are two worlds with two moralities. One is war and the other is peace.
We may affectionately survey the hospitals and orphanages, the
institutions for the blind and the mute, the asylums and the charities
with which each belligerent country pays tribute to the virtues of the
merciful life. Whatever we do, we cannot dispel the darkness by a
frenzied denunciation of war. The monster is not outside ourselves; it
is created and sustained by the hardness of our hearts and the
obtuseness of our brains. The responsibility is ours in war as well as
in peace. Reformers of all ages have battled with the wickedness of the
world, they have stormed stronghold after stronghold of social iniquity.
Their failures are no less conspicuous than their successes. Human
nature is infinitely pliable and infinitely resistant.
Is it, then, all a matter of change and recurrence? Do culture and
morality grow like flowers in a garden, obedient to the will and taste
of the gardener, but destined to fade and die with the turn of the
season? Do not the civilizations of the past with their perfection of
knowledge and art mock our faith in the permanency of human achievement?
Babylon and Egypt, Athens and Rome carried the seed of corruption within
their husk of glory. They had elaborate systems of social organization,
of laws, of elucidation of the mysteries of life. They saw beauty and
pursued it, in colour and sound, by word and chisel. The gods were kind
to them, and now and then dispensed with altar and temple. Divine
presences revealed themselves in brook and cornfield, on mountain-tops
and in the faces of animals. Reformers of all kinds were amongst them:
men of the sword with dreams of Empire and conquest for the good of the
nation, priests who demanded sacrifice in the name of a god, orators who
by skilful laying of words taught the art of philosophic calm. Problems
faced them, social iniquities troubled them; they grappled with morals
and strove to build up a better and happier future.
I was sinking into a reverie over the fall of Babylon and the problems
of recurrence when Marie-Joseph arrived. Marie-Joseph is my oldest and
dearest peasant friend. She is over seventy and devoted to hard work.
Her face is rosy and wrinkled, and when she laughs it becomes a mass of
merry furrows. Her body gives one the impression of an animated board.
It is strikingly flat and stiff, and proudly erect. She works in the
fields and tends the cows, and when she bends down to hoe the potatoes
or cut the grass, she just folds herself in two. The stiff straight back
in the neat black dress is different from all the other toiling backs on
the slopes. When I look down from the mountain-tops to the pastures and
plots below, I can always distinguish the back of Marie-Joseph from the
others. To-day she brought me a present of milk and potatoes, and we sat
down to chat over a cup of coffee--nay, four cups of coffee, for
Marie-Joseph has no cranky ideas about abstinence from food and drink,
and I must, perforce, pretend I have none. I love her and her ways,
though she always manages to disturb me when I wish to work or think.
Writing and thinking are not work to Marie-Joseph. She is wholly
innocent of the former dissipation and carries out the latter function
without any trouble or fuss. She is, therefore, justified in disposing
of my painful efforts with a contemptuous shrug of her wooden
shoulders.
"Marie-Joseph," I said cautiously, when I had watched the third cup of
coffee disappear, and duly discussed butter and cheese, wine and cows,
"do you think the world is getting better?" She was slicing a chunk of
bread with her capacious pocket-knife, and stopped short. Her small
bright blue eyes peered at me curiously. "I mean, do you believe there
is real progress--that we are better than we used to be?"
The knife came dancing down on the plate. "Better?" she said; "not at
all; we are worse. Why, when I was young we used constantly to have
processions and carry le Bon Dieu, and I tell you the harvest was
different from what it is now. And the young girls were modest then;
they all wore aprons, and our cure used to insist on them wearing
aprons, for, said he, all women should wear aprons."
"All women should wear aprons," I repeated mechanically, as my thoughts
flitted back to Babylon.
Marie-Joseph saw and misinterpreted my disappointment. "Did you grasp
what I said?" she asked; "there is no modesty nowadays. And you people
who come from England," she added sternly, "with your short skirts and
your peculiar ways, don't improve matters."
I felt duly rebuked, and during the rest of the hour which Marie-Joseph
wasted on me, I sought to re-establish myself in her opinion by
discoursing on the merits of _soupe au fromage_.
