Yes, there are some things I might quarrel with--but, ah, how much you give of Italy--of the English, of the American--three nations so well-beloved; and how much of things deeper than peoples or countries.
Imagine me at our New England farm--with the younger part of the family--in my annual "retreat." Last year at this time I was here, with the thermometer a dozen degrees below zero; now it is milder, but cold, bleak, snowy. Yesterday we were fishing for pickerel through the ice at Hayes"s Pond--in a wilderness where fox abound--and where bear and deer make rare appearances--all within a few miles of Lenox and Stockbridge. The farmer"s family is at one end of the long farm-house--I am at the other. It is a great place to read--one reads here with a sort of lonely pa.s.sion. You know the landscape--it is in _Eleanor_. Last night (or this morning) I wanted to talk with you about your book--or telegraph--but here I am calmly trying to thank you both for sending us the copy--and, too, for writing it.
Of the "deeper things" I can really say nothing--except that I feel their truth, and am grateful for them. But may I not applaud (even the Pope is "applauded," you know) such a perfect touch as--for instance--in Chapter XVI--"the final softening of that sweet austerity which hid Lucy"s heart of gold"; and again "Italy without the _forestieri_" "like surprising a bird on its nest"; and the scene beheld of Eleanor--Lucy pressing the terra-cotta to her lips;--and Italy "having not enough faith to make a heresy"--(true, too, of France, is it not?) and Chapter XXIII--"a base and plundering happiness"; and the scene of the confessional; and that sudden phrase of Eleanor"s in her talk with Manisty that makes the whole world--and the whole book--right, "_She loves you!"_ That is art.... But, above all, my dear lady, acknowledgments and praise for the hand that created "Lucy"--that recreated, rather--my dear countrywoman! Truly, that is an accomplishment and one that will endear its author to the whole new world.
And again one asks whether the readers that now are write such generous, such encouraging things to the makers of tales, as the readers of twenty years ago! If not, I cannot but think it is a loss. For praise is a great tonic, and helps most people to do their best.
It was during our stay on the Alban hills that I first became conscious in myself, after a good many springs spent in Italy, of a deep and pa.s.sionate sympathy for the modern Italian State and people; a sympathy widely different from that common temper in the European traveler which regards Italy as the European playground, picture-gallery, and curiosity-shop, and grudges the smallest encroachment by the needs of the new nation on the picturesque ruin of the past. Italy in 1899 was pa.s.sing through a period of humiliation and unrest. The defeats of the luckless Erythrean expedition were still hot in Italian memory. The extreme Catholic party at home, the sentimental Catholic tourist from abroad, were equally contemptuous and critical; and I was often indignantly aware of a tone which seemed to me ungenerous and unjust toward the struggling Italian State, on the part of those who had really most cause to be grateful for all that the youngest--and oldest--of European Powers had done in the forty years since 1860 to furnish itself with the necessary equipment, moral, legal, and material, of a modern democracy.
This vein of feeling finds expression in _Eleanor_. Manisty represents the scornful dilettante, the impatient accuser of an Italy he does not attempt to understand; while the American Lucy, on the other side draws from her New England tradition a glowing sympathy for the Risorgimento and its fruits, for the efforts and sacrifices from which modern Italy arose, that refuses to be chilled by the pa.s.sing corruptions and scandals of the new _regime_. Her influence prevails and Manisty recants. He spends six solitary weeks wandering through middle Italy, in search of the fugitives--Eleanor and Lucy--who have escaped him--and at the end of it he sees the old, old country and her people with new eyes--which are Lucy"s eyes.
"What rivers--what fertility--what a climate! And the industry of the people! Catch a few English farmers and set them to do what the Italian peasant does, year in and year out, without a murmur! Look at all the coast south of Naples. There is not a yard of it, scarcely, that hasn"t been made by human hands. Look at the hill towns; and think of the human toil that has gone to the making and maintaining of them since the world began.... _Ecco!_--there they are"--and he pointed down the river to the three or four distant towns, each on its mountain spur, that held the valley between them and Orvieto, pale jewels on the purple robe of rock and wood--"So Virgil saw them. So the latest sons of time shall see them--the homes of a race that we chatter about without understanding--the most laborious race in the wide world.... Anyway, as I have been going up and down their country, ... prating about their poverty, and their taxes, their corruption, the incompetence of their leaders, the mischief of their quarrel with the Church; I have been finding myself caught in the grip of things older and deeper--incredibly, primevally old!--that still dominate everything, shape everything here. There are forces in Italy, forces of land and soil and race--only now fully let loose--that will remake Church no less than State, as the generations go by. Sometimes I have felt as though this country were the youngest in Europe; with a future as fresh and teeming as the future of America. And yet one thinks of it at other times as one vast graveyard; so thick it is with the ashes and the bones of men! The Pope--and Crispi!--waves, both of them, on a sea of life that gave them birth "with equal mind"; and that "with equal mind" will sweep them both to its own goal--not theirs! ...
