ANY CURE?
I
How shall it all be set right? For it must be, of course. A people that
did not wait to be pushed off its seat by the Kaiser is not likely now
to turn its face to the wall and die inertly of shortage of faith and
general moral debility. Some day soon we shall have to cease squatting
among the potsherds and crabbing each other, and give all the strength
we have left to the job of regaining the old control of ourselves and
our fate which, in the days of our health, could only be kept by putting
forth constantly the whole force of the will. "Not to be done," you may
say. And, of course, it will be a miracle. But only the everyday miracle
done in somebody's body, or else in his soul. When the skin shines white
and tight over the joints, and the face is only a skull with some
varieties of expression, and the very flame flickers and jumps in the
lamp, the body will bend itself up to expel a disease that it could not,
in all its first splendour of health, keep from the door. In all the
breeds of cowardly livers--drunkards, thieves, liars, sorners,
drug-takers, all the kinds that have run from the enemy, throwing away
as they ran every weapon that better men use to repel him--you will find
some that turn in the end and rend with their bare hands the fiend that
they could not face with their bow and their spear.
But these recoveries only come upon terms: no going back to heaven
except through a certain purgatorial passage. There, while it lasts, the
invalid must not expect to enjoy either the heady visions of the fever
that is now taking its leave or the more temperate beatitude of the
health that may presently come. He lies reduced to animal, almost
vegetable, matter, quite joyless and unthrilled, and has to abide in
numb passivity, like an unborn child's, whatever may come of the million
minute molecular changes going on unseen in the enigmatic darkness of
his tissues, where tiny cell is adding itself to tiny cell to build he
knows not what. And then some day the real thing, the second birth as
wonderful as the first, comes of itself and the stars are singing
together all right and the sons of God shouting for joy. The same way
with the spirit, except that the body faints, and so is eased, at some
point in any rising scale of torment: the spirit has to go on through
the mill without such anæsthetics as fainting. So the man who has gone
far off the rails in matters of conduct, and tries to get back to them,
has such hells of patience to live through, and out of, as no liquid
fire known to the war chemists could make for the flesh. To possess your
soul in patience, with all the skin and some of the flesh burnt off your
face and hands, is a job for a boy compared with the pains of a man who
has lived pretty long in the exhilarating world that drugs or strong
waters seem to create and is trying to live now in the first bald
desolation created by knocking them off, the time in which
The dulled heart feels
That somewhere, sealed with hopeless seals,
The unmeaning heaven about him reels,
And he lies hurled
Beyond the roar of all the wheels
Of all the world.
And yet no other way out. Disease and imbecility and an early and
ignoble death, or else that stoic facing, through interminable days, of
an easily escapable dulness that may be anything from an ache up to an
agony.
II
That is about where we stand as a nation. Of course, a few fortunates
mailed in a happy, indefeasible genius of wonder and delight at
everything round them are all right. And so are a few clods of whole-hog
insensibility. Most of us, on the whole, find that effort is less fun
than it was, and many things somewhat dull that used to sparkle with
interest; the salt has lost, not all, but some of its savour; the
grasshopper is a bit of a burden; old hobbies of politics, social
causes, liberal comradeships, the loves and wars of letters and art,
which used to excite, look at times as if they might only have been, at
the best, rather a much ado about nothing; buzzing about our heads there
come importunate suspicions that much of what we used to do so keenly
was hardly worth doing, and that the dim, far goals we used to struggle
towards were only possibly worth trying for and are, anyhow, out of
reach now. That is the somewhat sick spirit's condition. The limp apathy
that we see at elections, the curious indifference in presence of public
wrongs and horrors, the epidemic of sneaking pilferage, the slackening
of sexual self-control--all these are symptomatic like the furred
tongue, subnormal heat, and muddy eye.
Like the hard drinker next morning, we suffer a touch of Hamlet's
complaint, the malady of the dyspeptic soul, of indolent kings and of
pampered youth before it has found any man's work to try itself on--
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
To me are all the uses of the world!
Not the despair of the battered, vanquished, or oppressed, but the
moping of the relaxed, the surfeited, or the morbid. Glad as we all were
to be done with the war, its ends left even the strongest of us a little
let down, as the ends of other long and intense excitements, good or
bad, do. As Ibsen's young woman out in search of thrills would have
said, there were harps in the air during the war. Many of them were
disagreeable in their timbre, but still they were harps. Since the war a
good many of the weaker vessels have somehow failed to find harps in the
air, though there are really plenty of them in full vibration. So they
have run about looking for little pick-me-ups and nips of something
mildly exciting to keep up to par their sagging sense of the
adventuresomeness of life. Derby sweeps never had such a vogue; every
kind of gamble has boomed; dealers in public entertainment have found
that the rawest sensationalism pays better than ever--anything that will
give a fillip, any poor new-whisky fillip, to jaded nerves.
