neither he nor Sir Wilfrid knew any more about the happiness of beasts
and birds than do the rest of us. But that brave old hopeful, Whitman,
would have laughed his loudest over Blunt’s final analysis of the
situation: “All the world would be a paradise in twenty years if man
could be shut out.” A paradise already imaged by Lord Holland and the
poet Gray:
“Owls would have hooted in Saint Peter’s choir,
And foxes stunk and littered in Saint Paul’s.”
To turn from these pages of pettish and puerile complaint to the
deep-seated discontent of Henry Adams is to reënter the world of the
intellect. Mark Pattison confessed that he could not take a train
without thinking how much better the time-table might have been
planned. It was an unhappy twist of mind; but the Rector of Lincoln
utilized his obtrusive critical faculties by applying them to his own
labours, and scourging himself to greater effort. So did Henry Adams,
though even the greater effort left him profoundly dissatisfied. He was
unelated by success, and he could not reconcile himself to that degree
of failure which is the common portion of mankind. His criticisms are
lucid, balanced, enlightening, and occasionally prophetic, as when
he comments on the Irishman’s political passion for obstructing even
himself, and on the perilous race-inertia of Russia. “Could inertia on
such a scale be broken up, or take new scale?” he asks dismayed; and we
read the answer to-day. A minority ruling with iron hand; a majority
accepting what comes to them, as they accept day and night and the
seasons.
If there is not an understatement in the five hundred pages of the
“Education,” which thereby loses the power of persuasion, there is
everywhere an appeal to man’s austere equity and disciplined reason.
Adams was not in love with reason. He said that the mind resorted to it
for want of training, and he admitted that he had never met a perfectly
trained mind. But it was the very essence of reason which made him
see that friends were good to him, and the world not unkind; that the
loveliness of the country about Washington gave him pleasure, even when
he found “a personal grief in every tree”; and that a self-respecting
man refrains from finding wordy fault with the conditions under which
he lives. He did not believe, with Wordsworth, that nature is a holy
and beneficent thing, or with Blake, that nature is a wicked and
malevolent thing; but he knew better than to put up a quarrel with an
invincible antagonist. He erred in supposing that other thoughtful
men were as discontented as he was, or that disgust with the methods
of Congress corroded their hours of leisure; but he expressed clearly
and with moderation his unwillingness to cherish “complete and archaic
deceits,” or to live in a world of illusions. His summing up is the
summing up of another austere and uncompromising thinker, Santayana,
when confronted by the same problem: “A spirit with any honour is not
willing to live except in its own way; a spirit with any wisdom is not
over-eager to live at all.”
As our eagerness and our reluctance are not controlling factors in
the situation, it is unwise to stress them too heavily. Yet we must
think, at least some of us must; and it is well to think out as clearly
as we can, not the relative advantages of content and discontent--a
question which briskly answers itself--but the relative rightness.
Emerson believed in the essential goodness of life, in the admirable
law of compensation. Santayana believes that life has evil for its
condition, and is for that reason profoundly sad and equivocal. He sees
in the sensuous enjoyment of the Greek, the industrial optimism of the
American, only a “thin disguise for despair.” Yet Emerson and Santayana
reach the same general conclusion. The first says that hours of sanity
and consideration come to communities as to individuals, “when the
truth is seen, and the martyrs are justified”; the second that “people
in all ages sometimes achieve what they have set their hearts on,” and
that, if our will and conduct were better disciplined, “contentment
would be more frequent and more massive.”
It is hard to think of these years of grace as a chosen period of
sanity and consideration; and the hearts of the Turk and the Muscovite
are set on things which do not make for the massive contentment of the
world. The orderly processes of civilization have been so wrenched and
shattered that readjustment is blocked at some point in every land, in
our own no less than in others. There are those who say that the World
War went beyond the bounds of human endurance; and that the peculiar
horror engendered by indecent methods of attack--poison-gases, high
explosives and corrosive fluids--has dimmed the faith and broken the
spirit of men. But Attila managed to turn a fair proportion of the
civilized world into wasteland, with only man-power as a destructive
force. Europe to-day is by comparison unscathed, and there are kinsfolk
dwelling upon peaceful continents to whom she may legitimately call for
aid.
