education have but a bowing acquaintanceship in the modern State; and I
wish I did feel that either education or politics had any definite idea
of what they were out to attain; in other words, had a clear image of
the ideal State. It seems to me that their object at present is just to
keep the heads of the citizens of the modern State above water; to keep
them alive, without real concern as to what kind of life they are being
preserved for. We seem, in fact, to be letting our civilisation run
us, instead of running our civilisation. If a man does not know where
he wants to go, he goes where circumstances and the telephone take
him. Where do we want to go? Can you answer me? Have you any definite
idea? What is the Ultima Thule of our longings? I suppose one ought to
say, roughly, that the modern ideal is: Maximum production of wealth
to the square mile of a country――an ideal which, seeing that a man
normally produces wealth in surplus to his own requirements, signifies
logically a maximum head of population to the square mile. And it seems
to me that the great modern fallacy is the identification of the word
wealth with the word welfare. Granted that demand creates supply, and
that it is impossible to stop human nature from demanding, the problem
is surely to direct demand into the best channels for securing health
and happiness. And I venture to say that the mere blind production of
wealth and population by no means fills that bill. We ought to produce
wealth only in such ways and to such an extent as shall make us all
good, clean, healthy, intelligent, and beautiful to look at. That is
the end, and production whether of wealth or population only the means
to that end, to be regulated accordingly. As things are, we confuse the
means with the end, and make of production a fetich.
Let me take a parallel from the fields of Art. What kind of good in
the world is an artist who sets to work to cover the utmost possible
acreage of canvas, or to spoil the greatest possible number of reams
of paper, in deference to the call from a vulgar and undiscriminating
market for all he can produce? Do we admire him――a man whose ideal is
blind supply to meet blind demand?
The most urgent need of the world to-day is to learn――or is it to
re-learn?――the love of quality. And how are we to learn that in a
democratic age, unless we so perfect our electoral machineries as to be
sure that we secure for our leaders, and especially for our leaders of
education, men and women who, themselves worshipping quality, will see
that the love of quality is instilled into the boys and girls of the
nation.
After all, we have some common sense, and we really cannot contemplate
much longer the grimy, grinding monster of modern industrialism without
feeling that we are becoming disinherited, instead of――as we are
brought up to think――heirs to an ever-increasing fortune.
It seems to me that no amount of political evolution or revolution
is going to do us any good unless it is accompanied by evolution or
revolution in ideals. What does it matter whether one class holds the
reins, or another class holds the reins, if the dominant impulse in
the population remains the craving for wealth without the power of
discriminating whether or not that wealth is taking forms which promote
health and happiness.
A new educational charter――a charter of taste, affirming the rule of
dignity, beauty, and simplicity, is wanted before political change can
turn out to be anything but cheap-jack nostrums, and a mere shuffling
around.
I would just cite three of the many changes necessary for any advance:
(1) The reduction of working hours to a point that would enable
men and women to live lives of wider interest.
(2) The abolition of smoke――which surely should not be beyond
attainment in this scientific age.
(3) The rescue of educational forces from the grip of vested
interests.
I would have all educational institutions financed by the State, but
give all the _directing_ power to heads of education elected by the
main body of teachers themselves. I would not have education dependent
on advertisement or on charity. I would not even have newspapers,
which are an educational force――though you might not always think
so――dependent on advertisements. A newspaper man told me the other
day that his paper had printed an article drawing attention to the
deleteriousness of a certain product. The manufacturers of that product
sent an ultimatum drawing the editor’s attention to the deleteriousness
of their advertising in a journal which printed such articles. The
result was perfect peace. What chance is there of rescuing newspapers,
for instance, until education has implanted in the rising generation
the feeling that to accept money for what you know is doing harm to
your neighbours, is not playing the game. Or take another instance:
Not long ago in England a College for the training of school-teachers
desired to make certain excellent advances in their curriculum, which
did not meet with the approval of the municipal powers controlling the
College. A short, sharp fight, and again perfect peace.
I suppose it would be too sweeping to say that a vested interest never
yet held an enlightened view, but I think one may fairly say that their
enlightened views are rare birds.
How, then, is any emancipation to come? I know not, unless we take to
looking on Education as the hub of the wheel――the Schools, the Arts,
the Press; and concentrate our thoughts on the best means of manning
these agencies with men and women of real honesty and vision, and
giving them real power to effect in the rising generation the evolution
of ethics and taste, in accordance with the rules of dignity, beauty,
and simplicity.
VII
TALKING AT LARGE
It is of the main new factors which have come into the life of the
civilised world that I would speak.
