of discovery you represent to us primeval Anglo-Britons. I prefer that
term to Anglo-Saxon, for even if we English glory in the thought that
our seaborne ancestors were extremely bloodthirsty, we have no evidence
that they brought their own women to Britain in any quantities, or had
the power of reproducing themselves without aid from the other sex!
Can you, I say, realise how much more enticing to my English mind
America is, than the Arabian Nights were to your fascinating fabulist,
O. Henry? One longs to unriddle to oneself the significance and sense
of America. In the English-speaking world to-day we need understanding
of each others’ natures, aims, sympathies, and dislikes. For without
understanding we become doctrinaire and partizan, building our ship in
compartments very watertight, and getting into them and shutting the
doors when the ship threatens to go down.
We English have a reputation for self-sufficiency. But speaking for
myself, who find no name that is not English in my genealogy, I never
can get up quite the interest in my own race that I can in others. We
English are so set and made, you Americans are yet in the making. We at
most experience modification of type; you are in process of creating
one. I have often asked Americans: What is now the American type? and
have been answered by――a smile. When I go back home my countrymen will
ask me the same question. I would I could sit down and listen to you
telling me what it is.
It will not have escaped you, at all events, that for four years the
various branches of the English-speaking peoples have been credited
with all the virtues――a love of liberty, humanity, and justice has,
as it were, been patented for them on both sides of the Atlantic, and
under the Southern Cross, till one has come to listen with a sort of
fascinated terror for those three words to tinkle from the tongue. I
am prepared to sacrifice a measure of the truth sooner than pronounce
them to-night. Let me rather speak of those lower qualities which I
think we English-speaking peoples possess in a conspicuous degree:
Commonsense and Energy. From those vulgar attributes, I am sure, the
historian of the far future will say that the English-speaking era has
germinated; and that by those vulgar attributes it will flourish. Deep
in the American spirit and in the English spirit is a curious intense
realism――sometimes very highly camouflaged by hot air――an instinct
for putting the finger on the button of life, and pressing it there
till the bell rings. We are so extraordinarily successful that we may
expect the historian of the far future to write: ‘The English-speaking
races were so rapid in their subjugation of the forces of Nature, so
prodigal of inventions, so eager in their use of them, so extremely
practical, and altogether so successful, that the only thing they
missed was――happiness.’
When I read of some great new American invention, or of a Lord
Leverhulme converting an island of Lewis into a commercial Paradise,
I confess to trembling. Gentlemen, it is a melancholy fact that the
complete man does not live by invention and trade alone. At the risk of
being laughed out of Paradise, I dare put in a plea for Beauty. Both
our peoples, indeed, are so severely practical that I do feel we run
the risk of getting machine-made, and coming actually to look down on
those who give themselves to anything so unpractical as the love of
Beauty. Now, I venture to think that the spirit of the old builders
of Seville cathedral: ‘Let us make us a church such as the world has
never seen before!’ ought to inspire us in these days too. ‘But it
does, my dear Sir.’ I shall be answered: ‘We make flying machines, and
iron foundries, Palace hotels, stock-yards, self-playing pianos, film
pictures, cocktails, and ladies’ hats, such as the world has never seen
before. A fig for the Giralda, the Sphynx, Shakespeare, and Michael
Angelo! They did not elevate the lot of man. We are for invention,
industry, and trade.’ Far be it from me to run down any of those
things, so excellent in moderation; but since I solemnly aver that
man’s greatest quality is the sense of proportion, I feel that if he
neglects Beauty (which is but proportion elegantly cooked)――the ‘result
of perfect economy’ Emerson had it――he sags backwards, no matter how
inventive and commercially successful he may be.
But this is to become grave, which is detestable, even in a country
which has just been taking its ticket for the Garden of Eden.
I believe I shall yet see (unless I perish of public speaking) America
taking the long cut to Beauty――for there are no short cuts to Her, no
cheap nostrums by which she can be conjured from the blue. Beauty and
Simplicity are the natural antidotes to the feverish industrialism of
our age. If only America will begin to take them freely she has it in
her power to re-inspire in us older peoples, just now rather breathless
and exhausted, the belief in Beauty, and a new fervour for the creation
of fine and rare things. If on the other hand America turns Beauty
down as a dangerous ‘bit of fluff’ and Simplicity as an impecunious
alien, we over there, one behind the other, will sink into a soup of
utilitarianism so thick that we may never get out.
Gentlemen, I long to see established between the English-speaking
peoples a fellowship, not only in matters political and commercial,
important as these are, but in philosophy and art. For after all those
laughing-stocks, philosophy and art――the beautiful expression of our
highest thoughts and fancies――are the lanterns of a nation’s life, and
we ought to hang them in each others’ houses.
