faculty, I could write a brilliant book comparing life in Ithaca, Sparta
and holy Pylos in the time of Odysseus with life in
Mecklenburg-Schwerin in the time of Herr Dr ----. In both you get the
same unquenchable hospitality and perfectly unquenchable anecdotage
faculty. In both whenever you make a visit or go into a house, they are
“busying themselves with a meal.” Du lieber Karl (I mean Herr Dr ----)
has three times, when his wife has tried to talk of death, disease or
crime by table, unconsciously given a literal translation of
Peisistratus’s sound remark οὐ γὰρ ἐγώ γε τέρπουʹ ὀδυρόμενος
μεταδόρπιοσ[2]--and that is their attitude to meals throughout. Need I
add the ἀγλαὰ δῶρα they insist on giving their guests, with the opinion
that it is the host that is the indebted party and the possession of a
guest confers honour and responsibility: and their innate patriotism,
the οὔ τοι ἐγώ γε ἦς γαίης δύναμαι γλυκερώτερον ἄλλο ἰδέσθαι[3] spirit
(however dull it is)--to complete the parallel? So I am really reading
it in sympathetic surroundings, and when I have just got past the part
where Helen shows off to Menelaus her new work-basket that runs on
wheels, and the Frau rushes in to show me her new water-can with a spout
designed to resemble a pig--I see the two are made from the same stuff
(I mean, of course, Helen and Frau ----, not Frau ---- and the pig). Also,
I enjoy being able to share in a quiet amateur way with Odysseus his
feelings about “were it but the smoke leaping up from his own land.”
(_23 April 1914._)
* * * * *
Good luck to Helen of Troy. As you say, she loved her own sex as well.
Her last appearance in Homer is when Telemachus was just leaving her and
Menelaus after paying them a visit in Sparta, and she stood on the
doorstep with a robe in her hand and spoke a word and called him ‘I also
am giving thee a gift, dear child,--this, a memorial of Helen’s
handiwork, against the day of thy marriage to which we all look forward,
that thou mayest give it to thy wife: till then, let it be stored in thy
palace under thy mother’s care.’” But she never gives to me the
impression in Homer of being quite happy. I’m sure she was always dull
down in Sparta with fatherly old Menelaus--though she never showed it of
course. But there is always something a little wistful in her way of
speaking. She only made other people happy and consequently another set
of other people miserable. One of the best things in the _Iliad_ is the
way you are made to feel (without any statement) that Helen fell really
in love with Hector--and this shows her good taste, for of all the
Homeric heroes Hector is the only unselfish man. She seems to me only to
have loved to please Menelaus and Paris but to have really loved
Hector--and naturally for Hector and Achilles, the altruist and the
egoist, were miles nobler than any one else on either side--but Hector
never gave any sign that he regarded her as anything more than his
distressed sister-in-law. But after Hector’s death she must have left
part of her behind her, and made a real nice wife to poor pompous
Menelaus in his old age. She seems to have had a marvellous power of
adaptability. (_April 1914._)
* * * * *
I made my pilgrimage on Saturday, when, though I had to get up with the
lark to hear the energetic old Eucken lecture at 7 a.m., I had no
lecture after 10, and went straight off to Weimar. I spent the rest of
the morning (actually) in the museum, inspecting chiefly Preller’s
wall-paintings of the _Odyssey_. They are the best criticism of the book
I have seen and gave me a new and more pleasant idea of Odysseus. Weimar
does not give the same impression of musty age as parts of Jena. It
seems a flourishing well-watered town, and I should like very much to
live there, chiefly for the sake of the park. The name “Park” puts one
off, but it is really a beautiful place like a college garden on an
extensive scale. After I had wandered about there very pleasantly for an
hour or so, I noticed a statue in a prominent position above me.
“Another Goethe,” thought I; but I looked at it again, and it had not
that look of self-confident self-conscious greatness that all the
Goethes have. So I went up to it and recognised a countryman--looking
down from this height on Weimar, with one eye half-closed and an
attitude of head expressing amused and tolerant but penetrating
interest. It was certainly the first satisfactory representation of
Shakespeare I have ever seen. It appears quite new, but I could not
discover the sculptor’s name. The one-eye-half-closed trick was most
effective; you thought “this is a very humorous kindly human
gentleman”--then you went round to the other side and saw the open eye!