III
Of course, life itself is all right. It never grows dull. All dullness
is in the mind; it comes out thence and diffuses itself over everything
round the dull person, and then he terms everything dull, and thinks
himself the victim of the impact of dull things. In stupid rich people,
in boys and girls deadeningly taught at dead-alive schools, in all
disappointed weaklings and in declining nations, this loss of power to
shed anything but dullness upon what one sees and hears is common
enough. Second-rate academic people, Victorian official art, the French
Second Empire drama, late Latin literature exhibit its ravages well. In
healthy children, in men and women of high mental vitality, in places
where any of the radio-activity of gifted teaching breaks out for a
while, and in swiftly and worthily rising nations the mind is easily
delighted and absorbed by almost any atom of ordinary experience and its
relation to the rest. The wonder and beauty and humour of life go on
just the same as ever whether Spain or Holland or Italy feel them or
miss them; youth would somewhere hear the chimes at midnight with the
stir they made in Shakespeare's wits although all England were peopled
for ages with dullards whose pastors and masters had trained them to
find the divine Falstaffiad as dull as a thaw.
It need not come to that. Sick as we are, we have still in reserve the
last resource of the sick, that saving miracle of recuperative force
with which I have bored you. To let the sick part of our soul just be
still and recover; to make our alcoholized tissues just do their work
long enough on plain water--that, if we can but do it, is all the
sweeping and garnishing needed to make us possible dwelling-places again
for the vitalizing spirit of sane delight in whatever adventure befalls
us. How, then, to do it? Not, I fancy, by any kind of pow-wow or palaver
of congress, conference, general committee, sub-committee, or other
expedient for talking in company instead of working alone. This is an
individual's job, and a somewhat lonely one, though a nation has to be
saved by it. To get down to work, whoever else idles; to tell no lies,
whoever else may thrive on their uses; to keep fit, and the beast in you
down; to help any who need it; to take less from your world than you
give it; to go without the old drams to the nerves--the hero stunt, the
sob story, all the darling liqueurs of war emotionalism, war vanity, war
spite, war rant and cant of every kind; and to do it all, not in a
sentimental mood of self-pity like some actor mounting in an empty
theatre and thinking what treasures the absent audience has lost, but
like a man on a sheep-farm in the mountains, as much alone and at peace
with his work of maintaining the world as God was when he made it.
You remember the little French towns which the pestle and mortar of war
had so ground into dust, red and white, that each separate brick went
back at last, dust to dust, to mix with the earth from which it had
come. The very clay of them has to be put into moulds and fired again.
To some such remaking of bricks, some shaping and hardening anew of the
most elementary, plainest units of rightness in action, we have to get
back. Humdrum decencies, patiently practised through millions of
undistinguished lives, were the myriad bricks out of which all the
advanced architecture of conduct was built--the solemn temples of
creeds, gorgeous palaces of romantic heroism, cloud-capped towers of
patriotic exaltation. And now, just when there seems to be such a babble
as never before about these grandiose structures, bricks have run short.
Something simple, minute, and obscure, wholly good and not pulled up at
all, something almost atomic--a grain of wheat, a thread of wool, a
crystal of clean salt, figures best the kind of human excellence of
which our world has now most need. We would seem to have plunged on too
fast and too far, like boys who have taken to spouting six-syllabled
words until they forget what they had learnt of the alphabet. The moral
beauty of perfect contrition is preached to a beaten enemy by our Press
while the vitals of England are rotting with unprecedented growths of
venereal disease: an England of boundlessly advertised heroes and saints
has ousted the England in which you would never, wherever you travelled,
be given wrong change on a bus.
The wise man saved his little city, "yet no man remembered that same
poor man," and no one had better take to this way of saving England if
what he wants is public distinction. It will be a career as
undistinguished as that of one of the extra corpuscles formed in the
blood to enable a lowland man to live on Himalayan heights. Our best
friends for a long time to come will not be any of the standing
cynosures of reporters' eyes; they will find a part of their
satisfaction in being nobodies; assured of the truth of the saying that
there is no limit to what a man can do so long as he does not care a
straw who gets the credit for it. Working apart from the whole overblown
world of war valuations, the scramble for honours earned and unearned,
the plotting and jostling for front places on the stage and larger
letters on the bill, the whole life that is commonly held up to
admiration as great and enviable, they will live in a kind of retreat
almost cloistral; plenty of work for the faculties, plenty of rest for
the nerves, control for desire and atrophy for conceit. Hard?--yes, but
England is worth it.
