He laid his hand on a daily newspaper beside him.
"Oh, you're not the only one. I will make you ashamed of yourself,
Wilkins. Here's the superlative to your positive. Here's the sort of
man I should like to hold for five minutes head downwards in the bilge
of a trench, writing on the Heroic Spirit in the _Morning Post_. He's
one of your gentlemen who sit in a room full of books and promise
themselves much moral benefit from the bloodshed in France. Coleridge,
he says, Coleridge--the heroic, self-controlled Spartan Coleridge was
of his opinion and very hard on Pacificism--Coleridge complained of
peace-time in such words as these: 'All individual dignity and power,
engulfed in courts, committees, institutions.... One benefit-club for
mutual flattery.'... And then, I suppose, the old loafer went off to
sponge on somebody.... And here's the stuff the heroic, spirited
Osborn, the _Morning Post_ gentleman--unhappily not a German, and
unhappily too old for trench work--quotes with delight
now--_now!_--after Belgium!--
"'My spear, my sword, my shaggy shield!
With these I till, with these I sow,
With these I reap my harvest field--
No other wealth the gods bestow:
With these I plant the fertile vine,
With these I press the luscious wine.
My spear, my sword, my shaggy shield!
They make me lord of all below--
For those who dread my spear to wield,
Before my shaggy shield must bow.
Their fields, their vineyards, they resign,
And all that cowards have is mine.'
"He goes on to this--
"'It is in vain that the Pacificist rages at such staunch
braggadocio. It blares out a political truth of timeless
validity in words that are by no means politic. Sparta was the
working model in ancient times of the State that lives by and
for warfare, though never despising the rewards of an astute
diplomacy; she was the Prussia of antiquity....
"'Spartan ideal of duty and discipline.'...
"You see the spirit of him! You see what has got loose! It is a real
and potent spirit; you have to reckon with it through all this
business. To this sort of mind the 'Pacificist' is a hateful fool. The
Pacificist prefers making vineyards, painting pictures, building
Gothic cathedrals, thinking clear thoughts to bawling "Bruteland,
Bruteland, over all!" and killing people and smashing things up. He is
a maker. That is what is intended here by a 'coward.' All real
creative activity is hateful to a certain ugly, influential,
aggressive type of mind, to this type of mind that expresses itself
here in England through the _Morning Post_ and _Spectator_. Both these
papers are soaked through and through with a genuine detestation of
all fine creation, all beauty, all novelty, all frank, generous, and
pleasant things. In peace-time they maintain an attitude of dyspeptic
hostility to free art, to free literature, to fresh thought. They
stand uncompromisingly for ugliness, dullness, and restriction--as
ends in themselves. When you talk, Wilkins, of the intellectual good
of the war, I ask you to note the new exultation that has come into
these evil papers. When they speak of the 'moral benefits' of war they
mean the smashing up of everything that they hate and we care for.
They mean reaction. This good man Osborn, whom I have never seen or
heard of before, seems to be quintessential of all that side. I can
imagine him. I believe I could reconstruct him from this article I
have here, just as anatomists have reconstructed extinct monsters from
a single bone. He is, I am certain, a don. The emotional note suggests
Oxford. He is a classical scholar. And that is the extent of his
knowledge. Something in this way."
He began to sketch rapidly.
[Illustration: _Fancy portrait of Mr. E. B. Osborn, singing about his
sword and his shield and his ruthless virility, and all that sort of
thing._]
"You have to realize that while the Pacificists talk of the horrible
ugliness of war and the necessity of establishing an everlasting
world-peace, whiskered old ladies in hydropaths, dons on the _Morning
Post_, chattering district visitors and blustering, bellowing parsons,
people who are ever so much more representative of general humanity
than we literary oddities--all that sort of people tucked away
somewhere safe, are in a state of belligerent lustfulness and
prepared--oh, prepared to give the very eyes of everybody else in this
country, prepared to sacrifice the lives of all their servants and see
the poor taxed to the devil, first for a victory over Germany and then
for the closest, silliest, loudest imitation of Prussian swagger on
our part (with them, of course, on the very top of it all) that we can
contrive. That spirit is loose, Wilkins. All the dowagers are mewing
for blood, all the male old women who teach classics and dream of
re-action at Oxford and Cambridge, are having the time of their lives.
They trust to panic, to loud accusations, to that fear of complexity
that comes with fatigue. They trust to the exhaustion of delicate
purposes and sensitive nerves. And this force-loving, bullying
silliness is far more likely to come out on top, after the distresses
of this war, after the decent men are dead in the trenches and the
wise ones shouted to silence, than any finely intellectual,
necessarily difficult plan to put an end for ever to all such
senseless brutalities."
"I think you underrate the power of--well, modern sanity," said
Wilkins.
"Time will show," said Boon. "I hope I do."
"This man Osborn, whoever he may be, must be just a fantastic
extremist.... I do not see that he is an answer to my suggestion that
for the whole mass of people this war means graver thought, steadier
thought, a firmer collective purpose. It isn't only by books and
formal literature that people think. There is the tremendous effect of
realized and accumulated facts----"
"Wilkins," said Boon, "do not cuddle such illusions. It is only in
books and writings that facts get assembled. People are not grasping
any comprehensive effects at all at the present time. One day one
monstrous thing batters on our minds--a battleship is blown up or a
hundred villagers murdered--and next day it is another. We do not so
much think about it as get mentally scarred.... You can see in this
spy hunt that is going on and in the increasing denunciations and
wrangling of the papers how the strain is telling.... Attention is
overstrained and warms into violence. People are reading no books.
They are following out no conclusions. No intellectual force whatever
is evident dominating the situation. No organization is at work for a
sane peace. Where is any _power_ for Pacificism? Where is any strength
on its side? America is far too superior to do anything but trade, the
liberals here sniff at each other and quarrel gently but firmly on
minor points, Mr. Norman Angell advertises himself in a small magazine
and resents any other work for peace as though it were an infringement
of his copyright. Read the daily papers; go and listen to the talk of
people! Don't theorize, but watch. The mind you will meet is not in
the least like a mind doing something slowly but steadfastly; far more
is it like a mind being cruelly smashed about and worried and sticking
to its immediate purpose with a narrower and narrower intensity. Until
at last it is a pointed intensity. It is like a dying man strangling a
robber in his death-grip.... We shall beat them, but we shall be dead
beat doing it.... You see, Wilkins, I have tried to think as you do.
In a sort of way this war has inverted our relations. I say these
things now because they force themselves upon me...."
Wilkins considered for some moments.
"Even if nothing new appears," he said at last, "the mere beating down
and discrediting of the militarist system leaves a world released...."
"But will it be broken down?" said Boon. "Think of the Osborns."
And then he cried in a voice of infinite despair: "No! War is just the
killing of things and the smashing of things. And when it is all over,
then literature and civilization will have to begin all over again.
They will have to begin lower down and against a heavier load, and the
days of our jesting are done. The Wild Asses of the Devil are loose
and there is no restraining them. What is the good, Wilkins, of
pretending that the Wild Asses are the instruments of Providence
kicking better than we know? It is all evil. Evil. An evil year. And I
lie here helpless, spitting and spluttering, with this chill upon my
chest.... I cannot say or write what I would.... And in the days of my
sunshine there were things I should have written, things I should have
understood...."