IV
FROM A SPEECH TO THE SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, NEW YORK
I do not know what your chief thought is now; for me the overmastering
thought is that of Creation――Re-creation. You know when we look at a
bit of moorland where the gorse and heather have been burned――swaled
we call it in Devon――how we delight in the green, pushing up among
the black shrivelled roots. I long to see the green pushing up, the
creative impulse at work in its thousand ways all over the world again;
each of us on both continents in his own line doing creative work; and
not so much that wealth and comfort, as that health and beauty may be
born again.
But, confronting as I do to-night, the Arts and Sciences, let me
divide my words. You sciences have no need to listen. You have never
had such a heyday as this; in engineering, in chemistry, in surgery,
in every branch except perhaps ‘star-gazing,’ you have been shooting
ahead, earning fresh laurels, putting new discoveries at the service
of bewildered Man. Science drags no lame foot, it dances along like
the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I had better not pursue the simile. But the
Arts, with faces muffled to the eyes, stand against the walls of life,
and gaze a little enviously, a little mournfully at the passing rout.
This is not their time for carnival; their lovers sleep, heavy with war
and toil. It is to those poor wallflowers the Arts, that I would speak:
Drop your veils, have the courage of your charms; you shall break many
a heart yet, make many a lover happy.
Ladies and gentlemen, you have all noticed as I have the difference
between a town by daylight and a town by night; well, the daylight
town belongs to the Sciences, the night-lit town to the Arts. I don’t
mean that artists are night-birds, though I have heard of such a case;
I mean that the Arts live on Mystery and Imagination. Have you ever
thought how we should get through if we had to live in a town which
never put on the filmy dark robe of night, so that hour-in, hour-out
we had to stare at things garbed in the efficient overalls of Science,
with their prices properly pinned on? How long would it be before we
found ourselves in Coney Hatch? Well, we are in a fair way to abolish
Night――Mystery and Imagination are ‘off,’ as they say, and that way
sooner or later madness lies.
It is time the Arts left off leaning against the wall, and took their
share of the dance again. We want them to be as creative, nay, as
seductive as the Sciences. We have seen Science work miracles of late;
now let Art work her miracles in turn.
People are inclined to smile at me when I suggest that you in America
are at the commencement of a period of fine and vigorous Art. The
signs, they say, are all the other way. Of course you ought to know
best; all the same, I stick to my opinion with British obstinacy, and I
believe I shall see it justified.
V
ADDRESS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
A doubter of the general divinity of our civilisation is labelled
‘pedant.’ Anyone who questions modern progress is tabooed. And yet
there is no doubt, I think, that we are getting feverish, rushed,
complicated, and have multiplied conveniences to such an extent that we
do little with them but scrape the surface of life.
We were rattling into a species of barbarism when the war came, and
unless we check ourselves shall continue to rattle now that it is over.
The underlying cause in every country is the increase of herd-life,
based on machines, money-getting, and the dread of being dull. Everyone
knows how fearfully strong that dread is. But to be capable of being
dull is in itself a disease.
And most of modern life seems to be a process of creating disease,
then finding a remedy, which in its turn creates another disease,
demanding fresh remedy, and so on. We pride ourselves, for example, on
scientific sanitation; but what is scientific sanitation if not one
huge palliative of evils which have arisen from herd-life enabling
herd-life to be intensified, so that we shall presently need even more
scientific sanitation? The true elixirs vitæ――for there be two, I
think――are open-air life, and a proud pleasure in one’s work, but we
have evolved a mode of existence in which it is comparatively rare to
find these two conjoined. In old countries such as mine, the evils of
herd-life are at present vastly more acute than in a new country such
as yours. On the other hand, the further one is from hades, the faster
one drives towards it, and machines are beginning to run along with
America even more violently than with Europe.
When our Tanks first appeared, they were described as snouting monsters
creeping at their own sweet will. I confess that this is how my
inflamed eye sees all our modern machines――monsters running on their
own, dragging us along, and very often squashing us.
We are, I believe, awakening to the dangers of this ‘Gadarening,’ of
rushing down the high cliff into the sea, possessed and pursued by the
devils of――machinery. But if any would see how little alarmed he really
is――let him ask himself how much of his present mode of existence he is
prepared to alter. Altering the modes of other people is delightful;
one would have great hope of the future if we had nothing before us but
that. The mediæval Irishman, indicted for burning down the cathedral
at Armagh, together with the Archbishop, defended himself thus: “As
for the cathedral, ’tis true I burned it; but indeed an’ I wouldn’t
have, only they told me himself was inside.” We are all ready to alter
our opponents, if not to burn them. But even if we were as ardent
reformers as that Irishman, we could hardly force men to live in the
open, or take a proud pleasure in their work, or enjoy beauty, or not
concentrate themselves on making money. No amount of legislation will
make us “lilies of the field” or “birds of the air,” or prevent us from
worshipping false gods, or neglecting to reform ourselves.