No--there are plenty of dangers ahead.... Socialism is serious; Sicily is serious; the economic difficulties are serious; the House of Savoy will have a rough task, perhaps, to ride the seas that may come.--But _Italy_ is safe. You can no more undo what has been done than you can replace the child in the womb. The birth is over. The organism is still weak, but it lives. And the forces behind it are, indefinitely, mysteriously stronger than its adversaries think."
In this mood it was that, when the book came out in the autumn of 1900, I prefixed to it the dedication--"To Italy, the beloved and beautiful, Instructress of our past, Delight of our present, Comrade of our future, the heart of an Englishwoman offers this book."
"_Comrade of our future_." As one looks out to-day upon the Italian fighting-line, where English troops are interwoven with those of Italy and France for the defense of the Lombard and Venetian plain against the attack of Italy"s old and bitter enemy, an attack in which are concerned not only the fortunes of Italy, but those also of the British Empire, I wonder what touch of prophecy, what whisper from a far-off day, suggested these words written eighteen years ago?
EPILOGUE
And here, for a time at least, I bring these _Recollections_ to an end with the century in which I was born, and my own fiftieth year.
Since _Eleanor_ appeared, and my father died, eighteen years have gone--years for me of constant work, literary and other. On the one hand, increasing interest in and preoccupation with politics, owing to personal links and friendships, and a life spent, as to half the year, in London, have been reflected in my books; and on the other, the English rural scene, with its country houses and villages, its religion, and its elements of change and revolution, has been always at my home gates, as a perpetually interesting subject. Old historic situations, also, have come to life for me again in new surroundings, as in _Lady Rose"s Daughter_, _The Marriage of William Ashe_, and _Fenwick"s Career;_ in _Richard Meynell_ I attempted the vision of a Church of England recreated from within, with a rebel, and not--as in _Robert Elsmere_--an exile, for a hero; _Lady Connie_ is a picture of Oxford as I saw her in my youth, as faithful as I can now make it; _Eltham House_ is a return to the method of _William Ashe_, and both _Lady Connie_ and _Missing_ have been written since the war. _Missing_ takes for its subject a fragment from the edge of that vast upheaval which no novel of real life in future will be able to leave out of its ken. In the first two years of the war, the cry both of writers and public--so far as the literature of imagination was concerned--tended to be--"anything but the war"!
There was an eager wish in both, for a time, in the first onrush of the great catastrophe, to escape from it and the newspapers, into the world behind it. That world looks to us now as the Elysian fields looked to Aeneas as he approached them from the heights--full not only of souls in a blessed calm, but of those also who had yet to make their way into existence as it terribly _is_, had still to taste reality and pain.
We were thankful, for a time, to go back to that kind, unconscious, unforeseeing world. But it is no longer possible. The war has become our life, and will be so for years after the signing of peace.
As to the three main interests, outside my home life, which, as I look back upon half a century, seem to have held sway over my thoughts--contemporary literature, religious development, and social experiment--one is tempted to say a few last summarizing things, though, amid the noise of war, it is hard to say them with any real detachment of mind.