Legitimately, unless our content is like the content extolled by Little
Ann’s mother; unless our shoes and stockings are indicative of God’s
meaningless partiality, and unless the contemplation of our neighbour’s
bleeding feet enhances our pious satisfaction. “I doubt,” says Mr.
Wells sourly, “if it would make any very serious difference for some
time in the ordinary daily life of Kansas City, if all Europe were
reduced to a desert in the next five years.” Why Kansas City should
have been chosen as the symbol of unconcern, I do not know; but space
has a deadening influence on pity as on fear. The farther we travel
from the Atlantic coast, the more tepid is the sympathy for injured
France. The farther we travel from the Pacific coast, the fainter is
the prejudice against Japan.
It may be possible to construct a state in which men will be content
with their own lot, if they be reasonable, and with their neighbours’
lot, if they be generous. It is manifestly impossible to construct
a world on this principle. Therefore there will always be a latent
grief in the nobler part of man’s soul. Therefore there will always be
a content as impious as the discontent from which Pope prayed to be
absolved.
The unbroken cheerfulness, no less than the personal neatness, of the
British prisoners in the World War astounded the more temperamental
Germans. Long, long ago it was said of England: “Even our condemned
persons doe goe cheerfullie to their deths, for our nature is free,
stout, hautie, prodigal of life and blood.” This heroic strain,
tempered to an endurance which is free from the waste of emotionalism,
produces the outward semblance and the inward self-respect of a content
which circumstances render impossible. It keeps the soul of man immune
from whatever degradation his body may be suffering. It saves the land
that bred him from the stigma of defeat. It is remotely and humanly
akin to the tranquillity of the great Apostle in a Roman prison. It
is wholly alien to the sin of smugness which has crept in among the
domestic virtues, and rendered them more distasteful than ever to
austere thinkers, and to those lonely, generous souls who starve in the
midst of plenty.
There is a curious and suggestive paragraph in Mr. Chesterton’s
volume of loose ends, entitled “What I Saw in America.” It arrests
our attention because, for once, the writer seems to be groping for
a thought instead of juggling with one. He recognizes a keen and
charming quality in American women, and is disturbed because he also
recognizes a recoil from it in his own spirit. This is manifestly
perplexing. “To complain of people for being brave and bright and kind
and intelligent may not unreasonably appear unreasonable. And yet there
is something in the background that can be expressed only by a symbol;
something that is not shallowness, but a neglect of the subconscious,
and the vaguer and slower impulses; something that can be missed amid
all that laughter and light, under those starry candelabra of the
ideals of the happy virtues. Sometimes it came over me in a wordless
wave that I should like to see a sulky woman. How she would walk in
beauty like the night, and reveal more silent spaces full of older
stars! These things cannot be conveyed in their delicate proportion,
even in the most large and elusive terms.”
Baudelaire has conveyed them measurably in four words:
“Sois belle! Sois triste!”
Yet neither “sulky” nor “triste” is an adjective suggesting with
perfect felicity the undercurrent of discontent which lends worth to
courage and charm to intelligence. Back of all our lives is the sombre
setting of a world ill at ease, and beset by perils. Darkening all our
days is the gathering cloud of ill-will, the ugly hatred of man for
man, which is the perpetual threat to progress. We Americans may not be
so invincibly optimistic as our critics think us, and we may not yet
be “speeding” down the road to destruction, as our critics painfully
foretell; but we are part of an endangered civilization, and cannot
hold up our end, unsupported by Europe. An American woman, cautiously
investing her money in government bonds, said to her man of business:
“These at least are perfectly secure?” “I should not say that,” was the
guarded reply; “but they will be the last things to go.”
