The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of
the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to
misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to
stating what will happen--which is (apparently) much easier. The modern
man no longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather; but
is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biography of his
great-grandson. Instead of trembling before the specters of the dead,
we shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn. This spirit is
apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form of futurist romance.
Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of the nineteenth century for the
novel of the past; Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the twentieth
century for the novel of the future. The old story, we know, was
supposed to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two horsemen might have
been seen--.” The new story has to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening
two aviators will be seen--.” The movement is not without its elements
of charm; there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so
many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened;
of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in
advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the
age is really rather odd.
But when full allowance has been made for this harmless element of
poetry and pretty human perversity in the thing, I shall not hesitate to
maintain here that this cult of the future is not only a weakness but
a cowardice of the age. It is the peculiar evil of this epoch that even
its pugnacity is fundamentally frightened; and the Jingo is contemptible
not because he is impudent, but because he is timid. The reason why
modern armaments do not inflame the imagination like the arms and
emblazonments of the Crusades is a reason quite apart from optical
ugliness or beauty. Some battleships are as beautiful as the sea; and
many Norman nosepieces were as ugly as Norman noses. The atmospheric
ugliness that surrounds our scientific war is an emanation from that
evil panic which is at the heart of it. The charge of the Crusades was a
charge; it was charging towards God, the wild consolation of the braver.
The charge of the modern armaments is not a charge at all. It is a rout,
a retreat, a flight from the devil, who will catch the hindmost. It is
impossible to imagine a mediaeval knight talking of longer and longer
French lances, with precisely the quivering employed about larger and
larger German ships The man who called the Blue Water School the “Blue
Funk School” uttered a psychological truth which that school itself
would scarcely essentially deny. Even the two-power standard, if it be
a necessity, is in a sense a degrading necessity. Nothing has more
alienated many magnanimous minds from Imperial enterprises than the fact
that they are always exhibited as stealthy or sudden defenses against a
world of cold rapacity and fear. The Boer War, for instance, was colored
not so much by the creed that we were doing something right, as by
the creed that Boers and Germans were probably doing something wrong;
driving us (as it was said) to the sea. Mr. Chamberlain, I think, said
that the war was a feather in his cap and so it was: a white feather.
Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic
armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society. The
modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue,
not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled
towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular
phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives
it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity Futurity does not
exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a
fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past
also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind.
There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many
harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of
monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once
sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition
of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking
at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street
of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to
play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank
wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes;
the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato,
Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as
narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as
humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that
men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They
look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
Now in history there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration. Among
the many things that leave me doubtful about the modern habit of fixing
eyes on the future, none is stronger than this: that all the men in
history who have really done anything with the future have had their
eyes fixed upon the past. I need not mention the Renaissance, the very
word proves my case. The originality of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare
began with the digging up of old vases and manuscripts. The mildness of
poets absolutely arose out of the mildness of antiquaries. So the great
mediaeval revival was a memory of the Roman Empire. So the Reformation
looked back to the Bible and Bible times. So the modern Catholic
movement has looked back to patristic times. But that modern movement
which many would count the most anarchic of all is in this sense the
most conservative of all. Never was the past more venerated by men than
it was by the French Revolutionists. They invoked the little republics
of antiquity with the complete confidence of one who invokes the gods.
The Sans-culottes believed (as their name might imply) in a return to
simplicity. They believed most piously in a remote past; some might call
it a mythical past. For some strange reason man must always thus plant
his fruit trees in a graveyard. Man can only find life among the dead.
Man is a misshapen monster, with his feet set forward and his face
turned back. He can make the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long as
he is thinking about the past. When he tries to think about the future
itself, his mind diminishes to a pin point with imbecility, which some
call Nirvana. To-morrow is the Gorgon; a man must only see it mirrored
in the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly he is turned
to stone. This has been the fate of all those who have really seen fate
and futurity as clear and inevitable. The Calvinists, with their perfect
creed of predestination, were turned to stone. The modern sociological
scientists (with their excruciating Eugenics) are turned to stone. The
only difference is that the Puritans make dignified, and the Eugenists
somewhat amusing, statues.
