_A Lecture Delivered at the Sorbonne on March 15th, 1927_
In the face of this audience, in the presence of so many distinguished
men and women, I feel in a very apologetic state to-night.
I am not accustomed to make public addresses. I am not used to being
entertained in this flattering fashion. But the invitation I received
to come here was so tactfully and charmingly conveyed, and did me so
much honour, that I could scarcely do otherwise than obey and come.
I come, if you will permit me to say so, less for the great compliment
that your attention does me personally than because this gives me an
opportunity of saluting France, the custodian of the world’s artistic
conscience, the exponent of intellectual freedom, the mighty mother
of valiant and liberal thought for all mankind. The name of the
Sorbonne is a very magical name to every intellectual worker, and I do
not disguise from myself that to speak here to-night is the highest
distinction that is ever likely to fall to me.
You receive me to-night as a man of letters. And as a man of letters
I know I am not very easy to define. I am something of a romancer,
something of a novelist, something of a publicist. I have written
essays and social speculations. I have stolen and dressed myself up
in the plumage of the historian. I have written schoolbooks and a
scientific handbook. For my own part, I fall back upon _Journalist_ as
the least misleading description of my use in the world.
But let me disabuse your minds of any idea that it is out of modesty
or as a pose of modesty that I call myself a Journalist and my very
miscellaneous mass of work Journalism, and that I am conceding a
superiority in kind and quality, as an iron pot might concede a
superiority to a porcelain vessel, to the novelist, the romancer, the
social philosopher, or the political essayist. I am not doing that. I
am not raising that sort of issue. I am not thinking of rank and order
and precedence. What I am doing is trying to express, in as bright
and hard a manner as possible, a very definite view of the value of
all literary effort, all literary and artistic effort. I am trying to
express, in so far as my own activities go, my sense of the temporary
nature, the transitory and personal nature, of every statement made by
science and philosophy and of every beauty revealed by art.
If I find any difference between my mind and the minds of most of the
people I meet, it is that my perception of time is rather more detached
than is usual from the dimensions of the individual life; that my mind
is, as it were, a small-scale map of wide range; that I think with
less detail and in longer stretches; that the race process as a whole
has come home to me with unusual vividness, and that future things and
our relationship to future things have an abnormal reality for me. And
consequently it is natural for me to think that the man of letters,
the artist, the scientific worker, and the philosopher live first and
foremost for their own time and for the times immediately following
their own, and that thereafter their real value diminishes.
Tradition and educational pressure may mask this process to a certain
extent, but only mask it. We belong to our own times and have
significance only in relation to our own times. And this is as true of
those we call “Immortals,” of Homer, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo
or Leonardo or Voltaire, in the measure of their scale, as it is of you
and me who are thinking and discussing here to-night. Great or little,
we work, we serve our purpose, we pass. Into the night or into the
museum of antiquities at last go one and all. Art, poesy, philosophy,
literature, are not permanent things. They change in their methods,
their function, their essential nature...
And when I say that, I do not belittle them, but glorify them. They
are living processes like ourselves who breed and pass, and not dead
things like crystals or cut gems to be treasured for ever in the vaults
of the classical temple. All of them but the mere bric-à-brac I would
sweep into one living mortality as Journalism in its widest sense. The
picture, the music, the book, the research that does not arise out of
actual current things--and does not bear upon what we are doing or what
we intend to do--does not in reality exist. It is a phantom. It is a
pretension. It is Nothing. Science, art, literature, philosophy, all
alike record Humanity’s impression of the present and its attempt to
adjust itself for a future. They express the thought and embody the
will--the growing changing thought, the developing will--of mankind.
They are not a beautiful excrescence upon human life; not mere pearls
secreted by the effort and suffering of mankind; they are the very core
of the life of mankind--its chief directive function.
Now, after this much of self-introduction, I will put before you
certain speculations that occupy me very much. I put them before you
not as something thought out and presented to you in a finished state,
but as something about which I find myself greatly exercised--something
that may evoke kindred operations going on in your minds also, and so
interest you this evening.
