A subtle change now began to affect the whole mental climate of the
planet. This is remarkable, since, viewed for instance from America or
China, this war was, after all, but a petty disturbance, scarcely more
than a brawl between quarrelsome statelets, an episode in the decline of
a senile civilization. Expressed in dollars, the damage was not
impressive to the wealthy West and the potentially wealthy East. The
British Empire, indeed, that unique banyan tree of peoples, was
henceforward less effective in world diplomacy; but since the bond that
held it together was by now wholly a bond of sentiment, the Empire was
not disintegrated by the misfortune of its parent trunk. Indeed, a
common fear of American economic imperialism was already helping the
colonies to remain loyal.
Yet this petty brawl was in fact an irreparable and far-reaching
disaster. For in spite of those differences of temperament which had
forced the English and French into conflict, they had cooperated, though
often unwittingly, in tempering and clarifying the mentality of Europe.
Though their faults played a great part in wrecking Western
civilization, the virtues from which these vices sprang were needed for
the salvation of a world prone to uncritical romance. In spite of the
inveterate blindness and meanness of France in international policy, and
the even more disastrous timidity of England, their influence on culture
had been salutary, and was at this moment sorely needed. For, poles
asunder in tastes and ideals, these two peoples were yet alike in being
on the whole more sceptical, and in their finest individuals more
capable of dispassionate yet creative intelligence than any other
Western people. This very character produced their distinctive faults,
namely, in the English a caution that amounted often to moral cowardice,
and in the French a certain myopic complacency and cunning, which
masqueraded as realism. Within each nation there was, of course, great
variety. English minds were of many types. But most were to some extent
distinctively English; and hence the special character of England’s
influence in the world. Relatively detached, sceptical, cautious,
practical, more tolerant than others, because more complacent and less
prone to fervour, the typical Englishman was capable both of generosity
and of spite, both of heroism and of timorous or cynical abandonment of
ends proclaimed as vital to the race. French and English alike might sin
against humanity, but in different manners. The French sinned blindly,
through a strange inability to regard France dispassionately. The
English sinned through faintheartedness, and with open eyes. Among all
nations they excelled in the union of common sense and vision. But also
among all nations they were most ready to betray their visions in the
name of commonsense. Hence their reputation for perfidy.
Differences of national character and patriotic sentiment were not the
most fundamental distinctions between men at this time. Although in each
nation a common tradition or cultural environment imposed a certain
uniformity on all its members, yet in each nation every mental type was
present, though in different proportions. The most significant of all
cultural differences between men, namely, the difference between the
tribalists and the cosmopolitans, traversed the national boundaries. For
throughout the world something like a new, cosmopolitan ‘nation’ with a
new all-embracing patriotism was beginning to appear. In every land
there was by now a salting of awakened minds who, whatever their
temperament and politics and formal faith, were at one in respect of
their allegiance to humanity as a race or as an adventuring spirit.
Unfortunately this new loyalty was still entangled with old prejudices.
In some minds the defence of the human spirit was sincerely identified
with the defence of a particular nation, conceived as the home of all
enlightenment. In others, social injustice kindled a militant
proletarian loyalty, which, though at heart cosmopolitan, infected alike
its champions and its enemies with sectarian passions.
Another sentiment, less definite and conscious than cosmopolitanism,
also played some part in the minds of men, namely loyalty toward the
dispassionate intelligence and perplexed admiration of the world which
was beginning to be revealed, a world august, immense, subtle, in which,
seemingly, man was doomed to play a part minute but tragic. In many
races there had, no doubt, long existed some fidelity toward the
dispassionate intelligence. But it was England and France that excelled
in this respect. On the other hand, even in these two nations there was
much that was opposed to this allegiance. These, like all peoples of the
age, were liable to bouts of insane emotionalism. Indeed the French
mind, in general so clear-sighted, so realistic, so contemptuous of
ambiguity and mist, so detached in all its final valuations, was yet so
obsessed with the idea ‘France’ as to be wholly incapable of generosity
in international affairs. But it was France, with England, that had
chiefly inspired the intellectual integrity which was the rarest and
brightest thread of Western culture, not only within the territories of
these two nations, but throughout Europe and America. In the seventeenth
and eighteenth Christian centuries, the French and English had
conceived, more clearly than other peoples, an interest in the objective
world for its own sake, had founded physical science, and had fashioned
out of scepticism the most brilliantly constructive of mental
instruments. At a later stage it was largely the French and English who,
by means of this instrument, had revealed man and the physical universe
in something like their true proportions; and it was chiefly the elect
of these two peoples that had been able to exult in this bracing
discovery.
With the eclipse of France and England this great tradition of
dispassionate cognizance began to wane. Europe was now led by Germany.
And the Germans, in spite of their practical genius, their scholarly
contributions to history, their brilliant science and austere
philosophy, were at heart romantic. This inclination was both their
strength and their weakness. Thereby they had been inspired to their
finest art and their most profound metaphysical speculation. But thereby
they were also often rendered un-self-critical and pompous. More eager
than other Western minds to solve the mystery of existence, less
sceptical of the power of human reason, and therefore more inclined to
ignore or argue away recalcitrant facts, the Germans were courageous
systematizes. In this direction they had achieved great things. Without
them, European thought would have been chaotic. But their passion for
order and for a systematic reality behind the disorderly appearances,
rendered their reasoning all too often biased. Upon shifty foundations
they balanced ingenious ladders to reach the stars. Thus, without
constant ribald criticism from across the Rhine and the North Sea, the
Teutonic soul could not achieve full self-expression. A vague uneasiness
about its own sentimentalism and lack of detachment did indeed persuade
this great people to assert its virility now and again by ludicrous acts
of brutality, and to compensate for its dream life by ceaseless
hard-driven and brilliantly successful commerce; but what was needed was
a far more radical self-criticism.
