THE PARIS SHRINE OF OUR LADY OF HATES
Men and women who have been spectators of great human tussles are
generally possessed by a desire to tell what they saw, thought and felt
during its progress, and until they have relieved themselves of this
obsession they are uneasy, as from a duty undone. Until one carries for
a time such an obsession as this he cannot realize the patness of the
vulgar expression getting a thing “off one’s chest.” It lies there,
literally a load. He may have a notion—and his delay is probably due to
that—that he will only be adding another folio to a more or less
pestiferous collection; that, as a matter of fact, he will not, and
cannot, communicate anything that others have not already communicated.
All he can do is to say, “So I saw it; so it seemed to me.”
For three years I had carried around a few impressions of the Paris
Conference of 1919. I had meant to keep them to myself—they were so
ungracious. Summed up they amounted to a melancholy conclusion that in
times of stress, public and press, unrestrained, make a bedlam in which
steady constructive effort, if not frustrated utterly, is sure to be
hindered and distorted. Taken as a whole the _milieu_ in which the Paris
Conference operated, furnished the most perfect example the world has
ever seen of the arrogance of the one who calls himself liberal, of the
irresponsibility of him who calls himself radical, of the unutterable
stupidity of him who calls himself conservative, of the universal habit
of saving your face by crying down what others are attempting to do, and
of the limitations which the laws of human nature and human society put
upon the collective efforts of human beings.
From the day that the Conference opened you had the impression of each
man—I am talking here only of the man on the outside—being for himself
in what was plainly and admittedly the world’s most gigantic effort to
sink this each man in the whole. It was the insistence of the individual
and his way of thinking, so long held in check by the terrific
necessities of the war, that caused the first doubts of the undertaking
to one who struggled to keep a disinterested outlook. Take the idealists
who had accepted the great formula for world peace laid down; they
regarded it as something accomplished because for the moment it stood
out as the clear desire of the world, and were heedless and contemptuous
of the wisest words that were uttered at the start, the words of Georges
Clemenceau, who, at the first session, told the delegates of all the
nations of the world that if this daring thing, which he doubted but to
which he consented, went through it meant sacrifice for everybody. But
your idealist had not come for sacrifice. He had come to put into
operation his particular formula for a perfect world.
With every day the numbers in Paris grew who had come to help—to get a
hearing—to help in the group at the top—to be heard by principals. They
failed. Disappointment, wounded vanity, the sense that they were
somebody, had something to contribute, stirred them to resentment. They
would serve, and they were rejected. There was, to be sure, one thing
that those who resented this apparent unconsciousness of their
importance by those charged with the conduct of things might have
done—one surely useful thing, and that was, casting an eye about and
seeing the multitude of problems that shrieked for solution, master one,
little as it might be:—the case of Teschen, of the Banat of Tamesvar,
the history of a boundary, the need of a coal mine here or there—and
working, really working, on this particular problem, produce some sound
presentation, something that men could not get around. The whole
bubbling pot of trouble called for such cooling drops of real, carefully
considered work.
But this demanded self-direction, poise, a willingness to make a very
small contribution, to have no pretense of being called into council, to
trust to the gods and your own knowledge of what really counts in
solving complications. It called for going aside, of not pretending to
be on the inside. Minds were too troubled, vanity was too keen. You
eased your mind and poulticed your vanity by talk—talk at dinner tables,
over restaurant coffee, over tea—and talk in endless articles.
One of the banes of the Paris Peace Conference was that there were so
many men and women on the field under contract to write, to produce so
many words every day or every week. There was no contract that these
words should add something to the knowledge of the many things about
which it was so necessary for men and women to learn—no contract that
they should contribute by ever so little to the great need of control on
every side, that they should comfort, soften hates, stimulate common
sense. Writers covered up their ignorance of things doing by prophecies,
by shrieks of despair, by poses of intimacy with the great, by
elaborately spun-out theories. And they built up superstitions. They
created things—absolutely created superstitions that may never be
dispelled from the minds of those who read them back home.
There was the superstition of the mysterious four who, without advice,
without use of the vast machinery of expert knowledge that had been
called into existence, without consideration of political prejudice, of
ancient hates and struggles, carved up countries, made artificial
boundaries, and did it with a nicely calculated sense of revenge, hate,
self-advantage. This “Big-Four” came in popular minds to be a
hydra-headed tyrant—more irresponsible, brutal, and cynical than any
czar of Russia or Machiavelli of the Middle Ages.
And it was a creation that left out of consideration facts that were
there for everybody to read if they were willing to work. It was a
Putois they created. Who was Putois? Read your Anatole France, or if
Crainquebille is not at hand, read Joseph Conrad’s review.
The malevolence of those not charged with the conduct of affairs against
those so charged grew thicker and thicker as the days went on. Gossip
became more and more unrestrained. It was the only refuge of the numbers
who had no definite business in the scene but who had come to
watch—often with the idea in their minds that they might be able to
contribute some definite, salutary, stimulating something, often again
with a very definite idea that they might be able to pull down this or
that person having some actual inside hold.
There were those who set themselves with calculation to destroy the
prestige of the President of the United States; not to destroy it by
sound criticism of his point of view, by the presentation of a larger
aspect of things than his, but to do it by a calculated meanness of
mind. In the general and frightful disorder left by the war, everything
begged that men should sink their littleness and show bigness, if there
was any in them, or if not leave the scene, in order at least, by their
absence, there might be so much less of littleness of mind around. But
these men—and women—stayed on. They sat at the tables of the Ritz and
smacked their lips over a nasty piece of scandal, born of
mischief-making partisans in far distant places; the meanness of the
“outs” against the leader of the “ins.” And there were always those to
listen and to spread.
