THE MOVIE INTERPRETING THE PAST
WHETHER the first antidote the race has discovered against polyglot
poison can save civilization before it is blown to pieces by high
explosive shells is a problem that assumes new significance daily, as
diplomacy continues to commit, in its blind and fatuous egotism, its
historic blunders. The head-lines in the newspapers furnish a sad
commentary upon the present status of the collective wisdom of mankind.
The average intelligence of the race as it is manifested in
international affairs is below the standard set by a day-nursery, where
a singed child, it is confidently assumed, will avoid the fire. The high
cost of war in life and treasure has been demonstrated to the race in
recent years by a world-wide conflict that threatened the very
foundations of civilization with destruction. Did mankind learn the
lesson taught by this titanic struggle? If it did not, if it continues
to provide itself with new and deadlier weapons for the waging of
unimaginably awful combats, what can be done at the last moment, as this
may prove to be, to save civilization from ruin as it totters upon the
very edge of a fatal precipice?
The tragic importance of this query may seem, at first sight, to throw
into comparative insignificance the topic we have under discussion,
namely, the teaching of history in our schools and colleges through
visual instruction. But our pointed question and our general theme are,
as will presently appear, closely related to one another.
Philip Kerr, for five years confidential adviser and secretary to Lloyd
George, is among those who hold that we who indulge the hope that the
screen may eventually act as a poultice to heal the blows delivered by
diplomacy against the peace of the world are but chasing another rainbow
that has at its end not a pot of ointment but a gigantic pile of
dynamite. At Williamstown, Mass., last summer, Mr. Kerr said, to an
audience of scholars and statesmen of international prominence:
If we look back through history we shall see that what has
happened in the last eight years is not a unique nor isolated
phenomenon. For example, there was a world war for the first
fifteen years of the last century, ending with the battle of
Waterloo. We can trace back through the ages an ever-recurring
procession of devastating wars engulfing the whole of the
civilized world, followed by peaces of exhaustion, which in turn
gave way to new eras of war. The question I have been asking
myself for the last two or three years has been this: Have we as
the result of the terrible experiences of the late war, and of
the victory of the Allies, any real security against a
repetition of a world war. To this question I have to answer,
No.
To this deplorable and hopeless conclusion Mr. Kerr comes because he
finds that mankind does its thinking not in terms of humanity, but of
states; that the world, in so far as international problems are
concerned, is as parochial as it was a generation or a century ago.
“Life,” remarked a flippant pessimist, “is just one damned thing after
another.” To Mr. Kerr’s despondent eyes history seems to be just one
devastating war after another, with no end to the infernal succession
now in sight. But is it not barely possible that history, gaining from
the screen a new method of exposition, a new way of approach to the soul
of Man, may eventually convince the human race that there is a more
sensible solution to international problems than through bloodshed?
It is through the study of history alone that Man can, in the opinion of
H. G. Wells, find his way toward higher planes of existence out of the
mire in which he is now stuck. In his book “The Undying Fire,” Wells,
speaking through the hero of his story, says, in explanation of his plan
for the improvement of society:
I want this world better taught, so that wherever the flame of
God can be lit it may be lit. Let us suppose everyone to be
educated. By educated, to be explicit, I mean possessing a
knowledge and understanding of history. Salvation can be
attained by history. Suppose that instead of a myriad of tongues
and dialects all men could read the same books and talk together
in the same speech—think what a difference there would be in
such a world from the conditions prevailing to-day.... This is a
world where folly and hate can bawl sanity out of hearing. Only
the determination of schoolmasters and teachers offers hope for
a change in all this.
Philip Kerr and H. G. Wells examining, as they do, the same historical
data, shocked, as they both are, by mankind’s constant repetition of
ancient and easily avoidable errors, reach, from the same premises,
diametrically opposite conclusions. Kerr denies that our race can obtain
from a study of its past any hope for its future. Wells, on the other
hand, holds that history can be made the handmaiden of progress and that
those who teach it can become, if they are worthy of their sacred
mission, the saviors of an imperilled race.
