isn’t even good for war. It is like a battle-axe in a tramcar, a
terrifying offensive affair, but not really effective in a fight at
close quarters. The time when war was a generalised thing is past.
You can no longer have an army or navy that goes anywhere and does
everything. For Britain to fight France, or Japan, or the United
States, or Russia, or Italy, demands in each case a different sort
of warfare, with different methods and different appliances. British
battleships camouflaged as cruisers and docks for them half-way round
the earth would be no good against Russia or Italy, and very little use
against France. Against Japan they would be good for her submarines
to chase and blockade while our submarines chased and blockaded the
Japanese warships. A big air force, again, would be little use against
the United States or Japan. Considered in relation to any possible
specific war they may have to wage, the present war establishments of
the great belligerent Powers, the miscellaneous elaborate material
that the armament people and their unimaginative army traditions have
induced them to buy are as likely to be efficient as the equipment of
the White Knight in _Alice in Wonderland_. The methods and objectives
and so forth of any next war that may surprise the politicians (just
as children are surprised by fires when they play with matches),
conducted by the sort of soldiers we possess and with the stuff they
will handle as “equipment,” will certainly be more discursive and silly
and ineffective even than those great pushes and counter-attacks and
raids and bombings and so forth of the last great war, and in their
inconclusive way infinitely more destructive.
But if these preposterous armaments are unlikely to be conclusive in
warfare, they do at any rate block the way very effectively to any
reorganisation of the world for peace. You can’t make love in armour.
All this lumpish preparedness keeps the atmosphere of human life
unwholesome; it prevents the settlement by any frank concerted action
of the tariff conflicts, financial squabbles, currency annoyance, and
mutual economic injuries that are rapidly destroying the present social
system. Every big nation comes into such discussions an implicit bully.
The nations have to learn the same lessons that individuals learnt
in the middle ages, they have to learn not to bear arms even in the
company of those who do. In the middle ages, when the loving-cup went
round, one’s neighbour stood as one drank to protect one’s back from
the assassin’s knife. At last some reckless souls took heart to sit and
drink and trust their fellow men. Other desperate spirits left their
weapons at home--and survived. But the nations are still half-way back
to barbarism. Our cartoonists draw Uncle Sam and John Bull as decent
peaceable everyday citizens. They flatter our countries. Really the
Great Powers should be drawn as completely canned warriors with their
wary eyes and noses just peeping out of their preparedness. And this in
spite of the fact that the only serious danger to either is that the
weight and clumsiness of this silly equipment and of the world-wide
distrust it produces will undermine his business and his national
health altogether.
XXXI
THE CASE OF UNAMUNO: THE FEEBLE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS
12.4.24
There is nothing greater in the world of men than thought. Science,
literature, and art; what other glories has man? And yet the company of
men of science and letters and art forms but the feeblest of republic
throughout the world, is insignificant socially and politically, and
wins only posthumous respect.
A time may come when men will have a better sense of the values of
things, and when the creative experimenter and writer and artist will
be accorded something of the respect and something of the immunity
we now give to royalties with the urbanity of second-rate waiters or
the pluck of second-rate jockeys, and to those casual possessors of
disproportionate spending power or disproportionate impudence, our
social leaders. But that day when the philosopher, or the discoverer,
or the great artist will be King, when there will be no recognised
nobility but the nobility of the mind, is still far away. Perhaps it
will never come. Perhaps there is a permanent necessity in our natures,
requiring us to exalt the common qualities we share and understand and
to contemn rare gifts. King Carnival, with his vast nose and goggling
eyes, is the most real, most natural of all human kings, because he
is frankly grotesque, a common creature raised up and magnified.
Such kings and princes, such popular heroes and fashionable leaders
as we have, assist us in our self-protective struggle against the
insupportable suspicion that we lack distinctive quality. We can tell
ourselves that they are in no way different from us except that they
are luckier. But it tortures our self-esteem to honour those who have
qualities we cannot pretend to possess. That is why we love to think of
the man of science as a foolish, absent-minded thing with spectacles
and a butterfly-net, and listen so greedily to rumours of vice and
wickedness in men of genius. There may be a profound instinctive
reasonableness in this acceptance of the gift and this rejection of
the giver. Ingratitude is better for the common man than servility. If
we did not distrust and restrain the exceptional people in the world,
they might run away from us or run away with us, until we became no
more than animals under direction and control. A king is the surest
protection against regal personalities and an aristocracy against any
rule of the best.