A few years ago there was a period that saw the workingmen and
working-women of the United States engaged in three hundred and
sixty-five strikes--one for every day of the year--and all of them on
at once. Something seems lacking in the equity of our industrial life.
The “Current History” of the New York “Times” is responsible for the
statement that eighty-five thousand men and women met their deaths by
violence in the United States during the past decade. Something seems
lacking in our programme of peace.
Can it be that Mr. Wells is right when he says that the American
believes in peace, but feels under no passionate urgency to organize
it? Does our notable indifference to the history of the past mean
that we are unconcerned about the history of the present? Two things
are sure. We cannot be nobly content with our own prosperity, unless
its service to the world is made manifest; grace before meat is not
enough to bless the food we eat. And we cannot be nobly content with
our unbroken strength, with the sublimity of size and numbers, unless
there is something correspondingly sublime in our leadership of the
wounded nations. Our allies, who saved us and whom we saved, face the
immediate menace of poverty and assault. They face it with a slowly
gathered courage which we honour to-day, and may be compelled to
emulate to-morrow. “The fact that fear is rational,” says Mr. Brownell,
“is what makes fortitude divine.”
Allies
“Friendship between princes,” observed the wise Philippe de Commines,
“is not of long duration.” He would have said as much of friendship
between republics, had he ever conceived of representative government.
What he knew was that the friendships of men, built on affection and
esteem, outlast time; and that the friendships of nations, built on
common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests,
which are always liable to deflection. He had proof, if proof were
needed, in the invasion of France by Edward the Fourth under the
pressure of an alliance with Charles of Burgundy. It was one of the
urbane invasions common to that gentlemanly age. “Before the King of
England embarked from Dover, he sent one of his heralds named Garter, a
native of Normandy, to the King of France, with a letter of defiance
couched in language so elegant and so polite that I can scarcely
believe any Englishman wrote it.”
This was a happy beginning, and the end was no less felicitous.
When Edward landed in France he found that Louis the Eleventh, who
hated fighting, was all for peace; and that the Duke of Burgundy,
who generally fought the wrong people at the wrong time, was in no
condition for war. Therefore he patched up a profitable truce, and went
back to England, a wiser and a richer man, on better terms with his
enemy than with his ally. “For where our advantage lies, there also is
our heart.”
The peculiar irritation engendered by what Americans discreetly
designate as “entangling alliances” was forced upon my perception in
early youth, when I read the letters of a British officer engaged in
fighting the Ashanti. The war, if it may be so termed, was fought in
1873, and the letters were published in “Blackwood’s Magazine.” The
Ashanti had invaded Fantiland, then under a British protectorate, and
the troops commanded by Sir Garnet Wolseley were presumably defending
their friends. This particular officer expressed his sense of the
situation in a fervid hope that when the Ashanti were beaten, as they
deserved to be, the English would then come to speedy terms with them,
“and drive these brutes of Fanti off the map.”
It is a sentiment which repeats itself in more measured terms on every
page of history. The series of “Coalitions” formed against Napoleon
were rich in super-comic, no less than in super-tragic elements; and
it was well for those statesmen whose reason and whose tempers were so
controlled that they were able to perceive the humours of this giant
game of pussy-in-the-corner. A mutual fear of France drew the Allies
together; a mutual distrust of one another pulled them apart. Sir
Gilbert Elliot, afterwards Lord Minto, endeavoured from the beginning
to make England understand that Austria would prefer her own interests
to the interests of the Coalition, and that it was not unnatural that
she should do so. The situation, as he saw it, was something like this:
“Austria: ‘If I am to dance to your tune, you must pay the piper.’
“England: ‘So long as I lead the figure, and you renounce a _pas
seul_.’”
