Racial or national jealousies do not enter into our calculations
here. We have no more right as Americans or Britons or Frenchmen or
Germans to be jealous of the primacy of Greece in such matters than
to be jealous of the multiplication tables because they happen to
enjoy a certain strategic position with regard to other facts. It
is true that we are no longer allowed the luxury of believing, with
the eighteenth century, for instance, that in looking back to Greece
we are looking at the very fathers of the race, who “discovered not
devised” the rules of nature, which until then there had been no men
to find out. All the more, however, are the Greeks instructive to us
when we realize that they, too, had to free themselves from immensely
ancient bonds of tradition and superstition. What clear reason did
for them, ceaselessly revolving and inquiring, it has at least a
chance to do for us, if we want it to. Study the Greeks and you are
likely to stop hugging prejudices, or taking pride in them. Study the
Greeks, and a hundred petty reverences fall away in a light as lucid
as the Athenian atmosphere. Our own day’s work concerns us every day,
as it did the Greeks, but, as a good maxim says, the man who knows
only his business does not know his business. Why will some one not
speak out and say what events have lately shown—that a knowledge of
history and literature is indispensable in affairs, and that only
those men, barring a genius or two, have shown any conspicuous talent
for leadership in our terrible decade who have known something about
history and literature? It is true. If we were beasts, we should not
especially need history; we should have instinct. But having, as men,
exchanged instinct for reason, we need as much of the past as we can
get—remembering that every man is free, thanks to the multiplication of
records, to choose his own past; that is, to choose that part of human
history between him and Adam which to him is worth most. The Middle
Ages are good to illustrate devotion; the Renaissance, passionate
individualism; the rise of the Americas, civilized men pitted against
virgin nature. But Greece surpasses them all not only in reasonableness
but also in completeness and sharpness of outline. She is the best
microcosm, with the scale best adjusted to our vision. She is the best
crystal, most purely revealing the vast matters therein pictured; she
is the best laboratory, and under the simplest and loveliest conditions
exhibits the processes of life which ordinarily appear confused and
vexed.
The claim frequently made, that we cannot find in Greek experience
enough that is analogous with our problems, because Greece had
so simple and circumscribed an existence and lived in a world so
little complicated by machinery, means no more than to say that in
a laboratory generations of guinea-pigs succeed one another with a
lower mortality than in Guinean jungles, or that diamonds may be made
out of their raw materials without the geological convulsions of
which in nature they are admirable but accidental byproducts. That
is what laboratories are for, to exhibit simply the behaviour of
complex things. And the parallel between laboratories for matter and
laboratories for mind has more than a fanciful value. Life in Greece
was reduced to the simple facts of the human intelligence, leaning
less than anywhere else upon mere tradition, upon mere materials, upon
mere superfluities. Much as we have grown in range of knowledge by our
study of the physical universe, and little as we can afford to reject
any wisdom founded upon it, we need often to remember that in practice
the centre of our universe is still the mind of man, that for the most
part we have to conduct our affairs as if really the Ptolemaic system
were good astronomy, as it is very fair politics and morals. The study
of the material universe and all sorts of highly specialized studies
tend to draw us away from these central facts, as pedants and casuists
are continually being drawn away from fundamental principles. The
principles, however, are still fundamental.
VI. LONG ROADS
THE COSMIC IRONIES
The Cosmic Ironies sat on a bright island in the midst of the Galaxy,
holding a caucus over the universe’s affairs. Boötes flamed, Orion
glowed, Scorpio glittered, Ursa Major sulked, Eridanus sprawled and
yawned, Canis Major and Canis Minor eyed each other distrustfully,
Centaurus and Pegasus huddled close and whispered at intervals.
Boötes, it appeared, had just been speaking, and there were still
reverberations of his great voice in the ether, while the glare of
difference or assent with which he had been greeted by his fellows
played upon him from every quarter and illuminated the enormous scene,
now red with fire, now blue with space, now opaline with shifting moods
of the Ironies.
