prominently forward. Poor exhausted bankrupt Poland, that sucked
orange, is thrust aside, and Czecho-Slovakia becomes the keystone
of France’s restless incessant rearrangement of alliances. But
Czecho-Slovakia is a very different country from Poland; it is sturdier
and less romantically inclined, its President and chief Minister are
among the most level-headed and far-seeing of European statesmen;
and it is likely to prove a sobering and restraining influence upon
French activities. Bohemia is the projecting westward angle of the
Slav world; its language is closely akin to Russian, Serbian, Polish
and Bulgarian; within its boundaries there are more than three million
Germans, and three-quarters of a million of Magyars, and its natural
destiny seems to be that it should act as a region of exchange and
interpretation between the Slavic world, Hungary and Turkey, and the
world of Central and Western Europe. German speech encloses it upon
three sides. In itself, with its thirteen million odd of heterogeneous
population, largely engaged in agriculture, it cannot be a country of
any great importance; its importance now, as in the past, lies in its
position and its possible inter-racial functions.
To these the President and his chief Minister and pupil, Mr. Benes, are
acutely alive. They see in their country a meeting-place and reconciler
of European interests. They are ambitious to make it a centre of trade,
of intellectual interchange, and political unification. For this end
they have worked steadfastly since their country emerged into renewed
political existence in 1918. Theirs is a splendid and civilised dream.
It has been stated in many quarters that this new alliance has been
made hastily, and at the initiative of France, as a stepping-stone to
an understanding with Russia. The possibility of a Labour Government
in Great Britain, and of a complete British recognition of Russia, is
supposed to have driven France into a hasty search for an intermediary
who would help her to end her long feud with the Bolsheviks. But in
reality the recent visit of President Masaryk to Paris and London was
already arranged last summer. He was already discussing the problems of
this understanding then. It is probably a Czech rather than a French
initiative that has brought it about.
There is something very attractive in these steadfast schemes to make
Bohemia the centre of a Europe renewed. I think everyone who hopes to
see a more noble and spacious civilisation emerging from the distresses
of the present time must feel warmly sympathetic with these great
ambitions. But it is impossible to ignore the enormous disadvantages
against which the imaginations of President Masaryk and Mr. Benes and
their colleagues are pitted. They make their creative effort in a
tangle of long-accumulated difficulties and with some extraordinarily
intractable material.
One first difficulty lies in the fact that the European railway
system was developed while Prague was merely a provincial capital.
The railways of Central Europe radiate from Vienna and Berlin. The
centres of banking and commercial exchange were in these cities. And
the efforts of Prague to deflect the currents of trade and finance to
herself have hitherto fallen far short of the political ambitions of
her leaders. I remember my astonishment on my first journey from Eger
to Prague in 1920 to discover that I was travelling to the capital on
a single line of railway.
In Prague at that time the great Sokol festival was going on, the
festival of the patriotic societies, and there was little thought
of Europe apparent and much of the three united peoples of Bohemia,
Moravia, and Slovakia. National costumes made the streets gay; national
music filled the air. But there was a great welcome at that time for
the foreign visitor, and the bunting of all the Allies interwove with
the national flag. French horizon-blue and the Stars and Stripes came
into the picture with the chain and robes of the Lord Mayor of London,
who was there in full regalia. And when one was in the presence of
President Masaryk, with his sweeping views and his amazing knowledge
of the contemporary intellectual activities of the English and French
and German and Russian speaking worlds, the nationalist enthusiasm
of Prague seemed no more than a picturesque and necessary background
clamour.
But I was there again this last summer, and the foreign flags and
visitors had gone, and I realised more fully the sturdy and obstinate
patriotism of the Bohemian people. I saw Prague not on show for the
foreigner, but in its everyday clothes. And the effect was extremely
provincial. My impression was that the friction between the German
Bohemians--an absolutely necessary element--and the Czechs had
increased. That may be the fault of the recalcitrant Germans; I will
not venture to adjudicate on the rights and wrongs of that issue.
The point is that that bad feeling has not been allayed. There was a
more pronounced objection to the German language. Hitherto the Czechs
have been a bilingual people, and it was in the double possession of
a Teutonic and Slav language and culture that one of our chief hopes
for their future lay. But they seem to be dropping German and learning
no other language in its place. They are sinking back into a churlish
monolingualism. The public notices of the town of Prague are in Czech,
and in Czech only. For the westerner Czech is as difficult as Russian.
Indeed, so far as he is concerned, they might as well be in Chinese.
This is patriotic barbarism. How can Prague expect either pleasure
visitors or business men to come to her if she will not speak to them
in any intelligible tongue? How can she become a mart or meeting-place
of the nations if she insists that no other speech than her own shall
be used in her streets? In a little while all the currents of Central
European life will be flowing back again to their former centres in
polyglot Vienna and Berlin.