I propose to launch a generalization, a generalization about the
probable forms of expression prevalent now and in the immediate
future--expression in political, social, literary, and artistic life.
I am going to suggest that we are in the beginning of an age whose
broad characteristics may be conveyed some day by calling it The Age of
Democracy Under Revision. That title I have chosen by way of defining
its relation to the age which has been drawing to its close under our
eyes: the Age of Democracy Ascendent.
Let us begin by exploring common ground. It would be easy to find
quite a large number of intelligent and well-instructed people who
would agree that the sixteenth century saw the germination, the
seventeenth and the eighteenth the birth struggles, the nineteenth the
rise and prevalence of something called Modern Democracy. Something
not merely political, but social, and profoundly differentiating
the literature and art of this time--quite as much as the political
life--from those of any previous period. That Ascendency of Democracy
has culminated; and like some wave that breaks upon a beach, its end
follows close upon its culmination.
Now what do we mean by this word Democracy? We are apt to say that
such words as Democracy and Socialism may mean anything or nothing.
But the truth is, that, in spite of many variations and convolutions,
both these words retain very definite meanings indeed. One might
compare them to little bags given to a multitude of children to collect
anything they liked from a pebble beach. In such bags, you might find
at the end of the day a great variety of things; in no two bags would
you find exactly the same things, and yet for all that in nearly all
the bags would you find very much the same content.
I suppose we should, nearly all of us, be in agreement that what we
meant by Democracy--in the modern sense--was expressed morally by the
statement:
_All human beings are of equal value in the sight of God_; or legally:
_All men are equal before the law;_
or practically:
_One man’s money is as good as another’s._
This implies a repudiation of caste, of inherent rank and function,
of all privileges and all fixed subordinations. It is equalitarian or
rebellious. And it is mildly paradoxical in the fact that, by insisting
upon the importance of _all_ individualities, it tends to restrain the
exaltation of particular individuals, and by exalting all individuals
to an equal level, it subordinates all individuals to the mass.
The democratic idea is no doubt very deeply rooted in the competitive
and insurgent heart of man. It is implicit in Christianity and in
Islam. But it was only in the sixteenth century, with the progressive
decay of Feudalism, that it began to be effective in the literary,
political, and artistic expression of mankind. If you reflect, I think
you will agree that its appearance was everywhere associated with the
breakdown of outworn or outpaced systems, with processes of release
and liberation, and generally also with processes of disintegration.
Democracy to many minds will also involve the challenging and
repudiation of authority. Some Catholic Democrats may question that,
but I believe I shall have the general feeling with me in accepting
that relaxation also as an aspect of Democracy.
Now as Democracy became ascendent in our world, its spirit produced
new forms in political life, in literature, in art, in music. Let us
consider these distinctive forms.
In politics it produced government by elected representative
assemblies--elected by an ever-widening constituency of voters. We
have Chambers of Representatives, Parliaments, spread throughout the
world, and we have seen the franchise extend until manhood, and at last
womanhood, suffrage seems everywhere in sight. It is strange to us
nowadays to imagine a fully organized country without a constitution,
a Parliament and periodic appeals to the mass of voters to endorse an
elected Government periodically replaceable. Yet six hundred years ago
such a way of managing public affairs would have seemed fantastic. The
Ancient World knew nothing of such devices. There were assemblies then,
but not representative assemblies. The Greek democracies and Republican
Rome assembled all their citizens. Even countries like France and
England before the sixteenth century, which had Parliaments of a sort,
did not conceive of them for a moment as governing bodies and kept
the elected element in a minor position. I doubt if many of us fully
realize the significance of the fact that the current political methods
and assumptions of the world to-day, prevalent from China to Peru,
would have been almost inconceivable even to highly intelligent human
beings until twelve or fifteen generations ago.