When we came up to London in 1881, George Eliot was just dead (December, 1880); Browning and Carlyle pa.s.sed away in the course of the "eighties; Tennyson in 1892. I saw the Tennyson funeral in the Abbey, and remember it vividly. The burying of Mr. Gladstone was more stately; this of Tennyson, as befitted a poet, had a more intimate beauty. A great mult.i.tude filled the Abbey, and the rendering, in Sir Frederick Bridge"s setting, of "Crossing the Bar" by the Abbey Choir sent the "wild echoes"
of the dead man"s verse flying up and on through the great arches overhead with a dramatic effect not to be forgotten. Yet the fame of the poet was waning when he died, and has been hotly disputed since; though, as it seems to me, these later years have seen the partial return of an ebbing tide. What was merely didactic in Tennyson is dead years ago; the difficulties of faith and philosophy, with which his own mind had wrestled, were, long before his death, swallowed up in others far more vital, to which his various optimisms, for all the grace in which he clothed them, had no key, or suggestion of a key, to offer. The "Idylls," so popular in their day, and almost all, indeed, of the narrative and dramatic work, no longer answer to the needs of a generation that has learned from younger singers and thinkers a more restless method, a more poignant and discontented thought. A literary world fed on Meredith and Henry James, on Ibsen or Bernard Shaw or Anatole France, or Synge or Yeats, rebels against the versified argument, however musical or skilful, built up in "In Memoriam," and makes mock of what it conceives to be the false history and weak sentiment of the "Idylls." All this, of course, is true, and has been said a thousand times, but--and here again the broad verdict is emerging--it does not touch the lyrical fame of a supreme lyrical poet.
It may be that one small volume will ultimately contain all that is really immortal in Tennyson"s work. But that volume, it seems to me, will be safe among the golden books of our literature, cherished alike by young lovers and the "drooping old."
I only remember seeing Tennyson twice--once in a crowded drawing-room, and once on the slopes of Blackdown, in his big cloak. The strong set face under the wide-awake, the energy of undefeated age that breathed from the figure, remains with me, stamped on my memory, like the gentle face of Mrs. Wordsworth, or a pa.s.sing glimpse--a gesture--of George Meredith as we met on the threshold of Mr. Cotter Morison"s house at Hampstead, one day perhaps in 1886 or 1887, and he turned his handsome curly head with a smile and a word when Mr. Morison introduced us. He was then not yet sixty, already a little lame, but the radiant physical presence scarcely marred. We had some pa.s.sing talk that day, but--to my infinite regret--that was the only time I ever saw him. Of his work and his genius I began to be aware when "Beauchamp"s Career"--a much truncated version--was coming out in the _Fortnightly_ in 1874. I had heard him and his work discussed in the Lincoln circle, where both the Pattisons were quite alive to Meredith"s quality; but I was at the time and for long afterward under the spell of the French limpidity and clarity, and the Meredithian manner repelled me. About the same time, when I was no more than three or four and twenty, I remember a visit to Cambridge, when we spent a week-end at the Bull Inn, and were the guests by day of Frederic Myers, and some of his Trinity and King"s friends.
Those two days of endless talk in beautiful College rooms with men like Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, Mr. Gerald Balfour, Mr. George Prothero, and others, left a deep mark on me. Cambridge seemed to me then a hearth whereon the flame of thought burnt with far greater daring and freedom than at Oxford. Men were not so afraid of one another; the sharp religious divisions of Oxford were absent; ideas were thrown up like b.a.l.l.s in air, sure that some light hand would catch and pa.s.s them on.
And among the subjects which rose and fell in that warm electric atmosphere, was the emergence of a new and commanding genius in George Meredith. The place in literature that some of these brilliant men were already giving to _Richard Feverel_, which had been published some fifteen years earlier, struck me greatly; but if I was honest with myself, my enthusiasm was much more qualified than theirs. It was not till _Diana of the Crossways_ came out, after we had moved to London, that the Meredithian power began to grip me; and to this day the saturation with French books and French ideals that I owed to my uncle"s influence during our years at Oxford, stands somewhat between me and a great master. And yet, in this case, as in that of Mr. James, there is no doubt that difficulty--even obscurity!--are part of the spell. The man behind is _great enough_, and rewards the reader"s effort to understand him with a sense of heightened power, just as a muscle is strengthened by exercise. In other words, the effort is worth while; we are admitted by it to a world of beauty or romance or humor that without it we should not know; and with the thing gained goes, as in Alpine-climbing, the pleasure of the effort itself.
Especially is this the case in poetry, where the artist"s thought fashions for itself a manner more intimate and personal than in prose.
George Meredith"s poetry is still only the possession of a minority, even among those who form the poetic audience of a generation. There are many of us who have wanted much help, in regard to it, from others--the young and ardent--who are the natural initiates, the "Mystae" of the poetic world. But once let the strange and poignant magic of it, its music in discord, its sharp sweetness, touch the inward ear--thenceforward we shall follow its piping.