Unfortunately the allurements of a _pas seul_ were too strong to be
anywhere resisted. Prices grew stiffer and stiffer, armies melted away
when the time for action neared. Britain, always victorious at sea,
paid out large sums for small returns on land. Her position was briefly
summed up by Sir Hugh Elliot--more brilliant and less astute than
his brother--at the hostile Court of Prussia. Frederick the Great,
overhearing the pious ejaculation with which the Englishman greeted the
arrival of a satisfactory dispatch from Sir Eyre Coote, said to him
acidly: “I was not aware that God was also one of your allies.” “The
only one, Sire, whom we do not finance,” was the lightning retort.
One more circumstance deserves to be noted as both familiar and
consolatory. Napoleon’s most formidable purpose was to empty England’s
purse by waging a commercial war. When he forbade her exports to the
countries he fancied he controlled, he was promised implicit obedience.
In March, 1801, Lord Minto wrote serenely to Lord Grenville: “The trade
of England and the necessities of the Continent will find each other
out in defiance of prohibitions. Not one of the confederates will be
true to the gang, and I have little doubt of our trade penetrating
into France itself, and thriving in Paris.”--Which it did.
The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines
us to think hopefully of our own times. The despairing tone of
contemporary writers would seem to indicate that the allied nations
that fought and won the Great War have fallen from some high pinnacle
they never reached to an abysmal depth they have never sounded. When
Dean Inge recorded in “The Contemporary Review” his personal conviction
that the war had been “a ghastly and unnecessary blunder, which need
not have happened, and ought not to have happened,” this casual
statement was taken up and repeated on both sides of the Atlantic,
after the exasperating fashion in which a Greek chorus takes up and
repeats in strophe and antistrophe the most depressing sentiment of the
play. And to what purpose? Did any sane man ever doubt that Austria’s
brutal ultimatum to Serbia was a ghastly and unnecessary blunder?
Did any sane man ever doubt that Germany’s invasion of Belgium was a
ghastly and unnecessary blunder? But if Dean Inge or his sympathizers
knew of any argument, save that of arms, by which the Central Powers
could have been convinced that they were blundering, and persuaded
to retrieve their blunder, so that what ought not to have happened
need not have happened, it is a pity that this enlightenment was not
vouchsafed to an imperilled world.
It is possible for two boys to build up a friendship on the basis
of a clean fight. It is possible for two nations to build up a good
understanding on the basis of a clean fight. The relations between
Great Britain and South Africa constitute a case in point. Germany’s
fighting was unclean from start to finish. Therefore, while there are
many to feel commiseration for her, there are none to do her honour.
The duration of the war has little to do with this strong sentiment
of disesteem. Had it lasted four months instead of four years, the
deeds done in Belgium and in France would have sterilized the seeds
of friendship in the minds of all who remembered them. To an abnormal
sense of superiority, Germany added an abnormal lack of humour, which
made her regard all resistance as an unjustifiable and unpardonable
affront. Her resentment that Belgians should have presumed to defend
their country was like the resentment of that famous marauder, the Earl
of Cassillis, when Allan Stewart refused to be tortured into signing
away his patrimony. “You are the most obstinate man I ever saw to
oblige me to use you thus,” said the justly indignant Earl. “I never
thought to have treated any one as your stubbornness has made me treat
you.”
The emotional ebb-tide which followed the signing of the armistice was
too natural to be deplored, save that it gave to obstructionists their
chance to decry the matchless heroisms of the war. No people can be
heroic over the problem of paying debts out of an empty treasury. Need
drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness. Bargaining
is essential to the life of the world; but nobody has ever claimed that
it is an ennobling process. If it were given to debtors to love their
creditors, there would have been no persecution of the Jews. If it were
given to creditors to love their debtors, there would be no poverty on
earth. That all the nations, now presumably on friendly terms, should
be following their own interests would seem to most of us the normal
thing it is, if they did not so persistently affect to be amazed and
grieved at one another’s behaviour, and if the mischief-makers of every
land were not actively engaged in widening breaches into chasms.