The division deep and subtle between those who have fought and those
who have not――concerns us in Europe far more than you in America;
for in proportion to your population the number of your soldiers
who actually fought has been small, compared with the number in any
belligerent European country. And I think that so far as you are
concerned the division will soon disappear, for the iron had not time
to enter into the souls of your soldiers. For us in Europe, however,
this factor is very tremendous, and will take a long time to wear away.
In my country the, as it were, professional English dislike to the
expression of feeling, which strikes every American so forcibly, covers
very deep hearts and highly sensitive nerves. The average Briton is
now not at all stolid underneath; I think he has changed a great deal
in this last century, owing to the town life which seven-tenths of our
population lead. Perhaps only of the Briton may one still invent the
picture which appeared in _Punch_ in the autumn of 1914――of the steward
on a battleship asking the naval lieutenant: “Will you take your bath
before or after the engagement, sir?” and only among Britons overhear
one stoker say to another in the heat of a sea-fight: “Well, wot I
say is――’E ought to ’ave married ’er.” For all that, the Briton feels
deeply; and on those who have fought the experiences of the battlefield
have had an effect which almost amounts to metamorphosis. There are
now two breeds of British people――such as have been long in the danger
zones, and such as have not; shading, of course, into each other
through the many who have just smelled powder and peril, and the very
few whose imaginations are vibrant enough to have lived the two lives,
while only living one.
In a certain cool paper called: “The Balance-sheet of the Soldier
Workman” I tried to come at the effect of the war; but purposely
pitched it in a low and sober key; and there is a much more poignant
tale of change to tell of each individual human being.
Take a man who, when the war broke out (or had been raging perhaps a
year), was living the ordinary Briton’s life, in factory, shop, and
home. Suppose that he went through that deep, sharp struggle between
the pull of home love and interests, and the pull of country (for
I hope it will never be forgotten that five million Britons were
volunteers) and came out committed to his country. That then he had to
submit to being rattled at great speed into the soldier-shape which we
Britons and you Americans have been brought up to regard as but the
half of a free man; that then he was plunged into such a hideous hell
of horrible danger and discomfort as this planet has never seen; came
out of it time and again, went back into it time and again; and finally
emerged, shattered or unscathed, with a spirit at once uplifted and
enlarged, yet bruised and ungeared for the old life of peace. Imagine
such a man set back among those who have not been driven and grilled
and crucified. What would he feel, and how bear himself? On the surface
he would no doubt disguise the fact that he felt different from his
neighbours――he would conform; but something within him would ever be
stirring, a sort of superiority, an impatient sense that he had been
through it and they had not; the feeling, too, that he had seen the
bottom of things, that nothing he could ever experience again would
give him the sensations he had had out there; that he had lived, and
there could be nothing more to it. I don’t think that we others quite
realise what it must mean to those men, most of them under thirty, to
have been stretched to the uttermost, to have no illusions left, and
yet have, perhaps, forty years still to live. There is something gained
in them, but there’s something gone from them. The old sanctions, the
old values won’t hold; are there any sanctions and values which can be
made to hold? A kind of unreality must needs cling about their lives
henceforth. This is a finespun way of putting it, but I think, at
bottom, true.
The old professional soldier lived for his soldiering. At the end of
a war (however terrible) there was left to him a vista of more wars,
more of what had become to him the ultimate reality――his business in
life. For these temporary soldiers of what has been not so much a war
as a prolonged piece of very horrible carnage, there succeeds something
so mild in sensation that it simply will not fill the void. When the
dish of life has lost its savour, by reason of violent and uttermost
experience, wherewith shall it be salted?
The American Civil War was very long and very dreadful, but it was
a human and humane business compared to what Europe has just come
through. There is no analogy in history for the present moment. An
old soldier of that Civil War, after hearing these words, wrote me
an account of his after-career which shows that in exceptional cases
a life so stirring, full, and even dangerful may be lived that no
void is felt. But one swallow does not make a summer, nor will a few
hundreds or even thousands of such lives leaven to any extent the vast
lump of human material used in this war. The spiritual point is this:
In front of a man in ordinary civilised existence there hovers ever
that moment in the future when he expects to prove himself more of a
man than he has yet proved himself. For these soldiers of the Great
Carnage the moment of probation is already in the past. They _have_
proved themselves as they will never have the chance to do again,
and secretly they know it. One talks of their powers of heroism and
sacrifice being wanted just as much in time of Peace; but that cannot
really be so, because Peace times do not demand men’s lives――which is
the ultimate test――with every minute that passes. No, the great moment
of their existence lies behind them, young though so many of them are.
This makes them at once greater than us, yet in a way smaller, because
they have lost the power and hope of expansion. They have lived their
masterpiece already. Human nature is elastic, and hope springs eternal;
but a _climax_ of experience and sensation cannot be repeated; I think
these have reached and passed the uttermost climax; and in Europe they
number millions.