Let me record another regret for another lost opportunity. In spite of common friends, and worlds that might have met, I never saw Robert Louis Stevenson--the writer who more, perhaps, than any other of his generation touched the feeling and won the affection of his time. And that by a double spell--of the life lived and the books written.
Stevenson"s hold both upon his contemporaries, and those who since his death have had only the printed word of his letters and tales whereby to approach him, has not been without some points of likeness--amid great difference--to the hold of the Brontes on their day and ours. The sense of an unsurpa.s.sable courage--against great odds--has been the same in both cases; and a great tenderness in the public mind for work so gallant, so defiant of ill fortune, so loyal to its own aims. In Stevenson"s case, quite apart from the claims of his work as literature, there was also an added element which, with all their genius, the Brontes did not possess--the element of charm, the _pet.i.t carillon,_ to which Renan attributed his own success in literature: undefinable, always, this last!--but supreme.[1] There is scarcely a letter of Stevenson"s that is without it, it plays about the slender volumes of essays or of travel that we know so well; but it is present not only in the lighter books and tales, not only in the enchanting fairy-tale, "Prince Otto," but in his most tragic, or his most intellectual work--in the fragment "Weir of Hermiston," or in that fine piece of penetrating psychology and admirable narrative, _The Master of Ballantrae_. It may, I think, be argued whether in the far future Stevenson will be more widely and actively remembered--whether he will enter into the daily pleasure of those who love literature--more as a letter-writer, or more as a writer of fiction. Whether, in other words, his own character and personality will not prove the enduring thing, rather than the characters he created. The volumes of letters, with their wonderful range and variety, their humor, their bravery, their _vision_--whether of persons or scenes--already mean to some of us more than his stories, dear to us as these are.
He died in his forty-fifth year, at the height of his power. If he had lived ten--twenty--years longer, he might well have done work that would have set him with Scott in the history of letters. As it is, he remains the most graceful and appealing, the most animated and delightful, figure in the literary history of the late nineteenth century. He is sure of his place. "Myriad-footed Time will discover many other inventions; but mine are mine!" And to that final award his poems no less than his letters will richly contribute--the haunting beauty of the "Requiem," the n.o.ble lines "To my Father," the lovely verses "In memory of F.A.S."--surely immortal, so long as mother-hearts endure.
[Footnote 1: Greek: Ti gar chariton agapaton Anthropois apaneuthen;]
Another great name was steadily finding its place during our first London years. Thomas Hardy had already published some of his best novels in the "seventies, and was in full production all through the "eighties and "nineties. The first of the Hardy novels that strongly affected me was the _Return of the Native_, and I did not read it till some time after its publication. Although there had been a devoted and constantly growing audience for Mr. Hardy"s books for twenty years before the publication of _Tess of the Durbervilles,_ my own recollection is that Tess marked the conversion of the larger public, who then began to read all the earlier books, in that curiously changed mood which sets in when a writer is no longer on trial, but has, so to speak, "made good."
And since that date how intimately have the scenes and characters of Mr.
Hardy"s books entered into the mind and memory of his country, compelling many persons, slowly and by degrees--I count myself among this tardy company--to realize their truth, sincerity, and humanity, in spite of the pessimism with which so many of them are tinged; their beauty also, notwithstanding the clashing discords that a poet, who is also a realist, cannot fail to strike; their permanence in English literature; and the greatness of Mr. Hardy"s genius! Personally, I would make only one exception. I wish Mr. Hardy had not written _Jude the Obscure!_ On the other hand, in the three volumes of _The Dynasts_ he has given us one of the n.o.blest, and possibly one of the most fruitful, experiments in recent English letters.
Far more rapid was the success of Mr. Kipling, which came a decade later than Mr. Hardy"s earlier novels. It thrills one"s literary pulse now to look back to those early paper-covered treasures, written by a youth, a boy of genius; which for the first time made India interesting to hundreds of thousands in the Western world; which were the heralds also of a life"s work of thirty years, unfailingly rich, and still unspent!