The blot in Weimar is the Schiller-Goethe statue in front of the
theatre. They are both embracing rather stupidly--and O so fat! (_8 May
1914._)
IV
GERMANY (p. 56)
In the evening I am generally to be found avoiding a certain insincere
type of German student, who hunts me down ostensibly to “tie a bond of
good-comradeship,” but really to work up facts about what “England”
thinks. Such people of undeveloped individuality tell me in return what
“wir Deutschen” think, in a touching national spirit, which would have
charmed Plato. But they don’t charm me. Indeed I see in them the very
worst result of 1871. They have no idea beyond the “State,” and have
put me off Socialism for the rest of my life. They are not the kind of
people, as [the Irish R.M.] puts it, “you could borrow half-a-crown to
get drunk with.” But such is only a small proportion and come from the
north and west; they just show how Sedan has ruined one type of German,
for I’m sure the German nature is the nicest in the world, as far as it
is not warped by the German Empire. I like their lack of reserve and
self-consciousness, our two national virtues. They all write poetry and
recite it with gusto to any three hours’ old acquaintance. We all write
poetry too in England, but we write it on the bedroom wash-stand and
lock the bedroom door, and disclaim it vehemently in public. (_2 June
1914._)
* * * * *
The two great sins people impute to Germany are that she says that might
is right and bullies the little dogs. But I don’t think she means that
might _qua_ might is right, but that confidence of superiority is right,
and by superiority she means spiritual superiority. She said to Belgium,
“We enlightened thinkers see that it is necessary to the world that all
opposition to Deutsche Kultur should be crushed. As citizens of the
world you must assist us in our object and assert those higher ideas of
world citizenship which are not bound by treaties. But if you oppose us,
we have only one alternative.” That, at least, is what the best of them
would have said; only the diplomats put it rather more brusquely, She
was going on a missionary voyage with all the zest of Faust--
Er wandle so den Erdentag entlang;
Wenn Geister spuken, geh’ er seinen Gang;
Im Weiterschreiten find’ er Qual und Glück,
Er, unbefriedigt jeden Augenblick![4]
--and missionaries know no law....
So it seems to me that Germany’s only fault (and I think you often
commented on it in those you met) is a lack of real insight and sympathy
with those who differ from her. We are not fighting a bully, but a
bigot. They are a young nation and don’t yet see that what they consider
is being done for the good of the world may be really being done for
self-gratification--like X. who, under pretence of informing the form,
dropped into the habit of parading his own knowledge. X. incidentally
did the form a service by creating great amusement for it, and so is
Germany incidentally doing the world a service (though not in the way it
meant) by giving them something to live and die for, which no country
but Germany had before. If the bigot conquers he will learn in time his
mistaken methods (for it is only of the methods and not of the goal of
Germany that one can disapprove)--just as the early Christian bigots
conquered by bigotry and grew larger in sympathy and tolerance after
conquest. I regard the war as one between sisters, between Martha and
Mary, the efficient and intolerant against the casual and sympathetic.
Each side has a virtue for which it is fighting, and each that virtue’s
supplementary vice. And I hope that whatever the material result of the
conflict, it will purge these two virtues of their vices, and efficiency
and tolerance will no longer be incompatible.
But I think that tolerance is the larger virtue of the two, and
efficiency must be her servant. So I am quite glad to fight against this
rebellious servant. In fact I look at it this way. Suppose my platoon
were the world. Then my platoon sergeant would represent efficiency and
I would represent tolerance. And I always take the sternest measures to
keep my platoon sergeant in check! I fully appreciate the wisdom of the
War Office when they put inefficient officers to rule sergeants. Adsit
omen.
Now you know what Sorley thinks about it. And do excuse all his gassing.