We all have our chosen test of moral worth, and perhaps our judgment of
the decline and rise of social virtue is as easily swayed by personal
predilection as was that of Marie-Joseph. To me the persistence of the
same cruel and stupid customs throughout the centuries is a source of
perplexed pessimism. I cannot brush aside the problem by a facile
reference to reincarnation. If John the brigand was a cut-throat and a
robber in his twentieth appearance on this planet, why should he persist
in these idiosyncrasies in his twenty-third return as George the
politician and successful captain of industry? This is not at all a fair
representation of the theory of reincarnation, I shall be told. It is
not, but it is one of those to which we are driven in the desperation
of impatience. A friend of mine, a high authority on matters
theosophical, knows of a potent explanation and anodyne for moral
impatience. Humanity, he tells me, is always being recruited from Mars.
Mars, in spite of its canals, is a low and wicked planet, with a
reptilian population. When the Martians advance a little beyond the
moral status of their fellow-creatures and close their bloodthirsty eyes
in death, their spirits are wafted to our planet, there to take on new
garments of flesh. The influx of brutal souls is perennial. This
explains why, Churches and missionary effort notwithstanding, we have
always savages, cannibals, and barbarians (and Prussian militarists?)
with us. But there is comfort in the other side of the picture. When we
in our turn have learnt all the lessons of this miserable globe of
folly, when we have mastered all the virtues and shed all the vices,
when we long to be free from the trammels of sense and appetite and
sickness and ambition, we are transferred to Mercury. Mercury is a
highly evolved planet, a spiritualized existence, free from the
obsessions of sex and greed, an abode of love and freedom.
Oh, how I sigh for Mercury!
Supposing this sinful earth is only a school for reformed Martians;
supposing human nature and history always repeat themselves, and the end
is as the beginning and the beginning as the end? The first steps in
education accomplished, the scholars would be removed to better
premises, and to a more advanced course of instruction. But the old
school would receive new pupils and go on in the same humdrum way. There
would be the same harsh teachers, the same ignorance and obstinacy, the
same punishment and suffering. The worst of it is that Mercury does not
seem exempt from the general curse of nothingness which seems to brood
over all physical existence. There is no stability even in solar
systems. Even we puny creatures can divine something of their birth and
death. Out of whirling nebulae suns and planets are born; souls slowly
evolve on worlds which were once balls of fire. There are endless
diversity and specialization, myriads of creatures rise out of the
furnace of life. Some gain ascendancy and lay claim to mental supremacy,
to science and religion and the overlordship of the universe. I am sure
Mars, Mercury, and Tellus are equally prone to this weakness. One
day--in the uncountably many of solar mornings--there is a collision, a
breaking up of all the old forms through contact with some mysterious
roving mass of burning matter. The planets with their kings and prophets
disappear in fire and gas, The perturbation in the vast Cosmos of Change
is probably not greater than that caused by the fall of an old and
rotten tree before the cleansing winds of spring.
All mankind clings to the hope that something escapes destruction and
rises unchangeable and eternal above the domain of nothingness. In that
hope we strive for better things and go forth to reform life, and in the
striving we find our spirit. We know we are shortsighted and sometimes
blind, and that the fight is often hopeless. But the joy, the
imperishable joy, lies in the struggle. Don Quixote is inexpressibly
dear to us because he personifies the ridiculous tasks which we attempt,
though we know them to be ridiculous.
There is a human need which is always paramount, yet surprisingly little
recognized. It is the need of an enemy. Life is a perpetual looking
forward to a time when we shall have conquered. We are happiest when we
see the enemy in all his ugliness and wickedness, and can draw our
swords without any doubt as to his presence. We prefer solid dragons of
evil to flitting butterflies of sin. We are ever in search of the enemy
in our schemes of reform, our political wrangles, our moral crusades.
The growth of individuality is indissolubly bound up with cognizance of
the enemy. He may be hiding in the bowels of the earth, defying the
attempt to tame the soil to our advantage; he may be mocking our efforts
to find scientific solutions to the riddles of nature; he may be
encamped in our own souls, confounding our goodness and demolishing our
moral defences. But he must be there. Without him life would be
stagnant, energy and virtue purposeless.
