WALLED TOWNS
BY
RALPH ADAMS CRAM
LITT.D., LL.D.
[Illustration]
BOSTON
MARSHALL JONES COMPANY
M D CCCC XX
COPYRIGHT, 1919
BY MARSHALL JONES COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
First Printing, September, 1919
Second Printing, February, 1920
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
WALLED TOWNS
PROLOGUE
The stone-flagged path on the top of the high walls winds along within
the battlemented parapet, broken here and there by round turrets,
steeple-crowned barriers of big timbers and, at wider intervals, great
towers, round or square or many-sided, where bright banners blow in
the unsullied air. From one side you may look down on and into the
dim city jostling the ramparts with crowding walls and dizzy roofs,
from the other the granite scarp drops sheer to the green fields and
vari-coloured gardens and shadowy orchards full forty feet below.
Within, the city opens up in kaleidoscopic vistas as you walk slowly
around the walls: here are the steep roofs of tall houses with delicate
dormers, fantastic chimney stacks, turret cupolas with swinging weather
vanes; here the closed gardens of rich burgesses, full of arbours,
flowers, pleached alleys of roses, _espaliers_ of pear and nectarine;
here a convent or guild chapel, newly worked of yellow stone and all
embroidered with the garniture of niches, balustrades, pinnacles.
Here, under one of the city gates, opens a main street, narrow and
winding but walled with high-gabled houses, each story jutting beyond
the lower, carved from pavement to ridge like an Indian jewel casket,
and all bedecked with flaming colour and burnished gold-leaf. Below
is the stream and eddy of human life; craftsmen in the red and blue
and yellow of their guild liveries, slow-pacing merchants and burghers
in furred gowns of cramoisy and Flemish wool and gold-woven Eastern
silks; scholars in tippet and gown, youths in slashed doublets and gay
hose, grey friars and black and brown, with a tonsured monk or two,
and perhaps a purple prelate, attended, and made way for with deep
reverence. Threading the narrow road rides a great lady on a gaily
caparisoned palfrey, with an officious squire in attendance, or perhaps
a knight in silver armour, crested wonderfully, his emblazoned shield
hanging at his saddle-bow,--living colour mixing and changing between
leaning walls of still colour and red gold.
Here a stream or canal cuts the houses in halves, a quay with gay
booths and markets of vari-coloured vegetables along one side, walls of
pink brick or silvery stone on the other, jutting oriels hanging over
the stream, and high, curved bridges, each with its painted shrine,
crossing here and there, with gaudy boats shoving along underneath.
Here a square opens out, ringed with carved houses,--a huge guild hall
on one side, with its dizzy watch-tower where hang the great alarum
bells; long rows of Gothic arches, tall mullioned windows, and tiers
and ranges of niched statues all gold and gules and azure, painted
perhaps by Messer Jan Van Eyck or Messer Hans Memling. In the centre
is a spurting fountain with its gilt figures and chiselled parapet,
and all around are market booths with bright awnings where you may buy
strange things from far lands, chaffering with dark men from Syria and
Saracen Spain and Poland and Venice and Muscovy.
And everywhere, tall in the midst of tall towers and spires, vast,
silvery, light as air yet solemn and dominating, the great shape of
the Cathedral, buttressed, pinnacled, beautiful with rose windows and
innumerable figures of saints and angels and prophets.
There is no smoke and no noxious gas; the wind that sweeps over the
roofs and around the delicate spires is as clean and clear as it is
in the mountains; the painted banners flap and strain, and the trees
in the gardens rustle beneath. There is no sound except human sound;
the stir and murmur of passing feet, the pleasant clamour of voices,
the muffled chanting of cloistered nuns in some veiled chapel, the
shrill cry of street venders and children, and the multitudinous bells
sounding for worship in monastery or church and, at dawn and noon and
evening, the answering clangour of each to all for the Angelus.
And from the farther side of the walls a wide country of green and
gold and the far, thin blue of level horizon or distant mountains.
There are no slums and no suburbs and no mills and no railway yards;
the green fields and the yellow grain, the orchards and gardens and
thickets of trees sweep up to the very walls, slashed by winding white
roads. Alongside the river, limpid and unstained, are mills with slow
wheels dripping quietly, there where the great bridge with its seven
Gothic arches and its guarding towers curves in a long arc from shore
to shore. Far away is perhaps a grey monastery with its tall towers,
and on the hill a greyer castle looming out of the woods. Along the
road blue-clad peasants come and go with swaying flocks of sheep and
fowl and cattle. Here are dusty pilgrims with staff and wallet and
broad hats, pursy merchants on heavy horses with harness of red velvet
and gold embroidery; a squadron of mounted soldiers with lances and
banners, and perhaps my Lord Bishop on his white mule, surrounded by
his retainers, and on progress to his see city from some episcopal
visitation; perhaps even a plumed and visored knight riding on quest or
to join a new Crusade to the Holy Land.