But there is one feature in the past which more than all the rest defies
and depresses the moderns and drives them towards this featureless
future. I mean the presence in the past of huge ideals, unfulfilled and
sometimes abandoned. The sight of these splendid failures is melancholy
to a restless and rather morbid generation; and they maintain a strange
silence about them--sometimes amounting to an unscrupulous silence. They
keep them entirely out of their newspapers and almost entirely out of
their history books. For example, they will often tell you (in their
praises of the coming age) that we are moving on towards a United States
of Europe. But they carefully omit to tell you that we are moving away
from a United States of Europe, that such a thing existed literally
in Roman and essentially in mediaeval times. They never admit that the
international hatreds (which they call barbaric) are really very recent,
the mere breakdown of the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire. Or again, they
will tell you that there is going to be a social revolution, a great
rising of the poor against the rich; but they never rub it in that
France made that magnificent attempt, unaided, and that we and all the
world allowed it to be trampled out and forgotten. I say decisively that
nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals
in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past. Anyone
can test this for himself. Read any thirty or forty pages of pamphlets
advocating peace in Europe and see how many of them praise the old Popes
or Emperors for keeping the peace in Europe. Read any armful of essays
and poems in praise of social democracy, and see how many of them praise
the old Jacobins who created democracy and died for it. These colossal
ruins are to the modern only enormous eyesores. He looks back along the
valley of the past and sees a perspective of splendid but unfinished
cities. They are unfinished, not always through enmity or accident,
but often through fickleness, mental fatigue, and the lust for alien
philosophies. We have not only left undone those things that we ought to
have done, but we have even left undone those things that we wanted to
do
It is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of
all the ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human
experiments. I know not what to say in answer to this, except to ask the
reader to look at the modern man, as I have just looked at the modern
man--in the looking-glass. Is it really true that you and I are two
starry towers built up of all the most towering visions of the past?
Have we really fulfilled all the great historic ideals one after the
other, from our naked ancestor who was brave enough to kill a mammoth
with a stone knife, through the Greek citizen and the Christian saint
to our own grandfather or great-grandfather, who may have been sabred by
the Manchester Yeomanry or shot in the ‘48? Are we still strong enough
to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to spare them? Does the cosmos
contain any mammoth that we have either speared or spared? When we
decline (in a marked manner) to fly the red flag and fire across a
barricade like our grandfathers, are we really declining in deference to
sociologists--or to soldiers? Have we indeed outstripped the warrior and
passed the ascetical saint? I fear we only outstrip the warrior in the
sense that we should probably run away from him. And if we have passed
the saint, I fear we have passed him without bowing.
This is, first and foremost, what I mean by the narrowness of the new
ideas, the limiting effect of the future. Our modern prophetic idealism
is narrow because it has undergone a persistent process of elimination.
We must ask for new things because we are not allowed to ask for old
things. The whole position is based on this idea that we have got all
the good that can be got out of the ideas of the past. But we have not
got all the good out of them, perhaps at this moment not any of the
good out of them. And the need here is a need of complete freedom for
restoration as well as revolution.
We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel
attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not
really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any
more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous
man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions
fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose
intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares
as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for
what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this
abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of
the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern
assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one
metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying,
“You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You
can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by
the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a
piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has
ever existed.
There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on
it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable,
please God I will make it again. We could restore the Heptarchy or the
stage coaches if we chose. It might take some time to do, and it might
be very inadvisable to do it; but certainly it is not impossible as
bringing back last Friday is impossible. This is, as I say, the first
freedom that I claim: the freedom to restore. I claim a right to propose
as a solution the old patriarchal system of a Highland clan, if that
should seem to eliminate the largest number of evils. It certainly would
eliminate some evils; for instance, the unnatural sense of obeying cold
and harsh strangers, mere bureaucrats and policemen. I claim the right
to propose the complete independence of the small Greek or Italian
towns, a sovereign city of Brixton or Brompton, if that seems the best
way out of our troubles. It would be a way out of some of our troubles;
we could not have in a small state, for instance, those enormous
illusions about men or measures which are nourished by the great
national or international newspapers. You could not persuade a city
state that Mr. Beit was an Englishman, or Mr. Dillon a desperado,
any more than you could persuade a Hampshire Village that the
village drunkard was a teetotaller or the village idiot a statesman.
Nevertheless, I do not as a fact propose that the Browns and the Smiths
should be collected under separate tartans. Nor do I even propose
that Clapham should declare its independence. I merely declare my
independence. I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the universe;
and I shall not admit that any of them are blunted merely because they
have been used.
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