The debt that two generations owe to Mr. Kipling is, I think, past calculating. There is a poem of his specially dear to me--"To the True Romance." It contains, to my thinking, the very essence and spirit of his work. Through all realism, through all technical accomplishment, through all the marvelous and detailed knowledge he has acc.u.mulated on this wonderful earth, there rings the lovely Linos-song of the higher imagination, which is the enduring salt of art. Whether it is Mowgli, or Kim, or the Brushwood Boy, or McAndrew, or the Centurion of the Roman Wall, or the trawlers and submarines and patrol-boats to which he lends actual life and speech, he carries through all the great company the flag of his lady--the flag of the "True Romance." It was Meredith"s flag, and Stevenson"s and Scott"s--it comes handed down in an endless chain from the story-tellers of old Greece. For a man to have taken undisputed place in that succession is, I think, the best and most that literary man can do. And that it has fallen to our generation to watch and rejoice in Rudyard Kipling"s work may be counted among those gifts of the G.o.ds which bring no Nemesis with them.
Another star--was it the one that danced when Beatrice was born?--was rising about the same time as Rudyard Kipling"s. _The Window in Thrums_ appeared in 1889--a masterpiece to set beside the French masterpiece, drawn likewise from peasant life, of almost the same date, _Pecheur d"Islande._ Barrie"s gift, also, has been a gift making for the joy of his generation; he too has carried the flag of the True Romance--slight, twinkling, fantastic thing, compared to that of Kipling, but consecrate to the same great service.
And then beside this group of men, who, dealing as they constantly are with the most prosaic and intractable material, are yet poets at heart, there appears that other group who, headed perhaps by Mr. Shaw, and kindred in method with Thomas Hardy, are the chief G.o.ds of a younger race, as hostile to "sentimentalism" as George Meredith, but without either the power--or the wish--to replace it by the forces of the poetic imagination. Mr. Shaw, whose dramatic work has been the goad, the gadfly of a whole generation, stirring it into thought by the help of a fascinating art, will not, I think, elect to stand upon his novels; though his whole work has deeply affected English novel-writing. But Mr.
Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett have been during the last ten or fifteen years--vitally different as they are--the leaders of the New Novel--of that fiction which at any given moment is chiefly attracting and stimulating the men and women under forty. There is always a New Novel, and a New Poetry, as there was once, and many times, a New Learning. The New Novel may be Romantic, or Realist, or Argumentative. In our day it appears to be a compound of the last two--at any rate, in the novels of Mr. Wells.
Mr. Wells seems to me a journalist of very great powers, of unequal education, and much crudity of mind, who has inadvertently strayed into the literature of imagination. The earlier books were excellent story-telling, though without any Stevensonian distinction; _Kipps_ was almost a masterpiece; _Tono-Bungay_ a piece of admirable fooling, enriched with some real character-creation, a thing extremely rare in Mr. Wells"s books; while _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_ is perhaps more likely to live than any other of his novels, because the subject with which it deals comes home so closely to so vast an audience. Mr. Britling, considered as a character, has neither life nor joints. He, like the many other heroes from other Wells novels, whose names one can never recollect, is Mr. Wells himself, talking this time on a supremely interesting topic, and often talking extraordinarily well. There are no more brilliant pages, of their kind, in modern literature than the pages describing Mr. Britling"s motor-drive on the night of the declaration of war. They compare with the description of the Thames in _Tono-Bungay_. These, and a few others like them, will no doubt appear among the _morceaux choisis_ of a coming day.
But who, after a few years more, will ever want to turn the restless, ill-written, undigested pages of _The New Machiavelli_ again--or of half a dozen other volumes, marked often by a curious monotony both of plot and character, and a fatal fluency of clever talk? The only thing which can keep journalism alive--journalism, which is born of the moment, serves the moment, and, as a rule, dies with the moment--is--again the Stevensonian secret!--_charm_. Diderot, the prince of journalists, is the great instance of it in literature; the phrase "_sous le charme_" is of his own invention. But Mr. Wells has not a particle of charm, and the reason of the difference is not far to seek. Diderot wrote for a world of friends--"_C"est pour moi et pour mes amis que je lis, que je reflechis, que j"ecris_"--Mr. Wells for a world of enemies or fools, whom he wishes to instruct or show up.
_Le Neveu de Rameau_ is a masterpiece of satire; yet there is no ill-nature in it. But the snarl is never very long absent from Mr.
Wells"s work; the background of it is disagreeable. Hence its complete lack of magic, of charm. And without some touch of these qualities, the _a peu pres_ of journalism, of that necessarily hurried and improvised work which is the spendthrift of talent, can never become literature, as it once did--under the golden pen of Denis Diderot.
Sainte Beuve said of Stendhal that he was an _excitateur d"idees_.