The exceptional men--because they are exceptional men--have no flock
instinct to hold them together for mutual protection against the crowd
and its leaders. Nearly all men of distinctive gifts are jealous. They
are driven by an inner necessity to assert their own special quality
against the aggressive special qualities of their fellows. There is
little generosity when men of science or literary and artistic men
talk of one another. Their mission is to do the thing they have to do
and not be good fellows with one another. When one considers this, one
may be reconciled to much egoism and lack of gregariousness in the man
of intellectual gifts and yet at times one may be startled by some
reminder of the extreme moral disintegration which is the normal state
of the “republics” of science and art and letters.
I recall my own amazement at the sudden outbreak of nationalism on the
part of the men of science of all countries at the beginning of the
war, and still more so at the reluctance with which they came together
after the armistice, when they had had four years to think it over.
When I went to the secretary of the Royal Society in 1920 and told him
of the poverty of such great men as Pavloff in Petersburg and of the
urgent need of the Russian men of science for Western publications and
for instruments and material kept out by our blockade, I thought the
society would take up the matter forthwith as a simple obvious duty.
It did nothing of the sort. It was argued that Pavloff and the others
ought to have come out of Russia as white refugees, and that a body
adorned with all the dukes and royal princes of Great Britain had other
things to consider than mere protection of research in the world.
The Royal Society was indeed, I found, not so much a society for the
promotion and exaltation of science, as a society of scientific men for
mutual restraint.
And now in the scandalous case of Don Miguel Unamuno comes a fresh
instance of the lack of any feeling of solidarity among the world’s
intellectuals. Here is a great writer and professor, the ex-Rector
of the University of Salamanca, a man of undisputed pre-eminence. He
is a professor of classical learning: not one of the scientific or
sociological fellows. He utters some lucid and deserved reproofs to the
King of Spain. As all the world knows, the King of Spain has consented
to, and possibly connived at, the illegal usurpation of his Government
by a military junta with a dictator of straw, a sham Mussolini, Primo
de Rivera. It is a dull, bad Government, chiefly concerned with the
suppression of opinion and the entirely incompetent maintenance of an
endless war with the Moors. For if Spanish generals have at times to
display the backs of their brilliant uniforms to the Moors, they can
at least keep a brave overbearing front towards Spain. No country was
ever in such need of drastic public criticism as Spain at the present
time. But so soon as Don Unamuno speaks plainly, he is seized and sent
without trial to the Canary Islands, away from his books, his students,
and all contact with the current activities of mankind. It is a purely
arbitrary act. There is not even an appeal to some pseudo-academic
court. It is done on the authority of the dull imitation who is failing
to be the Spanish Mussolini. An oaf in uniform has struck a great
teacher on the mouth and silenced him. In recent times in Europe there
has never been so plain and violent a challenge to the freedom and
honour of the intellectual world.
What protest has there been from that world? One might have expected
vigorous outcries on behalf of Salamanca from Oxford and Cambridge,
from London and the British Academy, from Harvard and Yale and
Chicago, and the hundred and one universities and colleges of North
and South America, an immense outbreak of indignation. I have heard
of scarcely any. From the University of Paris there has been a fairly
representative protest, and Lisbon has spoken. I have seen a few
paragraphs in the highbrow weeklies of Britain and America. But the
intellectual workers of our English-speaking world seem as a whole to
have been as little affected by this particular exploit of the King
of Spain’s Dictator as a flock of grazing sheep by the death of one
of its number. So far as they are concerned he may shut up all the
Universities of Spain and maroon their entire staffs. Their sense of
any community of interests among the Universities of the world seems
to be almost completely lacking. The ordinary miner or transport
worker has much to teach the university professor in the matter of
occupational self-respect.
