OUR MODERATE SATANISTS
I
Satanism is one of the words that most of us simple people have heard
others use; we guiltily feel that we ought to know what it means, but do
not quite like to ask, lest we expose the nakedness of the land. Then
comes Professor Gilbert Murray, one of the few learned men who are able
to make a thing clear to people not quite like themselves, and tells us
all about it in a cheap, small book, easy to read. It seems that the
Satanists, or the pick of the sect, were Bohemian Protestants at the
start, and quite plain, poor men from the country.
"Every person in authority met them with rack and sword, cursed
their religious leaders as emissaries of the Devil, and punished
them for all the things which they considered holy. The earth was
the Lord's, and the Pope and Emperor were the vicegerents of God
upon the earth. So they were told; and in time they accepted the
statement. That was the division of the world. On the one side God,
Pope and Emperor, and the army of persecutors; on the other
themselves, downtrodden and poor...."
How easy to understand! In crude works of non-imagination the wicked,
_repente turpissimus_, suddenly says, some fine morning, "Evil, be thou
my good." In life the conversion is slower. It is a gradual process of
coming to feel that what has passed officially as true, right, and
worshipful is so implicated in work manifestly dirty, and so easily made
to serve the ends of the greedy, lazy, and cruel, that faith in its
authenticity has to be given up as not to be squared with the facts of
the world. From feeling this it is not a long step to the further
surmise that the grand traditional foe of that old moral order of the
world, now so severely discredited, may be less black than so lying an
artist has painted him. Does he not, anyhow, stand at the opposite pole
to that which has just proved itself base? He, too, perhaps, is some
helpless butt of the slings and arrows of an enthroned barbarity
tormenting the world. The legend about his condign fall from heaven may
only be some propagandist lie--all we are suffered to hear about some
early crime in the long, beastly annals of governmental misdoing. So
thought trips, fairly lightly, along till your worthy Bohemian peasant,
literal, serious, and straight, like the plain working-man of all
countrysides, turns, with a desperate logical integrity and courage,
right away from a world order which has called itself divine and shown
itself diabolic. He will embrace, in its stead, the only other world
order supposed to be extant: the one which the former order called
diabolic; at any rate, he has not wittingly suffered any such wrong at
its hand as the scourges of Popes and of Emperors. So the plain man
emerges a Satanist.
II
To-day the convert does not insist upon bearing the new name. He does
not, except in the case of a few doctrinaire bigots, repeat any Satanist
creed. But in several portions of Europe the war made conversions
abound. Imagine the state of mind that it must have induced in many a
plain Russian peasant, literal, serious, and straight, like the
Bohemian. First the Tsar, in the name of God and of Holy Russia, sent
him, perhaps without so much as a rifle, to starve and be shelled in a
trench. If he escaped, the Soviet chiefs, in the name of Justice, sent
him to fight against those for whom the Tsar had made him fight before,
while his wife and babies were starved by those whom he fought both for
and against. When his fighting was done he was made, in the name of
social right, an industrial conscript or wage-slave. If alive, to-day,
he is probably overworked and starved, perhaps far from home, his family
life broken up, his instinct or right of self-direction ignored or
punished as treason by rulers whom he did not choose, his whole country
in danger of lapsing into the abject miseries of an uncared-for
fowl-run--all brought about in the name of human freedom.
Consider, again, the case of some German or Austrian widow with many
young children. The Kaiser's Government, breathing the most Christian
sentiments, gave the Fatherland war in her time; her husband was killed,
her country is ruined, her children are growing up stunted and marred by
all the years of semi-starvation; the Paris Press is crying out, in the
name of moral order throughout the world, that they ought to be starved
more drastically; part of the English Press complains, in the tone of an
outraged spiritual director, that she has shown no adequate signs of
repentance of the Kaiser's sins, and that she and hers are living like
fighting cocks; the German Agrarian Party, in the name of Patriotism,
manoeuvres to keep her from getting her weekly ounce or two of butcher's
meat from abroad more cheaply than they would like to sell it to her at
home.