Into this circle, before one of those present had had time to break the
meditative silence, came a brisk invader in burning yellow who walked
round the seated group and was obviously chagrined to find that no
place had been kept for him.
“I say, brothers of the universe,” he began, “it seems to me this
committee has been closed long enough. It needs new blood. One of you
move over and let me in.”
If any heard him, at least there was no sign. The reverberations of
Boötes’s words travelled farther away and the light from his listeners
gradually ceased playing upon him; but the charmed occasion was not
apparently disturbed.
“Well, it doesn’t seem very hospitable. I sent word I was coming, and
look how you receive me. And, as they say on the Earth, I think it
isn’t representative. The Solar System has a right to be here and a
right to be heard. Perhaps we are a little younger than some of you,
but that excuse won’t hold for ever. Youth, as they say on Jupiter, is
no crime.”
Somewhere a star exploded and threw a momentary brilliance over the
caucus, so that the gems on the brows of the Ironies sparkled as if
they were actually Betelgeux and Aldebaran and Spica and Arcturus and
Capella and Sirius and Altair. None of the brooding figures started at
the explosion, however, much less at the accusations of the Solar Irony.
“Have I got to repeat all I told you before about the ironic work I
and my helpers have done in the Solar System? I must say I am tired
of telling it. You ought not to close your minds the way you do to new
inventions and discoveries. The first thing you know you’ll all be so
out of date that this radical doctrine about the moral government of
the world will spread and ruin all your schemes. If you don’t wake up
pretty soon it won’t matter whether you ever wake.”
From one of the Ironies a red glow and from another a blue flame and
from yet another a white radiance swept around the circle as if looking
to see who would speak next, but, settling upon no one, they mingled
in the centre and there rested quietly, splashing the pavement with
gorgeous colours.
“Take what’s going on in Mars today if you want to test my right
to sit in this conclave. I have bilked the Martians into thinking
that their everlasting messages to Earth are understood. So those
philanthropists have wasted a mountain of treasure making instruments
to carry their pompous flashes, and they babble wisdom into the void—as
if their wisdom actually mattered or as if Earth would or could pay any
attention to it if it ever reached there! You strike me as glum enough,
but if you could only see the prophets and poets crowding around that
transmitter and pouring all they have and are into it, and then going
back to their business with the thick smirk of a duty performed—if you
could see that you would laugh a month. That’s what I’ve done in the
Solar System: I’ve trained the higher beings to prattle wisdom till
they are hoarse and then not to practise it any more than if they were
deaf and had never heard of it.”
It may have been some vibration of sympathy which ran through the
Ironies or it may have been merely deeper thoughts stirring them to
resume the huge discourse.
“For that matter, take Earth alone as evidence of what I can do when I
try. The scrawny race of bipeds who think they manage Earth have come
up from the slime by the exercise of their wits, trampling the slower
races under their heels for thousands of years to make a bare living,
and yet, now they have explored all the paths of Earth and dug up its
riches and learned to cultivate its fruits, they are acting as if they
couldn’t imagine any better future than to take the path back again
into the slime. But do they listen to even the petty wisdom a few of
them have got at? No, they strut about as they always have, blown up
with pride that they are human and not like the other beasts which they
have driven into the wilds or else made into slaves. Man, proud man!
You should see him. And I have taught him both to be all this and to
admire himself. Now why can’t I come into the caucus?”
Surely something was stirring in the moods of the Ironies. Ursa Major,
who had been almost grey in his sullenness, darted awakened glances
around the circle, coruscating, it seemed, with thought. Orion sent out
an iridescent gleam, fanned by quicker and quicker breath. The whole
place grew so bright that each ironic countenance shone in comparison
with the waves of the Galaxy which beat upon the island.