I know I already overdosed you on those five splendid days between
Coblenz and Neumagen. But I’ve seen the Fatherland (I like to call it
the Fatherland, for in many families Papa represents efficiency and
Mamma tolerance ... but don’t think I’m W.S.P.U.) so horribly
misrepresented that I’ve been burning to put in my case for them to a
sympathetic ear. Wir sind gewiss Hamburger Jungen, as that lieber
besoffener Österreicher told us. And so we must stand up for them, even
while trying to knock them down. (_October 1914._)
* * * * *
On return to England, by the way, I renewed my acquaintance with Robert
Browning. The last line of _Mr Sludge the Medium_--“yet there is
something in it, tricks and all”--converted me, and since then I have
used no other. I wish we could recall him from the stars and get him to
write a Dramatic Idyll or something, giving a soliloquy of the feelings
and motives and quick changes of heat and cold that must be going
through the poor Kaiser’s mind at present. He would really show that
impartial sympathy for him, which the British press and public so
doltishly deny him, when in talk and comment they deny him even the
rights of a human being. R. B. could do it perfectly--or Shakespeare. I
think the Kaiser not unlike Macbeth, with the military clique in Prussia
as his Lady Macbeth, and the court flatterers as the three weird
sisters. He’ll be a splendid field for dramatists and writers in days to
come. (_October 1914._)
* * * * *
It [a magazine article] brought back to me that little crooked old
fellow that Hopkinson and I met at the fag-end of our hot day’s walk as
we swung into Neumagen. His little face was lit with a wild uncertain
excitement he had not known since 1870, and he advanced towards us
waving his stick and yelling at us “Der Krieg ist los, Junge,” just as
we might be running to watch a football match and he was come to tell us
we must hurry up for the game had begun. And then the next night on the
platform at Trier, train after train passing crowded with soldiers bound
for Metz: varied once or twice by a truck-load of “swarthier alien
crews,” thin old women like wineskins, with beautiful and piercing
faces, and big heavy men and tiny aged-looking children: Italian
colonists exiled to their country again. Occasionally one of the men
would jump out to fetch a glass of water to relieve their thirst in all
that heat and crowding. The heat of the night is worse than the heat of
the day, and geistige Getränke were verboten. Then the train would
slowly move out into the darkness that led to Metz and an exact
reproduction of it would steam in and fill its place: and we watched the
signal on the southward side of Trier, till the lights should give a
jump and the finger drop and let in the train which was to carry us out
of that highly-strung and thrilling land.
At Cologne I saw a herd of some thirty American school-pmarms whom I had
assisted to entertain at Eucken’s just a fortnight before. I shouted out
to them, but they were far too upset to take any notice, but went
bobbing into one compartment and out again and into another like people
in a cinematograph. Their haste anxiety and topsyturviness were caused
by thoughts of their own safety and escape, and though perfectly natural
contrasted so strangely with all the many other signs of haste
perturbation and distress that I had seen, which were much quieter and
stronger and more full-bodied than that of those Americans, because it
was the Vaterland and not the individual that was darting about and
looking for the way and was in need: and the silent submissive
unquestioning faces of the dark uprooted Italians peering from the
squeaking trucks formed a fitting background--Cassandra from the
backmost car looking steadily down on Agamemnon as he stepped from his
triumphal purple chariot and Clytemnestra offered him her hand. (_23
November 1914._)
* * * * *
It is surprising how very little difference a total change of
circumstances and prospects makes in the individual. The German (I know
from the 48 hours of the war that I spent there) is radically changed,
and until he is sent to the front, his one dream and thought will be how
quickest to die for his country. He is able more clearly to see the
tremendous issues, and changes accordingly. I don’t know whether it is
because the English are more phlegmatic or more shortsighted or more
egoistic or what, that makes them inwardly and outwardly so far less
shaken by the war than at first seemed probable. The German, I am sure,
during the period of training “dies daily” until he is allowed to die.
We go there with our eyes shut. (_28 November 1914._)
* * * * *
We had a very swinging Christmas--one that makes one realize (in common
with other incidents of the war) how near savages we are and how much
the stomach (which Nietzsche calls the Father of Melancholy) is also the
best procurer of enjoyment. We gave the men a good church--plenty of
loud hymns--, a good dinner--plenty of beer--, and the rest of the day
was spent in sleep. I saw then very clearly that whereas for the upper
classes Christmas is a spiritual debauch in which one remembers for a
day to be generous and cheerful and open-handed, it is only a more or
less physical debauch for the poorer classes, who need no reminder,
since they are generous and cheerful and open-handed all the year round.
One has fairly good chances of observing the life of the barrack-room,
and what a contrast to the life of a house in a public school! The
system is roughly the same: the house-master or platoon-commander
entrusts the discipline of his charge to prefects or corporals, as the
case may be. They never open their mouths in the barrack-room without
the introduction of the unprintable swear-words and epithets: they have
absolutely no “morality” (in the narrower, generally accepted sense):
yet the public school boy should live among them to learn a little
Christianity: for they are so extraordinarily nice to one another. They
live in and for the present: we in and for the future. So they are
cheerful and charitable always: and we often niggardly and unkind and
spiteful. In the gymnasium at Marlborough, how the few clumsy specimens
are ragged and despised and jeered at by the rest of the squad; in the
gymnasium here you should hear the sounding cheer given to the man who
has tried for eight weeks to make a long-jump of eight feet and at last
by the advice and assistance of others has succeeded. They seem
instinctively to regard a man singly, at his own rate, by his own
standards and possibilities, not in comparison with themselves or
others: that’s why they are so far ahead of us in their treatment and
sizing up of others.
