Over the heads of the European tribes two mightier peoples regarded each
other with increasing dislike. Well might they; for the one cherished
the most ancient and refined of all surviving cultures, while the other,
youngest and most self-confident of the great nations, proclaimed her
novel spirit as the spirit of the future.
In the Far East, China, already half American, though largely Russian
and wholly Eastern, patiently improved her rice lands, pushed forward
her railways, organized her industries, and spoke fair to all the world.
Long ago, during her attainment of unity and independence, China had
learnt much from militant Bolshevism. And after the collapse of the
Russian state it was in the East that Russian culture continued to live.
Its mysticism influenced India. Its social ideal influenced China. Not
indeed that China took over the theory, still less the practice of
communism; but she learnt to entrust herself increasingly to a vigorous,
devoted, and despotic party, and to feel in terms of the social whole
rather than individualistically. Yet she was honeycombed with
individualism, and in spite of her rulers she had precipitated a
submerged and desperate class of wage-slaves.
In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be
custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied,
universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency
very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole
character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout
the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where
American capital did not support local labour. Moreover the American
press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph, and televisor ceaselessly
drenched the planet with American thought. Year by year the ether
reverberated with echoes of New York’s pleasures and the religious
fervours of the Middle West. What wonder, then, that America, even while
she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This,
perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her
very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only
the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get
through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude
instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people’s
baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America
herself, were irrevocably corrupted.
For the best of America was too weak to withstand the worst. Americans
had indeed contributed amply to human thought. They had helped to
emancipate philosophy from ancient fetters. They had served science by
lavish and rigorous research. In astronomy, favoured by their costly
instruments and clear atmosphere, they had done much to reveal the
dispositions of the stars and galaxies. In literature, though often they
behaved as barbarians, they had also conceived new modes of expression,
and moods of thought not easily appreciated in Europe. They had also
created a new and brilliant architecture. And their genius for
organization worked upon a scale that was scarcely conceivable, let
alone practicable, to other peoples. In fact their best minds faced old
problems of theory and of valuation with a fresh innocence and courage,
so that fogs of superstition were cleared away wherever these choice
Americans were present. But these best were after all a minority in a
huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an
outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of
youth. For this was essentially a race of bright, but arrested,
adolescents. Something lacked which should have enabled them to grow up.
One who looks back across the aeons to this remote people can see their
fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can
appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to
rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through
spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.
Inevitably. Yet here was a people of unique promise, gifted innately
beyond all other peoples. Here was a race brewed of all the races, and
mentally more effervescent than any. Here were intermingled Anglo-Saxon
stubbornness, Teutonic genius for detail and systematization, Italian
gaiety, the intense fire of Spain, and the more mobile Celtic flame.
Here also was the sensitive and stormy Slav, a youth-giving Negroid
infusion, a faint but subtly stimulating trace of the Red Man, and in
the West a sprinkling of the Mongol. Mutual intolerance no doubt
isolated these diverse stocks to some degree; yet the whole was
increasingly one people, proud of its individuality, of its success, of
its idealistic mission in the world, proud also of its optimistic and
anthropocentric view of the universe. What might not this energy have
achieved, had it been more critically controlled, had it been forced to
attend to life’s more forbidding aspects! Direct tragic experience might
perhaps have opened the hearts of this people. Intercourse with a more
mature culture might have refined their intelligence. But the very
success which had intoxicated them rendered them also too complacent to
learn from less prosperous competitors.
Yet there was a moment when this insularity promised to wane. So long as
England was a serious economic rival, America inevitably regarded her
with suspicion. But when England was seen to be definitely in economic
decline, yet culturally still at her zenith, America conceived a more
generous interest in the last and severest phase of English thought.
Eminent Americans themselves began to whisper that perhaps their
unrivalled prosperity was not after all good evidence either of their
own spiritual greatness or of the moral rectitude of the universe. A
minute but persistent school of writers began to affirm that America
lacked self-criticism, was incapable of seeing the joke against herself,
was in fact wholly devoid of that detachment and resignation which was
the finest, though of course the rarest mood of latter-day England. This
movement might well have infused throughout the American people that
which was needed to temper their barbarian egotism, and open their ears
once more to the silence beyond man’s strident sphere. Once more, for
only latterly had they been seriously deafened by the din of their own
material success. And indeed, scattered over the continent throughout
this whole period, many shrinking islands of true culture contrived to
keep their heads above the rising tide of vulgarity and superstition.
These it was that had looked to Europe for help, and were attempting a
rally when England and France blundered into that orgy of emotionalism
and murder which exterminated so many of their best minds and
permanently weakened their cultural influence.
Subsequently it was Germany that spoke for Europe. And Germany was too
serious an economic rival for America to be open to her influence.
Moreover German criticism, though often emphatic, was too heavily
pedantic, too little ironical, to pierce the hide of American
complacency. Thus it was that America sank further and further into
Americanism. Vast wealth and industry, and also brilliant invention,
were concentrated upon puerile ends. In particular the whole of American
life was organized around the cult of the powerful individual, that
phantom ideal which Europe herself had only begun to outgrow in her last
phase. Those Americans who wholly failed to realize this ideal, who
remained at the bottom of the social ladder, either consoled themselves
with hopes for the future, or stole symbolical satisfaction by
identifying themselves with some popular star, or gloated upon their
American citizenship, and applauded the arrogant foreign policy of their
government. Those who achieved power were satisfied so long as they
could merely retain it, and advertise it uncritically in the
conventionally self-assertive manner.
It was almost inevitable that when Europe had recovered from the
Russo-German disaster she should come to blows with America; for she had
long chafed under the saddle of American finance, and the daily life of
Europeans had become more and more cramped by the presence of a
widespread and contemptuous foreign ‘aristocracy’ of American business
men. Germany alone was comparatively free from this domination, for
Germany was herself still a great economic power. But in Germany, no
less than elsewhere, there was constant friction with the Americans.
Of course neither Europe nor America desired war. Each was well aware
that war would mean the end of business prosperity, and for Europe very
possibly the end of all things; for it was known that man’s power of
destruction had recently increased, and that if war were waged
relentlessly, the stronger side might exterminate the other. But
inevitably an ‘incident’ at last occurred which roused blind rage on
each side of the Atlantic. A murder in South Italy, a few ill-considered
remarks in the European Press, offensive retaliation in the American
Press accompanied by the lynching of an Italian in the Middle West, an
uncontrollable massacre of American citizens in Rome, the despatch of an
American air fleet to occupy Italy, interception by the European air
fleet, and war was in existence before ever it had been declared. This
aerial action resulted, perhaps unfortunately for Europe, in a momentary
check to the American advance. The enemy was put on his mettle, and
prepared a crushing blow.