So much for the political expression of Democracy. In literature the
democratic spirit found its natural vehicle in the Novel. That too was
new and distinctive. The tale, the story of adventures, mankind has
had always--most usually of kings, princes, and heroic leaders--but
it was only with the ascent of Democracy that stories of characters,
histories of common individual lives detached from politics, detached
from any sense of social function, getting loose from any subordination
or any responsibility, rose towards dominance in literature. At the
very outset of the ascent of Democracy came the great master Cervantes
with his “Don Quixote,” scoffing at aristocracy, scoffing at privileged
responsibility, mocking at the final futility of chivalrous mastery,
putting his wisest words into the mouth of a clown and letting the
flour mills of the common bread-eater overthrow his knight in armour.
As modern Democracy rose to its climax, the novel rose to its climax.
The common characteristic of almost all the great novels of the
nineteenth century, and up to our own time, is that they represent
great crowds of individuals who follow trades, professions, and so
forth, and who have either no public function or, if they have a public
function, are not so differentiated by it that it is of any serious
importance to the story and the values of the novel. The crowd of
individuals and its interplay have become everything. Great ideas that
bind people together into any form of collective life are disregarded.
Great religious ideas, great political ideas and developments are not
there in any living, fermenting, debatable form--are even challenged
and forbidden by the critics as having no place there. Consider
Balzac, Dickens, Turgeniev, Zola, and suchlike representative giants
of this closing age. You think at once of a picture of humanity like
a market-place, like a fair, like the high-road to anywhere on a busy
day. When political life appears, it appears just as any other sort of
life. Here is a novel about elections and their humours, and here is
one about peasants or fishermen. Just different scenery and costumes
for the common story.
It strikes one at first as paradoxical that a period in which the
exaltation of the individual has tended to make every one a voter, a
fractional sovereign of the whole world, should lead in the literary
expression of the time to the disappearance, so to speak, of the
whole world in a crowd of people. But the paradox involves no real
inconsistency. What is everybody’s business is nobody’s business. The
literature of the period of Democracy Ascendent displays what its
political developments mask only very thinly--that Modern Democracy
is not a permanent form of political and social life, but a phase of
immense dissolution.
I think it would be comparatively easy to call the drama of the
last three centuries to confirm the evidence of the novel. With the
beginning of the period under consideration the Miracle Play which gave
you Everyman and related him to God and Heaven and Hell gave place to
Falstaff and his jolly companions, to the jealousy of Othello and the
social aspirations of Monsieur Jourdain. If we turn to painting or to
music we find all over this period the same effect of release--if you
like--detachment, anyhow, from broad constructive conceptions and any
sort of synthesis. There was very little detached painting in the old
world. It was a part of something else. It decorated a building, it
subserved a religious or political as well as a decorative purpose. If
paintings were ever detachable, it was that they might be carried from
a studio to an altar or a palace elsewhere. But with the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries painting became more and more liberated, said
good-bye to the altar-piece and the palace, and set out upon a life of
its own. Now our painters are pure anarchists. They paint what pleases
them for the sake of painting. They paint with a total disregard of
any collective reality, and they are extremely offended when we build
our houses with insufficient accommodation for their bright irrelevant
observations upon the beauty of this and that.
So, too, music has broken loose. In the old world it was relevant
and generally subordinate. I can imagine nothing more astonishing
to a revenant from the ancient to our present world--not even a
general election!--than a visit to a large concert-hall during the
performance, let us say, of Debussy’s “L’Après-midi d’un Faune” or
Ravel’s “Septette,”--this gathering of fortuitous people with no common
function, to listen to music which, apart from its beauty, has no sort
of collective meaning, no social object at all.
So far I have been attempting to make a case for the assertion that a
consideration of the chief forms of human expression during the past
age enables us to see in all of them Democracy as a great process of
loosening of bonds and general disintegration. But that loosening
and disintegration were not universal. Now I would point out that in
certain fields synthesis is so necessary, so inherent, that it has put
up a very successful fight against the solvent tendencies of Democracy.
