It is the agreeable illusion of the theatre that life is a rounded
tale. We pay our money at the box, go in, see the story begin,
progress and end, sadly or cheerfully, and come away with the discords
resolved, virtue exalted and villainy abased, and the tangled skein of
things neatly unravelled. And so home, content. But on the stage of
life there is none of this satisfying completeness and finish. We
enter in the midst of a very ancient drama, spend our years in trying
to pick up the threads and purport of the action, and go as
inopportunely as we came. The curtain does not descend punctually upon
an exhausted plot and an accomplished purpose. It descends upon a
thrilling but unfinished tale. You have got, perhaps, into the most
breathless part of the action, seized at last the clue that will
assuredly explain the mystery, when suddenly and irrationally the light
fails, and for you the theatre is dark for ever. Your emotions have
been stirred, your curiosity awakened, your sympathies aroused in vain.
Even the episode you have been permitted to witness is left with ragged
ends and unfinished judgments. How did it proceed and how did it end,
and what was the sequel? Was virtue or villainy triumphant? Who was
the real hero? Were your sympathies on the right side or the wrong?
And, more personally, what of those shoots of life you have thrown out
to the challenge of the future? Did they wilt or flourish, and what
was their fortune? These are among the thousand questions to which we
should like an answer, and there is nothing unreasonable in thinking
that we may have an answer.
It would be enough to satisfy the curiosity of most of us to have the
privilege which Jeremy Bentham confessed that he would like to enjoy.
That amiable and industrious philosopher, having spent a blameless life
in the development of his comfortable gospel of the "greatest good of
the greatest number," entertained the pleasant fancy of returning to
the scene of his labours once in every hundred years to see humanity
marching triumphantly to the heavenly city of Utilitarianism, along the
straight and smooth turnpike road that he had fashioned for its ease
and direction. He had the touching confidence of the idealist that
humanity only had to be shown the way out of the wilderness to plunge
into it with joyous shouts, and hurry along it with eager enthusiasm.
And since he had shown the way all would henceforth be well. It is
this confidence which makes the idealist an object of pity to the
cynic. For the cynic is often only the idealist turned sour. He is
the idealist disillusioned by loss of faith, not in his ideals, but in
humanity.
This is about the time when Jeremy might be expected back on his first
centennial visit to see how we have got along the road to human
perfectibility. I can imagine him, poised in the unapparent, looking
with round-eyed astonishment upon the answer which a century of time
has given to his anticipations. This, the New Jerusalem of his
confident vision? This shambles the harvest of a hundred years of
progress? And the cynic beside him, tapping his ghostly snuff-box,
observes dryly, "They don't seem to have got very far on the way,
friend Jeremy; not very far on the way." I can conceive the
philosopher returning sadly to the Elysian fields, wondering whether,
after all, these visits are worth while. If this is the achievement of
a hundred years' enjoyment of the philosophy of Utilitarianism, what
unthinkable revelation may await him on his next visit! Perhaps ...
yes, perhaps, it will be better to stay away.
But all the answers of time will not be so disquieting. It is
probable, for example, that Benjamin Franklin will enjoy his visit
immensely. He will find much to delight his curious and adventurous
mind. I see him watching the flying machines as joyously as a child
and as fondly as a parent. For among his multitudinous activities he
experimented with balloons and suffered the gibes of the foolish. Why,
asked his critic, did he waste his time over these childish things?
What, in the name of heaven, was the use of balloons? And Benjamin
made the immortal reply, "What is the use of a new-born baby?" If he
is among the presences who watch the events of to-day he will be almost
as astonished as his critics to see the dimensions his "new-born baby"
has grown to. He will be astonished at other things. He will recall
the day when, in his fine flowered-silk garment, he entered, as the
delegate of the insurgent farmers of New England, the reception of the
great--was it not in Downing Street?--and was spat upon by the noble
lords, to whose dim vision the future of the new-born baby across the
Atlantic was undecipherable. He will recall how he put his outraged
garment away, never to wear it again until he had signed the
Declaration of Independence. And now, what miracle is this? England
and America reconciled at last. England, no less than France,
straining her eyes across the Atlantic for the relief that is hastening
to her help in the extremest peril of her history from the giant by
whose unquiet cradle he played his part a century and a half ago....