It is inevitable and logical that the men who were pacifists when the
word had a sinister meaning should heartily detest their countries’
allies who helped them win the war. The English “Nation and Athenæum”
wrote of France in 1922 as it might have written--but did not--of
Germany in 1914. Poincaré it likened to Shylock, France to a butcher
eager for the shambles. “French militarism at work in the Rhineland is
a lash to every evil passion.” “Europe is kept in social and political
disorder by the sheer selfishness of France.” “There _was_ a France of
the mind. Victory killed it, and a long slow renovation of the soul
must precede its resurrection.”
Like the ingenuous Mr. Pepys, the “Nation” does “just naturally hate
the French,” and takes it hard that the world should persistently
regard them as a valuable asset to civilization. The concentrated
nationalism which held Verdun now expresses itself in a steely
resolution to hold France, and to recover for her out of the wreckage
of Europe the material aid of which she stands in need. Coöperation
is a good word and a good thing. To a Frenchman it means primarily
the interest of his own country. What else does it mean to any of us?
Britain’s policy of conciliation, our policy of aloofness, Germany’s
bargaining, and Russia’s giant bluff, all have the same significance.
“Be not deceived! Nothing is so dear to any creature as his profit,”
said Epictetus, who, having stript his own soul bare of desires, was
correspondingly ready to forgive the acquisitive instincts of others.
Mr. Edward Martin, writing very lucidly and very sympathetically of
the French, admits that their conception of their duty to the world
“is to defend France, keep her functioning, and make her powerful
and prosperous.” It sounds narrow, and practical, and arrogant. It
also sounds familiar. France feels herself to be intellectually and
artistically a thing of value. The best service she can render to the
world is her own preservation. How does America feel? The very week
that Mr. Martin offered his interpretation of Gallic nationalism,
a writer in the “Review of Reviews” (New York), after asserting
with indescribable smugness that Americans “have been trained to an
attitude of philanthropy hardly known in other countries,” proceeded
to illustrate this attitude by defending high tariffs, restricted
immigration, and other comforting pieces of legislation. “Our best
service to the world,” he explained, “lies in maintaining our national
life and character.”
This is just what France thinks, only her most zealous sons forbear to
define prudence as philanthropy. They believe that the world is the
better for what they have to give; but they know that it is not for the
world’s sake that they so keenly desire to be in a position to give it.
They are profoundly sentimental, but their sentiment is all for _la
patrie_. Internationally they are practical to the point of hardness,
and they see no reason why they should be otherwise. There is for them
no pressing necessity to assume that they love their neighbours as
themselves.
It is different with Americans in whom idealism and materialism dispute
every inch of the ground. A Texan professor, sent by the American
Peace Commission to investigate conditions in Germany, published in
“The North American Review,” May, 1922, a paper on “American Ideals
and Traditions,” which was widely quoted as embodying a clear and
fervid spirit of hopefulness, much needed in these disillusioned days.
The writer took the high ground that Americans were the first people
in the world “to make the spirit of disinterested human service the
measure of a nation as well as of a man. What is now termed American
humanitarianism is but the American spirit of philanthropy at home,
translated into international relations.” This “simple historical
fact” is the key to all our actions. “The entrance of America into the
Great War was not a species of interruption in the normal flow of its
idealism; but was the irresistible on-pressing of the great current of
our ‘will to human service.’”
One wonders if this particular idealist remembers what happened in
Europe, in the United States, and on the high seas, between July, 1914,
and April, 1917? Does he recall those thirty-two months, close-packed
with incidents of such an order that their cumulative weight broke
down our hardy resistance to “service,” and drove us slowly but
splendidly into action? Great deeds are based on great emotions; but
the conflicting emotions of that period are not accurately described
as “irresistible.” The best of them were too long and too successfully
resisted. We gain no clear impression of events by thinking in
ornamental terms. Headlines are one thing, and history is another. “In
judging others,” says Thomas à Kempis, “a man usually toileth in vain.
For the most part he is mistaken, and he easily sinneth. But in judging
and scrutinizing himself, he always laboureth with profit.”