In certain fields the ascent of Democracy has not meant dissolution.
No doubt the whole world of modern science became possible, and could
only become possible, through the immense mental releases of ascendent
Democracy. But while in the realms of political, literary, and artistic
expression Democracy meant fragmentation and reduction to unorganized
masses, in this newer world of science the onset of Democracy was
accompanied by synthesis of the most extensive sort. The development of
science in the past three centuries has been diametrically different
from the political, literary, and artistic development of the same
period. In the preceding ages, when everything else was organized
and relevant, science was a mere miscellany of disconnected facts.
With the release of the human mind from authority, science began to
be systematic and coherent. Release from established traditions and
precedences meant in the world of politics, literature, and art,
limitless freedom. In science it meant subjugation to experimental
verification and the logical consistency of fact with fact. So while
the broad visible history of the Age of Democracy so far has been one
of release, escape, go-as-you-please: less conspicuous in laboratories
and faculties and books and classes--but in the end infinitely more
significant--has been the growth of one consistent vision of reality to
which all things must be referred, in which the moods of a man are made
to march with chemical changes, and the structure of the smallest atom
is brought into relation with the physics of the remotest star. To that
release of synthetic forces I shall presently return.
Next let me point out that this period of the ascent of Democracy
has by no means been a period of easy, undisputed ascent. Nor has it
been merely a struggle against kings and aristocracies, privileges
and advantages, ancient traditions and old authority. The proposition
that any man is as important as any man has come hard against certain
mental and material realities. History for the last hundred years or so
has been largely the story of that collision. This assertion of human
equality has come against the severest stresses at the boundaries where
language meets language, and at the geographical or social frontiers of
dissimilar races. There the common man, who has been willing to break
down all the boundaries between himself and his superiors, discovers
deep instinctive dispositions to call a halt and draw the line. His
mind is invaded by an exaggerated sense of difference. He develops
rivalries, suspicions, antagonisms. The Age of Democracy has also
been the Age of Nationalism. Never in the whole history of mankind
have national and racial antagonisms been so acute and conscious, so
massive, powerful, and dangerous, as they have become during the ascent
of Democracy. And yet that is entirely inconsistent with the larger
and completer aspirations of Democracy, which have insisted always
that there shall be no distinctions of class or creed or race. One of
the most human and interesting things to watch at the present time is
the struggle of the Labour parties in the European democracies against
their ingrained nationalist feelings and their belligerent patriotism.
And still more edifying are the fluctuations of the Labour movement in
such countries as Australia and South Africa with regard to yellow and
brown immigration and the black vote.
But nationalism is not the greatest force that Modern Democracy has
evoked against itself in its ascent. Far more fundamental is the
synthetic drive in economic life, the enormous material pressure making
for the replacement of individual and small competitive businesses by
great and unifying enterprises, not merely in manufactures but in the
production of such staples as coal, oil, iron and steel, cotton, food
substances, and fundamental chemical products. The small man and the
medium-sized business are pushed aside by highly organized and often
quite scientifically organized concerns.
Here again the paradoxical aspect of Democracy reappears. These
great crystallizations of business--so large as to become at last
monopolies--are plainly due to the releases of Democracy, the freedom
of science, invention, experiment and enterprise, the lack of control
and restriction the ascent of Democracy has involved. But just as
plainly do these crystallizations run counter to the more intimate
feeling of Democracy that every man is as good as every man, that every
man should be his own master and live his life in his own fashion
after his own heart. Essential to the life and success of these big
businesses is an intricate system of specialization and subordination
of functions, and great freedoms of action for the executives. Most
of those engaged in working them must be simply employed persons, and
there must be great inequalities of authority and initiative between
one man and another. In America a sort of reconciliation between this
democratic reality of economic synthesis and democratic ideals of
quality has been attempted by Anti-Trust legislation, and in England
there is a small but delightfully logical movement for what is called
the Distributive State, which is to cut up big businesses periodically
and hand the bleeding fragments back to the common man. But the main
expression of this conflict between synthesis and analysis in the
democratic age has been the struggle for and against Socialism. For
there is scarcely any form of Socialism that does not fall within the
definition of an attempt to take the general economic life out of
whatever hands control it at present and hand it over to the direction
either of representatives elected by the workers, or of politicians
elected by the voters of the entire community. Socialism is the attempt
to democratize economic life as political life has already been
democratized. And the final practical objection to Socialism, partial
or general--the objection that has usually carried the argument--has
always been this: that politicians and elected people are not good
enough for the job.
