the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects
more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before his gods,
without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship. Pathetic and
very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation
and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods:
surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most precious has
been freely given, their lust for blood must be appeased, and more will
not be required. The religion of Moloch--as such creeds may be
generically called--is in essence the cringing submission of the slave,
who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master
deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet
acknowledged, Power may be freely worshiped, and receive an unlimited
respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.
But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world
begins to be felt; and worship, if it is not to cease, must be given to
gods of another kind than those created by the savage. Some, though they
feel the demands of the ideal, will still consciously reject them, still
urging that naked Power is worthy of worship. Such is the attitude
inculcated in God's answer to Job out of the whirlwind: the divine power
and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness there is no hint.
Such also is the attitude of those who, in our own day, base their
morality upon the struggle for survival, maintaining that the survivors
are necessarily the fittest. But others, not content with an answer so
repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the position which we have
become accustomed to regard as specially religious, maintaining that, in
some hidden manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with the
world of ideals. Thus Man creates God, all-powerful and all-good, the
mystic unity of what is and what should be.
But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our
judgment to it, there is an element of slavishness from which our
thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt the
dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of
non-human Power. When we have realized that Power is largely bad, that
man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a
world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to us:
Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God
exist and be evil, or shall he be recognized as the creation of our own
conscience?
The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly
our whole morality. The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche
and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is the result of failure
to maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe: it is itself a
prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of our best to Moloch. If
strength indeed is to be respected, let us respect rather the strength
of those who refuse that false "recognition of facts" which fails to
recognize that facts are often bad. Let us admit that, in the world we
know there are many things that would be better otherwise, and that the
ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realized in the realm of
matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal
of perfection which life does not permit us to attain, though none of
these things meet with the approval of the unconscious universe. If
Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In
this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God
created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which
inspires the insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must
submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in
aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow-men, free from the petty
planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live,
from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith
which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let
us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always
before us.
When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a
spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary to
the assertion of freedom. To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile
universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated, to
refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears to be the
duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But indignation is
still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil
world; and in the fierceness of desire from which rebellion springs
there is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the wise to
overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our
desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the
submission of our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission
of our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of
our thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the
vision of beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant
world. But the vision of beauty is possible only to unfettered
contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and
thus Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall
yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations
of Time.
Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of
evil, yet Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding
that of the Promethean philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted
that, of the things we desire, some, though they prove impossible, are
yet real goods; others, however, as ardently longed for, do not form
part of a fully purified ideal. The belief that what must be renounced
is bad, though sometimes false, is far less often false than untamed
passion supposes; and the creed of religion, by providing a reason for
proving that it is never false, has been the means of purifying our
hopes by the discovery of many austere truths.
But there is in resignation a further good element: even real goods,
when they are unattainable, ought not to be fretfully desired. To every
man comes, sooner or later, the great renunciation. For the young, there
is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a
passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by
death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn,
each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however
beautiful may be the things we crave for, Fate may nevertheless forbid
them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without
repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain
regrets. This degree of submission to Power is not only just and right:
it is the very gate of wisdom.
But passive renunciation is not the whole wisdom; for not by
renunciation alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own
ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of
imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of
reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines
and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of
change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of
fact. In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will
shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the
world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs
whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.
Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a
cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered.
The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the
gravestones of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the
eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can
the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern the
Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose
radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to
gladden the pilgrim's heart.
When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both
to resign ourselves to the outward rule of Fate and to recognize that
the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at
last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to
transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining
gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the
world--in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the
events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death--the
insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which
its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery
over the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil the material with
which it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is
its achievement in inducing the reluctant rock to yield up its hidden
treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to
swell the pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the
proudest, the most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the
very center of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest
mountain; from its impregnable watch-towers, his camps and arsenals, his
columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls the free life
continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the
servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless
city new spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy
the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence. Honor to those brave warriors
who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved for us the
priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by sacrilegious
invaders the home of the unsubdued.
But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more
or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the
spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the
irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an
overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the
inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange
marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow.
In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire,
all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little
trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of
day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the
flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling
waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill
blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid
hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, which must
struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole
weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears.
Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true
baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into
the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter
of the soul with the outer world, renunciation, wisdom, and charity are
born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost
shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to
be--Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the
powerlessness of man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity
to vanity--to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.
This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of
its motionless and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of late
autumn, when the leaves, though one breath would make them fall, still
glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change or
strive; like Duncan, after life's fitful fever it sleeps well; what was
eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the
things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the
night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is unendurable; but to a
soul which has conquered Fate it is the key of religion.
The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison
with the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate
and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself,
and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great
as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless
splendor, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no
longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb
it, and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private
happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with
passion for eternal things--this is emancipation, and this is the free
man's worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of
Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be
purged by the purifying fire of Time.
United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a
common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always,
shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a
long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by
weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where
none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from
our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief
is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or
misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten
their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a
never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith
in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits
and demerits, but let us think only of their need--of the sorrows, the
difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their
lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same
darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their
day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the
immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered,
where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark
of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with
encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage
glowed.
Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow,
sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of
destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man,
condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through
the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow
falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the
coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his
own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a
mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly
defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his
knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding
Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the
trampling march of unconscious power.
SOME HISTORIANS
By PHILIP GUEDALLA
Philip Guedalla, born 1889, is a London barrister and at the
present time an Independent Liberal candidate for the House of
Commons. He has written excellent light verse and parodies, and a
textbook on European history, 1715-1815. His most conspicuous
achievement so far is the brilliant volume _Supers and Supermen_,
from which my selection is taken.
_Supers and Supermen_ is a collection of historical and political
portraits and skits. It is mercilessly and gloriously humorous.
Those who can always follow the wit and irony that Guedalla knows
how to conceal in a cunningly turned phrase, will find the book a
prodigious delight. He has an unerring eye for the absurd; his
paradoxes, when pondered, have a way of proving excellent truth.
(Truth is sometimes like the furniture in Through the Looking
Glass, which could only be reached by resolutely walking away from
it.)
Ten years ago Mr. Guedalla was considered the most continuously and
insolently brilliant undergraduate of the Oxford of that day. The
charm and vigor of his ironical wit have not lessened since his
fellow-undergraduates strove to convince themselves that no man
could be as clever as "P. G." seemed to be. When Mr. Guedalla
"holds the mirror up to Nietzsche" or "gives thanks that Britons
never never will be Slavs," or dynasticizes Henry James into three
reigns: "James I, James II, and the Old Pretender;" or when he
speaks of "the cheerful clatter of Sir James Barrie's cans as he
went round with the milk of human kindness," there will be some who
will sigh; but there will also (I hope) be many who will forgive
the bravado for the quicksilver wit.
It was Quintillian or Mr. Max Beerbohm who said, "History repeats
itself: historians repeat each other." The saying is full of the mellow
wisdom of either writer, and stamped with the peculiar veracity of the
Silver Age of Roman or British epigram. One might have added, if the
aphorist had stayed for an answer, that history is rather interesting
when it repeats itself: historians are not. In France, which is an
enlightened country enjoying the benefits of the Revolution and a public
examination in rhetoric, historians are expected to write in a single
and classical style of French. The result is sometimes a rather
irritating uniformity; it is one long Taine that has no turning, and any
quotation may be attributed with safety to Guizot, because _la nuit tous
les chats sont gris_. But in England, which is a free country, the
restrictions natural to ignorant (and immoral) foreigners are put off by
the rough island race, and history is written in a dialect which is not
curable by education, and cannot (it would seem) be prevented by
injunction.
Historians' English is not a style; it is an industrial disease. The
thing is probably scheduled in the Workmen's Compensation Act, and the
publisher may be required upon notice of the attack to make a suitable
payment to the writer's dependants. The workers in this dangerous trade
are required to adopt (like Mahomet's coffin) a detached
standpoint--that is, to write as if they took no interest in the
subject. Since it is not considered good form for a graduate of less
than sixty years' standing to write upon any period that is either
familiar or interesting, this feeling is easily acquired, and the
resulting narrations present the dreary impartiality of the Recording
Angel without that completeness which is the sole attraction of his
style. Wilde complained of Mr. Hall Caine that he wrote at the top of
his voice; but a modern historian, when he is really detached, writes
like some one talking in the next room, and few writers have equaled the
legal precision of Coxe's observation that the Turks "sawed the
Archbishop and the Commandant in half, and committed other grave
violations of international law."