“But I have done more than all that to win my seat. Those same bipeds,
who have been clever enough to map and weigh the stars, have made
them gods in their own scrawny image and have laid out heavens on the
plan of their desires. And I have taught them to lay the blame of
their follies on their gods and to call the consequences their just
punishment; I have taught them, moreover, to endure whatever comes,
no matter how much the fault of men, in the confidence that they will
shortly die and be born again into a world which will make good their
wrongs and agonies; I have, in fact, persuaded that tiny race, on its
mortal star, that it is the heart and heir and purpose and crown of the
universe.”
Now for the first time the great silence was broken by bursts of
laughter which shook the zenith and perturbed the Galaxy. From each
of the giant faces leaped rays of fearful brilliance, revolving like
wheels, interlacing in an ineffable net of light. The Cosmic Ironies
rocked in their seats with mirth, smote one another on knee and
shoulder, tossed their giant arms in paroxysms of delight, and shouted
genial invitations to the candidate.
The Solar Irony stepped forward and sat down between Canis Major and
Canis Minor, who unhesitantly made room for him.
JUSTICE OR MELODRAMA?
Notions about justice, in the heads of dull or selfish or angry men,
have done so much harm that I sometimes despairingly inquire whether
it would not be better if the very principle itself had never been
discovered. Dull men follow paths which they have been told are just
until they ruin them with ruts. Selfish men are just only to themselves
with a complacency denied to those who have no doctrine to sustain
them. Angry men vindicate their rages and unreason by pointing to the
primitive sense—father of revenge and vendetta—from which we with
so much difficulty free ourselves in the long progress toward civil
conditions. If justice, according to an enthusiastic hyperbole of
Emerson’s, is the rhyme of things, then the vulgar conceptions of it
are no more than tinkling couplets. A blow struck must rhyme instanter
with a blow received; an eye rhymes with an eye, a tooth with a
tooth, burning with burning, and strife with strife. Or, to allude to
another mode of literature, justice in its primitive aspects is merely
melodrama, wherein virtue is always rewarded with prosperity and evil
is always fatally punished.
The mood which followed the war was the mood of melodrama, on a larger
scale, perhaps, than ever before in human history. Germany, seen
solely as a bully and a brute, had been beaten at her own foul game;
therefore let her be joyously annihilated, while the gallery gods who
filled the theatre of the world almost from top to bottom hooted and
gloried at the justice weighed out to her. What made it harder to
contend against the uproar was that the uproar at first thought seemed
justifiable. Nemesis never looks like so righteous a doctor as when he
feeds a poisoner his own poison. But I always suspect first thoughts.
For civilization, after all, is but the substitution for first thoughts
of second or third or hundredth thoughts, reason supplanting passion,
and polity guiding anarchic instinct. Melodrama is what commonly
occurs to us first, in the form of those too neat or too hasty moral
conclusions to which we are all more or less prone to jump when we
allow ourselves to indulge too amply the sense of primitive justice
which we share with all the savages of our ancestry.
Men do not, of course, jump too hastily to conclusions merely by reason
of their ruder sense of justice. There is involved also a certain
obscure instinct toward art, toward rounding out and completing and
closing a chapter. Paradox cheerfully says, not forgetting Oscar Wilde,
that affairs in 1918-1920 were trying to conform to dramaturgy, that
the war was trying to shape itself a good fifth act. But paradox is not
needed, for few things are clearer than that centuries of literature
were then indeed influencing the world’s attitude toward the peace and
the treaty. Obscurely, again let it be emphasized, men had felt that
they were witnessing, or acting, the vastest of dramas. The curtain,
for them, rose sharply with the Austrian ultimatum and the invasion of
Belgium. The sinking of the _Lusitania_, say, was the villain’s fatal
blunder, which brought against him a fresh, powerful enemy. The odds
then deserting him, he hazarded all on a single blow, lost, and came
down in a fearful wreck with the spent world falling about him. Was
it not due and natural that there should descend another curtain to
hide the bloody stage, and that the lights should flash sharply on,
and that the spectators should turn away, contented though somewhat
subdued, to eat, drink, and make love, possibly commenting upon the
actors and their art? Of course the peace on which the curtain fell had
to be dramatically satisfying, the villain dead or prostrate and the
hero in the ascendant. The sense of form must be served, the taste for
melodramatic finality gratified. If the piece ended happily for the
victors, justice had been done.