War satisfies the human hunger for a sight of the enemy. All the vague
sense of evil which in peace-time makes the morality of our next-door
neighbour a matter of anxious concern to us is now solidified in hatred
of the foe of the country. Smaller enmities are patched, national
brotherhood is recognized. The country at war with us becomes the
target of all our moral bullets. Tyranny, cruelty, lust, greed, and all
manner of abomination dwell there; its people are the servants of
Antichrist.
The evil seen in the enemy stimulates unseen good in the masses, to whom
the sacrifices of war would be impossible but for the conviction that
the nations have been sharply divided into sheep and goats. The
abolition of war will come about when we have learnt to eliminate sham
enemies and to recognize the real one within our own hearts. In our
present stage of cosmic education, the idea of a negative peace is
entirely repellent. Now and then, after a bout of too much talking or
too much doing, we may dwell tenderly on the thought of complete
inaction and stillness. A nightmare is an excellent means of inducing a
desire for dreamless sleep. But normal, natural humanity shuns complete
rest. Hence the notorious failure--mental and physical--of complete
holidays. We must attack something, and if there is no work to attack,
we attack the inanimate stupidity of our surroundings. It is strange
that the laborious task once achieved should so often become the thing
abhorred. Scales fall from our eyes, perspective is restored, and we see
what a trumpery affair held us enthralled. I have often thought with
dismay of the effect on scores of reformers, whom I know, if the reform
to which they have sworn allegiance should be accomplished. To many this
would be a personal disaster of the gravest kind. For years they have
poured their mental energy and their devotion into one channel. The
enemy was always there, to be beaten at sunrise and cursed at sunset.
The cause inspired high ideals and hard work; self and selfish matters
were neglected in the pursuit of victory. Life eventually became
identified with the cause and its vicissitudes, and, like the picture in
Olive Schreiner's story, the work took on brighter and more wonderful
colour, whilst the painter became paler and paler. Narrowness of vision
and purpose became essential conditions of efficiency, and gradually
human attributes became sharpened into fanatical weapons of assault. Few
reformers live to see the triumph of their cause, and fewer still
succeed in preserving equilibrium of judgment.
There is, verily, every excuse for the pointed energy of reformers. The
world is full of horrors that cry aloud for extirpation; one head
cannot easily harbour knowledge of all the strongholds of wickedness.
True, those who are called by the spirit to become missionaries of mercy
can harbour a greater measure of sympathy than the average man. The
average man suffers through incapacity to reach the fountain of
spiritual replenishment at which the saints refresh their parched
throats. An acute sensitiveness to the suffering of others, without a
corresponding power to reach the sources of comfort, leads to the abyss
of madness. Nature imposes limits to sympathy in most minds, barriers of
forgetfulness without which healthy thought is impossible. The danger to
the mind of indulging in unlimited sympathy has been emphasized by the
most divergent students of psychological law. Herbert Spencer analysed
it with characteristic thoroughness. Nietzsche went farther. He reacted
violently against the onslaughts of pity in his own soul, and in
philosophical self-defence inverted the promptings of compassion. The
war has shown the human need of self-defence against excessive sympathy.
We are surfeited with horrors on land and sea; the ghastly truth of a
carnage which exceeds anything known in history, of maimed and broken
lives, of starving and homeless people, is shunned lest we lose our
reason in impotent and disruptive pity. The man of bayonet and bomb, who
a short time ago spent mildly exciting days over his desk in the City,
and who was anxiously concerned over the indisposition of his
neighbour's cat, has made himself a heart of steel for the purposes of
the war. If sympathy interfered with the issue of every bullet and the
thrust of every bayonet, there would be an end to military efficiency.
The civilian has not seldom gone far beyond the needs of emotional
self-defence and equipped himself with a heart of stone. The perfect Man
of Sympathy--controlling His sympathy, yet radiating it to all the world
and its sins--was Jesus Christ. His compassion had none of the corrosive
qualities which drove Nietzsche to distraction. He could retain the
consciousness of all the suffering which men inflict on fellow-creatures
and yet keep ever abundant the measure of His pity and the regenerating
power of His love. He saw the root of our evil, the one cause and the
one remedy. He is the catholic and consistent reformer, whilst we--we
of the smaller measure--flounder in the web of a hundred causes.