This is a veritable portent, and I am glad that in America you will
not have it to any great extent.
Now how does this affect the future? Roughly speaking it must, I think,
have a diminishing effect on what I may call loosely――Creative ability.
People have often said to me: “We shall have great writings and
paintings from these young men when they come back.” We shall certainly
have poignant expression of their experiences and sufferings; and the
best books and paintings of the war itself are probably yet to come.
But, taking the long view, I do not believe we shall have from them, in
the end, as much creative art and literature as we should have had if
they had not been through the war. Illusion about life, and interest
in ordinary daily experience and emotion, which after all, are to be
the stuff of their future as of ours, has in a way been blunted or
destroyed for them. And in the other provinces of life, in industry, in
trade, in affairs, how can we expect from men who have seen the utter
uselessness of money or comfort or power in the last resort, the same
naïve faith in these things, or the same driving energy towards the
attaining of them that we others exhibit?
It may be cheering to assume that those who have been almost superhuman
these last four years in one environment will continue to be almost
superhuman under conditions the very opposite. But alack! it is not
logical.
On the other hand I think that those who have had this great and
racking experience will be left, for the most part, with a real passion
for Justice; and that this will have a profoundly modifying effect on
social conditions. I think, too, that many of them will have a sort of
passion for humaneness, which will, if you will suffer me to say so,
come in very handy; for I have observed that the rest of us, through
reading about horrors, have lost the edge of our gentleness, and have
got into the habit of thinking that it is the business of women and
children to starve, if they happen to be German; of creatures to be
underfed and overworked if they happen to be horses; of families to be
broken up if they happen to be aliens; and that a general carelessness
as to what suffering is necessary and what is not, has set in. And,
queer as it may seem, I look to those who have been in the thick of
the worst suffering the world has ever seen, to set us in the right
path again, and to correct the vitriolic sentiments engendered by the
armchair and the inkpot, in times such as we have been and are still
passing through. A cloistered life in times like these engenders bile;
in fact, I think it always does. For sheer ferocity there is no place,
you will have noticed, like a club full of old gentlemen. I expect the
men who have come home from killing each other to show us the way back
to brotherliness! And not before it’s wanted. Here is a little true
story of war-time, when all men were supposed to be brothers if they
belonged to the same nation. In the fifth year of the war two men sat
alone in a railway carriage. One, pale, young, and rather worn, had an
unlighted cigarette in his mouth. The other, elderly, prosperous, and
of a ruddy countenance, was smoking a large cigar.
The young man, who looked as if his days were strenuous, took his
unlighted cigarette from his mouth, gazed at it, searched his pockets,
and looked at the elderly man. His nose twitched, vibrated by the scent
of the cigar, and he said suddenly:
“Could you give me a light, sir?”
The elderly man regarded him for a moment, drooped his eyelids, and
murmured:
“I’ve no matches.”
The young man sighed, mumbling the cigarette in his watering lips, then
said very suddenly:
“Perhaps you’ll kindly give me a light from your cigar, sir.”
The elderly man moved throughout his body as if something very sacred
had been touched within him.
“I’d rather not,” he said; “if you don’t mind.”
A quarter of an hour passed, while the young man’s cigarette grew
moister, and the elder man’s cigar shorter. Then the latter stirred,
took it from under his grey moustache, looked critically at it, held
it out a little way towards the other with the side which was least
burned-down foremost, and said:
“Unless you’d like to take it from the edge.”
On the other hand one has often travelled in these last years with
extreme embarrassment because our soldiers were so extraordinarily
anxious that one should smoke their cigarettes, eat their apples, and
their sausages. The marvels of comradeship they have performed would
fill the libraries of the world.
The second main new factor in the world’s life is the disappearance of
the old autocracies.
In 1910, walking in Hyde Park with a writer friend, I remember saying:
“It’s the hereditary autocracies in Germany, Austria, and Russia
which make the danger of war.” He did not agree――but no two writers
agree with each other at any given moment. “If only autocracies go
down in the wreckage of this war!” was almost the first thought I
put down in writing when the war broke out. Well, they are gone!
They were an anachronism, and without them and the bureaucracies and
secrecy which buttressed them we should not, I think, have had this
world catastrophe. But let us not too glibly assume that the forms
of government which take their place can steer the battered ships
of the nations in the very troubled waters of to-day, or that they
will be truly democratic. Even highly democratic statesmen have been
known to resort to the way of the headmaster at my old school, who
put a motion to the masters’ meeting and asked for a show of hands
in its favour. Not one hand was held up. “Then,” he said, “I shall
adopt it with the greater regret.” Nevertheless, the essential new
factor is, that, whereas in 1914 civilisation was on two planes, it is
now, theoretically, at least, on the one democratic plane or level.