Justice or melodrama? It is only in art, and that not always the
truest, that things come out so right. History has no beginning, no
middle, no end, but moves everlastingly in some dim direction of which
mankind at least does not know the secret. Poets and dramatists may
honourably pilfer from history such materials as they require, and may
of course work them into forms more compact or conclusive than life
itself. But history cannot be handled so masterfully, for one can
never be sure at what point in it one is standing. When the _Lusitania_
went down, no one knew whether her loss opened the first act or the
last. When America entered the war no one could be sure whether the
fourth act of five or of fifty acts had ended. And no one could say
that the peace absolutely concluded the drama. The business of the
treaty was not to close the war but to open the peace, not to avenge
those who died but to preserve those who still lived, not to crown
events past with poetic justice, which belongs to the technique of
melodrama, but to prepare for events to come by trusting to the higher
and humaner justice which is less concerned with righting old wrongs
than with trying to foresee and prevent new wrongs—the justice, let me
call it, of plain prose.
THE CORRUPTION OF COMFORT
Someone lately asked me by what image I would represent the age that
began with the use of steam and ended with the World War. I was not
sure that any age had actually ended then, but an image did occur to
me. It came from the story of the fisherman in the _Thousand Nights and
a Night_ who let the Jinni out of the jar and then found him fierce and
uncontrollable. But upon second thought I saw that the image was not
accurate: the fisherman by using his wits did persuade the spirit back
into his copper prison and made a bargain with him which saved the man
from death. Then another image occurred to me. It was that of a crew
of pirates who chanced upon an unexpected island and there found such
incalculable treasure that they went mad with their good fortune, raged
up and down the island, extended their fury to a whole archipelago, and
at last wound up in a debauch of robbery and slaughter. But neither did
this image satisfy me: the people of the last age were not criminals to
start with; they were as virtuous as those of any other age on—or not
on—record. A better image would be that of some tribe of anthropoids
who, after long subsisting on a more or less difficult plane of life,
suddenly got hold of a hundred tricks and secrets which gave them
power over earth, air, fire, and water, endowing them with human riches
without human discipline.
And yet it is less than fair to make this distinction between men
and their lagging cousins of the tree-tops. Not monkeys too abruptly
promoted to be men but men come too abruptly into wealth—that is the
analogy. Thinking in terms of the long history of the race, look what
happened. Never before, to put it broadly, had men been warm enough
except in those regions of the earth where the sun warmed them; now
they dug up mountains of coal and drew off rivers of oil and fashioned
whole atmospheres of gas for fuel; and with these, besides warming
themselves, they made such tools and weapons as had not even been
dreamed of. Never before, still to put it broadly, had men had food
enough; now they discovered how to coax unprecedented crops out of the
soil and how to breed new armies of beasts to be devoured and how to
catch what the depths of forests and oceans had hitherto denied them
and how to create all sorts of novel foods by manufacture. Never before
had men, except in dangerous, communal migrations, moved much from
their native places; now they made vehicles and ships to go like the
wind and in time took to the wind itself for their trafficking until
restless tides of human life flowed here and there over the surface
of the earth as if men and nations had no such things as homes. Long
naked, they covered themselves with preposterous garments and strutted
up and down; long hungry, they stuffed their bellies till they were
sick with surfeit; long home-bound, they ran wild till they were lost.
Meanwhile their minds could not keep pace with this enormous increase
of their goods. Their ancestors, it may be guessed, had taken centuries
to accustom themselves to the use of fire and of the successive
machines they had invented; they had taken centuries to find out those
parts of the earth they knew. In the last age such processes were
accelerated to a dash and a scramble. Things poured in upon minds and
overwhelmed them. The century in retrospect has a bewildered look,
like a baby at a circus: some art which it could hardly comprehend had
brought a universe into a tumbling, twisting focus and the century’s
head ached with the effort to find a meaning in it. To vertigo
succeeded what was probably an actual madness of the race—but a madness
with the least possible method. Everywhere a wild activity occupied
the faculties of those who followed affairs; and—though the finest
intelligences dissented—among the sophists who encouraged such activity
was an even greater frenzy of bewilderment.
