
historian as everything that was bestial, damnable, and abominable.”
These would be words of criminal lunacy--nothing less--in the mouth of
civilized beings, yet they are merely examples of things said on
innumerable occasions in every part of our land. Great masses of
Englishmen were, for the time, in a mental state lower than that of
remote tribes whom we regard as Bushmen and cannibals.
Perhaps the most curious feature of this orgie of patriotic Hatred was
its artificial nature: it was at home, not at the front, that it
flourished; and if those who indulged in it had been sane enough to read
even the war-news with intelligence, they would there have found ample
disproof of their denunciations. Half a dozen lines from one of Mr.
Philip Gibbs’s descriptions would have put their ravings to shame. “Some
of them [English wounded] were helped down by German prisoners, and it
was queer to see one of our men with his arms round the necks of two
Germans. German wounded, helped down by our men less hurt than they,
walked in the same way, with their arms round the necks of our men; and
sometimes an English soldier and a German soldier came along together
very slowly, arm in arm, like old cronies.” Not much patriotic Hatred
_there_.
Nor, of course, was it only the wounded, companions in misfortune, who
thus forgot their enmity; for the practice of “fraternizing” sprang up
to such an extent at the first Christmas of the war, that it was
afterwards prohibited. “They gave us cigars and cigarettes and toffee,”
wrote an English soldier who took part in this parley with the accursed
race, “and they told us that they didn’t want to fight, but they had to.
We were with them about an hour, and the officers couldn’t make head or
tail of it.” To this a military correspondent adds: “There is more
bitterness against the Germans among the French soldiers than among the
British, who as a rule show no bitterness at all, but the general spirit
of the French army is much less bitter than that of many civilians.” It
is an interesting psychological fact that it was the civilians, the
do-nothings, who made Hatred into a cult.
And what a beggarly, despicable sort of virulence it was! For a genuine
hatred there is at least something to be said; but this spurious
manufactured malevolence, invented by yellow journalists, and fostered
by Government placards, was a mere poison-gas of words, a thing without
substance, yet with power to corrupt and vitiate the minds of all who
succumbed to it. Men wrangled, as in Æsop’s fable, not over the ass, but
over the shadow of the ass. Theirs was, in Coleridge’s words:
A wild and dreamlike trade of blood and guile,
Too foolish for a tear, too wicked for a smile.
Yet it was difficult not to smile at it. The Niagara of nonsense that
the war let loose--the war that was supposed to be “making people
think”--was almost as laughable as the war itself was tragic; and
satirists[42] there were who, like Juvenal, found it impossible to keep
a grave countenance under such provocation. Hereafter, no doubt, smiles
and tears will be freely mingled, when posterity realizes, for example,
what tragi-comic part was played by “the scrap of paper,” that emblem of
national adherence to obligations of honour; by the concern felt among
the greater nations for the interests of the smaller; or by the
justification of the latest war as “the war to end war.”[43] What a
vast amount of material, too, will be available for an illustrated book
of humour, when some wag of the future shall collect and reprint the
series of official war-posters, including, of course, those printed as
advertisements of the war-loans (the melancholy lady, reminded that “Old
Age must Come,” and the rest of them), and when it shall be recollected
that these amazing absurdities could really influence the public! As if
militarism in itself were not comical enough, its eulogists succeeded in
making it still more ridiculous by their cartoons. As for the blind
credulity which the war-fever inspired, the legend of the Angels of Mons
will stand for age-long remembrance.
Parturiunt mures, nascetur ridiculus Mons.
This credulity begins, like charity, at home. Whenever a war breaks out,
there is much talk of the disingenuousness of “enemy” writers; but the
sophisms which are really perilous to each country are those of native
growth--those which lurk deep in the minds of its own people, ready,
when the season summons them, to spring up to what Sydney Smith called
“the full bloom of their imbecility.” That egregious maxim, _si vis
pacem para bellum_, “If you wish for peace, prepare for war,” is now
somewhat discredited; but it did its “bit” in causing the war, and after
a temporary retirement will doubtless be brought forward again when
circumstances are more favourable. It is perhaps as silly a saying as
any invented by the folly of man. Imagine a ward of lunatics, who,
having got their keepers under lock and key by a reversal of position
such as that described in one of Poe’s fantastic stories, should proceed
to safeguard peace by arming themselves with pokers and legs of tables.