Of course, both in England and America in the last dozen years or
so there have been rather similar cases to this crowning outrage of
vulgar force upon mind. There was the case of Mr. Bertrand Russell,
for example, during the war, and in America it is inadvisable for
professors of economics and social science to lean too visibly
towards collectivism. And Mr. William Jennings Bryan knows all about
creation and incites backward States to dismiss teachers of biology
who teach contrary to the beliefs of this favoured confidant of the
Deity. Perhaps an uneasy consciousness of such facts has hampered the
English-speaking communities in this affair. Meanwhile Don Miguel
Unamuno studies the seascapes of the Canary Islands, and, so far as his
opinion of King Alfonso goes, he is restricted to conversation with the
islanders.
And if by any chance King Alfonso should visit England and go to Oxford
or Cambridge, all the dons and deans and heads would put on their
fullest plumage to bow and scrape to him.
XXXII
AN OPEN LETTER TO ANATOLE FRANCE ON HIS EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY
(WRITTEN AS THE ENGLISH CONTRIBUTION TO A BOOKLET OF CONGRATULATION)
19.5.24
_Cher Maître_,--You write for the whole world, and the whole world
salutes you on this happy occasion of your eightieth birthday. You
are eighty years old, and yet it seemed to me a little time ago, when
I paid my personal homage to you and found you, as ever, smiling,
friendly, interested, and amused, that you were still untouched by
age. And indeed what has age to do with you, who are already immortal,
staying on here in the pleasant land of France for a time, but having
made for yourself a sure habitation among that great company of writers
already in Elysium who talk to youth with the freshness of youth, and
to all with a living wisdom, now and for centuries to come? Millions of
readers yet unborn will grow up to find in you a liberator, a choice
companion, a very dear friend. We your contemporaries are only the
first-comers of your following, and of those who will love and honour
your name.
We writers of England are not so much a body of writers as a cloud;
we have no Academy to represent us, and no acknowledged head, and so
almost by chance it falls to me, as it might have fallen to others more
distinguished and deserving, to tell you of your place in the hearts
and minds of the English-speaking world. All of us who can do so read
you in your inimitable French, but it may not be amiss to say a word or
two of the readers you have outside the community of French readers,
outside that great cosmopolitan France of the mind. You have been,
I think, almost completely translated into English, and in England
and America there are scores of thousands who know you only in your
English guise. All translations are made at a loss, but most of your
translators have served you honestly and some have served you well, and
you are so rich that you can pay the high tariff between our languages
and still carry over enough to entrance and win fine minds. All the
cultured and successful people of the world know you by necessity, and
send homage to you. But I think I understand you well enough to be
assured that even more than such salutations you will value the fact
that there are miner lads in Scotland, railway workers in England,
London clerks, and provincial shopmen, who know no more than a few
hundred words of French, and yet whose faces flush and brighten at your
name, workers struggling against a thousand disadvantages to possess
their souls, to whom you have brought the priceless gifts of happiness
and release and inspiration. I wish I could steal and send you a
well-thumbed copy of an English translation of _Thaïs_ or _L’Isle des
Penguins_ from the shelves of some English public library in evidence
of this outer empire of your mind.
As spokesman for your English-speaking readers, it is natural for
me to dwell upon the ease with which you wear an English costume.
In many respects you are intensely French: French after the manner
of the greatness of France, the France of liberty, equality, and
world fraternity. But you transcend all narrow and nationalist
limitations. In the past, before the great wars of the Napoleonic
period, the English and French had not that sense of difference,
that disposition to antagonistic contrasts, too frequently evident
to-day. Intellectually our communities were more closely interwoven.