That brings me to the great conspicuous fact of our present time, to
what I may call the arrest, the pause, in the advance of political
Democracy--to the fact that now, and since the war, there has been
a growing distrust of and discontent with the politicians and the
political methods evolved by Parliamentary Democracy.
In two great Latin countries we have seen politicians and parliamentary
institutions thrust aside with no signs of popular regret. In
Russia a parliamentary republic appeared and vanished like a dream
and gave place to a government by an organized association of a
quite unprecedented pattern, the Communist Party, making only the
slightest concessions to the representative idea. In China we see
another extraordinary organization, the Kuomintang, consolidating the
whole country with tremendous vigour in the face of the discredited
parliamentarianism of Peking. I will not discuss nor even raise other
instances to enforce my argument that the magic has gone out of the
method of government by general elections.
I have said enough, I think, to pose my essential question. Is the
process of ascendent Democracy played out? Or is it going on upon the
old lines, in spite of these appearances? Or is it perhaps entering
upon a new phase, a phase so different as practically to open a new
age in the story of human experience? Are not its synthetic releases
overtaking and mastering its tendency to fragmentation?
I have already betrayed, even in my title, the answer I am disposed
to give to these questions, which is that Democracy is entering upon
a phase of revision in which Parliaments and parliamentary bodies and
political life as we know it to-day are destined to disappear. And that
with the disappearance will come profound changes in all our methods of
expression, indeed in all our lives.
For a number of generations the democratic process ruling the world
has meant nothing but release, enfranchisement for freedom, the
breaking down of controls and restraints and obstacles. There has
been a world-wide detachment of individuals from codes and controls,
subjugations and responsibilities, functions and duties. I suggest that
this process of dissolution is at an end, and that mankind is faced--is
challenged--by the need for reorganization and reorientation, political
and social and intellectual, quite beyond the power of the negligent
common voter and his politicians and the happy-go-lucky education and
literature on which our minds are fed.
Let me state three great interrelated problems that have been facing
mankind since the war, and let me remind you how futile so far have
been the attempts of our modern democratic Governments and communities
to find solutions, to produce any hope of solutions, for these problems.
Foremost of these three in our consciousness is the problem of war. I
need not, before such an audience as this, dilate upon the cruelty, the
horror, the sheer destructiveness into which the war process, equipped
by modern science, necessarily develops. I will not talk of air
bombardment, or of poison gas and germs, nor of the practical abolition
of the immunity of the non-combatant, nor of the complete economic and
social disorganization that would probably ensue upon another group of
wars. I take it that upon these matters you are of the same mind as
myself. I take it that an enormous majority of humanity now wants no
more war.
Yet consider how feeble have been the efforts of any Government since
1918 to set up more than the flimsiest paper barriers against war. The
sabres still rattle in Europe. The big guns are moved from position
to position. In 1910 war hung over Europe, over the world, like a
cliff we knew must fall. And it fell. Here and now, are we any safer?
For what were these politicians elected? Little conferences, little
junketings, little demonstrations of amiability--like tying back the
cliff with coloured cotton. Meanwhile the foundries go on making tanks,
battleships, guns, all the world over.