Each cause can be endowed with an importance which outdoes all the
others. Education--can any one deny the overwhelming need of proper
concentration on its possibilities? "Here we have a generation of
ignorant, selfish, immoral creatures, devoid of a sense of social
responsibility," says our first reformer; "why, the remedy is obvious:
let us begin with the children in the schools. Is any one so dense as
not to perceive the all-pervading importance of the guidance we give to
the young?"
"It is no use beginning with the children whilst those who teach them
are so hopelessly sunk in materialism and stupidity," says our second
reformer. "Look at the education laws; they are all ill-conceived and
ill-administered. Education is not only a failure; it is a dead-weight
of falsehood and class tyranny which hampers progress. Let us go
straight for socialism and equal human rights and opportunities. Your
education is only used to perpetuate industrial slavery and to keep the
children of the working classes ignorant of the blood-sucking system
into whose meshes they will be thrown unless we combine and make our
influence felt now."
"You are neglecting the most obvious duties which should come first,"
says the quiet and motherly voice of the third reformer; "infants die by
the hundred thousand owing to neglect. There will soon be no babies for
you to instruct either in materialism or socialism. The race will die
out whilst you talk. Look at the slums and the careless, ignorant
mothers; we want infant-welfare work, we want a new baby cult, we want
to teach people parental responsibility."
"Nonsense," breaks in the virile voice of the fourth reformer; "what you
want is to take people away from the slums, to bring them back to the
country. Land nationalization is what we need--a free, healthy life, far
removed from the factories that kill soul and body by the grinding
monotony of existence. Man was made for life on the soil, for contact
with sun and wind, flowers and trees. They will give health and life to
your babies."
"Your schemes have only a secondary importance"--the voice of a
prominent suffragist is now heard. "Give women the vote and these
reforms will follow. Men have made all these abominable laws and
customs; women will bring in just and human laws and change all social
life. As for the suggestion that country life will improve the standard
of living, I can only say that it is made in ignorance of the real
conditions. Look at the farm labourer's wife and her home-life. She is
often the most miserable, worn-out creature, who tries in vain to keep
the children and herself properly fed and clothed. Her life is a long
travesty of the laws of health."
"Naturally," comments the temperance reformer, "whilst you allow the
labourer to soak himself in drink and to spend his money at the
public-house. Drink is the root of all our social troubles: it ruins the
body and corrupts the mind, it poisons the unborn children, fills our
prisons and asylums. You may legislate and equalize opportunities as
much as you please; so long as you allow the cursed liberty of drink
there can be no health and no human decency. Prohibition is the most
urgent of all our needs."
An athletic-looking young man, rosy-cheeked and clear-eyed, who had been
listening with a somewhat supercilious smile, now joins in the debate.
"There would be no need for you to bother about drink if you could
persuade people to give up flesh-eating. Vegetarianism is the cure of
all ills. It drives away disease and the craving for stimulants, it
gives you pure blood and a desire for the really simple life. I live in
a tent on ninepence a day and sleep in the open. I grow my own fruit and
vegetables and do my own cooking. Thoreau is my master and Carpenter my
friend. I hate smoky cities with their slums and their shambles and your
whole sickly civilization."
"Sickly!" repeats a Christian Scientist, with reproachful emphasis on
the word. The speaker is a woman of sixty, whose face bears the stamp of
successful self-discipline and a sound physique. "I have seen
vegetarians who looked extremely sickly. Before I became a Christian
Scientist I, too, sought health by various systems of diet. Now I know
that all disease is but an error of mortal mind, and in _Science and
Health_, by Mrs. Eddy, we are told----"
She was not allowed to finish her sentence, for a Congregational
minister, famous for his pulpit denunciations of sin, has risen and
gravely waves his hand to ensure a respectful hearing. "All you people,"
he says, in a voice vibrating with solemn indignation, "are pursuing
fleeting shadows. The kingdom of God is within. This false cult of
health by self-hypnotism, or health by living like the beasts in the
field, gives undue weight to things which, after all, relate to the
body. It is the _soul_ of man that is important, not where he lives or
what he eats. We need the fear of God and the thirst for His mercy; we
need the Divine guidance which will transform and sanctify our social
relations."