For a time this adoption of the _para bellum_ principle might postpone
hostilities; but even lunatics would be wasting time and temper in thus
standing idly arrayed, and it is certain that sooner or later that
madhouse would realize its Armageddon. For opportunity in the long run
begets action; and whether you put a poker into a lunatic’s hand, or a
sword into a soldier’s, the result will eventually be the same.
Or perhaps we are told that war is “a great natural outburst,”
mysterious in its origin, beyond human control: the creed expressed in
Wordsworth’s famous assertion that carnage is “God’s daughter.” Could
any superstition be grosser? There is nothing mysterious or cataclysmic
in the outbreak of modern wars. Antipathies and rivalries of nations
there are, as of individuals, and of course if these are cherished they
will burst into flame; but it is equally true that if they are wisely
discountenanced and repressed they will finally subside. We do not
excuse an individual who pleads his jealousy, his passion, his thirst
for revenge as a reason for committing an assault, though personal crime
is just as much an “outbreak” as war is. There seems to be an idea that
when such passions exist it is better for them to “come out.” On the
contrary, the only hope for mankind is that such savage survivals should
_not_ come out, but that “the ape and tiger” should be steadily
repressed until they die.
But “_this_ war was justifiable.” In every nation the belief prevails
that, though war in general is to be deprecated, any particular contest
in which they may be engaged is righteous, inevitable, one of pure
self-defence, in their own words, “forced on us.” Even if this were
true, in some instances, in bygone years when international relations
were less complex, and when it was possible for two countries to quarrel
and “fight it out,” like schoolboys, without inflicting any widespread
injury upon others, it is wholly different now; for the calamity caused
by a modern war is so great that it hardly matters, to the world at
large, who, in schoolboy phrase, “began it.” It takes two to make a
quarrel; and the two are jointly responsible for the disaster that their
quarrel entails upon mankind.
The more one looks into these fallacies about fighting--and their number
is legion--one is compelled to believe that the spirit which chiefly
underlies the tendencies to war, apart from the direct incentive of
commercial greed, is one of Fear. Hatred is more obvious, but it is fear
which is at the bottom of the hatred. This alone can account for the
extraordinary shortsightedness with which all freedom, both of speech
and of action, is trampled on, when a war is once commenced. In such
circumstances, society at once reverts, in its panic alarm for its own
safety, to what may be called the Ethics of the Pack. Of all the absurd
charges levelled against those objectors to military service who refused
to sacrifice their own principles to other persons’ ideas of patriotism,
the quaintest was that of “cowardice”; for, with all respect to the very
real physical bravery of those who fought, it must be said that the
highest courage shown during the war was that of the persons who were
denounced and ridiculed as cravens. It was a moment when it required
much more boldness to object than to consent; one of those crises to
which the famous lines of Marvell are applicable:
When the sword glitters o’er the judge’s head,
And fear has coward churchmen silencéd,
Then is the poet’s time; ’tis then he draws,
And single fights forsaken virtue’s cause.
The despised “Conchie” was, in truth, the hero and poet of the occasion.
Again, it must be owing to fear, above all other impulses, that when a
war is over, the conquerors, instead of offering generous terms--a
course which would be at least as much to their own advantage as to that
of the vanquished--enforce hard and ruinous conditions which rob them
of a permanent peace. This they do from what Leigh Hunt calls
The consciousness of strength in enemies,
Who must be strain’d upon, or else they rise.
It was this that caused the Germans, fifty years ago, to dictate at
Paris those shameful terms which have now been their own undoing; and it
was this which caused the French, in their hour of victory, to imitate
the worst blunders of their enemies.
We are but a world of savages, or we should see that in international as
in personal affairs generosity is much more mighty than vengeance. Some
years before the war there appeared in the _Daily News_ an article by
its Paris correspondent, the late Mr. J. F. Macdonald, which even at the
time was very impressive, and which now, as one looks back over the
horrors of the war, has still greater and more melancholy significance.
He called it “A Dream.” He pointed out that the sole obstacle to a
friendly relationship between France and Germany, and the chief peril to
European peace, was the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine.
“During my fifteen years’ residence in France I have often dreamt a
dream--so audacious, so quixotic, so startling, that I can hardly
put it down on paper. It was that the German Emperor restored the
provinces of Alsace-Lorraine to France.... What a thrill throughout
the world, what a heroic and imperishable place in history for the
German Emperor, were the centenary of Waterloo to be commemorated
by the generous, the magnificent release of Alsace-Lorraine.”