It’s very interesting, what you say about Athens and Sparta, and England
and Germany. Curious, isn’t it, that in old days a nation fought another
for land or money: now we are fighting Germany for her spiritual
qualities--thoroughness, and fearlessness of effort, and effacement of
the individual. I think that Germany, in spite of her vast bigotry and
blindness, is in a kind of way living up to the motto that Goethe left
her in the closing words of Faust, before he died.
Ay, in this thought is my whole life’s persistence.
This is the whole conclusion of the true:
He only earns his Freedom, owns Existence,
Who every day must conquer her anew!
So let him journey through his earthly day,
Mid hustling spirits, go his self-found way,
Find torture, bliss, in every forward stride,
He, every moment still unsatisfied![5]
A very close parallel may be drawn between Faust and present history
(with Belgium as Gretchen). And Faust found spiritual salvation in the
end! (_27 December 1914._)
V
“MANY A BETTER ONE” (p. 69)
----’s death was a shock. Still, since Achilles’ κάτθανε καί Πάτροκλος
ὄ περ σέο πολλὸυ ἀμείνων[6], which should be read at the grave of every
corpse in addition to the burial service, no saner and splendider
comment on death has been made, especially, as here, where it seemed a
cruel waste. (_28 November 1914._)
VI
“BLANK SUMMER’S SURFEIT” (p. 70)
From the time that the May blossom is scattered till the first frosts of
September, one is always at one’s worst. Summer is stagnating: there is
no more spring (in both senses) anywhere. When the corn is grown and the
autumn seed not yet sown, it has only to bask in the sun, to fatten and
ripen: a damnable time for man; heaven for the vegetables. And so I am
sunk deep in “Denkfaulheit,” trying to catch in the distant but
incessant upper thunder of the air promise of October rainstorms: long
runs clad only in jersey and shorts over the Marlborough downs, cloked
in rain, as of yore: likewise, in the aimless toothless grumbling of the
guns, promise of a great advance to come: hailstones and coals of fire.
(_July 1915._)
VII
“ETERNALLY TO DO” (p. 71)
Masefield has founded a new school of poetry and given a strange example
to future poets; and this is wherein his greatness and originality lies:
that he is a man of action not imagination. For he has one of the
fundamental qualities of a great poet--a thorough enjoyment of life. He
has it in a more pre-eminent degree than even Browning, perhaps the
stock instance of a poet who was great because he liked life. Everyone
has read the latter’s lines about “the wild joys of living, the leaping
from rock up to rock.” These are splendid lines: but one somehow does
not feel that Browning ever leapt from rock up to rock himself. He saw
other people doing it, doubtless, and thought it fine. But I don’t think
he did it himself ever....
Masefield writes that he knows and testifies that he has seen.
Throughout his poems there are lines and phrases so instinct with life,
that they betoken a man who writes of what he has experienced, not of
what he thinks he can imagine: who has braved the storm, who has walked
in the hells, who has seen the reality of life: who does not, like
Tennyson, shut off the world he has to write about, attempting to
imagine shipwrecks from the sofa, or battles in his bed. Compare for
instance _Enoch Arden_ and _Dauber_. One is a dream: the other, life....
The sower, who reaps not, has found a voice at last--a harsh rough
voice, compelling, strong, triumphant. Let us, the reapers where we have
not sown, give ear to it. Are they not much better than we? The voice of
our poets and men of letters is finely trained and sweet to hear; it
teems with sharp saws and rich sentiment: it is a marvel of delicate
technique: it pleases, it flatters, it charms, it soothes: it is a
living lie. The voice of John Masefield rings rough and ill trained: it
tells a story, it leaves the thinking to the reader, it gives him no
dessert of sentiment, cut, dried,--and ready made to go to sleep on: it
jars, it grates, it makes him wonder; it is full of hope and faith and
power and strife and God. Till Mr Masefield came on earth, the poetry
of the world had been written by the men who lounged, who looked on. It
is sin in a man to write of the world before he has known the world, and
the failing of every poet up till now has been that he has written of
what he loved to imagine but dared not to experience. But Masefield
writes that he knows and testifies that he has seen; with him expression
is the fruit of action, the sweat of a body that has passed through the
fire.
We stand by the watershed of English poetry; for the vastness and wonder
of modern life has demanded that men should know what they write about.
Behind us are the poets of imagination; before us are the poets of fact.