IV
Among the mind's powers is one that comes of itself to many children and
artists. It need not be lost, to the end of his days, by anyone who has
ever had it. This is the power of taking delight in a thing, or rather
in anything, everything, not as a means to some other end, but just
because it is what it is, as the lover dotes on whatever may be the
traits of the beloved object. A child in the full health of his mind
will put his hand flat on the summer turf, feel it, and give a little
shiver of private glee at the elastic firmness of the globe. He is not
thinking how well it will do for some game or to feed sheep upon. That
would be the way of the wooer whose mind runs on his mistress's money.
The child's is sheer affection, the true ecstatic sense of the thing's
inherent characteristics. No matter what the things may be, no matter
what they are good or no good for, there they are, each with a thrilling
unique look and feel of its own, like a face; the iron astringently cool
under its paint, the painted wood familiarly warmer, the clod crumbling
enchantingly down in the hands, with its little dry smell of the sun and
of hot nettles; each common thing a personality marked by delicious
differences.
This joy of an Adam new to the garden and just looking round is brought
by the normal child to the things that he does as well as those that he
sees. To be suffered to do some plain work with the real spade used by
mankind can give him a mystical exaltation: to come home with his legs,
as the French say, re-entering his body from the fatigue of helping the
gardener to weed beds sends him to sleep in the glow of a beatitude that
is an end in itself. Then the paradoxes of conduct begin to twinkle into
sight; sugar is good, but there is a time to refrain from taking it
though you can; a lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet,
strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the
scrape and left out the lie. Divine unreason, as little scrutable and
yet as surely a friend as the star that hangs a lamp out from the Pole
to show you the way across gorse-covered commons in Surrey. So he will
toe the line of a duty, not with a mere release from dismay, but
exultantly, with the fire and lifting of heart of the strong man and the
bridegroom, feeling always the same secret and almost sensuous
transport, while he suppresses a base impulse, that he felt when he
pressed the warm turf with his hand or the crumbling clay trickled warm
between his fingers.
The right education, if we could find it, would work up this creative
faculty of delight into all its branching possibilities of knowledge,
wisdom, and nobility. Of all three it is the beginning, condition, or
raw material. At present it almost seems to be the aim of the
commonplace teacher to take it firmly away from any pupil so blessed as
to possess it. How we all know the kind of public school master whose
manner expresses breezy comradeship with the boys in facing jointly the
boredom of admittedly beastly but still unavoidable lessons! And the
assumption that life out of school is too dull to be faced without the
aid of infinitely elaborated games! And the girl schools where it seems
to be feared that evil must come in any space of free time in which
neither a game nor a dance nor a concert nor a lecture with a lantern
intervenes to rescue the girls from the presumed tedium of mere youth
and health! Everywhere the assumption that simple things have failed;
that anything like hardy mental living and looking about for oneself, to
find interests, is destined to end ill; that the only hope is to keep up
the full dose of drugs, to be always pulling and pushing, prompting and
coaxing and tickling the youthful mind into condescending to be
interested. You know the effects: the adolescent whose mind seems to
drop when taken out of the school shafts, or at least to look round,
utterly at a loss, with a plaintive appeal for a suggestion of something
to do, some excitement to come, something to make it worth while to be
alive on this dull earth. We saw the effects in our hapless brain work
in the war.
But if we were to wait to save England till thousands of men and women
brought up in this way see what they have lost and insist on a better
fate for their children we might as well write England off as one with
Tyre and Sidon already. Her case is too pressing. She cannot wait for
big, slowly telling improvements in big institutions, although
improvements must come. She has to be saved by a change in the
individual temper. We each have to fall back, with a will, on the only
way of life in which the sane simplicity of joy in plain things and in
common rightness of action can be generated. Health of mind or body
comes of doing wholesome things--perhaps for a long time without joy in
doing them, as the sick man lies chafing, eating the slops that are all
he is fit for, or as the dipsomaniac drinks in weariness and depression
the insipid water that is to save him. Then, on some great day,
self-control may cease to be merely the sum of many dreary acts of
abstention; it may take life again as an inspiriting force, both a
warmth and a light, such as makes nations great.