A dream, indeed, and of a kind which at present flits through the ivory
gate; but a true dream in the sense that it conveyed a great
psychological fact, and of the sort which will yet have to be fulfilled,
if ever the world is to become a fit place for civilized beings--not to
mention “heroes”--to dwell in.
But let us return to realities and to the Cave-Man. However irrational
the Hatred which surged up in so many hearts, it nevertheless had power
to trample every humane principle under foot. That gorilla-like visage
which looked out at us from numbers of human faces meant that our
humanitarian cause, if not killed or mortally injured by the war-spirit,
was at least, in military parlance, “interned.” What we were advocating
was a more sympathetic conduct of life with regard to both our human and
our non-human fellow-beings, and what we mainly relied on, and aimed at
developing by the aid of reason, was the compassionate instinct which
cannot view any suffering unmoved. We had advanced to a point where some
sort of reprobation, however inadequate, was beginning to be felt for
certain barbarous practices; and though we could not claim to have done
more than curb the ferocious spirit of cruelty that had come down to us
from the past, it was at least some satisfaction that limits were
beginning to be imposed on it. What result, then, was inevitable, when,
in a considerable area of the world, all such ethical restrictions were
suddenly and completely withdrawn, and mankind was exhorted to take a
deep draught of aboriginal savagery?
Terrible as are the wrongs that countless human beings have to suffer,
when great military despotisms are adjusting by the sword their “balance
of power,” and exhibiting their entire lack of balance of mind, still
more terrible are the cruelties inflicted on the innocent non-human
races whose fate it is to be involved in the internecine battles of men.
In a message addressed to the German people, the Kaiser was reported to
have said: “We shall resist to the last breath of man and of horse.” As
if the horse could enjoy the comforts of “patriotism,” and were not
ruthlessly sacrificed, like a mere machine, for a quarrel in which he
had neither lot nor part! More suffering is caused to animals in a day
of war than in a year of peace; and so long as wars last it is idle to
suppose that a humane treatment of animals can be secured. Do the
opponents of blood-sports, of butchery, of vivisection, wonder at the
obstinate continuance of those evils? Let them consider what goes on
(blessed by bishops) in warfare, and they need not wonder any more.
“Do men gather figs from thistles?” It seemed as if some of our sages
expected men to do so, if one might judge from the anticipations of a
regenerated Europe that was to arise after the close of the war! Already
we see the vanity of such prophesyings--of making a sanguinary struggle
the foundation of idealistic hopes. Not all the wisdom of all the
prophets can alter the fact that like breeds like, that savage methods
perpetuate savage methods, that evil cannot be suppressed by evil, nor
one kind of militarism extinguished by another kind of militarism. Hell,
we say, is paved with good intentions; but those who assumed that the
converse was true, and that the pathway of their good intentions could
be paved with hell, have been woefully disillusioned by the event.
There is a too easy and sanguine expectation of “good coming out of
evil.” People talked as if Armageddon would naturally be followed by the
millennium. But history shows that modern wars leave periods of
exhaustion and repression. “Reconstruction” is a phrase now much in
vogue, but reconstruction is not progress. If two neighbouring families,
or several families, quarrel and pull down each others’ houses, there
will certainly have to be “reconstruction”; but it will be a long time
before they are even as well off as they were before. So it is with
nations. The question is: Does war quicken men’s sympathies or deaden
them? To some extent, both, according to the difference in their
temperaments; but it is to be feared that those who are quickened by
experience of war to hatred of war are but a small minority, compared
with those who are rendered more callous.
One great obstacle to the discontinuance of bloodshed is the
incorrigible sentimentality with which war has always been regarded by
mankind. “Who was it,” exclaimed the poet Tibullus, “that first invented
the dreadful sword? How savage, how truly steel-hearted was he!” But
surely the reproach is less deserved by the early barbarian who had the
ingenuity to discover an improved method of destruction than by the
so-called civilized persons who, for the sake of lucre, prolong such
inventions long after the date when they should have been abandoned.
“War is hell,” men say, and continue to accept it as inevitable. But if
war is hell, who but men themselves are the fiends that people it?