Call what happened the corruption of comfort. Men had so long been cold
and starved and isolated that they clutched at the chance to wrest
every advantage from stubborn nature, and they clutched it faster than
they could put it to sound uses. Discomfort was one of the penalties
of their madness. Nerves in the loud din of the new age learned new
agonies. Confusions grew and desperations thrived till the whole earth
was on a tension out of which anything might develop. What did develop
was the war which wrapped the world in horror. To ascribe it to this
or that particular cause or guilt is to see it in terms too small. The
race of man was gorged and could not digest its meal; it was drunk and
could not control its motions; it was mad and could not understand its
course. In the long run the observer of mankind must look back upon the
last age as one of the several moments in the history of the race when
it has blundered into mania and cruelly hurt itself before it could
find its head again.
The race is very old and it doubtless has many aeons still to live
before the cooling of the planet sends it back to its aboriginal state.
Nor is there use or sense in imagining that the race might return to
the simpler conditions that existed before the era of superfluous
things. Things are. Hope must be seen to lie in the direction of their
assimilation by the human mind. Here and there different prophets
insist that the mind is on the verge of some discovery as large as
Columbus’s which will establish a truer balance between it and the
matter which now outweighs it. But why put trust in miracles? The
madness of the age is more likely to subside gradually, under quiet
counsels, as the debauch wears out its influence. Slowly the mind must
lift its faith in itself up above its temporary obsession with mere
things. It must learn to hold and master all of them which are capable
of being held and mastered. It must become accustomed to live among
the rest of them as a mountaineer becomes accustomed to live in the
city streets after the panic which overcomes him when first he enters
them from the high silences and pure outlooks of his native hills.
“GOD IS NOT DEAD OF OLD AGE”
It is a pleasant literary speculation, and not without its moral
bearings, to inquire whether the disorder and discontent and chaos
now ominous among men may not arise from the fact that the world has
grown too large for us to manage—like a lion cub which can no longer
be played with or like another mechanical monster which indeed we
have created but which refuses to do our bidding any longer. A man of
affairs, a financier certainly not acclimated to philosophic despair
and certainly accustomed to govern wherever his hand turns, lately
ventured such an explanation. It may be, he said, that there is no
solution which our reason can arrive at. We look about us for authentic
leaders and see none; we pass in review hundreds of counsels but
find none that seem in all ways to suit—unless we are doctrinaires;
assuredly of all the schemes we have tried no one has been successful.
By what right do we assume that some such device for salvation exists?
Plagues have come before for which there was no cure. Our crisis may
be one of them. It may be that the day of solutions is over. H. G.
Wells would have us search history to find our future there—or at
least some track pointing to a future we can reasonably confide in.
But perhaps he was just as near the truth in his younger scientific
days when he gave us vivid pictures of men who travelled beyond the
known areas of our kind, no longer the engineers of their own destiny
but drifting about at the convenience of fate. We think of Anatole
France, voluptuously contemplating the age when our earth shall have
grown too cold for human habitation and men have gradually died away
among the ice hummocks of a universal frozen sea. Or, bitterest of
all, we remember Thomas Hardy’s fancy of the delegate sent up to God
to ask about the direful state of the planet, only to learn that God
had utterly forgotten us and but dimly recollects that He had made
us so long ago and had meant to destroy His experiment when He saw
how contemptible it was. Beyond Hardy on that path of reflection lies
merely such madness as drove Swift to his Yahoos and Houyhnhnms.
And if we dare the path the only escapes from madness are some
Asiatic discipline of the will to the peace of acquiescence or some
sleek optimism shutting its eyes to all the evidences of horror and
chattering and eating and wooing merrily among them.