In the greatness of the calamity that had overwhelmed the world, it
would seem that men should have gone beyond the point not only of this
wanton mischief but beyond the point of sneering. A sneer in the face of
this vast destruction of mankind was like a sneer at an angry Jehovah.
But men everywhere sneered at the attempts at order, at justice. And,
curiously enough, it was those who labeled themselves liberal, humane,
that sneered most.
There was a despairing consciousness at times that in every heart some
unextinguishable hatred was nourished. There were the hatreds against
those who did not believe with you. You began to see growing in Paris
among Americans what we have seen growing here at home since the war—the
revival of that old, old hate of England. What hope is there of the
world, one felt sometimes like asking, when some man or woman who
literally had given his life to good works or good causes poured a vial
of vitriol on the English nation? It took you back to the Civil War, and
the delivery up to England, by the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln, of the
Confederate commissioners. Owen Lovejoy, lifelong friend of human
freedom, enemy of human slavery, rose in the Congress of the United
States then and swore, so that all the country heard, his own undying
hatred of England.
What was the world problem, after all, but to extinguish hatred?
Unless that hymn of hate could be silenced, what hope was there of
peace, order, or the forms of order? And yet the advocates of peace fed
the fires in their own hearts and did their best to enkindle them in
others.
And it was not alone American hatred of England, French hatred of
Germany, or English hatred of Germany that you heard of, but new hates.
They ran about like fire maniacs, pouring oil on old factional, national
and international troubles,—the Egyptian against the English, the Greek
against the Turk—the Pole against the Russian.
There used to stand in Brittany one of those frank, realistic shrines
that the Gallic—honest with the ways of his own heart—so often sets up,
a statue to Notre Dame des Haines-Our Lady of the Hates. A mob from all
over the earth flocked to Paris, carrying under their arms big or little
replicas of Notre Dame des Haines—intent on rearing them at the doors of
the Conference.
Savage instincts came to the top, and no contradiction, in all this sea
of contradiction, stared at you more hatefully than that of announced
pacifists lending all their efforts to a May Day riot, almost panting to
see blood run, and perching themselves on possible vantage points, to
cheer on any possible disorder at a time when tormented authorities had
ordered the public to stay indoors, and had taken taxis and omnibuses
from the streets. They wanted the protest of blood against what? As
nearly as one could see, it was against the only organized widespread
effort then making in the tormented world to bring the peace and justice
which they had made it their professional business to preach.
A despairing fact was that individuals and groups, whose profession in
life it had been to be auxiliaries of peace and order, became
auxiliaries of war and disorder. There was one way of counteracting
their power, and that was using them, putting it up to them as Mr.
Lincoln put it up to Horace Greeley in 1864.
To put it up to them in the way of the Niagara Conference—that was the
real wisdom, the real wisdom of the leader always toward protesting
groups—let them try their hand. Possibly they can pull it through,
contribute something which he and those of his type cannot do. But in
this avalanche of demands—causes, old and new; injustices running back
to the Flood; with a hundred unsolvable problems for every hour—how
place all this pestiferous mob that knew how to do it? It was to bale
out the Seine with a teaspoon—a vaster river than the Potomac and a
smaller teaspoon.
And the trying came so often to naught. There was Prinkipo—modeled on
the real idealist’s formula, sound enough for a limited scene, with a
limited cast—“get together around a table and talk it over.”
But the table? How find it in this still seething land over so much of
which the lava was still hot and uncrossable, with so many craters where
at every instant new eruptions threatened. They tried it—went into the
sea for their table, at a spot of which some of those who chose it had
never heard, and to which one at least objected—soundly enough—because
the name sounded so like the name of a comic opera.
And the table selected, how get contestants there? In this Europe they
were remaking, such was the physical, military and political hampering
that there was no spot to which it was certain that everybody could
reach. And, as in the Prinkipo case, you ran up against things more
unyielding than armies or parties—that hardening of will, that deadening
of the spirit of coöperation which is one of the most terrible works of
revolutions—something happening to men who have all their lives been
good men, devoted to the end of human happiness, freezing them until
they will no longer work with other men to bring order and peace to a
tormented land for which they have always slaved.
To sit at a table and hear a great noble, white-bearded advocate of
human rights, turned to bitterness and scorn of those who have ruined
his plan of doing things but who, for the moment, are in the saddle,
carrying out their own violent, fanatic way, refuse to even meet at the
Prinkipo table the representative of those advocates of violence in
order to attempt to somehow soften their madness—you know then that you
have reached a human limit, a limit to the human being’s capacity to
face those who disagree and those whom he despises though in that
meeting there may be a remote, though ever so remote, chance to stay a
murderous hand and soften a murderous spirit.
It was not only such curious impressions of the limitations of the human
mind one received, but of the human heart as well. It seemed as if it
were not big enough—even in the case of those whose profession it is to
be humane—not big enough to cover anything but some special group whose
cause they espoused. There were many disheartening exhibits of this
limitation. One that will always stick in my mind as one of the most
hideous was the tears of a great humanitarian over the German prisoner
in France—a prisoner at that time receiving the same rations and even
better shelter and more clothes than most French refugees, and an
absolute setting of lips and hardness of eyes at the mention of children
and women in the caves of Lens, the shattered ruins of Peronne—it was
not humanity but an espoused group of humanity that stirred his
sympathy.
Limits to human endurance, human capacity, human kindness, human
foresight—that was what every day of the Peace Conference cried louder
and louder into your ear.