Now these excesses of Czech patriotism make President Masaryk, to
my mind, a very tragic figure. For this amazing man, this learned
professor who was a village blacksmith’s son, did more than anyone to
revive the self-respect and national feeling of the Czechs. He restored
the Czech nation. He believed, and still believes, that he restored
a necessary and decisive councillor to the European board. It may be
that he has done no more than produce a tough, rustic dwarf. The fine
patriotism he evoked has been vulgarised and cheapened, and about him
and behind him and Mr. Benes presses a loud and irreconcilable body
of ultra-patriots. His Germans have been foolish and tiresome; egged
on by the Austrian landowners, who are furious because of the Capital
Levy and a liberal land policy, they will do nothing but rehearse
grievances. In such German places as Marienbad you see them retaliating
the insults of Prague by boycotting Czech. Yet a generous understanding
between Czech and German is essential to any future beyond obscurity
for Bohemia. A Czecho-Slovakia, pure Czech, with perhaps for political
purposes a smattering of French, will be following in the way of Poland
towards a vexed and vexatious insignificance in European affairs.
XXI
THE MANDARINS AT THE GATE: THE REVIVAL OF THE OLD LEARNING
2.2.24
It would be near the truth of things to say that the only events of
permanent importance in human affairs are educational events. Except
in so far as they demonstrate and teach or interrupt teaching, wars
and treaties, kings and laws, and all the standard material of history
are but the by-products of the educator’s work. Some day, when we have
escaped from the trumpery dignity of classical history, a new Gibbon
will trace for us the failure in understanding and co-operation that
made the Roman Empire no more than a staggering pretension and left
Europe and Western Asia a festering cluster of nationalisms to this
day. No conqueror can make the multitude different from what it is, no
statesman can carry the world’s affairs beyond the ideas and capacity
of the generation of adults with which he deals, but the teachers--I
use the word in the widest sense--can do more than either conqueror or
statesman; they can create a new vision and liberate latent powers in
our kind. Or, if the perversity of their possibilities hold them, they
can continue to put out the eyes of the children of men and let the
world go on still under blind leaders of the blind.
At no time in the world’s experience has the need for a creative
education been so manifest as it is to-day. This social and political
system in which we live is ailing and divided against itself, failing
to reconstitute even as much economic universalism as prevailed before
the great war, involving itself in a hopeless muddle of debts. It is
a system plainly doomed to a further series of wider and profounder
disasters, unless amidst its distresses it can evolve a clearer
realisation, not only in its ruling classes but generally, of the
origins of our race and our civilisation, of the conditions under
which our communities have grown, of the vital inter-relationships
of our social order, and of the tremendous perils and the immense
possibilities before mankind. A population with such a breadth of
outlook, a population disciplined to creative constructive work, is not
simply desirable to-day; it is imperatively demanded if civilisation
is to avert a decay and a collapse as much greater than the Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire as a modern liner is greater than an
Alexandrian galley.
It is because of his realisation of the paramount need of a great
educational effort as the first and supreme thing in human affairs
to-day that every intelligent man must needs note with something
between dismay and bitter derision the recent signs of a revival
of “classical” teaching in the schools and colleges of the Atlantic
peoples. The French, who so love the eighteenth century that in foreign
and domestic policy they are always trying to get back to it, have led
the way. Disturbing modern subjects which tend to betray the facts
that the Mediterranean Sea is not the whole world, and that most great
events of present importance to mankind occurred before or outside of
or in revolt against the Latin civilisation, are to be kept out of
the purview of French adolescence. More Greek will be taught, but not
enough of it and not well enough for the young Frenchman to realise
how feeble was the political, social, and economic reaction of Greece
upon Rome. He will be trained to think that there was some sort of
magnificent succession between the two, whereas Rome got little from
Greece except slave pedagogues and pedants, misleading literary models
which crippled her own sturdier initiative, articles de luxe, living
and dead, architects, sculptors and painters, and cared so little for
the clarifying Aristotle that she left his books about and lost them.
The French, so largely German in race and mental quality, must however
cherish their own Latin illusion in their own fashion; it comes nearer
home to an English writer when he finds President Coolidge blessing the
classical side. And still more dismaying is the truculent behaviour of
the British Classical Association which has recently been meeting in
the congenial atmosphere of Westminster School. Mr. Costley-White, the
Headmaster, boasted of the increasing number of unfortunates in his
school who were taking up the classical course, and made it clear that
even those who were supposed to have a modern course in his school were
really not given an honest modern course at all, but wasted their time
with elementary classics before they were contemptuously “specialised”
in science, modern history, mathematics, or modern languages. (What
a classification!) And Mr. Herbert Fisher told coyly how even in
a Coalition Government fragments of the Greek Anthology were not
unfrequently translated into English verse during the duller Cabinet
discussions--on contemporary education, one presumes. He further
pointed out the power every headmaster had to direct the studies in his
school, and in plain words to steal people’s sons for the classics.