In like manner the outbreak of war is often called “a relapse into
barbarism,” but rather it is a proof that we have never emerged from
barbarism at all; and the knowledge of that fact is the only rational
solace that can be found, when we see the chief nations of Europe flying
at each other’s throats. For if this were a civilized age, the prospect
would be without hope; but seeing that we are not civilized--that as yet
we have only distant glimpses of civilization--we can still have faith
in the future. For the present, looking at the hideous lessons of the
war, we must admit that the growth of a humaner sentiment has been
indefinitely retarded. We cannot advance at the same time on the path of
militarism and of humaneness: we shall have to make up our minds, when
the fit of savagery has spent itself, which of the two diverging paths
we are to follow. And the moral of the war for social reformers will
perhaps be this: that it is not sufficient to condemn the barbarities of
warfare alone, as our pacifists have too often done. The civilized
spirit can only be developed by a consistent protest against all forms
of cruelty and oppression; it is only by cultivating a whole-minded
reverence for the rights of all our fellow-beings that we shall rid
ourselves of that inheritance of selfish callousness of which the
militarist and imperialist mania is a part.[44]
Is it not time that we sent the Cave-Man back to his den--henceforth to
be his sepulchre--and buried for ever that infernal spirit of Hatred
which he brought with him from the pit?
XVI
POETRY OF DEATH AND LOVE
And Death and Love are yet contending for their prey.
SHELLEY.
To look back over a long stretch of years, or to re-read the annals of a
Society with which one has been closely associated, is to be reminded of
the loss of many cherished comrades and friends. During the past decade,
especially, there are few households that have not become more
intimately associated with Death; but even in this matter, it would
seem, the war, far from “making men think,” has thrown them back more
and more on the ancient substitutes for thought, and on consolations
which only console when they are quite uncritically accepted.
For though the ceaseless conflict between death and love has brought to
the aid of mankind in this age, as in all ages, a host of comforters
who, whether by religion or by philosophy, have made light of the
terrors of the grave, they have as yet failed to supply the solace for
which mankind has long looked and is still looking. They profess to
remove “the sting of death,” but leave its real bitterness--the
sundering of lover from lover, friend from friend--unmitigated and
untouched.
Death is the eternal foe of love; and it is just because it is the foe
of love, not only because it is the foe of life, that it is properly and
naturally dreaded. Its sting lies not in the mortality, but in the
separation. A lover, a friend, a relative, grieves, not because the
loved one is mortal, still less because he himself is mortal, but
because they two will meet no more in the relation in which they have
stood to each other.
They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead.
They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.
It is useless to surmise, or to assert, that the spirit passes, after
death, into other spheres of activity or of happiness; for, even if
there were proof of this, it would in no way lessen the grief of those
who are bereaved of the actual. It was long ago pointed out by Lucretius
that even a renewed physical life would in any case be so different from
the present life that it could not be justly regarded as in any true
sense a continuance of it:
Nor yet, if time our scattered dust re-blend,
And after death upbuild the flesh again--
Yea, and our light of life arise re-lit--
Can such new birth concern the Self one whit,
When once dark death has severed memory’s chain?[45]
In like manner a future spiritual life could never compensate for the
severance of love in _this_ life; for it is of the very essence of love
to desire, not similar things, nor as good things, nor even better
things, but the same things. As Richard Jefferies wrote: “I do not want
change; I want the same old and loved things, the same wild flowers, the
same trees and soft ash-green: the turtle-doves, the blackbirds, ... and
I want them in the same place.”
And what is true of the nature-lover is not less true of the
human-lover, be he parent, or brother, or husband, or friend. It is not
a solace but a mockery of such passionate affection to assert that it
can be compensated for its disruption in the present by a new but
changed condition in the future. A recognition of this truth may be seen
in Thomas Hardy’s poem, “He Prefers Her Earthly”:
... Well, shall I say it plain?
I would not have you thus and there,
But still would grieve on, missing you, still feature
You as the one you were.
But this, it may be said, is to set love in rebellion against not death
only, but the very laws of life. There is truth in such censure; and
wisest is he who can so reconcile his longings with his destiny as to
know enough of the sweetness of love without too much of the bitterness
of regret. Perhaps, in some fairer society of a future age, when love is
more generally shared, the sting of death will be less acute; but what
centuries have yet to pass before that “Golden City” of which John
Barlas sang can be realized?
There gorgeous Plato’s spirit
Hangs brooding like a dove,
And all men born inherit
Love free as gods above;
There each one is to other
A sister or a brother,
A father or a mother,
A lover or a love.