I once wrote the unpopular sentence: “Democracy at present offers the
spectacle of a man running down a road followed at a more and more
respectful distance by his own soul.” For democracy read rather the
words modern civilisation which prides itself on redress after the
event, foresees nothing and avoids less; is purely empirical if one may
use so high brow a word.
I look very eagerly and watchfully to America in many ways. After the
war she will be more emphatically than ever, in material things, the
most important and powerful nation of the earth. We British have a
legitimate and somewhat breathless interest in the use she will make
of her strength, and in the course of her national life, for this will
greatly influence the course of our own. But power for real light and
leading in America will depend, not so much on her material wealth,
or her armed force, as on what her attitude towards life, and what
the ideals of her citizens are going to be. Americans have a certain
eagerness for knowledge; they have also, for all their absorption in
success, the aspiring eye. They do want the good thing. They don’t
always know when they see it, but they want it. These qualities, in
combination with material strength, give America her chance. Yet, if
she does not set her face against “Gadarening,” we are all bound for
downhill. If she goes in for spreadeagleism, if her aspirations are
towards quantity, not quality, we shall all go on being commonised.
If she should get that purse-and-power-proud fever which comes from
national success, we are all bound for another world flare-up. The
burden of proving that democracy can be real and yet live up to an
ideal of health and beauty will be on America’s shoulders, and on ours.
What are we and Americans going to make of our inner life, of our
individual habits of thought? What are we going to reverence, and what
despise? Do we mean to lead, in spirit and in truth, not in mere money
and guns? Britain is an old country, though still in her prime, I hope;
America is yet on the threshold. Is she to step out into the sight of
the world as a great leader? That is for America the long decision, to
be worked out, not so much in her Senate and her Congress, as in her
homes and schools. On America, now that the war is over, the destiny
of civilisation may hang for the next century. If she mislays, indeed
if she does not improve the power of self-criticism――that special dry
American humour which the great Lincoln had――she might soon develop
the intolerant provincialism which has so often been the bane of the
earth and the undoing of nations. Above all, if she does not solve the
problems of town life, of Capital and Labour, of the distribution of
wealth, of national health, and attain to a mastery over inventions
and machinery――she is in for a cycle of mere anarchy, disruption, and
dictatorships, into which we shall all follow. The motto “noblesse
oblige” applies as much to democracy as ever it did to the old-time
aristocrat. It applies with terrific vividness to America. Ancestry and
Nature have bestowed on her great gifts. Behind her stand Conscience,
Enterprise, Independence, and Ability――such were the companions of the
first Americans, and are the comrades of American citizens to this day.
She has abounding energy, an unequalled spirit of discovery, a vast
territory not half developed, and great natural beauty. I remember
sitting on a bench overlooking the Grand Canyon of Arizona; the sun was
shining into it, and a snow storm was whirling down there. All that
most marvellous work of Nature was flooded to the brim with rose and
tawny-gold, with white, and wine-dark shadows; the colossal carvings
as of huge rock-gods and sacrificial altars, and great beasts along
its sides, were made living by the very mystery of light and darkness,
on that violent day of Spring; I remember sitting there, and an old
gentleman passing close behind, leaning towards me and saying in a sly,
gentle voice: “How are you going to tell it to the folks at home?”
America has so much, that one despairs of telling to the folks at home,
so much grand beauty to be to her an inspiration and uplift towards
high and free thought and vision. Great poems of Nature she has,
wrought in the large, to make of her and keep her a noble people. In my
beloved Britain――all told, not half the size of Texas――there is a quiet
beauty of a sort which America has not. I walked not long ago from
Worthing to the little village of Steyning, in the South Downs. It was
such a day as one seldom gets in England; when the sun was dipping and
there came on the cool chalky hills the smile of late afternoon, and
across a smooth valley on the rim of the Downs one saw a tiny group
of trees, one little building, and a stack, against the clear-blue,
pale sky――it was like a glimpse of heaven, so utterly pure in line and
colour so removed, and touching. The tale of loveliness in our land is
varied and unending, but it is not in the grand manner. America has the
grand manner in her scenery and in her blood, for in America all are
the children of adventure, every single man an emigrant himself or a
descendant of one who had the pluck to emigrate. She has already had
past-masters in dignity, but she has still to reach as a nation the
grand manner in achievement. She knows her own dangers and failings;
her qualities and powers; but she cannot realise the intense concern
and interest, deep down behind our provoking stolidities, with which
we of the old country watch her, feeling that what she does reacts on
us above all nations, and will ever react more and more. Underneath
surface differences and irritations we English-speaking peoples are
fast bound together. May it not be in misery and iron! If America walks
upright, so shall we; if she goes bowed under the weight of machines,
money, and materialism, we too shall creep our ways. We run a long
race, we nations; a generation is but a day. But in a day a man may
leave the track, and never again recover it! Nations depend for their
health and safety on the behaviour of the individuals who compose them.
