As I looked into the shaving glass in the privacy of the bathroom this
morning, I noticed that there was a very pronounced smile on my face.
I was surprised. Not that I am a smileless person in ordinary: on the
contrary, I fancy I have an average measure of mirthfulness--a little
patchy perhaps, but enough in quantity if unequal in distribution. But
I have not been hilarious for a week past. There is not much to be
hilarious about in these anxious days when the tide of war is sweeping
back over the hills and valleys of the Somme and every hour comes
burdened with dark tidings. I find the light-hearted person a trial,
and gaiety an offence, like a foolish snigger breaking in on the mad
agony of Lear.
Why, then, this smiling face in the glass? Only last night, coming up
on the top of the late bus, I was irritated by the good humour of a fat
man who came and sat in front of me. He looked up at the brilliant
moonlit sky and round at the passengers, and then began humming to
himself as though he was full of good news and cheerfulness. When he
was tired of humming he began whistling, and his whistling was more
intolerable than his humming, for it was noisier. Hang the fellow,
thought I, what is he humming and whistling about? This moon that is
touching the London streets with beauty--what scenes of horror and
carnage it looks down on only a few score miles away! What nameless
heroisms are being done for us as we sit under the quiet stars in
security and ease! What mighty issues are in the balance! ... And this
fellow hums and whistles as though he had had no end of a good day.
Perhaps he is a profiteer. Anyhow, I was relieved when he went down
the stairs, and his vacuous whistling died on the air.... Yet this
face in the glass looked as though it could hum or whistle quite as
readily as that fat man whom I judged so harshly last night.
It was certainly not the sunny morning that was responsible. The
beauty of these wonderful days would, in ordinary circumstances, charge
my spirits to the brim, but now I wake to them with a feeling of
resentment. They are like a satire on our tragedy--like marriage
garments robing the skeleton of death. Moreover, they are a practical
as well as a spiritual grievance. They are the ally of the enemy.
They have come when he needed them, just as they deserted us last
autumn when we needed them, and when day after day our gallant men
floundered to the attack in Flanders through seas of mud. No, most
Imperial Sun, I cannot welcome you. I would you would hide your face
from the tortured earth, and leave the rough elements to deal out even
justice between the disputants in this great argument.... No, this
smile cannot be for you. And it is not wholly a tribute to the letter
that has just come from that stalwart boy of nineteen, boy of the
honest, open face and the frequent hearty laugh, stopped on the eve of
his first leave and plunged into this hell of death. Dated Saturday.
All well up to Saturday. The first two terrible days survived. Those
who love him can breathe more freely.
But though that was perhaps the foundation, it did not explain the
smile. Ah, I had got it! It was that paragraph I had read in the
newspaper recording the Kaiser's message to his wife on the victory of
his armies, and concluding its flamboyant braying with the familiar
blasphemy, "God is with us." I find that when I am cheerless a message
from the Kaiser always provides a tonic, and that his patronage of the
Almighty gives me confidence. This crude, humourless vanity cannot be
destined to win the world. It cannot be that humanity is to suffer so
grotesque a jest as to fall under the heel of this inflated buffoon and
of the system of which he is the symbol. I know that other warriors
have claimed the Almighty and have justified the claim have won even in
virtue of the claim. Mohammedanism swept the Christian world before it
to the cry of "Allah-il-Allah," and to Cromwell the presence of the
Lord of Hosts at his side was as real as the presence of Jehovah was to
the warriors of Israel. Stonewall Jackson was all the more terrible
for the grim, fanatical faith that burned in him from the days of his
conversion in Mexico, and, though Lincoln had no orthodox creed, the
sense of divine purpose was always present to him, and no one used the
name of the Almighty in great moments with more sincere and impressive
beauty.
You have only to turn to Lincoln or Cromwell to feel the vast gulf
between their piety and this vulgar impiety. And the reason is simple.
They believed in the spiritual governance of human life. Cromwell may
have been mistaken in his conception of God, but it was a God of the
spirit whom he served and whose unworthy instrument he was in achieving
the spiritual redemption of men. The material victory was nothing to
him except as a means of accomplishing the emancipation of the soul of
man, of which political liberty was only the elementary expression.
But the Kaiser's conception of God is a denial of everything that is
spiritual and humane. He talks of his God as if he were a brigand
chief, or an image of blood and iron wrought in his own likeness, a
family deity, a sort of sleeping partner of the firm of Hohenzollern,
to be left snoring when villainy is afoot and nudged into wakefulness
to adorn a triumph. It is the negation of the God of the spirit. It
is the God of brute force, of violence and terror, trampling on the
garden of the soul in man. It is the God of materialism at war with
all that is spiritual. In a word, this thing that the Kaiser calls God
is not God at all. It is the Devil.
On this question of the partisanship of the Almighty in regard to our
human quarrels, the best attitude is silence. Lincoln, with his
unfailing wisdom, set the subject in its right relationship when a lady
asked him for the assurance that God was on their side. "The important
thing," he said, "is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are
on the side of God." This attitude will save us from blasphemous
arrogance and from a good deal of perplexity. For when we claim that
God is our champion and is fighting exclusively for us we get into
difficulties. We have only finite tests to apply to an infinite
purpose, and by those tests neither the loyalty nor the omnipotence of
the Almighty will be sustained. And what will you do then? Will you,
when things go wrong, ask with the poet,
Is he deaf and blind, our God? ... Is he indeed at all?
The Greeks disposed of the dilemma by having many deities who took the
most intimate share in human quarrels, but adopted opposite sides.
They could do much for their earthly clients, but their efforts were
neutralised by the power of the gods briefed on the other side. Vulcan
could forge an impenetrable shield for Achilles, and Juno could warn
him, through the mouth of his horse Xanthus, of his approaching doom,
but neither could save him. This guess at the spiritual world supplied
a crude working explanation of the queer contrariness of things on the
human plane, but it left the gods pale and ineffectual shadows of the
mind.
We have lost this ingenuous explanation of the strange drama of our
life. We do not know what powers encompass us about, or in what vast
rhythm the tumultuous surges and wild discords of our being are
engulfed. No voice comes from the void and no portents are in the sky.
The stars are infinitely aloof and the face of nature offers us neither
comfort nor revelation. But within us we feel the impulse of the human
spirit, seeking the free air, turning to the light of beautiful and
reasonable things as the flower turns to the face of the sun. And in
that impulse we find the echo to whatever far-off, divine strain we
move. We cannot doubt its validity. It is the authentic,
indestructible note of humanity. We may falter in the measure, stumble
in our steps, get bewildered amidst the complexity of intractable and
unintelligible things. But the spiritual movement goes on, like the
Pilgrim's Chorus fighting its way through the torrent of the world. It
may be submerged to-day, to-morrow, for generations; but in the end it
wins--in the end the moral law prevails over the law of the jungle.
The stream of tendency has many turnings, but it makes for
righteousness and saps ceaselessly the foundations of the god of
violence. It is to that god of harsh, material things that the Kaiser
appeals against the eternal strivings of man towards the divine
prerogative of freedom. Like the false prophets of old he leaps on his
altar, gashes himself with knives till the blood pours out and cries,
"Oh, Baal, hear us." And it is because Baal is an idol of wood and
stone in a world subject to the governance of the spirit that, even in
the darkest hour of the war, we need not lose faith.
That, I think, is the meaning of the smile I caught in the shaving
glass this morning.