Mr. Wells no doubt deserves the phrase. As an able journalist, a preacher of method, of foresight, and of science, he has much to say that his own time will do well to heed. But the writer among us who has most general affinity with Stendhal, and seems to me more likely to live than Mr. Wells, is Mr. Arnold Bennett. Mr. Bennett"s achievement in his three princ.i.p.al books, the _Old Wives" Tale_, _Clayhanger_, and _Hilda Lessways_, has the solidity and relief--the ugliness also!--of Balzac, or of Stendhal; a detachment, moreover, and a coolness, which Mr. Wells lacks. These qualities may well preserve them, if "those to come" find their subject-matter sufficiently interesting.
But the _Comedie Humaine_ has a breadth and magnificence of general conception which govern all its details, and Stendhal"s work is linked to one of the most significant periods of European history, and reflects its teeming ideas. Mr. Bennett"s work seems to many readers to be choked by detail. But a writer of a certain quality may give us as much detail as he pleases--witness the great Russians. Whenever Mr. Bennett succeeds in offering us detail at once so true and so exquisite as the detail which paints the household of Lissy-Gory in _War and Peace_, or the visit of Dolly to Anna and Wronsky in _Anna Karenin_, or the nursing of the dying Nicolas by Kitty and Levin, he will have justified his method--with all its _longueurs_. Has he justified it yet?
One great writer, however, we possess who can give us any detail he likes without tedium, because of the quality of the intelligence which presents it. Mr. Conrad is not an Englishman by race, and he is the master, moreover, of a vast exotic experience of strange lands and foreign seas, where very few of his readers can follow him with any personal knowledge. And yet we instinctively feel that in all his best work he is none the less richly representative of what goes to make the English mind, as compared with the French, or the German, or the Italian mind--a mind, that is, shaped by sea-power and far-flung responsibilities, by all the customs and traditions, written and unwritten, which are the fruit of our special history, and our long-descended life. It is this which gives value often to Mr. Conrad"s slightest tales, or intense significance to detail, which, without this background, would be lifeless or dull. In it, of course, he is at one with Mr. Kipling. Only the tone and accent are wholly different. Mr.
Conrad"s extraordinary intelligence seems to stand outside his subject, describing what he sees, as though he were crystal-gazing at figures and scenes, at gestures and movements, magically clear and sharp. Mr.
Kipling, on the other hand, is part of--intimately one with--what he tells us; never for a moment really outside it; though he has at command every detail and every accessory that he needs.
Mr. Galsworthy, I hope, when this war is over, on which he has written such vivid, such moving pages (I know! for in some of its scenes--on the Somme battle-fields, for instance--I have stood where he has stood), has still the harvest of his literary life before him. Since _The Country House_ it does not seem to me that he has ever found a subject that really suits him--and "subject is everything." But he has pa.s.sion and style, and varied equipment, whether of training or observation; above all, an individuality it is abundantly worth while to know.
On the religious development of the last thirty years I can find but little that is gladdening, to myself, at any rate, to say. There are ferments going on in the Church of England which have shown themselves in a series of books produced by Oxford and Cambridge men, each of them representing some greater concession to modern critical and historical knowledge than the one before it. The war, no doubt, has gripped the hearts and stirred the minds of men, in relation to the fundamental problems of life and destiny, as nothing else in living experience has ever done. The religious minds among the men who are perpetually fronting death in the battle-line seem to develop, on the one hand, a new and individual faith of their own, and, on the other, an instinctive criticism of the faiths. .h.i.therto offered them, which in time may lead us far. The complaints, meanwhile, of "empty churches" and the failing hold of the Church of England, are perhaps more persistent and more melancholy than of old; and there is a general anxiety as to how the loosening and vivifying action of the war will express itself religiously when normal life begins again. The "Life and Liberty"
movement in the Anglican Church, which has sprung up since the war, is endeavoring to rouse a new Christian enthusiasm, especially among the young; and with the young lies the future. But the war itself has brought us no commanding message, though all the time it may be silently providing the "pile of gray heather" from which, when the moment comes, the beacon-light may spring.