Colour everywhere, in the fresh country, in the carven houses, in
gilded shrines and flapping banners, in the clothes of the people like
a covey of vari-coloured tropical birds. No din of noise, no pall of
smoke, but fresh air blowing within the city and without, even through
the narrow streets, none too clean at best, but cleaner far than they
were to be thereafter and for many long centuries to come.
Such was any walled town in the fifteenth century, let us say in
France or England or Italy, in Flanders or Spain or the Rhineland.
Carcassonne, Rothenbourg, San Gimignano, Oxford, ghosts of the past,
arouse hauntings of memory today, but they tell us little, for the
colour is gone, and the stillness and the clean air. Ghosts they are
and not living things; and life, colour, clarity, these were the
outward marks of the Walled Towns of the Middle Ages.
* * * * *
“It was not a pretty station where McCann found himself, and he glared
ill-naturedly around with restless, aggressive eyes. The brick walls,
the cheaply grained doors bearing their tarnished legends, “Gents,”
“Ladies,” “Refreshment Saloon,” the rough raftered roof over the
tracks,--everything was black and grimy with years of smoke, belching
even now from the big locomotive, and gathering like an ill-conditioned
thunder-cloud over the mob of scurrying, pushing men and women, a mob
that swelled and scattered constantly in fretful confusion. A hustling
business-man with a fat, pink face and long sandy whiskers, his silk
hat cocked on one side in grotesque assumption of jauntiness, tripped
over the clay-covered pick of a surly labourer, red of face and sweaty,
blue of overalls and mud-coloured of shirt, and as he stumbled over the
annoying implement scowled coarsely, and swore, with his cigar between
his teeth.
“Ragged and grimy children, hardly old enough to walk, sprawled
and scrambled on the dirty platform, and as McCann hurried by, a
five-year-old cursed shrilly a still more youthful little tough,
who answered in kind. Vulgar theatre-bills in rank reds and yellows
flaunted on the cindery walls; discarded newspapers, banana skins,
cigar butts, and saliva were ground together vilely under foot by the
scuffling mob. Dirt, meanness, ugliness everywhere--in the unhappy
people no less than in their surroundings....
“The prospect was not much better outside than in. The air was thick
with fine white dust, and dazzling with fierce sunlight. On one side
was a wall of brick tenements, with liquor saloons, cheap groceries,
and a fish-market below, all adding their mite to the virulence of
the dead, stifling air. Above, men in dirty shirt-sleeves lolled out
of the grimy windows, where long festoons of half-washed clothes
drooped sordidly. On the other side, gangs of workmen were hurriedly
repairing the ravages of a fire that evidently had swept clear a large
space in its well-meant but ineffectual attempts at purgation. Gaunt
black chimneys wound with writhing gas-pipes, tottering fragments of
wall blistered white on one side, piles of crumbling bricks where men
worked sullenly loading blue carts, mingled with new work, where the
walls, girdled with yellow scaffolding, were rising higher, uglier than
before; the plain factory walls with their rows of square windows less
hideous by far than those buildings where some ignorant contractor was
trying by the aid of galvanized iron to produce an effect of tawdry,
lying magnificence. Dump-carts, market-waggons, shabby hacks, crawled
or scurried along in the hot dust. A huge dray loaded with iron bars
jolted over the granite pavement with a clanging, clattering din that
was maddening. In fact, none of the adjuncts of a thriving, progressive
town were absent, so far as one could see....
“The carriage threaded its way through the roaring crowd of vehicles,
passing the business part of the city, and entering a tract given over
to factories, hideous blocks of barren brick and shabby clapboards,
through the open windows of which came the brain-killing whir of heavy
machinery, and hot puffs of oily air. Here and there would be small
areas between the buildings where foul streams of waste from some
factory of cheap calico would mingle dirtily with pools of green,
stagnant water, the edges barred with stripes of horrible pinks and
purples where the water had dried under the fierce sun. All around
lay piles of refuse,--iron hoops, broken bottles, barrels, cans,
old leather stewing and fuming in the dead heat, and everywhere
escape-pipes vomiting steam in spurts. Over it all was the roar of
industrial civilization. McCann cast a pitying look at the pale,
dispirited figures passing languidly to and fro in the midst of the din
and the foul air, and set his teeth closely.
“Presently they entered that part of the city where live the poor, they
who work in the mills, when they are not on strike, or the mills are
not shut down,--as barren of trees or grass as the centre of the city,
the baked grey earth trodden hard between the crowded tenements painted
lifeless greys, as dead in colour as the clay about them. Children and
goats crawled starvedly around or huddled in the hot shadow of the
sides of the houses. This passed, and then came the circle of “suburban
residences,” as crowded almost as the tottering tenements, but with
green grass around them. Frightful spectacles these,--“Queen Anne” and
“Colonial” vagaries painted lurid colours, and frantic in their cheap
elaboration. Between two affected little cottages painted orange and
green and with round towers on their corners, stood a new six-story
apartment-house with vulgar front of brown stone, “Romanesque” in
style, but with long flat sides of cheap brick. McCann caught the
name on the big white board that announced “Suites to let.” “Hotel
Plantagenet,” and grinned savagely.
