[_December, 1921_]
As the Christmas season approaches, it sits heavily upon our mind that
there are some to whom we should like to say a word of respectful
admiration. First of these is Woodrow Wilson. This, you may think, is
a gesture both irrelevant and impertinent on our part. We cannot help
it. We feel, as the Friends say, a “concern.” The conjunction of the
Christmas month, the Conference on Limitation of Armaments, the hopes
and memories of all honest men, Mr. Wilson’s coming birthday, makes the
occasion irresistible. There are some things that must be said.
Woodrow Wilson has found the peace he sought. Never before, perhaps,
did a public man enjoy such posthumous privilege in his own lifetime.
He has joined (in Melville’s noble phrase) “the choice hidden handful
of the divine inert.” This phrase requires scrutiny. The divinity
is not ascribed to Mr. Wilson, but to inertia. Silence, thought,
withdrawal from the maddening struggles of mankind--these are divine;
these are godlike. If there were ever any doubt as to his having
qualities of true greatness, consider the patience and decency of his
present silence. It is a silence, one feels, not of bitterness but of
honourable dignity.
Sometimes, tucked away in the papers, one finds a single line or so
that gives us more to ponder than all the rest of the day’s news. Such
an item was the following, quoted lately by Mr. Tumulty as having been
said by Mr. Wilson to one of his advisers at the Paris Conference:
“M. Clemenceau called me a pro-German and abruptly left the
room.”
They said this man was impatient and stubborn. Yet he endured insult
calmly in the pursuit of his strangely hoped-for peace.
The post-Armistice career of Mr. Wilson has been called a tragedy. We
do not see it so. The Paris Conference--it is easy to see it now--was
foredoomed to a certain measure of failure. On sand one puts up a tent,
not a house. Moreover, in so far as that Conference is concerned, Mr.
Wilson has suffered a double fatality. He has never spoken candidly
for himself; he has been unfortunate in those who have spoken for him.
It has been the habit of those naïf and loyally affectionate souls who
have been closest to him to assure us of his subtlety and quicksilver
craft. We cannot see it. He has seemed to us, always, a man of genuine
simplicity--what would have been called, at one time, a _righteous_ man.
It is an odd thing that when you say a character is rooted in
simplicity and piety some will conclude that you are sneering. His
character is a great character. Those influences which shake and
unsettle men’s fibre more than anything else it has endured in full
measure--adulation and hatred. The anger and mockery which were
lavished upon Wilson are interesting to contemplate. But, so far
as one can see, they did not trouble that stubborn zeal. There was
a Cromwellian grimness and singleness of heart in his battle with
Europe. You remember what Cromwell said (if Carlyle can be trusted as a
reporter)--
“Would we have Peace without a Worm, lay we Foundations of
Justice and Righteousness.”
For that he struggled, burdening himself beyond human strength. For
that he compromised, as all men do. For that he incurred the malice of
all aspirants--both the pure and the impure.
It is amazing to remember the power and depth of that malice. In a
perverse way, it is almost encouraging to remember it: it proves so
excellently that this earth is still the fallen star, the cindered
Eden, in which merely human failings incur more than human angers. What
a gruesome life that of politics must be! And yet when, in our recent
history, were more positive virtues and high-minded hopes brought into
the muddled ferment of national politics? Do you remember how this man
lay at death’s door for many silent months, and how ill suppressed
were the satisfaction and the sneer? What was his crime? We used to
wonder. Only that he had believed the world was ripe for some strokes
of simplicity and unselfishness.
Little by little the minds of fair-hearted men are returning to
realization and gratitude. There is nothing now accomplished, or even
accomplishable, in matters of international dealing, that Woodrow
Wilson was not fighting for three years ago. The granolithic minds
of the old stand-patters and the luxurious sniffs of young, hot
doctrinaires formed for a while a quaint partnership of scorn. Nor
would we ourself deny that there were many things to lament. But
the world still waits for a competent, understanding, and judicial
expression of Woodrow Wilson’s service to men. It was not a perfect
service, for it was marred by necessary mortal blunders and qualms.
For that perhaps we reverence it the more. And when the just tribute
comes, perhaps it will come from the hand of some great writer to whom
the puerilities of partisan squabble fade into their deserved shadow;
to whom the humour and the pathos will be evident; and most evident of
all, the dignity and austerity of a great human hope, frustrated and
postponed, but an addition to the honour of the race. Perhaps it will
come from the hand of some great dramatist, with the dramatist’s art
that can revive great figures, great moments; can purge the occasion
of what was merely peevish and fortuitous, and remind us of truths and
visions we lost in the hurly-burly of the time.
It is sheer selfishness on our part to hope that some such expression
may come soon. We are jealous for the credit of this generation. We
are proud to have lived in days when men suffered so hideously and
yet did and said and wrote great things. We would like it to be said
of this generation that it recognized greatness in its own time. That
would be an honourable thing to be able to say. Have we erected, from
our imagination, a figure that is not really there? We think not. And
so, with humility and hesitation, but impelled by a motive we cannot
resist, we would like to say to Woodrow Wilson that there are many who
gratefully wish him Merry Christmas.
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