"And pray how has the Church dealt with the war?" cries the pacifist who
has now risen, his eyes ablaze with denunciation of the minister. "The
Christian Church--established or unestablished--is nothing but the
handmaid of the politician and the State, the servile echo of
capitalists and diplomatists. You talk of Divine guidance and the
sanctification of life. How do you respect life and the teaching of
Jesus Christ? Jesus said, 'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you,
do good to them that hate you, pray for them that despitefully use you
and persecute you.' You, His professed followers, bless war and its
orgies of hate. You stand by hypocritically thanking God for your own
sanctity, whilst Christians drench battlefields with the blood of
Christians. The abolition of war is the reform to which you should all
bend your lives and direct your prayers. Even now you have not learnt
your lesson. Your social order, your laws, your constitution, your
personal liberties, your lives and those of your children, are thrown to
the Juggernaut of war, and yet you continue your futile pursuit of
shadows. Without peace there can be no reform."
I have joined in the debate, I have heard all these voices. They are
familiar to me with the familiarity of the songs of our childhood. Their
sentiment is true, oh so true! yet so sadly inadequate. The reformers
are valiant and true, and every one has hitched his waggon to his pet
star. Happiest are those who do not encounter the cross-influence of
rival stars or see the irony of our human limitation of sight and
achievement. The blood-red cross of the crusader will stand no admixture
of colour. The soul dominated by one idea gains ground. Henri Dunant,
Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry, General Booth, Josephine
Butler--these succeed by dint of their singleness of purpose. The
narrowness serves to concentrate the strength and accelerate the work.
The reformer may be bigoted and unreasonable, but he must be an optimist
whilst pursuing his object. He must believe in life and in the inherent
goodness of the earth. He must be a stranger to the dyspeptic melancholy
through which Carlyle saw the world as a "noisy inanity" and life as an
incomprehensible monstrosity. Macbeth is called to denounce life as "a
tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury," and "signifying
nothing." Macbeth must be shunned by the reformer as the monk repels the
visits of Satan in the desert. He must share the hopefulness of Sir
Thomas More. Utopia is possible here, now, and everywhere, though
execution is likely to be the penalty of too close application to
principles.
He must not fear the companionship of the crank. He had better recognize
that he is one. What is a crank? The dictionary is somewhat vague as to
the meaning. I find that the verb is unravelled as "bend, wind, turn,
twist, wind in and out, crankle, crinkle." The last two appeal to me
strongly. How I have crankled and crinkled over wrongs and horrors
which I have discovered on my little path! No crank can see his
crankiness at the time of crankling, though sometimes he sees it
afterwards. The crank is a person who holds views which to us seem
ridiculous. The man who first objected to cannibalism was a crank. The
man who first thought lunatics should not be chained to walls or left
naked on unsavoury beds of straw was a crank. Galileo was an
intellectual crank of the shameless type. Shelley is the beautiful crank
of all times, champion of forlorn causes, the inspired rebel of the
spirit.
There are small and noisy and irritating cranks. I have met scores of
them. They are intense, but shortsighted. Some are delightfully
ingenuous, with the lovable simplicity of the child. Others are of a
morbid and carping disposition, with an inordinate sense of their own
importance.
I have for many years been the privileged though unworthy recipient of
confidences and schemes for the elimination of all manner of cruelty and
wickedness from the world. My office in Piccadilly has received within
its sympathetic walls a procession of born cranks, of souls charged with
high missions for the betterment of the world. Faddists, eccentrics,
dreamers, mystics, workers chained to lifelong slavery by their dominant
idea, have poured out their plans to me. Sometimes visitors came who
clearly had crossed the unguarded frontier between sanity and insanity,
interesting and pathetic and clever, yet of the great order of God's
fools. They were not unhappy, for their path was brilliantly lit by an
idea, whilst the rest of the world was plunged in darkness. They would
scold me and pity me because I refused to follow their light, but they
were never unkind.