What could you say to such people if they should break out at last in
despair and defiance: "Anyhow, all these people, here and abroad, who
take upon themselves to speak for God and duty and patriotism and
liberty and loyalty are evil people, and do evil things. Shall not all
these trees that they swear by be judged by their fruits? Away with them
into the fire, God and country and social duty and justice and every old
phrase that used to seem more than a phrase till the war came to show it
up for what it was worth as a means to right conduct in men?" Of course
you could say a great deal. But at every third word they could incommode
you with some stumping case of the foulest thing done in the holiest
name till you would be shamed into silence at the sight of all the
crowns of thorns brought to market by keepers of what you still believe
to be vineyards. So, throughout much of Europe, Satan's most promising
innings for many long years has begun.
III
In their vices as well as their virtues the English preserve a
distinguished moderation. They do not utterly shrink from jobbery, for
example; they do from a job that is flagrant or gross. They give
judgeships as prizes for party support, but not to the utterly
briefless, the dullard who knows no more law than necessity. Building
contractors, when in the course of their rise they become town
councillors, do not give bribes right and left: their businesses thrive
without that. An Irishman running a Tammany in the States cannot thus
hold himself in: the humorous side of corruption charms him too much: he
wants to let the grand farce of roguery rip for all it is worth. But the
English private's pet dictum, "There's reason in everything," rules the
jobber, the profiteer, the shirker and placeman of Albion as firmly as
it controls the imagination of her Wordsworths and the political
idealism of her Cromwells and Pitts. Like her native cockroaches and
bugs, whose moderate stature excites the admiration and envy of human
dwellers among the corresponding fauna of the tropics, the caterpillars
of her commonwealth preserve the golden mean; few, indeed, are
flamboyants or megalomaniacs.
So, when the war with its great opportunities came we were but
temperately robbed by our own birds of prey. Makers of munitions made
mighty fortunes out of our peril. Still, every British soldier did have
a rifle, at any rate when he went to the front. I have watched a
twelve-inch gun fire, in action, fifteen of its great bales or barrels
of high explosives, fifteen running, and only three of the fifteen
costly packages failed to explode duly on its arrival beyond. Vendors of
soldiers' clothes and boots acquired from us the wealth which dazzles us
all in these days of our own poverty. They knew how to charge: they made
hay with a will while the blessed suns of 1914-18 were high in the
heavens. Still, nearly all the tunics made in that day of temptation did
hold together; none of the boots, so far as I knew or heard tell, was
made of brown paper. "He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be
innocent." Still, there is reason in everything. "Meden agan," as the
Greeks said--temperance in all things, even in robbery, even in
patriotism and personal honour. Our profiteers did not bid Satan get him
behind them; but they did ask him to stand a little to one side.
So, too, in the army. Some old Regular sergeant-majors would sell every
stripe that they could, but they would not sell a map to the enemy. Some
of our higher commanders would use their A.D.C. rooms as funk-holes to
shelter the healthy young nephew or son of their good friend the earl,
or their distant cousin the marquis. But there were others. Sometimes a
part of our Staff would almost seem to forget the war, and give its
undivided mind to major struggles--its own intestine "strafes" and the
more bitter war against uncomplaisant politicians at home. But presently
it would remember, and work with a will. There was, again, an undeniable
impulse abroad, among the "best people" of the old Army, to fall back
towards G.H.Q. and its safety as soon as the first few months made it
clear that this was to be none of our old gymkhana wars, but almost
certainly lethal to regimental officers who stayed it out with their
units. But this centripetal instinct, this "safety first" movement,
though real, was moderate. Lists of headquarter formations might show an
appreciable excess of names of some social distinction. But not an
outrageous excess. Some peers and old baronets and their sons were still
getting killed, by their own choice, along with the plebs to the very
end of the war. Again, all through the war one could not deny that those
who had chosen the safer part, or had it imposed upon them, absorbed a
stout and peckish lion's share of the rewards for martial valour. And
yet they did not absolutely withhold these meeds from officers and men
who fought. The king of beasts being duly served, these hard-bitten
jackals got some share, though not perhaps, for their numbers, a copious
one. Some well-placed shirkers were filled with good things, but the
brave were not sent utterly empty away. Guardsmen and cavalrymen, the
least richly brained soldiers we had, kept to themselves the bulk of the
distinguished jobs for which brain-work was needed; and yet the poor
foot-soldier was not expressly taboo; quite a good billet would fall to
him sometimes--Plumer commanded an army.