“Then, at last, even this region of speculative horrors came to an end,
giving place to a wide country road that grew more and more beautiful
as they left the town far behind. McCann’s eyebrows were knotted in a
scowl. The ghastly nonsense, like a horrible practical joke, that the
city had been to him, excited, as it always did, all the antagonism
within his rebellious nature. Slowly and grimly he said to himself,
yet half aloud, in a tone of deliberation, as though he were cursing
solemnly the town he had left: ‘I hope from my soul that I may live to
see the day when that damned city will be a desolate wilderness; when
those chimneys shall rise smokeless; when those streets shall be stony
valleys between grisly ridges of fallen brick; when Nature itself shall
shrink from repairing the evil that man has wrought; when the wild
birds shall sweep widely around that desolation that they may not pass
above; when only rats and small snakes shall crawl though the ruin of
that “thriving commercial and manufacturing metropolis”; when the very
name it bore in the days of its dirty glory shall have become a synonym
for horror and despair!’ Having thus relieved himself he laughed
softly, and felt better.”[A]
[A] “The Decadent,” 1893.
I
What is the way out? The question that was universal during the war,
“How has this thing come?” gives place to the other that is no less
poignant and no less universal, “What is the way out?” There must be
a way; this coil of uttermost confusion must be solvable, must be
solved--_if only we knew the way!_ There can be no going back, of that
we are sure, and the industry of the serious-minded men, busy with set
faces and a brave optimism, in their cheerful efforts to restore the
old course of events after an accidental interlude, fills us with a
kind of shame that people who have lived through the war should have
learned so little both of the war and from it. Four years have ended
the work of four centuries and--there is no going back. “Finis” has
been written at the end of a long episode and there is no way by which
we can knit together again the strands that are severed forever. There
is even less desire than ability. It does not show very well in the
red light of war, that act in the great world-drama that opened with
the dissolution of Mediævalism and the coming of the Renaissance; that
developed through the Reformation, the revolutions of the eighteenth
century and the sequent industrialism, to its climax and catastrophe
in war. There is little in it we would have back if we could, but the
unstable equilibrium in which we hang for the moment, poised between
reactionism and universal anarchy, cannot last; already the balance
is inclining towards chaos, and in the six months that will intervene
between the writing of this and its publication it may very well be
that the decision of inertia will be made and the plunge effected that
will bring us down into that unintelligent repetition of history now so
clearly indicated in Russia, Austria, Germany. We can neither return
nor remain but--would we go on, at least along the lines that are at
present indicated? Are we tempted by the savage and stone-age ravings
and ravenings of Bolshevism? Have we any inclination towards that
super-imperialism of the pacifist-internationalist-Israelitish “League
of Free Nations” that comes in such questionable shape? Does State
Socialism with all its materialistic mechanisms appeal to us? Other
alleviation is not offered and in these we can see no encouragement.
It is the eternal dilemma of the Two Alternatives, which is
nevertheless no more than a vicious sophism: “Either you will take this
or you must have that,” the starling-cry of partizan politics by which
“democracies” have lived. In all human affairs there are never only
two alternatives, there is always a third and sometimes more; but this
unrecognized alternative never commands that popular leadership which
“carries the election,” and it does not appeal to a public that prefers
the raw obviousness of the extremes. Yet it is the third alternative
that is always the right one, except when the God-made leaders, the
time having come for a new upward rush of the vital force in society,
put themselves in the vanguard of the new advance and lift the world
with them, as it were by main force. Reactionism or Bolshevism: “Under
which king, Bezonian? Speak or die!” We are told that the old world
of before-the-war must be restored in its integrity or we must fall
a victim to the insane anarchy of a proletariat in revolt, and for
many of us there is little to choose between the two. We have seen how
fragile, artificial and insecure is civilization, how instantly and
hopelessly it can crumble into a sort of putrid dissolution the moment
its conventions are challenged and the ultimate principles of democracy
are put in practice, and we do not like it. We have seen Russia,
Germany, Hungary, and sporadic but disquieting examples in every State,
no matter how conservative it may be or how successful in a first
stamping out of the flame. On the other hand, we saw the triumph of
“Modern Civilization” in the twenty-five years preceding the Great
War, and as we realize now what it was, through the revelations it has
made of itself during the last five years, we like it quite as little
as the other. We see it now as an impossible farrago of false values,
of loud-mouthed sentimentality and crude, cold-blooded practices; of
gross, all-pervading injustice sicklied o’er with the pale cast of
smug humanitarianism; a democracy of form that was without ideal or
reality in practice; imperialism, materialism and the quantitative
standard. Is there no alternative other than this, restored in its
unvarying ugliness of fact and of manifestation, or the imitative era
of a new Dark Ages which will be brought to pass by the new hordes of
Huns and Vandals that again, after fifteen centuries, menace a greater
Imperialism than Rome with an identical fate? There _is_ a third
alternative; there may be more, but the one which makes its argument
for acceptance on the basis of history and experience is here put
forward for consideration.