And second of these three problems Modern Democracy has no power to
handle is the monetary question. If anything is plain, if there is
anything upon which every one must be agreed, it is that for the proper
working of contemporary civilization a stable money basis of world-wide
validity is essential. Just so far as money is unstable, so far does
speculation undermine and replace sound business enterprise and honest
work for profit. For eight years now we have seen the exchanges of the
world dance together. We have seen the effort for economic recuperation
crippled and deflected by this drunkard dance of money. Each democratic
Government has pursued its own policy according to its lights and
apparent interests. The bankers and the financiers have performed their
mysterious operations in obscurity. And nowhere, in any Democracy, has
the mass of voters shown the slightest understanding of or ability to
grasp the processes which threw them out of employment, made their poor
savings evaporate, and snatched the necessaries of life out of their
reach.
But the military obsession with its war threat and the monetary tangle
are, so to speak, merely complications of the more general riddle
before mankind, which is that, chiefly through changes in methods of
transport and the advance of science and invention, economic life
has become world-wide and a certain economic unity is being imposed
willy-nilly upon the globe. A vast change of scale is happening in
economic life--a vast extension of range. So that the method of the
small individual manufacturer and trader, the method even of the
moderate-sized competing company, the method even of national groups,
tend to be superseded, in the case of all our staple supplies, by
combinations upon a universal scale. The master problem before us all,
before our race, is how to achieve this world economic unity, how to
produce a system of world controls with as little blind experiment
as possible, without the sacrifice of countless millions of whole
generations, in the throes of this inevitable reconstruction. How
to establish enough political unity in the world to ensure peace;
how to establish enough political unity to save industry and trade
from becoming the mere preliminaries to a gamble with the exchange;
how to establish enough political unity to control and direct the
distribution of raw products, employment and manufactured goods about
the earth--that, in brief, is the present task before the human
intelligence. And we have no Governments, we have nothing in the world
able to deal with this trinity of problems, this three-headed Sphinx
which has waylaid and now confronts mankind.
Now the sense of the inadequacy of modern democratic Governments
for the task before them grows upon us all. What is going to be
attempted, what is going to be done in the matter? We are all familiar
nowadays with various projects of electoral reform. Some, such as the
Referendum, aim merely at restraining and paralyzing Governments.
Others, such as the proposal to have smaller representative bodies of
members elected by large constituencies by the methods of proportional
representation by the simple transferable vote, would no doubt give
a more free and vigorous assembly, and go far to abolish political
parties and the hack professional politician. But none of these
electoral reform projects go to the root of the trouble with Modern
Democracy, which is the indifference, ignorance, and incapacity of the
common man towards public affairs.
We have to recognize more plainly than is generally admitted to-day
that the ordinary voter does not care a rap for his vote. He does
not connect it with the idea of the world at large, nor use it to
express any will or purpose whatever about the general conduct of
things. I have already called attention to the fact that the novel,
the characteristic literary form of Modern Democracy, and the modern
drama ignore all comprehensive political and religious ideas. Thereby
they display current reality with the utmost veracity. These forms,
the novel and the play, have so far embodied no new concepts and
directions about life as a whole, they have simply represented life
at large released from pre-existing concepts and directions. Our
modern democratic Governments reveal as clearly that the onset of
Modern Democracy did not mean a transfer of power from the few to the
many, but a disappearance of power from the world. The vote is an
instrument of defence, and not a constructive tool. Faced with gigantic
constructive needs of ever-increasing urgency, political Democracy
fails. It cannot produce inventive and original Governments; it
cannot produce resolute Governments; it cannot produce understanding,
far-thinking Governments. Its utmost act of will is the capricious or
peevish dismissal of Governments by a general election.