As with the moral virtues, so with the mental. Brilliancy, genius,
scientific imagination in any higher command would have caused almost a
shock; a general with the demonic insight to see that he had got the
enemy stiff at Arras in 1917 and at Cambrai the same autumn, might have
seemed an _outré_ highbrow, almost unsafe. And yet the utter slacker was
not countenanced, and the dunce had been known to be so dull that he was
sent home as an empty by those unexacting chiefs. There was reason in
everything, even in reason.
IV
All this relative mildness in the irritants administered to the common
Englishman as soldier had its counterpart in the men's ingrained
moderateness of reaction. At Bray-sur-Somme during the battle of 1916 I
saw a French soldier go so mad with rage at what he considered to be the
deficiencies of his leaders that he brought out each article of his kit
and equipment in succession to the door of his billet and threw it into
the deep central mud of the road with a separate curse, at each cast, on
war, patriotism, civilization, and the Commander-in-Chief. This
Athanasian service of commination endured for a full quarter of an hour.
But from an English private who witnessed the rite it only drew the
phlegmatic diagnosis: "He'll 'ave 'ad a drop o' sugar-water an' got
excited." Firewater itself could not excite the English soldier to so
rounded an eloquence or to so sweeping a series of judgements. He never
thought of throwing his messing-tin and his paybook into the mud; still
less of forming a Council of Soldiers and Workmen. Either step would
have been of the abhorred nature of a "scene."
Unaggressive, unoriginal, anti-extreme, contemptuous of all "hot air"
and windy ideas, he too was braked by the same internal negations that
helped to keep his irredeemably middling commanders equidistant from
genius and from arrant failure. Confronted now with the frustration of
so many too-high hopes, the discrediting of so many persons or
institutions hitherto taken on trust, he did not say, as the humbler
sort of Bolshevist seems to have said in his heart: "What order, or
disorder, could ever be worse than this which has failed? Why not
anything, any wild-seeming nihilism or fantasy of savage rudeness,
rather than sit quiet under this old contemptible rule?" Instead of
contracting a violent new sort of heat he simply went cold, and has
remained so. Where a Slav or a Latin might have become a hundred per
cent. Satanist he became about a thirty per center. The disbelief, the
suspicion, the vacuous space in the disendowed heart, the spiritual
rubbish-heap of draggled banners and burst drums--all that blank,
unlighting and unwarming part of Satanism was his, without any other: a
Lucifer cold as a moon prompted him listlessly, not to passionate
efforts of crime, but to self-regarding and indolent apathy.
From the day he went into the army till now he has been learning to take
many things less seriously than he did. First what Burke calls the pomps
and plausibilities of the world. He has tumbled many kings into the dust
and proved the strongest emperor assailable. I remember a little
private, who seemed to know Dickens by heart, applying to William the
Second in 1915 the words used by the Game Chicken about Mr. Dombey--"as
stiff a cove as ever he see, but within the resources of science to
double him up with one blow in the waistcoat." This he proved, too, he
and his like, casting down the proud from their seats with little help
from all that was highly placed and reverently regarded in his own
country. Our ruling class had, on the whole, failed, and had to be
pulled through by him and the French and Americans; that feeling, in one
form or another, is clear in the common man's mind. He may not know in
detail the record of French as commander-in-chief, nor the exact state
of the Admiralty which let the _Goeben_ and the _Breslau_ go free, nor
the inner side of the diplomacy which added Turkey, and even Bulgaria,
to our enemies, nor yet the well-born underworld of war-time luxury,
disloyalty, and intrigue which notorious memoirs have since revealed.