Men remembered then how the Normans linked us; how Burgundian and
Englishman were sturdy allies; how Briton and Breton had a common past,
and how close were Frank and Fleming to the Anglo-Saxon stock. We
Normans and Saxons and Franks and Flemings and Scots and Burgundians
and Gascons and Angevins built our Gothic cathedrals in brotherly
competition, and our knights and bowmen and princes and bishops
bickered and went to and fro. Our literatures sprang from common
roots and intertwined, and were continually grafted and regrafted one
upon the other. No Englishman finds anything essentially foreign
in Rabelais and Montaigne; they are in the same company as Swift
and Sterne, as to-day Voltaire almost lives again in Shaw. Such
contemporary English writers as Belloc and Chesterton would be seen
plainly for Frenchmen if they wrote in French. And we do not find in
you anything foreign to our spirit and our humour. Our response to you
is a kindred response. You probably have far more imitators in Britain
and America than you have in all the Latin countries of the world.
Some of the most promising of the newer American writers are clearly
indebted to you. There are many of us writers of English--and some of
these not the least among us--to whom it would be the sweetest praise
to be likened to Anatole France. In the end it may be found that you
have exerted an influence upon our English literature even greater
than that influence upon your own. We are not intruders, therefore,
not foreign admirers and outsiders, at these birthday celebrations. We
English writers are here of right, and because we are akin to you and
within the realm of your thought and power.
XXXIII
THE EUROPEAN KALEIDOSCOPE: THE GERMAN WILL IN DEFAULT
23.4.24
I was in Paris the other day when M. Poincaré reconstructed his
Government, and I heard him make his declaration of policy to the
Chamber of Deputies. I had never seen him before. It was a dramatic and
amusing occasion, and I conceived for M. Poincaré the same sort of warm
and hostile affection that I have for Mr. Winston Churchill and Mr.
Lloyd George. He is an entirely delightful personality; he has all the
charm--and much of the appearance--of a wiry-haired terrier. He even
barks.
The Chamber of Deputies is in a semi-circle like a Roman theatre;
there is none of the waste and confusion of effect one gets in the
Gothic oblong at Westminster. The public was present by ticket; it
sat in a semi-circle of little boxes within nodding distance of the
deputies--and mostly it was ladies and very well dressed. High up over
it all and facing it all sat M. François Arago, like a finite and
protesting deity, with his recording angels behind him and a large
bell convenient for his hand. Beneath him was the rostrum from which
one addresses the house, and then a lower rank of reporters. But there
was no beam of limelight. The political world has still to discover
limelight. It is extraordinary how slow all legislative assemblies are
in adopting modern conveniences. A beam of limelight would be excellent
at Westminster to indicate the direction of the Speaker’s eye.
M. Poincaré read out his intentions in a hard, very audible voice.
His opening sentences went to much applause and interruption. The
chief scene came when, enumerating the ways in which France proposed
to restore and preserve her solvency, he referred to an intensive
exploitation of her colonies. “Our colonial policy,” said he.
“Sarraut!” cried the Left--a fine, wolf-like sound. “Our colonial
policy!” said M. Poincaré with increasing firmness. “Sarraut!” “Our
colonial policy,” M. Poincaré repeated, in small capitals, so to speak.
“Sarraut!” much louder--the Left enjoying itself. M. Poincaré brought
up unexpected vocal resources. After five--or was it six?--repetitions,
honour was satisfied and the statement went on.
In the horrible language of English political discussion, M. Poincaré
is attempting to “dish” the Left. He was trying to make his policy
look as “Left” as possible, while still remaining the same inflexible
person as ever. He had thrown over various associates from the Right
and brought in reasonable men from the Left Centre to liberalise the
effect of his reconstituted Government. He was prepared to be generous
to Germany provided she paid the uttermost farthing. He was prepared to
seem to come out of the Ruhr, while in reality sticking there. He spoke
hopefully and brightly and emptily of the League of Nations.
That is the quality of the new phase. M. Poincaré is talking as
liberally as he can. He exchanges compliments and large liberal
gestures with Mr. Ramsay MacDonald; neither of them meaning anything
whatever, except a desire to pass the time and be in the fashion.
It is the change in the fashion that should interest the student
of affairs. M. Poincaré is getting ready for the elections in May,
and his proceedings betray his consciousness of the deep strong
movement of French thought and intention leftward, away from adventure
and nationalism and militarism, towards--sanity. In spite of a
systematically perverted news service and many provocations and natural
fears, the mind of France is becoming powerfully reasonable. It thinks
less and less of glory and more and more of solvency. It is more
open to-day to ideas of reconciliation, disarmament, and organised
international co-operation than it has been at any time since the war.