That is a great easing of the world-situation, and removes a chief
cause of international misunderstanding. The rest depends on what we
can now make of democracy. Surely no word can so easily be taken in
vain; to have got rid of the hereditary principle in government is by
no means to have made democracy a real thing. Democracy is neither
government by rabble, nor government by caucus. Its measure as a
beneficent principle is the measure of the intelligence, honesty,
public spirit, and independence of the average voter. The voter who
goes to the poll blind of an eye and with a cast in the other, so that
he sees no issue clear, and every issue only in so far as it affects
him personally, is not precisely the sort of ultimate administrative
power we want. Intelligent, honest, public-spirited, and independent
voters guarantee an honest and intelligent governing body. The best men
the best government is a truism which cannot be refuted. Democracy to
be real and effective must succeed in throwing up into the positions
of administrative power the most trustworthy of its able citizens.
In other words it must incorporate and make use of the principle of
aristocracy; government by the best――_best in spirit_, not best-born.
Rightly seen, there is no tug between democracy and aristocracy;
aristocracy should be the means and machinery by which democracy works
itself out. What then can be done to increase in the average voter
intelligence and honesty, public spirit and independence? Nothing
save by education. The Arts, the Schools, the Press. It is impossible
to overestimate the need for vigour, breadth, restraint, good taste,
enlightenment, and honesty in these three agencies. The artist, the
teacher (and among teachers one includes, of course, religious
teachers in so far as they concern themselves with the affairs of this
world), and the journalist have the future in their hands. As they
are fine the future will be fine; as they are mean the future will be
mean. The burden is very specially on the shoulders of Public Men,
and that most powerful agency the Press, which reports them. Do we
realise the extent to which the modern world relies for its opinions on
public utterances and the Press? Do we realise how completely we are
all in the power of report? Any little lie or exaggerated sentiment
uttered by one with a bee in his bonnet, with a principle, or an end
to serve, can, if cleverly expressed and distributed, distort the
views of thousands, sometimes of millions. Any wilful suppression of
truth for Party or personal ends can so falsify our vision of things
as to plunge us into endless cruelties and follies. Honesty of thought
and speech and written word is a jewel, and they who curb prejudice
and seek honourably to know and speak the truth are the only true
builders of a better life. But what a dull world if we can’t chatter
and write irresponsibly, can’t slop over with hatred, or pursue our
own ends without scruple! To be tied to the apron-strings of truth, or
coiffed with the nightcap of silence; who in this age of cheap ink and
oratory will submit to such a fate? And yet, if we do not want another
seven million violent deaths, another eight million maimed and halt
and blind, and if we do not want anarchy, our tongues must be sober,
and we must tell the truth. Report, I would almost say, now rules the
world and holds the fate of man on the sayings of its many tongues.
If the good sense of mankind cannot somehow restrain utterance and
cleanse report, Democracy, so highly vaunted, will not save us; and
all the glib words of promise spoken might as well have lain unuttered
in the throats of orators. We are always in peril under Democracy of
taking the line of least resistance and immediate material profit.
The gentleman, for instance, whoever he was, who first discovered
that he could sell his papers better by undercutting the standard of
his rivals, and, appealing to the lower tastes of the Public under
the flag of that convenient expression “what the Public wants,” made
a most evil discovery. The Press is for the most part in the hands
of men who know what is good and right. It can be a great agency for
levelling up. But whether on the whole it is so or not, one continually
hears doubted. There ought to be no room for doubt in any of our minds
that the Press is on the side of the angels. It can do as much as
any other single agency to raise the level of honesty, intelligence,
public spirit, and taste in the average voter, in other words, to build
Democracy on a sure foundation. This is a truly tremendous trust; for
the safety of civilisation and the happiness of mankind hangs thereby.
The saying about little children and the kingdom of heaven was meant
for the ears of all those who have it in their power to influence
simple folk. To be a good and honest editor, a good and honest
journalist is in these days to be a veritable benefactor of mankind.
Now take the function of the artist, of the man who in stone, or music,
marble, bronze, paint, or words, can express himself, and his vision
of life, truly and beautifully. Can we set limit to his value? The
answer is in the affirmative. We set such limitation to his value that
he has been known to die of it. And I would only venture to say here
that if we don’t increase the store we set by him, we shall, in this
reach-me-down age of machines and wholesale standardisations, emulate
the Goths who did their best to destroy the art of Rome, and all these
centuries later, by way of atonement, have filled the Thiergarten at
Berlin and the City of London with peculiar brands of statuary, and are
always writing their names on the Sphynx.