on expediency, and on the generous hypothesis that men and women,
outside of the professional pauper class, would prefer work with wages
to wages without work. A cartoon in “Punch” representing the Minister
of Labour blandly and insinuatingly presenting a house-maid’s uniform
to an outraged “ex-munitionette,” who is the Government’s contented
pensioner, suggests some rift in this harmonious understanding.
Progressives have branded temperamental conservatism as distrust of
the unknown,--a mental attitude which is the antithesis of love of
adventure. But distrust of the unknown is a thin and fleeting emotion
compared with distrust of human nature, which is perfectly well known.
To know it is not necessarily to quarrel with it. It is merely to take
it into account.
Economics and ethics have little in common. They meet in amity, only to
part in coldness. Our preference for our own interests is essentially
and vitally un-Christian. The competitive system is not a Christian
system. But it lies at the root of civilization; it has its noble as
well as its ignoble side; it is the main-spring of both nationalism
and internationalism; it is the force which supports governments,
and the force which violently disrupts them. Men have risen above
self-interest for life; nations, superbly for a time. The sense of
shock which was induced by Germany’s acute reversion to barbarism was
deeper than the sense of danger induced by her vaulting ambitions.
There is no such passionate feeling in life as that which is stirred by
the right and duty of defence; and for more than four years the Allied
nations defended the world from evils which the world fancied it had
long outgrown. The duration of the war is the most miraculous part of
the miraculous tale. A monotony of heroism, a monotony of sacrifice,
transcends imagination.
Now it is over. Citizens of the United States walked knee-deep in
newspapers for a joyous night to signify their satisfaction, and at
once embarked on vivacious disputes over memorial arches, and statues,
and monuments. The nations of Europe, with lighter pockets and heavier
stakes, began to consider difficulties and to cultivate doubts. No one
can fail to understand the destructive forces of the world, because
they have given object-lessons on a large and lurid scale. But the
constructive forces are on trial, with imposing chances of success or
failure. They are still in the wordy stage, and now, as never before,
the world is sick of words. “This is neither the time nor the place
for superfluous phrases,” said Clemenceau (ironically, one hopes),
when he placed in the hands of Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau a peace
treaty which some stony-hearted wag has informed us was precisely the
length of “A Tale of Two Cities.” The appalling discursiveness of the
Versailles Conference has added to the confusion of the world; but
fitted into the “Preamble” of the Covenant of the League of Nations are
five little vocables, four of them monosyllabic, which embody the one
arresting thought that dominates and authorizes the articles,--“Not to
resort to war.” These five words are the crux of the whole serious and
sanguine scheme. They hold the hope of the weak, and the happiness of
the insecure. They deny to the strong the pleasures--and the means--of
coercion.
The rapid changes wrought by the twentieth century are less
disconcerting to the temperamental conservative, who is proverbially
slow, than movements which take time to be persuasive. For one thing,
the vast spiral along which the world spins brings him face to face
with new friends before he loses sight of the old. The revolutionary
of yesterday is the reactionary of to-day, and the conservative finds
himself hob-nobbing with men and women whom he had thought remote as
the Poles.
Two interesting examples are Madame Catherine Breshkovskaya and Mr.
Samuel Gompers. Time was, and not so many years ago, when both condoned
violence--the violence of the Russian Nihilist, the violence of the
American dynamiter--as a short road to justice. Their attitude was not
unlike that of the first Southern lynchers: “We take the law into our
own hands, because conditions are unbearable, and the State affords
no adequate relief.” But Madame Breshkovskaya has seen the forces
she helped to set in motion sweeping in unanticipated and shattering
currents. She has seen a new terrorism arise and wield the weapons of
the old to crush man’s sacred freedom. The peasants she loved have been
beyond the reach of her help. The country for which she suffered thirty
years of exile repudiated her. Radicals in Europe and in the United
States mocked at her. The Grandmother of the Revolution has become a
conservative old lady, concerned, as good grandmothers ought to be,
with the welfare of little children, and pleading pitifully for order
and education.