Having purged his mind of all unsteadying interest in the subject, the
young historian should adopt a moral code of more than Malthusian
severity, which may be learned from any American writer of the last
century upon the Renaissance or the decadence of Spain. This manner,
which is especially necessary in passages dealing with character, will
lend to his work the grave dignity that is requisite for translation
into Latin prose, that supreme test of an historian's style. It will be
his misfortune to meet upon the byways of history the oddest and most
abnormal persons, and he should keep by him (unless he wishes to forfeit
his Fellowship) some convenient formula by which he may indicate at once
the enormity of the subject and the disapproval of the writer. The
writings of Lord Macaulay will furnish him at need with the necessary
facility in lightning characterization. It was the practice of Cicero to
label his contemporaries without distinction as "heavy men," and the
characters of history are easily divisible into "far-seeing statesmen"
and "reckless libertines." It may be objected that although it is
sufficient for the purposes of contemporary caricature to represent Mr.
Gladstone as a collar or Mr. Chamberlain as an eye-glass, it is an
inadequate record for posterity. But it is impossible for a busy man to
write history without formulæ, and after all sheep are sheep and goats
are goats. Lord Macaulay once wrote of some one, "In private life he was
stern, morose, and inexorable"; he was probably a Dutchman. It is a
passage which has served as a lasting model for the historian's
treatment of character. I had always imagined that Cliché was a suburb
of Paris, until I discovered it to be a street in Oxford. Thus, if the
working historian is faced with a period of "deplorable excesses," he
handles it like a man, and writes always as if he was illustrated with
steel engravings:
The imbecile king now ripened rapidly towards a crisis. Surrounded
by a Court in which the inanity of the day was rivaled only by the
debauchery of the night, he became incapable towards the year 1472
of distinguishing good from evil, a fact which contributed
considerably to the effectiveness of his foreign policy, but was
hardly calculated to conform with the monastic traditions of his
House. Long nights of drink and dicing weakened a constitution that
was already undermined, and the council-table, where once Campo
Santa had presided, was disfigured with the despicable apparatus of
Bagatelle. The burghers of the capital were horrified by the wild
laughter of his madcap courtiers, and when it was reported in
London that Ladislas had played at Halma the Court of St. James's
received his envoy in the deepest of ceremonial mourning.
That is precisely how it is done. The passage exhibits the benign and
contemporary influences of Lord Macaulay and Mr. Bowdler, and it
contains all the necessary ingredients, except perhaps a "venal
Chancellor" and a "greedy mistress." Vice is a subject of especial
interest to historians, who are in most cases residents in small county
towns; and there is unbounded truth in the rococo footnote of a writer
on the Renaissance, who said _à propos_ of a Pope: "The disgusting
details of his vices smack somewhat of the morbid historian's lamp." The
note itself is a fine example of that concrete visualization of the
subject which led Macaulay to observe that in consequence of Frederick's
invasion of Silesia "black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red
men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America."
A less exciting branch of the historian's work is the reproduction of
contemporary sayings and speeches. Thus, an obituary should always close
on a note of regretful quotation:
He lived in affluence and died in great pain. "Thus," it was said
by the most eloquent of his contemporaries, "thus terminated a
career as varied as it was eventful, as strange as it was unique."
But for the longer efforts of sustained eloquence greater art is
required. It is no longer usual, as in Thucydides' day, to compose
completely new speeches, but it is permissible for the historian to
heighten the colors and even to insert those rhetorical questions and
complexes of personal pronouns which will render the translation of the
passage into Latin prose a work of consuming interest and lasting
profit:
The Duke assembled his companions for the forlorn hope, and
addressed them briefly in _oratio obliqua_. "His father," he said,
"had always cherished in his heart the idea that he would one day
return to his own people. Had he fallen in vain? Was it for nothing
that they had dyed with their loyal blood the soil of a hundred
battlefields? The past was dead, the future was yet to come. Let
them remember that great sacrifices were necessary for the
attainment of great ends, let them think of their homes and
families, and if they had any pity for an exile, an outcast, and an
orphan, let them die fighting."