At the present moment, of course, it is impossible to determine whether
the pessimism of Kerr or the optimism of Wells is entitled to the
verdict of the court. The evidence is not all in, and, from present
appearances, the case seems destined to a long and tedious life, going
down on appeal, as it must, from one generation to another. But would it
not be a hopelessly mad world which, on the issue involved in this
contention, backed Kerr against Wells? Imagine the race abandoning
itself to despair, admitting that it can find within itself no safeguard
against its impending doom of hari-kari, turning heart-sick and hopeless
from futile peace-conferences and gazing in sullen silence at the
mobilization of new armies under old catch-words in various parts of a
blood-soaked planet! Even if Wells shall prove to be in the end a
dreamer of dreams and chaser of rainbows, defeated in his effort to put
salt on the tail of the millennium, is it not more reasonable to take a
gambling chance on his possible victory as an idealist than to give
abject surrender with Kerr to the evil influences that for countless
ages have made of our planet a recurrent shambles?
Common-sense, then, forces us to the conclusion that, in the perturbed
world in which we at present find ourselves there is no feature of our
complicated modern life more entitled to earnest consideration than the
screen as historian. In schools, colleges and movie theatres, with films
depicting significant episodes in Man’s past or illuminating events of
to-day, a mirror is vouchsafed to this generation in which it can see
both itself and its progenitors in a light that now for the first time
clarifies our sight. The regeneration of the individual through
religious influences is effected in large part by means of a
self-revelation that begets repentance and reform. To employ a bit of
slang to illustrate the point, all sinners come from Missouri and refuse
to be rescued blindly. They must be shown. The wicked, war-soiled,
wantonly selfish nations of the world have never had, so far as the
masses of the people are concerned, the truths of history visualized to
their startled eyes. Is it not possible that when the errors, the
tragedies, the cumulative horrors of the past are revealed to them, when
the majority of men and women turn to the evidence of their senses
rather than to gossip, rumor and hearsay for historical enlightenment,
Mankind, horrified at his scowling face and bloody hands, as he sees
them for the first time in a mirror, will take an oath to remove the
brand of Cain from his brow, the blush from his cheeks as the screen
shows him what man’s inhumanity to man really means?
The late Viscount Bryce, just before his regrettable death, delivered
eight lectures in the United States on “the large subject covered by the
term International Relations.” “It is History,” says Bryce, “which,
recording the events and explaining the influences that have moulded the
minds of men, shows us how the world of international politics has come
to be what it is. History is the best—indeed the only—guide to a
comprehension of the facts as they stand, and to a sound judgment of the
various means that have been suggested for replacing suspicions and
enmities by the co-operation of States in many things and by their good
will in all.” But Bryce, than whom no publicist of our times has held
higher place as a seer and prophet, speaks not in an optimistic vein in
his last published utterances.
The great lesson of the war, that the ambitions and hatreds
which cause war must be removed, has not been learned, and if
this war has failed to impress the lesson upon most of the
peoples, what else can teach them? This is why thoughtful men
are despondent, and why some comfort must now be sought for,
some remedy devised at once against a recurrence of the
calamities we have suffered.
Bryce is in agreement with the leading minds of to-day striving for a
solution of international problems. They see no way out of the
difficulties and perils confronting the race unless some new and
hitherto unknown method be found to prevent mankind from repeating the
scarlet sins that have disgraced and incarnadined the past. Arbitration,
conciliation, alliances, treaties, congresses, leagues, peace palaces
and palaver—what have they accomplished that can be cited to confute the
pessimism of Philip Kerr or to suggest the remedy the necessity for
which James Bryce, with the clairvoyance of a dying man, acutely
realized? What the race needs at this critical hour is both a message
and a medium, a warning and a way, a revelation and a road, with a light
from the past shining on the pathway just ahead.
And Man has at his command this way, this medium, this road, upon which
gleams a radiance that might easily save the race from destruction, if
he had sufficient sense to learn from his past just a few elementary
lessons in common-sense, just a few basic truths that, once grasped,
would change history from a record of recurrent crimes to an epic tale
of Man’s triumph over himself.
History as told by the screen in the class-room—is it not possible that
the destiny of mankind is thus to be decided? The plastic minds of the
young intrigued by the story of Man’s rise from protoplasm to poet, from
amœba to aeronaut, from cave-man to lord of creation may be so
impressed, within the next few generations, by the tragic absurdity of
civilized man’s periodical reversions to savagery that some divine day
the enlightened youth of the world will go out on a universal strike
against old idiocies and cruelties, and to the screen that taught
history will be given the glory of bringing mankind at one bound within
striking distance of the millennium.
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