But some horse instinct or some pricking in his thumbs told him
correctly that in every public service manned mainly by our upper
classes the war-time achievement was relatively low. There is very
little natural inclination to class jealousy among plain Englishmen.
Equalitarian theory does not interest them much. Their general relish
for a gamble makes them rather like a lucky-bag or bran-tub society in
which anyone may pick up, with luck, a huge unearned prize. By
cheerfully helping to keep up the big gaming-hell, by giving Barnatos
and Joels pretty full value for their win, the pre-war governing class
gained a kind of strength which a prouder and more fastidious
aristocracy would have forgone. It stands in little physical danger now.
But it lives, since the war, in a kind of contempt. The one good word
that the average private had for bestowal among his unseen "betters"
during the latter years of the war was for the King. "_He_ did give up
his beer" was said a thousand times by men whom that symbolic act of
willing comradeship with the dry throat on the march and the war-pinched
household at home had touched and astonished.
Other institutions, too, had been weighed in the balance. The War Office
was only the commonest of many by-words. The Houses of Parliament, in
which too many men of military age had demanded the forced enlistment of
others, wore an air of insincerity, apart from the loss of prestige
inevitable in a war; for armies always take the colour out of
deliberative assemblies. To moderate this effect a large number of
members who did not go to the war found means to wear khaki in London
instead of black, but this well-conceived precaution only succeeded in
further curling the lip of derision among actual soldiers. The churches,
as we have seen, got their chance, made little or nothing of it, and
came out of the war quite good secular friends with the men, but almost
null and void in their eyes as ghostly counsellors, and stripped of the
vague consequence with which many men had hitherto credited them on
account of any divine mission they might be found to have upon closer
acquaintance. Respect for the truthfulness of the Press was clean gone.
The contrast between the daily events that men saw and the daily
accounts that were printed was final. What the Press said thenceforth
was not evidence. But still it had sent out plum puddings at Christmas.
Neither was anything evidence now that was said by a politician. A great
many plain men had really drawn a distinction, all their lives, between
the solemn public assurances of statesmen and the solemn public
assurances of men who draw teeth outside dock-gates and take off their
caps and call upon God to blast the health of their own darling children
if a certain pill they have for sale does not cure colds, measles,
ring-worm, and the gripes within twenty-four hours of taking. A Swift
might say there never was any difference, but the plain man had always
firmly believed that there was. Now, after the war, he is shaken. Every
disease which victory was to cure he sees raging worse than before: more
poverty, less liberty, more likelihood of other wars, more spite between
master and man, less national comradeship. And then the crucial test
case, the solemn vow of the statesmen, all with their hands on their
sleek bosoms, that if only the common man would save them just that once
they would turn to and think of nothing else, do nothing else, but build
him a house, assure him of work, settle him on land, make all England a
paradise for him--a "land fit for heroes to live in." And then the
sequel: the cold fit; the feint at house-building and its abandonment;
all the bankruptcy of promise; the ultimate bilking, done by way of
reluctant surrender to "anti-waste" stunts got up by the same
cheap-jacks of the Press who in the first year of the war would have had
the statesmen promise yet more wildly than they did. Colds, measles,
ring-worm, and gripes all flourishing, much more than twenty-four hours
after, and new ailments added unto them.
No relief, either, by running from one medicine-man to the next. Few of
our disenchanted men doubt that the lightning cure of the Communist is
only just another version of the lightning cure of the Tory, the
authoritarian, the peremptory regimentalist. "Give _me_ a free hand and
all will be well with you." Both say exactly the same thing in the end.
One of them may call it the rule of the fittest, the other the rule of
the proletariat; each means exactly the same thing--the rule of himself,
the enforcement on everyone else of his own darling theory of what is
best for them, whether they know it or not. Small choice in rotten
apples; one bellyful of east wind is a diet as poor as another. Not in
the yells and counter-yells of this and that vendor of patent hot-air is
the heart of the average ex-soldier engaged. Rather "Away with all
gas-projectors alike" is his present feeling towards eloquent men, Left
or Right. For the moment he knows them too well, and is tired of hearing
of plans which might work if he were either a babe in arms or a Michael
of super-angelic wisdom and power.