As for Mr. Gompers, his unswerving loyalty to the cause of the Allies,
his unswerving rejection of Germany and all her works, will never
be forgiven by pacifists, by the men and women who had no word of
protest or of pity when Belgium was invaded, when the Lusitania was
sunk, when towns were burned, civilians butchered, and girls deported;
and who recovered their speech only to plead for the nation that had
disregarded human sufferings and human rights. Mr. Gompers helped
as much as any one man in the United States to win the war, and
winning a war is very distasteful to those who do not want to fight.
Therefore has he been relegated by international Socialists, who held
hands for four years with Pan-German Socialists, to the ranks of the
conservatives. When the “Nation,” speaking _ex cathedra_, says, “The
authority of the old machine-type of labour leader like Mr. Gompers is
impaired beyond help or hope,” we hear the echo of the voices which
babbled about capitalism and profiteering in April, 1917. The Great
War has made and unmade the friendships of the world. If the radicals
propose it as a test, as a test the conservatives will accept it.
The successive revolutions which make the advance-guard of one movement
the rear-guard of the next are as expeditious and as overwhelming in
the field of art as in the fields of politics and sociology. In the
spring of 1877 an exhibition of two hundred and forty pictures, the
work of eighteen artists, was opened in the rue le Peletier, Paris.
For some reason, never sufficiently explained, Parisians found in these
canvases a source of infinite diversion. They went to the exhibition
in a mood of obvious hilarity. They began to laugh while they were
still in the street, they laughed as they climbed the stairs, they were
convulsed with laughter when they looked at the pictures, they laughed
every time they talked them over with their friends.
Now what were these mirth-provoking works of art? Not cubist diagrams,
not geometrical charts of human anatomy, not reversible landscapes, not
rainbow-tinted pigs. Such exhilarants lay in wait for another century
and another generation. The pictures which so abundantly amused Paris
in 1877 were painted by Claude Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Renoir,--men
of genius, who, having devised a new and brilliant technique, abandoned
themselves with too little reserve to the veracities of impressionism.
They were not doctrinaires. The peace they disturbed was only the peace
of immobility. But they were drunk with new wine. Their strength lay in
their courage and their candour; their weakness in the not unnatural
assumption that they were expressing the finalities of art.
Defenders they had in plenty. No pioneer can escape from the hardship
of vindication. Years before, Baudelaire had felt it incumbent
upon himself, as a professional mutineer, to support the “fearless
innovations” of Manet. Zola, always on the lookout for somebody to
attack or to defend, was equally enthusiastic and equally choleric.
Loud disputation rent the air while the world sped on its way, and
lesser artists discovered, to their joy, what a facile thing it was
to produce nerve-racking novelties. In 1892, John La Farge, wandering
disconsolately through the exhibitions of Paris, wondered if there
might not still be room for something simple in art.
Ever and always the reproach cast at the conservative is that he has
been blind in the beginning to the beauty he has been eventually
compelled to recognize; and ever and always he replies that, in the
final issue, he is the guardian of all beauty. His are the imperishable
standards, his is the love for a majestic past, his is the patience to
wait until the wheat has been sorted from the chaff, and gathered into
the granaries of the world. If he be hostile to the problematic, which
is his weakness, he is passionately loyal to the tried and proven,
which is his strength. He is as necessary to human sanity as the
progressive is necessary to human hope.
Civilization and culture are very old and very beautiful. They imply
refinement of humour, a disciplined taste, sensitiveness to noble
impressions, and a wise acceptance of the laws of evidence. These
things are not less valuable for being undervalued. “At the present
time,” says the most acute of American critics, Mr. Brownell, “it is
quite generally imagined that we should gain rather than lose by having
Raphael without the Church, and Rembrandt without the Bible.” The
same notion, less clearly defined, is prevalent concerning Milton and
Dante. We had grown weary of large and compelling backgrounds until the
Great War focussed our emotions. We are impatient still of large and
compelling traditions. The tendency is to localization and analysis.
