Next week things had mended, and the French and British were pushing
the Germans back from the Marne to the Aisne. Whatever doubts we had
felt about the French were dispelled in that swift week of recovery.
They were all right. It was a stupendous relief, for if France had
gone down, if her spirit had failed us, then we felt all liberalism,
all republicanism, all freedom and light would have gone out in this
world for centuries.
But then again at the Aisne the Germans stood, and our brisk rush of
hope sobered down towards anxiety as the long flanking movement
stretched towards the sea and the Antwerp situation developed....
By imperceptible degrees our minds began to free themselves from the
immediate struggle of the war, from strategy and movements, from the
daily attempt to unriddle from reluctant and ambiguous dispatches,
Dutch rumours, censored gaps, and uninforming maps what was happening.
It became clear to us that there were to be no particular dramatic
strokes, no sudden, decisive battles, no swift and clear conclusions.
The struggle began to assume in our minds its true proportions, its
true extent, in time, in space, in historical consequence. We had
thought of a dramatic three months' conflict and a redrawn map of
Europe; we perceived we were in the beginnings of a far vaster
conflict; the end of an age; the slow, murderous testing and
condemnation of whole systems of ideas that had bound men uneasily in
communities for all our lives. We discussed--as all the world was
discussing--the huge organization of sentiment and teaching that had
produced this aggressive German patriotism, this tremendous national
unanimity. Ford Madox Hueffer came in to tell us stories of a
disciplined professoriate, of all education turned into a war
propaganda, of the deliberate official mental moulding of a whole
people that was at once fascinating and incredible. We went over
Bernhardi and Treitschke; we weighed Nietzsche's share in that mental
growth. Our talk drifted with the changing season and Boon's sudden
illness after his chill, from his garden to his sitting-room, where he
lay wrapped up upon a sofa, irritable and impatient with this
unaccustomed experience of ill-health.
"You see how much easier it is to grow an evil weed than a wholesome
plant," he said. "While this great strong wickedness has developed in
Germany, what thought have we had in our English-speaking community?
What does our world of letters amount to? Clowns and dons and prigs,
cults of the precious and cults of style, a few squeaking
author-journalists and such time-serving scoundrels as I, with my
patent Bathwick filter, my twenty editions, and my thousands a year.
None of us with any sense of a whole community or a common purpose!
Where is our strength to go against that strength of the heavy German
mind? Where is the Mind of our Race?"
He looked at me with tired eyes.
"It has been a joke with us," he said.
"Is there no power of thought among free men strong enough to swing
them into armies that can take this monster by the neck? Must men be
bullied for ever? Are there no men to think at least as earnestly as
one climbs a mountain, and to write with their uttermost pride? Are
there no men to face truth as those boys at Mons faced shrapnel, and
to stick for the honour of the mind and for truth and beauty as those
lads stuck to their trenches? Bliss and I have tried to write of all
the world of letters, and we have found nothing to write about but
posturing and competition and sham reputations, and of dullness and
impudence hiding and sheltering in the very sheath of the sword of
thought.... For a little while after the war began our people seemed
noble and dignified; but see now how all Britain breaks after its
first quiet into chatter about spies, sentimentality about the
architecture of Louvain, invasion scares, the bitter persecution of
stray Germans, and petty disputes and recriminations like a pool under
a breeze. And below that nothing. While still the big thing goes on,
ungrasped, day after day, a monstrous struggle of our world against
the thing it will not have.... No one is clear about what sort of
thing we will have. It is a nightmare in which we try continually to
escape and have no-whither to escape.... What is to come out of this
struggle? Just anything that may come out of it, or something we mean
_shall_ come out of it?"
He sat up in his bed; his eyes were bright and he had little red spots
in his cheeks.
"At least the Germans stand for something. It may be brutal, stupid,
intolerable, but there it is--a definite intention, a scheme of
living, an order, Germanic Kultur. But what the devil do _we_ stand
for? Was there anything that amounted to an intellectual life at all
in all our beastly welter of writing, of nice-young-man poetry, of
stylish fiction and fiction without style, of lazy history, popular
philosophy, slobbering criticism, Academic civilities? Is there
anything here to hold a people together? Is there anything to make a
new world? A literature ought to dominate the mind of its people. Yet
here comes the gale, and all we have to show for our racial thought,
all the fastness we have made for our souls, is a flying scud of paper
scraps, poems, such poems! casual articles, whirling headlong in the
air, a few novels drowning in the floods...."