M. Poincaré has been superficially dexterous, his majority is
beautifully restored, but France and all the world know him for
an honest obdurate man. I doubt if he will come back after the
elections. M. Millerand has seemed to threaten a dictatorship if the
Poincaré policy is defeated. Is France so Latin as to stand that? I
think M. Millerand will be better advised to try a resignation. For
the recent credit given to France to support the franc is probably
the end of French borrowing power, and a defeat of the Left by
fraud or violence--a cessation of the movement towards reason and
disarmament--means a withdrawal of foreign confidence and a swift and
sure financial collapse.
Now unhappily it is just at this phase of French affairs, with the
peace-intending reconciling forces of France and Britain coming
rapidly into accord and ascendancy, that Germany begins to manifest
her least agreeable traits. The recent Munich trials, the acquittal
of that foolish old monarchist blusterer, Ludendorff, the ridiculous
mitigated sentences of Hitler and the other conspirators against the
German Republic, and, above all, the public demonstrations of sympathy
with these second-rate nationalist reactionaries, come as a real shock
to our hopes of an approaching European reconstruction. Like that
supremely silly incident, the neglect to lower the German flag in
Washington on the occasion of President Wilson’s death, it is ugly;
it betrays the bad heart. One may recognise the stream of injustices
and disappointments that have been inflicted on Germany in the last
five years, one may be willing to concede the right of Germans to a
considerable resentment, and yet one may find it hard to forgive these
sentimental dangerous reversions towards monarchism in uniform, and,
above all, that petty and provocative folly at Washington.
It has been a great disappointment and discouragement to those who
have worked, and who are now drawing near to the accomplishment of
their work, for a reconciled Europe, to note how feeble has been the
collateral movement in Germany. Where is liberal and intelligent
Germany to-day? It is begging its bread; but I do not see why it should
concentrate all its energies upon begging its bread. When one goes into
Germany one encounters plenty of residual swash-buckler spirit; the old
heroism of the expanded chest and the high voice; and one encounters a
vast amount of abject sob-stuff; but it is very hard indeed to find any
Germans who seem to be steadily busy upon the reconstruction of Europe
upon broad modern lines. Germany seems to be divided anatomically
between the right and left. The Monarchists have the backbone and no
brains; the Liberals have the brain and no backbone. When a German
displays will he does something stupid and violent, and when he
displays intelligence he does nothing at all. In Berlin last summer
everybody I sought out and questioned talked in terms of crisis.
Germany was sinking. England must do something for Germany at once.
America must do something for Germany at once. The one thing they would
not recognise was the necessity of Germany doing something for Germany
at once. And no party has arisen, no newspapers have arisen, no leader
or group of men stands out yet to embody a new Germany in a new Europe.
The time of opportunity draws near and Germany, one fears, may remain
too sick and beaten, too witless and unteachable, to make any use of
this year of opening opportunity.
I write without any profound knowledge of things German. I may be too
much impressed by the reactionary crowd in the streets of Munich. There
may be deeper currents in German life which find no adequate expression
in the German Press, and of which I know nothing. But with the French
elections drawing near, it is time that the good Europeans in Germany,
if there are good Europeans in Germany, should make themselves heard
and felt. The impression I have of an unhelpful and uncreative
and irresponsive Germany, cheated, it is true, and disappointed,
but lapsing far too readily towards a sullen unhelpfulness, is a
very general impression in France and Britain. France is under an
urgent necessity of retrenchment and ready to abandon her futile
aggressiveness; Britain was never less imperialist than she is to-day.
Is there no German initiative to meet this new occasion?
XXXIV
CHINA: THE LAND OUT OF THE LIMELIGHT
26.4.24
China has been out of the limelight of the newspapers lately. It is the
tradition of the Atlantic civilisations to think about China as little
as possible. We ignore the enormous importance of its gifts to us in
the past, and we do our utmost to disregard its immediate share in the
world’s future.