The new and facile experiments in verse, which have some notable
exponents, are interesting and indecisive. Midway between the
enthusiasm of the experimenters (which is not contagious) and the
ribald gibes of the disaffected (which are not convincing) the
conservative critic practises that watchful waiting, so safe in the
world of art, so hazardous in the world of action. He cannot do as he
has been bidden, and judge the novel product by its own standards,
for that would be to exempt it from judgment. Nothing--not even a
German--can be judged by his--or its--own standard. If there is to be
any standard at all, it must be based on comparison. Keen thoughts
and vivid words have their value, no matter in what form they are
presented; but unless that form be poetical, the presentation is not
poetry. There is a world of truth in Mr. Masters’s brief and bitter
lines:
“Beware of the man who rises to power
From one suspender.”
It has the kind of sagacity which is embodied in the old adage, “You
cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” and it is as remote from
the requirements of prosody.
The medium employed by Walt Whitman, at times rhythmic and cadenced,
at times ungirt and sagging loosely, enabled him to write passages of
sustained beauty, passages grandly conceived and felicitously rendered.
It also permitted him a riotous and somewhat monotonous excess. Every
word misused revenges itself forever upon a writer’s reputation.
The medium employed by the unshackled poets of to-day is capable
of vivid and accurate imagery. It has aroused--or revealed--habits
of observation. It paints pen-pictures cleverly. In the hands of
French, British, and American experts, it shows sobriety, and a clear
consciousness of purpose. But it is useless to deny that the inexpert
find it perilously easy. The barriers which protect an ordinary
four-lined stanza are not hard to scale; but they do exist, and they
sometimes bring the versifier to a halt. Without them, nothing brings
him to a halt, save the limits of the space allotted by grudging
newspapers and periodicals.
Yet brevity is the soul of song, no less than the soul of wit. Those
lovely lyrics, swift as the note of a bird on the wing, imperishable
as a jewel, haunting as unforgotten melody, are the fruits of artifice
no less than of inspiration. In eight short lines, Landor gave “Rose
Aylmer” to an entranced and forever listening world. There is magic in
the art that made those eight lines final. A writer of what has been
cynically called “socialized poetry” would have spent the night of
“memories and sighs” in probing and specifying his emotions.
The conservative’s inheritance from the radical’s lightly rejected
yesterdays gives him ground to stand on, and a simplified point of
view. In that very engaging volume, “The Education of Henry Adams,” the
autobiographer tells us in one breath how much he desires change, and,
in the next, how much he resents it. He would like to upset an already
upset world, but he would also like to keep the Pope in the Vatican,
and the Queen in Windsor Castle. He feels that by right he should have
been a Marxist, but the last thing he wants to see is a transformed
Europe. The bewildered reader might be pardoned for losing himself
in this labyrinth of uncertainties, were it not for an enlightening
paragraph in which the author expresses unqualified amazement at
Motley’s keen enjoyment of London society.
“The men of whom Motley must have been thinking were such as he might
meet at Lord Houghton’s breakfasts: Grote, Jowett, Milman, or Froude;
Browning, Matthew Arnold, or Swinburne; Bishop Wilberforce, Venables,
or Hayward; or perhaps Gladstone, Robert Lowe, or Lord Granville....
Within the narrow limits of this class the American Legation was fairly
at home; possibly a score of houses, all liberal and all literary, but
perfect only in the eyes of a Harvard College historian. They could
teach little worth knowing, for their tastes were antiquated, and their
knowledge was ignorance to the next generation. What was altogether
fatal for future purpose, they were only English.”
Apart from the delightful conception of the author of “Culture and
Anarchy,” and the author of “Atalanta in Calydon,” as “only English,”
the pleasure the conservative reader takes in this peremptory estimate
is the pleasure of possession. To him belongs the ignorance of Jowett
and Grote, to him the obsoleteness of Browning. From every one of these
discarded luminaries some light falls on his path. In fact, a flash
of blinding light was vouchsafed to Mr. Adams, when he and Swinburne
were guests in the house of Monckton Milnes. Swinburne was passionately
praising the god of his idolatry, Victor Hugo; and the young American,
who knew little and cared less about French poetry, ventured in a
half-hearted fashion to assert the counter-claims of Alfred de Musset.