Modern man is a very new and marvellous creature. Without quite
realising it, we have evolved a fresh species of stoic――even more
stoical, I suspect, than were the old Stoics. Modern man stands on
his own feet. His religion is to take what comes without flinching
or complaint, as part of the day’s work, which an unknowable God,
Providence, Creative Principle, has appointed. By courage and kindness
modern man exists, warmed by the glow of the great human fellowship. He
has re-discovered the old Greek saying: “God is the helping of man by
man”; has found out in his unselfconscious way that if he does not help
himself, and help his fellows, he cannot reach that inner peace which
satisfies. To do his bit; and to be kind! It is by that creed, rather
than by any mysticism, that he finds the salvation of his soul, for, of
a truth, the religion of this age is conduct.
After all, does not the only real spiritual warmth, not tinged by
Pharisaism, egotism, or cowardice, come from the feeling of doing your
work well and helping others; is not all the rest embroidery, luxury,
pastime, pleasant sound and incense? Modern man is a realist with too
romantic a sense, perhaps, of the mystery which surrounds existence, to
pry into it. And, like modern civilisation itself, he is the creature
of West and North, of those atmospheres, climates, manners, of life,
which foster neither inertia, reverence, nor mystic meditation.
Essentially man of action, in ideal action he finds his only true
comfort. I am sure that padres at the front have seen that the men
whose souls they have gone out to tend, are living the highest form
of religion; that in their comic courage, unselfish humanity, their
endurance without whimper of things worse than death, they have gone
beyond all pulpit-and-deathbed teaching. And who are these men? Just
the early manhood of the race, just modern man as he was before the war
began, and will be now that the war is over.
This modern world, of which we English and Americans are perhaps the
truest types, stands revealed from beneath its froth, frippery, and
vulgar excrescences, sound at core――a world whose implicit motto
is: “The good of all humanity.” But the herd-life which is its
characteristic, brings many evils, has many dangers; and to preserve
a sane mind in a healthy body is the riddle before us. Somehow we
must free ourselves from the driving domination of machines and
money-getting, not only for our own sakes but for that of all mankind.
And there is another thing of the most solemn importance: We
English-speaking nations are by chance as it were, the ballast of the
future. It is _absolutely necessary_ for the happiness of the world
that we should remain united. The comradeship that we now feel must and
surely shall abide. For unless we work together, and in no selfish or
exclusive spirit――Goodbye to Civilisation! It will vanish like the dew
off grass. The betterment not only of the British nations and America,
but of all mankind is and must be our object.
From all our hearts a great weight has been lifted; in those fields
death no longer sweeps his scythe, and our ears at last are free
from the rustling thereof――now comes the test of magnanimity, in all
countries. Will modern man rise to the ordering of a sane, a free, a
generous life? Each of us loves his own country best, be it a little
land or the greatest on earth; but jealousy is the dark thing, the
creeping poison. Where there is true greatness, let us acclaim it;
where there is true worth, let us prize it――as if it were our own.
This earth is made too subtly, of too multiple warp and woof, for
prophecy. When he surveys the world around――“the wondrous things
which there abound,” the prophet closes foolish lips. Besides, as the
historian tells us: “Writers have that undeterminateness of spirit
which commonly makes literary men of no use in the world.” So I, for
one, prophesy not. Still, we do know this: All English-speaking peoples
will go to this adventure of Peace with something of big purpose and
spirit in their hearts, with something of free outlook. The world is
wide and Nature bountiful enough for all, if we keep sane minds. The
earth is fair and meant to be enjoyed, if we keep sane bodies. Who dare
affront this world of beauty with mean views? There is no darkness but
what the ape in us still makes, and in spite of all his monkey-tricks
modern man is at heart further from the ape than man has yet been.
To do our jobs really well and to be brotherly! To seek health and
ensue Beauty! If, in Britain and America, in all the English-speaking
nations, we can put that simple faith into real and thorough practice,
what may not this century yet bring forth? Shall man, the highest
product of creation, be content to pass his little day in a house like
unto Bedlam?
When the present great task in which we have joined hands is really
ended; when once more from the shuttered mad-house the figure of Peace
steps forth and stands in the risen sun, and we may go our ways again
in the wonder of a new morning――let it be with this vow in our hearts:
“No more of Madness――in War, or in Peace!”
VI
TO THE LEAGUE OF POLITICAL EDUCATION, NEW YORK
Standing here, privileged to address my betters――I, the least
politically educated person in the world, have two thoughts to leave on
the air. They arise from the title of your League.