In three books already published in this series which has been issued
from time to time during the Great War--“The Nemesis of Mediocrity,”
“The Great Thousand Years” and “The Sins of the Fathers”--I have tried
to determine certain of the causes which led to the tragical _débâcle_
of modern civilization at the very moment of its highest supremacy;
and now while mediocrity pitifully struggles to meet and solve an
avalanche of problems it cannot cope withal, and anarchy, like Alaric
and Attila and Genseric at the head of their united hosts, beat against
the dissolving barriers of a forlorn and impotent and discredited
culture, I would try to find some hints of the saving alternative, and
if possible discover some way out of the deadly _impasse_ in which the
world finds itself.
From “The Nemesis of Mediocrity” it should be sufficiently clear
that I do not believe that any mechanical devices whatever will
serve the purpose: neither the buoyant plan to “make the world safe
for democracy,” nor any extension and amplification of “democratic”
methods onward to woman’s suffrage or direct legislation or proletarian
absolutism through Russian soviets, nor socialistic panaceas varying
from a mild collectivism to Marxism and the _Internationale_, nor a
league of nations and an imposing but impotent “Covenant,” nor even
a world-wide “League to Enforce Peace.” We have heard something too
much of late of peace, and not enough of justice; peace is not an end
in itself, it is rather a by-product of justice. Through justice the
world can attain peace, but through peace there is no guaranty that
justice may be achieved. There must always be the material enginery
through the operation of which the ideal is put into practice, but in
the ideal lies the determining force, whether for good or evil, and by
just so far as this is right in its nature will the mechanism operate
for good ends. The best agent in the world, even the Catholic Church or
the American Republic, may be employed towards evil and vicious ends
whenever the energizing force is of a nature that operates towards
darkness and away from the light.
I have tried in “The Sins of the Fathers,” to prove that the marks of
degeneracy and constructive evil in the modernism that went to its
ruin during the Great War, and is now accomplishing its destiny in
the even more tragical epoch of after-the-war, are its imperialism,
its materialism and its quantitative standard--that is to say, its
acceptance of the gross aggregate in place of the unit of human scale,
its standard of values which rejected the passion for perfection in
favour of the numerical equivalent, and its denial of spirit as a
reality rather than a mere mode of material action--while the only
salvation for society is to be found in the restoration, in all things,
of small human units, the testing of all things by value not bulk, and
the acceptance once more of the philosophy of sacramentalism.
It would be possible, I suppose, to develop a detailed scheme for the
reconstruction of the world along certain definite lines that would
be in accordance with these principles, but the question would at
once arise, How could it be made to work? Frankly, the question is
unanswerable except by a categorical negative. The nineteenth-century
superstition that life proceeds after an inevitable system of
progressive evolution, so defiant of history, so responsible in great
degree for the many delusions that made the war not only possible but
inevitable, finds few now to do it honour. The soul is not forever
engaged in the graceful industry of building for itself ever more
stately mansions; it is quite as frequently employed in defiling and
destroying those already built, and in substituting the hovel for
the palace. It is not even, except at infrequent intervals, desirous
of improving its condition. As a whole, man is not an animal that
is eager for enlightenment that it may follow after the right. At
certain crescent periods in the long process of history, when great
prophets and leaders are raised up, it is forced, even against its
will, to follow after the leaders when once the prophets have been
conscientiously stoned, and great and wonderful things result--Athens,
Rome, Byzantium, Venice, Sicily, the cities of the Middle Ages,
Flanders, Elizabethan England--but the untoward exertion is its own
executioner, and always society sinks back into some form of barbarism
from whence all is to be begun again.
Nor is education--free, universal, secular and “efficient”--an
universal panacea for this persistent disease of backsliding; it is not
even a palliative or a prophylactic. The most intensive educational
period ever known had issue in the most preposterous war in history,
initiated by the most highly and generally educated of all peoples, by
them given a new content of disgrace and savagery, and issuing at last
into Bolshevism and an obscene anarchy that would be ridiculous but
for the omnipresent horror. And the same is true both of industrialism
and democracy, for both have belied the promises of their instigators
and have brought in, not peace and plenty and liberty, but universal
warfare, outrageous poverty, and the tyranny of the ignorant and the
unfit.