Swinburne listened impatiently, and brushed aside the comparison with a
trenchant word: “De Musset did not sustain himself on the wing.”
If a bit of flawless criticism from an expert’s lips be not
educational, then there is nothing to be taught or learned in the
world. Of the making of books there is no end; but now as ever the
talker strikes the light, now as ever conversation is the appointed
medium of intelligence and taste.
It is well that the past yields some solace to the temperamental
conservative, for the present is his only on terms he cannot easily
fulfil. His reasonable doubts and his unreasonable prejudices block
the path of contentment. He is powerless to believe a thing because it
is an eminently desirable thing to believe. He is powerless to deny
the existence of facts he does not like. He is powerless to credit new
systems with finality. The sanguine assurance that men and nations can
be legislated into goodness, that pressure from without is equivalent
to a moral change within, needs a strong backing of inexperience. “The
will,” says Francis Thompson, “is the lynch-pin of the faculties.”
We stand or fall by its strength or its infirmity. Where there is
no temptation, there is no virtue. Parental legislation for the
benefit of the weak leaves them as weak as ever, and denies to the
strong the birthright of independence, the hard, resistant manliness
with which they work out their salvation. They may go to heaven in
leading-strings, but they cannot conquer Apollyon on the way.
The well-meant despotism of the reformer accomplishes some glittering
results, but it arrests the slow progress of civilization, which
cannot afford to be despotic. Mr. Bagehot, whose cynicism held the
wisdom of restraint, maintained that the “cake of custom” should
be stiff enough to make change of any kind difficult, but never so
stiff as to make it impossible. The progress achieved under these
conditions would be, he thought, both durable and endurable. “Without
a long-accumulated and inherited tendency to discourage originality,
society would never have gained the cohesion requisite for effecting
common action against its external foes.” Deference to usage is a
uniting and sustaining bond. Nations which reject it are apt to get off
the track, and have to get back, or be put back, with difficulty and
disaster. They do not afford desirable dwelling-places for thoughtful
human beings, but they give notable lessons to humanity. Innovations to
which we are not committed are illuminating things.
If the principles of conservatism are based on firm supports, on a
recognition of values, a sense of measure and proportion, a due regard
for order,--its prejudices are indefensible. The wise conservative
does not attempt to defend them; he only clings to them more lovingly
under attack. He recognizes triumphant science in the telephone and
the talking machine, and his wish to escape these benefactions is but
a humble confession of unworthiness. He would be glad if scientists,
hitherto occupied with preserving and disseminating sound, would turn
their attention to suppressing it, would collect noise as an ashman
collects rubbish, and dump it in some lonely place, thus preserving the
sanity of the world. He agrees with Mr. Edward Martin (who bears the
hall-mark of the caste) that periodicals run primarily for advertisers,
and secondarily for readers, are worthy of regard, and that only the
tyranny of habit makes him revolt from so nice an adjustment of
interests. Why, after all, should he balk at pursuing a story, or an
article on “Ballads and Folk-Songs of the Letts,” between columns
of well-illustrated advertisements? Why should he refuse to leap
from chasm to chasm, from the intimacies of underwear to electrical
substitutes for all the arts of living? There is no hardship involved
in the chase, and the trail is carefully blazed. Yet the chances are
that he abandons the Letts, reminding himself morosely that three years
ago he was but dimly aware of their existence; and their “rich vein of
traditional imagery,” to say nothing of their early edition of Luther’s
catechism, fades from his intellectual horizon.
If we are too stiff to adjust ourselves to changed conditions, we are
bound to play a losing game. Yet the moral element in taste survives
all change, and denies to us a ready acquiescence in innovations
whose only merit is their practicality. Through the reeling years of
war, the standard set by taste remained a test of civilization. In
these formidable years of peace, racked by anxieties and shadowed by
disillusions (Franklin’s ironic witticism concerning the blessedness of
peace-makers was never more applicable than to-day), the austerity of
taste preserves our self-respect. We are under no individual obligation
to add to the wealth of nations. It is sometimes a pleasant duty to
resist the pervasive pressure of the business world.