For a century or more it has worked well that the world should be
under-governed and under-organized. In that liberty science has won its
way, established itself in a world-wide system of research and record,
gained an invincible inertia. Music has achieved the most glorious
developments, painting risen to unprecedented levels of technique,
literature learnt a new fearlessness, and industry and commerce
have tried and expanded a thousand subtle and huge combinations no
official control would ever have permitted. The mere breakdown of the
cramping systems of the past, the escape from traditional privilege and
authority, was enough to permit the great expansion of life that has
gone on since the sixteenth century. But there is a limit to unguided
and uncontrolled expansion, and at that limit we seem to have arrived
with a war threat, a monetary instability, and a chronic conflict
between the organic growth of economic processes and the desire of the
worker for freedom and happiness, which none of the Governments in the
world seem to have the necessary initiative and vigour to meet.
We need now more definite direction and government in human affairs,
on a scale and of a quality commensurate with the three mighty problems
our race has to face. It is idle to talk of returning to the little
royalties, aristocracies, and so forth of the pre-democratic past.
Are there any signs of a new, more decisive, and more vigorously
constructive form of government in our world? I submit there are, and
on these signs I rest my anticipations of the Age of Democracy Under
Revision that is dawning upon us. Coming events cast their shadows
before, and a keen eye can detect a number of shadows of what is
coming. But the two shadows to which I would particularly draw your
attention are the Communist Party and Fascism.
Let me be perfectly clear upon one point here. I am an unsparing
hostile critic of Marxist Communism. I have a strong dislike for many
aspects of Fascism--including particularly its head. May I insist upon
that? There is a mental disease about called “Seeing red,” and I want
to avoid any manifestations of that to-night. I am not sympathetic with
Communist ideas. In my latest book, “The World of William Clissold,”
you will find a most careful, elaborate, and destructive criticism of
Marxism, and my treatment of Lenin has brought down upon me the violent
vituperation of Mr. Trotsky. Quite as fervently have I plunged into
conflict with Fascism. I am anti-Communist and anti-Fascist. But what I
am discussing now is not the mental content of these two movements, but
their quality and spirit as organizations.
Their quality and spirit as organizations.... They are both mainly
composed of youngish people. They are so far democratic that they are
open to any one who will obey their disciplines and satisfy their
requirements. Some of my hearers may know something of the intimate
lives of young Communists or young Fascists. The movement dominates the
entire life. The individual gives himself--or herself--to the movement
in a spirit essentially religious. It enters into the life and into
the conscience as few religions do nowadays. Communism indeed claims
that it is a complete substitute for religion. Everything else is to be
subordinated to the ends of the movement. With the Fascist these are
the supposed good of the Italian community; with the Communist they
are the supposed good of the whole world. These movements began as
voluntary movements of young people, so concerned about public affairs
as willingly to give themselves to the sacrifices and dangers--and
adventure--involved. I submit it is a fact of profound significance
that Fascism could attract enough vigorous young people to capture and
hold and govern Italy, and that the Communist Party, with perhaps a
hundred thousand members or so in Russia, could seize upon the ruins of
that war-broken land and hold it against all comers.
One has to admit, in spite of many assertions to the contrary, that
neither in Italy nor Russia do the masses of the population seem to
resent the dictatorship of these associations. No vote famine has
broken out in these disenfranchised countries. You do not find haggard
peasants wandering about in search of a polling booth. So that our
assertion that the average common man, the common voter, does not care
a rap about the commonweal and his vote, has to be supplemented by
the fact that there is an active-minded minority capable of so vivid
an interest in the direction of public affairs as to make the most
complete sacrifices to see things going in the way it considers right.
This is most conspicuous in Russia and Italy, but in China students’
associations, closely similar in character, are taking possession of
the larger half of the country, and in Japan and many other countries
kindred bodies of mentally energetic types are playing an increasingly
important rôle in public life. In the nineteenth century such types
were either not stimulated to activity, or their energies were spent
upon parliamentary politics or diverted in other directions. Now all
over the world a certain section of them is taking its activities out
of parliamentary affairs and setting itself into vigorous competition
with the parliamentary system.