Before the revelations of war, while the curious superstitions of
the nineteenth century were still in vogue, it was widely held that
evolution, education and democracy were irresistible, and that progress
from then on must be continuous and by arithmetical if not geometrical
progression. When the war came and the revelations began to unfold
themselves, it was held with equal comprehensiveness that even if our
civilization had been an illusion, our trinity of mechanistic saviours
but a bundle of broken reeds, the war itself would prove a great
regenerative agency, and that out of its fiery purgation would issue
forth a new spirit that would redeem the world. It is a fair question
to ask whether those that once saw this bow of promise in the red skies
have found the gold at the rainbow’s end or are now even sure the
radiance itself has not faded into nothingness.
Every great war exhibits at least two phenomena following on from
its end: the falling back into an abyss of meanness, materialism and
self-seeking, with the swift disappearance of the spiritual exaltation
developed during the fight, and the emergence sooner or later of
isolated personalities who have retained the ardour of spiritual
regeneration, who seem indeed to epitomize it within themselves,
and who struggle, sometimes with success, sometimes with failure, to
bring the mass of people back to their lost ideals and embody these
in a better type of society. Apparently success or failure depends on
whether the particular war in question came on the rise or the fall of
the rhythmical curve that conditions all history.
At the present moment the first of these two phenomena has shown
itself. Whether it is in Russia or in the fragments of the despoiled
Central Empires where the ominous horror of Bolshevism riots in a
carnival of obscene destruction, or in the governments and “interests”
and amongst the peoples of the Allies, there is now, corporately, no
evidence of anything but a general break-down of ideals, and either an
accelerating plunge into something a few degrees worse than barbarism,
with the Dark Ages as its inevitable issue, or an equally fatal return
to the altogether hopeless, indeed the pestilential, standards and
methods of the fruition of modernism in the world-before-the-war. The
new warfare is between these, the malignant old Two Alternatives; fear
of one encompasses the other, and in each case all that is done is
with the terror of Bolshevism conditioning all on the one hand, terror
of reactionism on the other. Expediency, desperate self-preservation,
is the controlling passion, and the principles of justice, right and
reason are no longer operative.
As this is written there is no sure indication as to which of these
alternatives is to prevail, but it is for the moment quite clearly
indicated that it will be the one or the other,--either the tyranny
of the degraded, Bolshevism, universal anarchy, with the modernist
reversal of all values succeeded by the post-modernist destruction
of all values, or the triumph of reaction, with a return to the
world-before-the-war for a brief period of profligate excess along
all materialistic, intellectual and scientific lines not unlike the
Restoration period of Charles II, with the same ruin achieved in the
end though after a certain interlude. And yet the third alternative
is theoretically possible: escape from the Scylla and Charybdis of
error through the opportune development of the second phenomenon, the
reasonable certainty of which is indicated by history--the appearance
of those leaders of vision and power who had been generated through
the alchemy of war.
That in the end they will come we need not doubt, but in the meantime
an errant world, leaderless and ungoverned, is urged swiftly on towards
catastrophe of either one sort or another, nor will it wait the coming
of the indispensable leaders. It is not from the men whose potential
greatness was perfected and revealed by war, Cardinal Mercier, for
example, or Marshal Foch, great leaders absolutely of the first
class, that solution is to be sought, for in their age is sufficient
inhibition. It is rather from those whose character has actually
been made by war, youths perhaps, who have fought and found, either
in the armies or the navies or in the air, or even in some of the
non-combatant branches of the Service. Boys they are now, perhaps, in
years, but into them has been poured the energizing power that leads to
mastership; to them is given the first fire of progressive revelation.
Somewhere, in the still active units, on the way back to their homes
and to civil life, or already mingled in the activities from which they
were called for their great testing, are those who sooner or later
will find themselves the leaders of the quest for a new life for the
world. The Divine finger-touch has been granted them, the spark of
inspiration has lightened in their souls, but seldom is the generation
swift; it may be years before it is effected, and meanwhile only the
Two Alternatives remain.
For my own purpose in this book, perhaps indeed so far as society
itself is concerned, it is a matter of indifference which is the
victor in the fight for supremacy; the ultimate issue will be the
same though the roads are various. Universal beastliness issuant of
Russia, or universal materialism _redivivus_, the conditions of life
will be intolerable, and in the end a new thing will be built up as
different on the one hand to anarchy as on the other it is different
to the industrial-democratic-materialist _régime_ of the immediate
past. With the former we are assured some five hundred years not unlike
those that followed the fall of Rome; with the latter we at least are
given the respite of a brief Restoration, during which the war-bred
potencies may mature, and at the end of the few gross years which would
be allotted to this _status quo ante_-civilization, become operative
to avert the horror of a recrudescent Bolshevism. At least so we
may hope; on the other hand it may be doubted whether, after all, a
revived and intensified materialism such as that which the reactionary
element is attempting, would not afford an even less favourable and
stimulating soil for fostering the possible war-potentialities than
would red anarchy, for the suffocating qualities of gross luxuriance
are sometimes more fatal than the desperate sensations of danger,
adversity and shame. In any case, the immediate future is not one to
be anticipated with enthusiasm or confidence and we shall do well
to consider the course to be followed by those who reject the Two
Alternatives and refuse to have any part in either.