It is clear that the classical headmasters of Great Britain, in a
mood of self-complacent obstinacy, will spare no efforts to pith as
many young intelligences as possible with their antiquated, deadening
and antisocial disciplines. The classical tradition is still strongly
entrenched in the educational world of the English-speaking peoples,
and both in America and in the British Empire it will be over its dead
body only that a modern education will be able to reach the finer minds
of the new generation.
Now it is a useless and dangerous civility to write flattering things
about the classical education that still cripples the selected best
of our youth. It robs us of a directive class of lively intelligences;
it is the root cause of the pretentious sterility of contemporary
statescraft. The uncritical cant it sustains about the peerless beauty
of Greek art and Greek character, and the massive wisdom and integrity
of Roman law and administration, has been and still is a blight upon
the creative impulses of modern life. In schools and in colleges it
is, and, considering the sort of man who will generally have to impart
it, it must always be, a deadening grammatical grind. It consumes
the scanty time of our youth, it eats up the time-table, so that any
effectual broadening study of other things cannot co-exist with it.
It presents the history of mankind grotesquely out of perspective;
it saturates its victims with a pro-Hellenic, pro-Latin partisanship
that perverts their judgment of all historical processes. Its material
being languages and--in a lesser degree--literature, dead, pickled,
and without any power of growth or fresh combination, it is, before
anything else, a training in stereotyped expression and stereotyped
forms of thought. At the present time, in the face of the world’s
present needs, it is impossible to regard a school or college presided
over by a classical scholar and devoted to the classical tradition as
anything but a dead and death-diffusing spot in our educational system.
This new offensive against the proper education of our children,
to which the British Classical Association gives such definite
expression, is a thing essentially evil, a thing which any servant
of creative civilisation must fight at any cost. We cannot afford to
sacrifice our convictions to politeness and pretend that we think the
classically trained mind anything better than a warped and restricted
and mischievously infectious mind.
We need a world-wide common education of which the history of life and
the sciences of life and matter are the two main divisions, in which
drawing, mathematics, and living languages are studied as tools and
methods of expression and not as subjects in themselves, and in which
music is properly utilised in the development of æsthetic perception.
In such a modern education the dead languages and literature can play
only a subordinate and illustrative and properly proportioned part.
XXII
LENIN: PRIVATE CAPITALISM AGAINST COMMUNISM
9.2.24
So Lenin is dead at last. He dies on the eve of the recognition of the
Soviet Government by the Western Powers. For most practical purposes
the work of Lenin was over before 1920. His death now or a little later
will make only the smallest difference in the destinies of Russia.
For the Communist Party which still controls Russia has this in common
with the Catholic Church, that it is sustained by a system of dogmas,
disciplines and, now, experiences and traditions so much stronger than
any single individual, that individuals, though they may serve it more
or less effectively, cannot control nor deflect it. They must move
inside its limitations. Russia, under the Communist rule, is at the
opposite pole to such a phase of affairs as would evoke a Cæsarism.
It is over the Western Latin democracies, subjected to the adventures
and ravages of uncontrolled rich men, that the dictators arise.
Lenin was never in reality a dictator as Mussolini is a dictator. He
impressed one as being in the grip of forces quite beyond his control,
albeit they are forces he had himself helped to develop and organise.
Communism is definite, directive, compelling; Fascism is dramatic
and empty, a puerile, vague, violent thing, a young ass to be ridden
anywhere by a bold, competent rider. A score of Lenins might die and
Communism would go on as though nothing had changed. Without Mussolini
the Fascisti might do anything--fall into a torrent, get lost, destroy
society, vanish.
I saw Lenin in 1920 in the Kremlin. He was an extraordinarily fragile
little thing, small hands clasped together upon the corner of his desk
and little feet that dangled from his chair far off the ground. He was
very bald. I learn now with astonishment that I was the older man.
He put his amusing Mongoloid face a little on one side as we talked,
with something of the wary expression of a fencer. When he found out
I didn’t want to score points for or against Communism, but to learn
what they proposed to do next and particularly what they proposed to do
about the peasants, he dropped any appearance of controversy and laid
his views and plans before me very frankly.
In return I tried to tell him things about England, but he seemed to
have been stuffed up with a lot of nonsense about British conditions.
He believed that a certain obscure paper called the _Dreadnought_, or
the _Woman’s Dreadnought_, or some such title, edited by Miss Sylvia
Pankhurst, represented millions of insurgent British proletarians,
and that the violent struggle then going on in Ireland was, in some
slightly obscured form, a struggle between Capitalism and Communism. It
was difficult to readjust his perspectives.