Political conservatism may be a lost cause in modern democracy; but
temperamental conservatism dates from the birth of man’s reasoning
powers, and will survive the clamour and chaos of revolutions. It
may rechristen its political platform, but the animating spirit will
be unchanged. As a matter of fact, great conservatives have always
been found in the liberal ranks, and Tory Cassandras, who called
themselves radicals, have prophesied with dismal exactitude. It was a
clear-eyed, clear-voiced Socialist who, eight years before the war,
warned British Socialists that they would do well to sound the temper
of German Socialists before agitating for a reduction of the British
navy. M. Paul Deschanel says of the French that they have revolutionary
imaginations and conservative temperaments. An English critic has
used nearly the same terms in defining the elemental principles of
civilization,--conservatism of technique and spiritual restlessness. It
is the fate of man to do his own thinking, and thinking is subversive
of content; but a sane regard for equilibrium is his inheritance from
the travail of centuries. He sees far who looks both ways. He journeys
far who treads a known track.
Resistance, which is the function of conservatism, is essential to
orderly advance. It is a force in the social and political, as well as
in the natural order. A party of progress, a party of stability,--call
them by what names we please,--they will play their rôles to the end.
The hopefulness of the reformer (Savonarola’s bonfire of vanities is
an historic precedent for Hawthorne’s allegory) is balanced by the
patience of the conservative, which has survived the disappointments
of time, and is not yet exhausted. He at least knows that “the chief
parts of human doom and duty are eternal,” and that the things which
can change are not the things essential to the support of his soul.
We stand at the door of a new day, and are sanguine or affrighted
according to our temperaments; but this day shall be transient as the
days which have preceded it, and, like its predecessors, shall plead
for understanding and pardon before the bar of history.
The Cheerful Clan
Now that the Great War is a thing of the past, there is no longer any
need to be cheerful. For years a valorous gaiety has been the rôle
assigned us. For years we struck a hopeful note, whether it rang true
or false. For years the plight of the world was so desperate that we
dared not look straight ahead, lest the spectre of a triumphant Germany
smite us blind. Confronted with a ruthlessness which threatened to
extinguish the liberties and decencies of civilization, we simply had
to cast about us for a wan smile to hide from apprehensive eyes the
trouble of our souls.
Now the beast of militarism has been chained, and until it is strong
enough to break its fetters (which should be a matter of years), we
can breathe freely, and try and heal our hurt. True, there is trouble
enough on every side to stock a dozen worlds. The beauty of France
has been unspeakably defiled. The butcheries in Belgium scarred the
nation’s soul. The flower of British youth have perished. Italy’s
gaping wounds have festered under a grievous sense of wrong. Russia
seethes with hatred and strife. In the United States we see on one hand
a mad welter of lawlessness, idleness, and greed; and, on the other,
official extravagance, administrative weakness, a heavy, ill-adjusted
burden of taxation, and shameless profiteering. Our equilibrium
is lost, and with it our sense of proportion. We are Lilliput and
Brobdingnag jumbled up together, which is worse than anything Gulliver
ever encountered.
But this displacement of balance, this unruly selfishness, is but the
inevitable result of the world’s great upheaval. It represents the
human rebound from high emotions and heavy sacrifices. The emotions
and the sacrifices have met their reward. Germany cannot--for some time
to come--spring at our throat. If we fail to readjust our industries on
a paying basis, we shall of course go under, and lose the leadership of
the world. But we won’t be kicked under by the Prussian boot.
Therefore cheerfulness is no longer obligatory. We can shut the door in
the faces of its professional purveyors--who have been making a good
thing of it--and look with restful seriousness upon the mutability
of life. Our intelligence, so long insulted by the sentimental
inconsistencies which are the text of the Gospel of Gladness, can
assert its right of rejection. The Sunshine School of writers has done
its worst, and the fixed smile with which it regards the universe is as
offensive as the fixed smile of chorus girls and college presidents,
of débutantes and high officials, who are photographed for the Sunday
press, and who all look like advertisements of dentifrice.