II
It is not my intention to write another in the long list of Utopias
with which man has amused himself, from Plato to H. G. Wells. Where the
preceding volumes in this series have been frankly destructive, I would
make this volume constructive, if only by suggestion. It is in no sense
a programme, it is still less an effort at establishing an ideal. Let
us call it “a way out,” for it is no more than this; not “the” way,
nor yet a way to anything approaching a perfect State, still less a
perfect condition of life, but rather a possible issue out of a present
_impasse_ for some of those who, as I have said, peremptorily reject
both of the intolerable alternatives now offered them.
What I have to propose is based on acceptance, at least substantially,
of the criticisms of modernism that appear in “The Nemesis of
Mediocrity” and in “The Sins of the Fathers”; it also assumes the
general accuracy of the interpretation of history attempted in
“The Great Thousand Years,” and the estimate of certain historic
religio-social forces therein described. To those who dissent from
these opinions this volume will contain nothing and they will be well
advised if they pursue it no further. Since it is written for those
who have done me the honour to read these previous books, I shall not
try to epitomize them here, assuming as I do a certain familiarity
with their general argument. All that it is necessary to say is that
the assumption is made that “modern civilization” was essentially
an inferior product; that it could have had no other issue than
precisely such a war as occurred; that its fundamental weaknesses
were its imperialism, its materialism and its quantitative standard;
that the particular type of “democracy” for which the world was to
be made safe was and is a menace to righteous society, since it had
lowered and reversed all standards, established the reign of the
venal, the incapable and the unfit, and had destroyed all competent
leadership while preventing its generation, and that the only visible
hope of recovery lay in a restoration of the unit of human scale, the
passion for perfection, and a certain form of philosophy known as
sacramentalism, with the precedents of the monastic method used as a
basis of operation, and the whole put in process through the leadership
of great captains of men such as always in the past have accomplished
the building up of society after cataclysms similar to that which
during five years has brought modernism to an end.
Society is no longer to be dealt with as an unit, nor even as a
congeries of units; it is a chaos, both as a whole and in each
moiety thereof. The evolutionary process, if it ever existed, is now
inoperative, and something more nearly approaching devolution has
taken its place. As under the earlier assault of the everlasting
barbarian the great, imperial unity of Rome broke up into minute
family fragments, and as the pseudo-unity of the Holy Roman Empire
broke up into a myriad of heterogeneous states, so our own world,
both political and social, is deliquescing into its elements, and no
ingenious mechanism, however cleverly devised, can arrest the process
for more than the briefest of periods. When the mechanism breaks down,
whether it is a year or ten years hence, the interrupted process of
disintegration will continue to its appointed end.
Man has always nursed the dream of corporate regeneration, of the
finding or devising of some method or mechanism whereby society as
a whole could be redeemed _en bloc_. The dream has engendered many
revolutions but the results have been other than those anticipated,
and even these unexpected happenings have proved evanescent, with a
constant return to the old evils and abuses. Persistently the world
as a whole refuses regeneration. Latterly the ingenious device has
somewhat superseded the violent changing of things, and democracy with
its miscellaneous spawn of doctrinaire inventions, industrialism with
its facile subterfuges of political economy; evolution, education,
socialism, each in turn has offered itself as the sovereign elixir.
The war has quashed the major part, the following “peace” is dealing
with the remainder. The last device of all, socialism, whether of the
Marxian variety or of the Fabian sort, is now the most discredited
of all, for Bolshevism on the one hand, state ownership, control,
or management of industry on the other, have both proved, the one
intolerable, the other a bloody synonym for social extinction.
Yet the way out must be found by those for whom the present scheme of
existence is not good enough; for those who refuse to go back to the
pre-war _régime_ or on to the predicted era of anarchy. The way may
be found, but it will reveal itself not through wide and democratic
social processes but through group action in which the units are few in
number. The process will be one of withdrawal, of segregation, at first
even of isolation; but if this really proves to be the right way, the
end may be, as so often in the past, a centrifugal action developing
from one originally centripetal, with an ultimate leavening of the
whole lump.