Well, no one will rejoice more at the reconciliation or watch the tide
of relief streaming across the ocean with more goodwill than Benjamin,
who deplored the breach with England as much as anybody. But the noble
lords who spat on him!...
And I can see Napoleon, with his unpleasant familiarity, pinching the
spiritual ears of the French scientists of his day and saying, "How
now, gentlemen? What do you say to the steamboat now?" Poor wretches,
how humiliated they will be. For when Napoleon asked the Academie des
Sciences to report as to the possibilities of the newly-invented
steamboat, their verdict was, "Idee folle, erreur grossiere,
absurdite." They saw in it only a foolish toy, and not a new-born baby
destined to be the giant who is performing such prodigies on the seas
of the world to-day.
But it is not the scientists who will need to hang their heads before
the revelations that await them. They will look on with the
complacency of those who see the mighty harvest of their sowing.
Perhaps among the presences who surround them they may descry a bulky
man, with rolling gait, whom they knew in their day on earth as the
intellectual autocrat of his generation and who levelled the shafts of
his wit at their foolish experiments. They will have lost the very
human frailty of retaliation if they do not remind him of some of those
shafts that, to the admiring circle which sat at his feet, seemed so
well-directed and piercing. Perhaps they will read this to him:
Some turn the wheel of electricity, some suspend rings to a loadstone
and find that what they did yesterday they can do again to-day. Some
register the changes of the wind, and die fully convinced that the wind
is changeable. There are men yet more profound, who have heard that
two colourless liquors may produce a colour by union, and that two cold
bodies will grow hot if they are mingled; they mingle them, and produce
the effect expected, say it is strange, and mingle them again.
Admirable old boy! What wit you had! We can still enjoy it even
though time has turned it to foolishness and planted its barb in your
own breast. All your roaring, sir, will not take the barb out. All
your genius for argument will not prevail against the witness you see
of the mighty fruits of those little experiments that filled your
Olympian mind with scorn. But you will have your compensations. Even
you will be astonished at the place you fill in our thoughts so long
after your queer figure and brown wig were last seen in Fleet Street.
You will find that the very age in which you lived is remembered as the
Age of Johnson, and that the thunders of your voice, transmitted by the
faithful Bozzy, are among the immortal reverberations from the past.
Yes, sir, in spite of the scientists, you will go back very well
content with your visit.
And it may be that the victory of the scientists will assuage the
disappointment of Jeremy himself. It is possible that when, back once
more in whatever region of heaven is reserved for philosophers, he
begins to reflect on all he has seen, Jeremy will recover his spirits.
This moral catastrophe of man, he will say, must be seen in relation to
his astonishing intellectual victory. I forgot that stage in the
journey to the heavenly city of Utilitarianism. This century that has
passed has witnessed that stage. It has been a period of inconceivable
triumph over matter. Man has discovered all the wonders of the earth
and is dazzled and drunk with the conquest of things. His moral and
social sense has not been able to keep pace with this breathless
material development. He has lost his spiritual bearings in the midst
of the gigantic machine that his genius has fashioned. He has become
the slave of his own creation, the victim of the monster of his
invention, and this calamity into which he has fallen is his blind
effort to readjust his life to the new scheme of things that the
machine has imposed on him. The great parturition is upon him and he
is shedding gouts of blood in his agony. But he will emerge from his
pains. The material century is accomplished; the conquest of the
machine is at hand, and with that conquest the moral sense of man will
revive with a grandeur undreamed of in the past. The march is longer
than I thought, but it will gain impetus and majesty from this immense
overthrow. The road I built was only premature. Man was not ready to
take it. But it is still there--a little grass-grown and neglected,
but still beckoning him on to the earthly paradise. When he rises from
his wrestle in the dark, his sight will clear and he will surely take
it.... Yes, I think I shall go back after all....
Unteachable old optimist, murmurs the cynic at his side.