You see, I am building my expectation of a new phase in human affairs
upon the belief that there is a profoundly serious minority in the
mass of our generally indifferent species. I cannot understand the
existence of any of the great religions, I cannot explain any fine
and grave constructive process in history, unless there is such a
serious minority amidst our confusions. They are the salt of the earth,
these people capable of devotion and of living lives for remote and
mighty ends--and, unless the composition of our species has altered,
they are as numerous as they have ever been. I see them less and less
satisfied and used by existing loyalties and traditional faiths. I see
them ready to crystallize about any constructive idea powerful enough
to grip their minds. Is it not reasonable then to hold that these
associations, these concentrations of mentally energetic types for
political ends, these revelations of politico-religious fervour in the
community--considerable as they are even now--are the mere beginnings
of much greater things? The breakdown of the old loyalties and the
old faiths in the past age has released this great fund of effort and
synthetic possibility for new applications. And over against it we have
the need for world peace--which can be achieved only by some sort of
political unity--and for social adjustment, which seems only possible
through the comprehensible handling of world economic affairs as one
great system.
More than twenty years ago, in a book called “A Modern Utopia,” when
there was not a fact on earth to support me, I sketched a World State
ruled by a self-devoted organization of volunteers. To-day I can
recall that conception of a future society and I can appeal to Russia,
China, Italy, and much that is astir everywhere, to substantiate that
possibility. I have spoken of the youth in these two specimen movements
I have cited, but it is not merely the young who will be found willing
to orient their dispersed lives to great aims and comprehensive ideas.
The pain of aimlessness and ineffectiveness can be aroused at any
age with the realization of insecurity. The search for a consuming
objective ends only with life. In short, we have the morally energetic
types needed for such a movement in a released and nascent state.
We have the manifest need for such a movement. We are gathering the
creative ideas and accumulating the impulse for such a movement.
What is there to prevent a great politico-religious drive for social
and world unity taking hold everywhere of the active and adventurous
minority of mankind--that is to say, of all mankind that matters--even
quite soon?
That is the essence of what I want to put before you to-night. That
is what I mean when I say that the phase of Democracy as release has
come to its end, and that we are already in the beginning of the phase
of Democratic Synthesis, a great religious-spirited phase. If you
choose to link it to Christianity or Islam or Buddhism or any existing
democratic religion; or to Communism, that religious substitute; or
call it in itself the Religion of Progress, nothing that I am saying
here to-night will stand in your way. And if this diagnosis is correct,
then necessarily the changing spirit of Democracy, the change from
fragmentation and irrelevance to synthesis and reference to directive
general ideas on a universal scale, will become apparent in all forms
of human expression.
Here with the time at my disposal I can but ask: Is that so? In
political life, is there any tendency among intelligent people to
be dissatisfied with the passive rôle of voters and to attempt, in
all sorts of ways, to exert a direct influence on common affairs?
In intellectual life, is there an increasing tendency to discuss
world-wide problems--political, economic, social? Is there a marked
increase of such literature? A livelier interest in such questions? If
this thesis is right, the novel and the drama should be changing. They
should both be bringing in great issues, a _quasi_-religious attitude
to world affairs as a living part of the human story. The novel should
no longer be merely a picture of a spectacle relying for its interest
upon adventures and the extraordinary traits of individual characters,
in no way responsible for the whole. It should be turning decisively
towards responsibility, to what I might call creative propaganda. It
should be permeated by the question: “What do these lives make for?”
And the drama--to turn to the drama--should be no longer the well-made
play grouping itself around a situation. Is such a play as Shaw’s
“Saint Joan,” or Toller’s “Masses and Men,” any intimation of Synthetic
Democracy upon the stage? Again, is there in painting and music any
tendency to return from--what shall I say?--pure painting and pure
music to breadth and profundity of reference?
Well, I ask these questions. I put these ideas before you. I have done
my best to give you my impression of this new phase into which human
life is passing, and my forecast of the new spirit that I believe will
guide the criticism of expression in the time before us. And I thank
you with all my heart for the reception and the attention you have
given me.