It may be remembered that in “The Great Thousand Years” I endeavoured
to demonstrate the vibratory theory of history, whereby the life of
society is conditioned by a rhythmical wave motion; curves rising and
descending, inflexibly though with varying trajectories, the falling
curve meeting at some point the rising curve of a future coming
into being, the crossing points forming the nodes of history, and
spacing themselves at five-century intervals either side the birth
of Christ, or the year 1 A.D. In the same place I called attention to
the correspondence in time (since the Christian era) between certain
periodic manifestations of spiritual force, identical in nature though
somewhat varied in fashion, and these nodal points; that is to say,
the monastic idea as this showed itself in the first, sixth, eleventh
and sixteenth centuries. This synchronism may be graphically explained
thus, the thin line indicating the approximate curve of social
development, the shaded line the monastic manifestation:
[Illustration: A THE CURVE OF CIVILIZATION B THE CURVE OF MONASTICISM]
It would appear from this that now, while the next nodal point is
possibly seventy-five years in the future, the next manifestations of
monasticism should already be showing itself. The curve of modernism
is now descending as precipitously as did that of Roman Imperialism,
but already, to those who are willing to see, there are indisputable
evidences of the rising of the following curve. Whether this is to
emulate in lift and continuance the curves of Mediævalism and of
modernism, or whether it is to be but a poor copy of the sag and the
low, heavy lift of the Dark Ages, is the question that man is to
determine for himself during the next two generations.
Now as a matter of fact the last thirty years have shown an altogether
astonishing recrudescence of the monastic spirit, while already the war
has added enormously to its force and expansion. Thus far it has been
wholly along old-established lines, which was to be expected; but as we
approach nearer and nearer to the next nodal point of the year 2000,
we are bound to see a variant, a new expression of the indestructible
idea. This has always been the case. At the beginning of the Christian
era the impulse was personal, the individual was the unit, and the
result was the anchorites and hermits, each isolating himself in a
hidden mountain cave, a hut in the desert or, if his fancy took this
eccentric, on the top of a lonely column, like St. Simon Stylites.
With St. Benedict the group became the unit, a sort of artificial
family either of men or of women, as the case might be. He himself
began as a hermit in the cleft of a far mountain, but within his own
lifetime his original impulse was overridden and the new communal
or group life came into being, though each monastery or convent was
quite autonomous and self-contained. Five centuries later (or four,
to speak more exactly) began the Cluniac reform, which was followed
by the Cistercian movement, and here, though the old Benedictine mode
was followed at first, in a brief time came the differentiation, for
now all the houses of one order were united under a centralizing and
coördinating force. Here we have the State as the parallel of the new
scheme. Latest of all, in another five centuries, came still a new model,
the army, with the Society of Jesus as its perfect exponent. So we have
at almost exact five-century intervals four models of monasticism: the
individual, the family, the State and the army. A fifth is now due; what
will be its form?
It will, I think, be one in which the human family is made the unit. It
will not supersede the older modes but supplement them, for the monks,
canons-regular and friars, of the old tradition and the old line, will
be as necessary then as ever; instead it will be an amplification
of the indestructible idea, fitted to, and developing from, the new
conditions which confront society. In addition to the groups of either
men or women, living in a community life apart, and vowed to poverty,
celibacy and obedience, there will be groups of natural families,
father, mother and children, entering into a communal but not by any
means “communistic” life, within those Walled Towns they will create
for themselves, in the midst of the world but not of it, where the
conditions of life will be determined after such sort as will make
possible that real and wholesome and joyful and simple and reasonable
living that has long been forbidden by the conditions of modern
civilization.
Let me explain at once that I have nothing in mind resembling in the
least the communistic schemes of Fourier, Owen, George; of the Shakers,
the Concord enthusiasts or their ilk. In these cases it was always
the unnatural element of communism that was their undoing, and in
the Walled Towns of the new era the preservation of individuality,
of private property, of family integrity, would be of necessity a
fundamental principle. Many evils and abuses have grown up around all
these, but I cannot claim that I am one of those (in spite of its wide
popularity and almost universal acceptance) who hold tenaciously to
the belief that the only way to get rid of the dust is to burn down
the house, or that the only way to correct a child’s faults is to kill
it. Rather I incline to the somewhat outworn method of reform without
destruction, and I lean to the opinion that there are enough others
of like convictions to make possible the creation of a certain number
of Walled Towns that the experiment may be put into effect, since
manifestly it is no longer possible in society as a whole.
The method would be simple, the process carried out quietly, and
preferably in several places at once. A certain community of interest
must be presupposed, but this would hardly extend beyond substantial
unity in religion, in philosophy and in a revolt against the
industrial-democratic-imperialist scheme of society which has dominated
Europe and America since the beginning of the nineteenth-century.