For Masefield as a poet may be bad or good: I think him good, but you
may think him bad: but, good or bad, he has got this quality which no
one can deny and few belittle. He is the first of a multitude of coming
poets (so I trust and pray) who are men of action before they are men of
speech and men of speech because they are men of action. Those whom,
because they do not live in our narrow painted groove, we call the Lower
Classes, it is they who truly know what life is: so to them let us look
for the true expression of life. One has already arisen, and his name is
Masefield. We await the coming of others in his train. (_Essay on
Masefield_, _3 November 1912_.)
The war is a chasm in time.... In a job like this, one lives in times a
year ago--and a year hence, alternately. Keine Nachricht. A large amount
of organized disorderliness, killing the spirit. A vagueness and a
dullness everywhere: an unromantic sitting still 100 yards from Brother
Bosch. There’s something rotten in the state of something. One feels it
but cannot be definite of what. Not even is there the premonition of
something big impending: gathering and ready to burst. None of that
feeling of confidence, offensiveness, “personal ascendancy,” with which
the reports so delight our people at home. Mutual helplessness and
lassitude, as when two boxers who have battered each other crouch
dancing two paces from each other, waiting for the other to hit.
Improvised organization, with its red hat, has muddled out romance. It
is not the strong god of the Germans--that makes their Prussian Beamter
so bloody and their fight against fearful odds so successful. Our
organization is like a nasty fat old frowsy cook dressed up in her
mistress’s clothes: fussy, unpopular, and upstart: trailing the scent of
the scullery behind her. In periods of rest we are billeted in a town of
sewage farms, mean streets, and starving cats: delightful population:
but an air of late June weariness. For Spring again! This is not Hell as
I hoped, but Limbo Lake with green growths on the water, full of
minnows.
So one lives in a year ago--and a year hence. What are your feet doing,
a year hence?... where, while riding in your Kentish lanes, are you
riding twelve months hence? I am sometimes in Mexico, selling cloth: or
in Russia, doing Lord knows what: in Serbia or the Balkans: in England,
never. England remains the dream, the background: at once the memory and
the ideal. Sorley is the Gaelic for wanderer. I have had a conventional
education: Oxford would have corked it. But this has freed the spirit,
glory be. Give me the _Odyssey_, and I return the New Testament to
store. Physically as well as spiritually, give me the road.
Only sometimes the horrible question of bread and butter shadows the
dream: it has shadowed many, I should think. It must be tackled. But I
always seek to avoid the awkward, by postponing it.
You figure in these dreams as the pioneer-sergeant. Perhaps _you_ are
the Odysseus, I am but one of the dog-like έταῖροι.... But however that
may be, our lives will be πολύπλαγκτοι, though our paths may be
different. And we will be buried by the sea--
Timon will make his everlasting mansion
Upon beachéd verge of a salt flood,
Which twice a day with hid embosséd froth
The turbulent surge shall cover.
Details can wait--perhaps for ever. These are the plans. I sometimes
almost forgive Tennyson his other enormities for having written
_Ulysses_. (_16 June 1915._)
VIII
“THE GRANDEUR OF THEIR MESS” (p. 74)
I am bleached with chalk and grown hairy. And I think exultantly and
sweetly of the one or two or three outstandingly admirable meals of my
life. One in Yorkshire, in an inn upon the moors, with a fire of logs
and ale and tea and every sort of Yorkshire bakery, especially bears me
company. And yet another in Mecklenburg-Schwerin (where they are very
English) in a farm-house utterly at peace in broad fields sloping to the
sea. I remember a tureen of champagne in the middle of the table to
which we helped ourselves with ladles! I remember my hunger after three
hours’ ride over the country: and the fishing-town of Wismar lying like
an English town on the sea. In that great old farm-house where I dined
at 3 p.m. as the May day began to cool, fruit of sea and of land joined
hands together, fish fresh caught and ducks fresh killed: it was a
wedding of the elements. It was perhaps the greatest meal I have had
ever, for everything we ate had been alive that morning--the champagne
was alive yet. We feasted like kings till the sun sank, for it was
impossible to overeat. ’Twas Homeric and its memory fills many hungry
hours. (_5 October 1915._)
IX
“THE OLD WAR-JOY, THE OLD WAR-PAIN” (p. 76)
This is a little hamlet, smelling pleasantly of manure. I have never
felt more restful. We arrived at dawn: white dawn across the plane trees
and coming through the fields of rye. After two hours in an oily ship
and ten in a grimy train, the “war area” was a haven of relief. These
French trains shriek so: there is no sight more desolating than
abandoned engines passing up and down the lines, hooting in their
loneliness. There is something eerie in a railway by night.