Beyond Germany, Russia. Here was a people whose genius needed, even more
than that of the Germans, discipline under the critical intelligence.
Since the Bolshevik revolution, there had risen in the scattered towns
of this immense tract of corn and forest, and still more in the
metropolis, an original mode of art and thought, in which were blended a
passion for iconoclasm, a vivid sensuousness, and yet also a very
remarkable and essentially mystical or intuitive power of detachment
from all private cravings. America and Western Europe were interested
first in the individual human life, and only secondarily in the social
whole. For these peoples loyalty involved a reluctant self-sacrifice,
and the ideal was ever a person, excelling in prowess of various kinds.
Society was but the necessary matrix of this jewel. But the Russians,
whether by an innate gift, or through the influence of age-long
political tyranny, religious devotion, and a truly social revolution,
were prone to self-contemptuous interest in groups, prone, indeed, to a
spontaneous worship of whatever was conceived as loftier than the
individual man whether society, or God, or the blind forces of nature.
Western Europe could reach by way of the intellect a precise conception
of man’s littleness and irrelevance when regarded as an alien among the
stars; could even glimpse from this standpoint the cosmic theme in which
all human striving is but one contributory factor. But the Russian mind,
whether orthodox or Tolstoyan or fanatically materialist, could attain
much the same conviction intuitively, by direct perception, instead of
after an arduous intellectual pilgrimage; and, reaching it, could
rejoice in it. But because of this independence of intellect, the
experience was confused, erratic, frequently misinterpreted; and its
effect on conduct was rather explosive than directive. Great indeed was
the need that the West and East of Europe should strengthen and temper
one another.
After the Bolshevik revolution a new element appeared in Russian
culture, and one which had not been known before in any modern state.
The old regime was displaced by a real proletarian government, which,
though an oligarchy, and sometimes bloody and fanatical, abolished the
old tyranny of class, and encouraged the humblest citizen to be proud of
his partnership in the great community. Still more important, the native
Russian disposition not to take material possessions very seriously
cooperated with the political revolution, and brought about such a
freedom from the snobbery of wealth as was quite foreign to the West.
Attention which elsewhere was absorbed in the amassing or display of
money was in Russia largely devoted either to spontaneous instinctive
enjoyments or to cultural activity.
In fact, it was among the Russian townsfolk, less cramped by tradition
than other city-dwellers, that the spirit of the First Men was beginning
to achieve a fresh and sincere readjustment to the facts of its changing
world. And from the townsfolk something of the new way of life was
spreading even to the peasants; while in the depths of Asia a hardy and
ever-growing population looked increasingly to Russia, not only for
machinery, but for ideas. There were times when it seemed that Russia
might transform the almost universal autumn of the race into a new
spring.
After the Bolshevik revolution the new Russia had been boycotted by the
West, and had therefore passed through a stage of self-conscious
extravagance. Communism and naïve materialism became the dogmas of a new
crusading atheist church. All criticism was suppressed, even more
rigorously than was the opposite criticism in other countries; and
Russians were taught to think of themselves as saviours of mankind.
Later, however, as economic isolation began to hamper the Bolshevik
state, the new culture was mellowed and broadened. Bit by bit, economic
intercourse with the West was restored, and with it cultural intercourse
increased. The intuitive mystical detachment of Russia began to define
itself, and so consolidate itself, in terms of the intellectual
detachment of the best thought of the West. Iconoclasm was harnessed.
The life of the senses and of impulse was tempered by a new critical
movement. Fanatical materialism, whose fire had been derived from a
misinterpreted, but intense, mystical intuition of dispassionate
Reality, began to assimilate itself to the far more rational stoicism
which was the rare flower of the West. At the same time, through
intercourse with peasant culture and with the peoples of Asia, the new
Russia began to grasp in one unifying act of apprehension both the grave
disillusion of France and England and the ecstasy of the East.
The harmonizing of these two moods was now the chief spiritual need of
mankind. Failure to integrate them into an all-dominant sentiment could
not but lead to racial insanity. And so in due course it befell.
Meanwhile this task of integration was coming to seem more and more
urgent to the best minds of Russia, and might have been finally
accomplished had they been longer illumined by the cold light of the
West.
But this was not to be. The intellectual confidence of France and
England, already shaken through progressive economic eclipse at the
hands of America and Germany, was now undermined. For many decades
England had watched these newcomers capture her markets. The loss had
smothered her with a swarm of domestic problems, such as could never be
solved save by drastic surgery; and this was a course which demanded
more courage and energy than was possible to a people without hope. Then
came the war with France, and harrowing disintegration. No delirium
seized her, such as occurred in France; yet her whole mentality was
changed, and her sobering influence in Europe was lessened.
As for France, her cultural life was now grievously reduced. It might,
indeed, have recovered from the final blow, had it not already been
slowly poisoned by gluttonous nationalism. For love of France was the
undoing of the French. They prized the truly admirable spirit of France
so extravagantly that they regarded all other nations as barbarians.
Thus it befell that in Russia the doctrines of communism and
materialism, products of German systematists, survived uncriticized. On
the other hand, the practice of communism was gradually undermined. For
the Russian state came increasingly under the influence of Western, and
especially American, finance. The materialism of the official creed also
became a farce, for it was foreign to the Russian mind. Thus between
practice and theory there was, in both respects, a profound
inconsistency. What was once a vital and promising culture became
insincere.