There can be no sane and wholesome society in the future where there
is not an universally accepted religion of perfectly definite form, a
clear, logical and convincing philosophy of life, and a social system
diametrically opposed to that which was current before the war and is
now striving desperately for a restoration. As the unity of religion
has been shattered since the sixteenth century, the creators of the
Walled Towns may very well be divided into individual groups, so far
as religion is concerned. I can imagine Roman Catholics forming the
nucleus of one, Episcopalians another, and it may be there are among
the Protestant denominations those who would be led along the same
lines. The essential point is the fundamental necessity for a vital and
common religion among those who go forward to the building of the new
social units. The same is true of philosophy, for this and religion can
never be separated except under pain of the results that have followed
the severance in the fifteenth century, and the workings of a world
void of any real philosophy ever since. If there is any philosophy
except sacramentalism which is at the same time intellectually
satisfying in a perfectly complete degree, consonant with the proved
results of scientific investigation and thought, and sufficiently
dynamic as a controlling force in life, I am not acquainted with it. If
such a thing exists, it might serve its turn, but false philosophies
such as materialism, evolutionism, Christian Science and pragmatism
are not working substitutes for a real philosophy such as that of
Hugh of St. Victor, Duns Scotus or St. Thomas Aquinas. As for the
social vision, there must be not only the negative quality of revolt
but the positive quality of construction. It is not sufficient to
hate the tawdry and iniquitous fabrications of the camp-followers of
democracy; the gross industrial-financial system of “big business”
and competition, with the capital _versus_ labour antithesis it has
bred. It is not enough to curse imperialism and materialism and the
quantitative standard. There must be some vision of the plausible
substitute, and while this must determine itself slowly, through many
failures, and will in the end appear as a by-product of the spiritual
regeneration that must follow once the real religion and a right
philosophy are achieved, there must be a starting somewhere.
Personally, I should say that for this starting point we might fix on
Justice (whichever way the sword cuts) as the first consideration;
Charity (or rather _Caritas_--the Latin is more exact) follows close
after, or even goes side by side. So do the other Cardinal Virtues; but
who has not invoked them in support of every reform, whether it was of
God or the devil? They fall as lightly from the lips of Marat or Lenine
as from those of Plato, Dante or Sir Thomas More; they may be assumed.
There are, however, certain less abstract propositions which it seems
to me must serve at least as a trial basis; these, for example:
Power is Divine in its origin, since it is an attribute of Divinity,
and its exercise is by Divine permission. It follows, therefore, that,
as was held during the Middle Ages, no man or group of men, neither
king nor boss nor parliament nor soviet, has any authority to exercise
power after a wrong fashion or to govern ill.
Society exists through coöperation, not through competition; the latter
must therefore be abolished, though this does not imply the destruction
of emulation, which is quite a different thing.
All men are equal before God and the Law but not otherwise.
Privilege, in the sense of immunity or of special opportunity without
corresponding obligations is abhorrent, but justice, self-interest and
the common good demand that those who _can_ do a thing well should do
it, those who cannot should be debarred. This applies to government or
legislation or the exercise of the electoral franchise, as well as to
education, medicine or the arts.
In industry of all kinds, production should be for use, not profit. The
paying of money for the use of money is questionable, both from the
standpoint of morals and of expediency. It may prove that the Church
was right during the Middle Ages in calling it all _usury_, and that
John Calvin, when he declared in its favour, was guilty of a crime.
In any case, the return on capital should be the fixed charge and
small in amount; the margin of profit belongs to those who produce,
whether they work with their brains or their hands. The holding of
land for dwelling and cultivation is essential for every family in any
wholesome society; this land should be sufficient to support the family
at necessity. Land belongs to the community, but tenure thereof on
the part of families or individuals is perpetual, and the land may be
bequeathed or transferred so long as the rent or taxes are duly paid.
Every community is in duty bound to guard its own integrity by
determining its own membership, but none once admitted can be expelled
except by process of law.
No society can endure when a false standard of comparative values
exists. At the present time about half the working male population in
Europe and America is engaged in producing or marketing things which
add nothing to the virtue, the real welfare, or the joy in life of man,
and for the most part he would be better off without them. There are as
many directly or indirectly engaged in getting rid of these essentially
useless products as there are in their manufacture. None of these men
produces anything, and they must be fed, housed and clothed by those
who do. It costs as much to market the surplus product as it does to
bring it into existence, and the consumer pays. The result is that
“labour-saving” machines have vastly increased the burden of labour;
the surplus product demands markets, and exploitation both of labour
and of markets becomes the foundation of industrial civilization. The
modern world has become a perfectly artificial fabric of complicated
indebtedness, the magnitude and ramifications of which are so enormous
that nothing preserves it but public confidence. Were this removed, or
even shaken seriously, the whole fabric would collapse in universal
bankruptcy, a situation even now indicated for all Europe, as may be
seen in Mr. Vanderlip’s remarkable book “What has Happened to Europe.”
It is to correct this silly artifice, to obliterate this preposterous,
wrong-headed and insecure way of life, that sooner or later men, women
and children will seek refuge in the Walled Towns they will build, as
they have gone, time out of mind, into the monasteries and convents of
religion which they built for their earlier refuge.
III