V
You may be disillusioned about the value of things, or about their
security, either coming to feel that your house is a poor place to live
in or that, pleasant or not, it is likely enough to come down on your
head. Of these two forms of discomfort our friend experiences both. Much
that he took to be fairly noble now looks pretty mean; and much that
seemed reassuringly stable is seen to be shaky. Civilization itself, the
at any rate habitable dwelling which was to be shored up by the war,
wears a strange new air of precariousness.
Even before the war a series of melancholy public mis-adventures had
gone some way to awake the disquieting notion that civilization, the
whole ordered, fruitful joint action of a nation, a continent, or the
whole world, was only a bluff. When the world is at peace and fares
well, the party of order and decency, justice and mercy and
self-control, is really bluffing a much larger party of egoism and greed
that would bully and grab if it dared. The deep anti-social offence of
the "suffragettes," with their hatchets and hunger-strikes, was that
they gave away, in some measure, the bluff by which non-criminal people
had hitherto kept some control over reluctant assentors to the rule of
mutual protection and forbearance. They helped the baser sort to see
that the bluff of civilization is at the mercy of anyone ready to run a
little bodily risk in calling it. Sir Edward Carson took up the work. He
"called" the bluff of the Pax Britannica, the presumption that armed
treason to the law and order of the British Empire must lead to the
discomfiture of the traitor, whoever he was; he presented Sinn Fein and
every other would-be insurgent with proof that treason may securely do
much more than peep at what it would; British subjects, he showed, might
quite well conspire for armed revolt against the King's peace and not be
any losers, in their own persons, by doing it.
The greatest of all bluffs, the general peace of the world and the joint
civilization of Europe, remained uncalled for a year or two more. It was
a high moral bluff. People were everywhere saying that world-war was too
appalling, too frantically wicked a thing for any government to invite
or procure. Peace, they argued, held a hand irresistibly strong. Had she
not, among her cards, every acknowledged precept of Christianity and of
morality, even of wisdom for a man's self or a nation's? Potsdam called
the world's bluff, and the world's hand was found to be empty. Potsdam
lost the game in the end, but it had not called wholly in vain. To a
Europe exhausted, divided, and degraded by five years of return to the
morals of the Stone Age it had suggested how many things are as they
are, how many things are owned as they are, how many lives are safely
continued, merely because our birds of prey have not yet had the wit to
see what would come of a sudden snatch made with a will and with
assurance. The total number of policemen on a race-course is always a
minute percentage of the total number of its thieves and roughs. The bad
men are not held down by force; they are only bluffed by the pretence of
it. They have got the tip now, and the plain man is dimly aware how
surprisingly little there is to keep us all from slipping back into the
state we were in when a man would kill another to steal a piece of food
that he had got, and when a young woman was not safe on a road out of
sight of her friends.
The plain man, so far as I know him, is neither aghast nor gleeful at
this revelation. For the most part he looks somewhat listlessly on, as
at a probable dog-fight in which there is no dog of his. A sense of
moral horror does not come easily when you have supped full of horrors
on most of the days of three or four years; sacrilege has to go far,
indeed, to shock men who have seen their old gods looking extremely
human and blowing out, one by one, the candles before their own shrines.
Some new god, or devil, of course, may enter at any time into this
disfurnished soul. Genius in some leader might either possess
it with an anarchic passion to smash and delete all the
old institutions that disappointed in the day of trial or fire it with a
new craving to lift itself clear of the wrack and possess itself on the
heights. For either a Lenin or a St. Francis there is a wide field to
till, cleared, but of pretty stiff clay. Persistently sane in his
disenchantment as he had been in his rapture, the common man, whose
affection and trust the old order wore out in the war, is still slow to
enlist out-and-out in any Satanist unit. There's reason, he still feels,
in everything. So he remains, for the time, like one of the angels whom
the Renaissance poet represented as reincarnate in man; the ones who in
the insurrection of Lucifer were not for Jehovah nor yet for his enemy.