His schemes for the reorganisation of Russia seemed to me to be
right-minded, honestly conceived, and very, very artless. He had a
scheme for the “Electrification of Russia” that struck my usually quite
sufficiently imaginative mind as hopelessly impractical. It ignored
distances, and Russia is a country consisting mostly of distances.
I suppose no gambler who stakes his all upon a single throw against
great odds and wins was ever so astonished as the Bolsheviks when they
came into power in 1917. They went into Russia like good revolutionists
to make trouble and die. They found themselves presently in scarcely
disputed possession of a completely exhausted country. Even in 1920
they seemed still a little incredulous to find themselves still there.
Never was there such rant and nonsense as the stuff Mr. Winston
Churchill, for example, talks about the Bolsheviks seizing upon and
ruining Russia. So far from seizing, there was nothing to oppose them
but brigands and hopelessly incapable military adventurers, and so
far from ruining, the ruin was already complete. In this chaos the
Bolsheviks grasped power, according to all the accepted revolutionary
examples. There was not so much an organised resistance to their
seizure as a lawless disregard. They had to shoot. All revolutionists
have to shoot. It is their privilege and their danger. But it is
usually conceded that the Bolsheviks shot too much and went on shooting
too long, and acquired almost a habit of shooting.
It is not that they were bloodthirsty men, but that they were
inexperienced and unprepared. They murdered in a fit of Russian nerves.
And they were equally inexperienced and unprepared for the task of
government, once their power was secure. They served Russia well in
defending her from France, Poland, Churchill, Kolchak, Judenitch,
Deniken, Wrangel, and all the evil horde that beset her from without,
but they rebuilt within slowly and experimentally and wastefully. And
they had the bad luck of two famine years.
Still, they are on their feet now; they are making headway, and it is
from the red root of Communist theory that the new Russian order will
grow. It is manifestly destined to be a very great system, a United
States in the Old World, stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific.
It is very important to grasp the fact that the former Russian
political and social order was bankrupt and collapsed of its own
accord, because it is the lesson that the private adventurers of the
West are most loath to learn. Communism is not a dragon that devours
healthy States; it is rather the scavenger of the rotten and fallen.
You cannot say, for example, that Communism is either very strong
nor spreading very rapidly as an aggressive doctrine in Europe. And
yet it may still come to prevail over great parts of Europe. Europe
is sick and obstinately set against its own cure; the decay of its
monetary system (without which, as Mr. Keynes has pointed out, private
capitalism is a totally unworkable system) spreads, and the European
community, saturated with ideas of eager private gain, destitute of
a sufficiently strong sense of the collective good, and enslaved by
narrow individualistic and partisan and patriotic obsessions, makes no
effort sufficiently comprehensive and intelligent to arrest the decay.
The European system is not being seriously attacked from without at
the present time, and least of all by Communism; the whole Communist
propaganda in Western Europe does not amount to much more than the
advertisement organisation of a typewriter seller or a patent medicine
vendor. But the European system is being attacked from within by its
own speculators and profit-makers, its tariffs and its combines for
the restraint and deflection of trade. It has taught all its children
competitive self-seeking, and it crumbles and collapses now for the
lack of creative effort.
I am not one of those who minimise and detract from the great
achievements of the nineteenth century, and deep in my nature is a
craving for irresponsible liberty. Temperamentally I dislike Communism.
I am a collectivist but not a Communist. I have always clung and
still cling to the belief that the sprawling social and economic life
in which I have grown up might be progressively organised into a
secure, generous, and scientific system without any abrupt and violent
destructive change. But I must confess to a deepening and increasing
doubt whether the present European system can right itself. The
collapse continues so steadily and disconcertingly. The little nations
sit within their boundaries scheming for small advantages, none heeding
the general good. Germany follows Russia; her enemies without and her
“big-business” fools within have prepared another great area in which
the Communist may make his experiments. And the collapse shows no
tendency to end at the Rhine. The Western exchanges totter.
It may be that the hopes of such as I are excessive, that tinkering
cannot save the European system now, that it is destined to profounder
and more drastic changes than we are willing to admit as necessary.
Perhaps the root is too rotten with self-seeking. Perhaps the
Communist, with all his faults, his wastefulness and ugliness of
method, has something vital to teach the world, if it is no more than
discipline and devoted subordination to large ideas. Perhaps the whole
European system, like Russia, may after all need to be regrafted upon
this new strange root of Communism before it enters upon a fresh
creative phase. I do not know. But it is plain to me that the years
pass and the recovery of Europe does not begin.
XXIII
THE FANTASIES OF MR. BELLOC AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD
16.2.24