The greatest figure in the twenty years before the war seems to me to have been George Tyrrell. The two volumes of his biography, with all their absorbing interest, have not, I think, added much to the effect of his books. _A Much-abused Letter, Lex Orandi, Scylla and Charybdis_, and _Christianity at the Cross-Roads_ have settled nothing. What book of real influence does? They present many contradictions; but are thereby, perhaps, only the more living. For one leading school of thought they go not nearly far enough; for another a good deal too far. But they contain pa.s.sages drawn straight from a burning spiritual experience, pa.s.sages also of a compelling beauty, which can hardly fall to the ground unfruitful. Whether as Father Tyrrell"s own, or as a.s.similated by other minds, they belong, at least, to the free movement of experimental and inductive thought, which, in religion as in science, is ever the victorious movement, however fragmentary and inconclusive it may seem at any given moment to be.
Other men--Doctor Figgis, for instance--build up shapely and plausible systems, on given material, which, just because they are plausible and shapely, can have very little to do with truth. It is the seekers, the men of difficult, half-inspired speech, like T. H. Green and George Tyrrell, through whose work there flashes at intervals the "gleam" that lights human thought a little farther on its way.
Meanwhile, it must often seem to any one who ponders these past years, as if what is above all wanting to our religious moment is courage and imagination. If only Bishop Henson had stood his trial for heresy!--there would have been a seed of new life in this lifeless day.
If only, instead of deserting the churches, the Modernists of to-day would have the courage _to claim them!_--there again would be a stirring of the waters. Is it not possible that Christianity, which we have thought of as an old faith, is only now, with the falling away of its original sheath-buds, at the beginning of its true and mightier development? A religion of love, rooted in and verified by the simplest experiences of each common day, possessing in the Life of Christ a symbol and rallying cry of inexhaustible power, and drawing from its own corporate life of service and aspiration, developed through millions of separate lives, the only reasonable hope of immortality, and the only convincing witness to a Divine and Righteous Will at work in the universe;--it is under some such form that one tries to dream the future. The chaos into which religious observance has fallen at the present day is, surely, a real disaster. Religious services in which men and women cannot take part, either honestly or with any spiritual gain, are better let alone. Yet the ideal of a common worship is an infinitely n.o.ble one. Year after year the simplest and most crying reforms in the liturgy of the Church of England are postponed, because n.o.body can agree upon them. And all the time the starving of "the hungry sheep" goes on.
But if religious ideals have not greatly profited by the war, it is plain that in the field of social change we are on the eve of transformations--throughout Europe--which may well rank in history with the establishment of the Pax Romana, or the incursion of the northern races upon the Empire; with the Renaissance, or the French Revolution.
In our case, the vast struggle, in the course of which millions of British men and women have been forcibly shaken out of all their former ways of life and submitted to a sterner discipline than anything they have ever known, while, at the same time, they have been roused by mere change of circ.u.mstance and scene to a strange new consciousness both of themselves and the world, cannot pa.s.s away without permanently affecting the life of the State and the relation of all its citizens to each other. In the country districts, especially, no one of my years can watch what is going on without a thrilling sense, as though, for us who are nearing the last stage of life, the closed door of the future had fallen mysteriously ajar and one caught a glimpse through it of a coming world which no one could have dreamt of before 1914. Here, for instance, is a clumsy, speechless laborer of thirty-five, called up under the Derby scheme two years ago. He was first in France and is now in Mesopotamia. On his first leave he reappears in his native village. His family and friends scarcely know him. Always a good fellow, he has risen immeasurably in mental and spiritual stature. For him, as for Cortez, on the "peak in Darien," the veil has been drawn aside from wonders and secrets of the world that, but for the war, he would have died without even guessing at. He stands erect; his eyes are brighter and larger; his speech is different. Here is another--a boy--a careless and troublesome boy he used to be--who has been wounded, and has had a company officer of whom he speaks, quietly indeed, but as he could never have spoken of any one in the old days. He has learned to love a man of another social world, with whom he has gone, unflinching, into a h.e.l.l of fire and torment. He has seen that other dare and die, leading his men, and has learned that a "swell" can reckon _his_ life--his humble, insignificant life as it used to be--as worth more than his own.
And there are thousands on whom the mere excitement of the new scenes, the new countries, cities, and men, has acted like flame on invisible ink, bringing out a hundred unexpected apt.i.tudes, developing a mental energy that surprises themselves. "On my farm," says a farmer I know, "I have both men that have been at the front, and are allowed to come back for agricultural purposes, and others that have never left me. They were all much the same kind of men before the war; but now the men who have been to the front are worth twice the others. I don"t think they _know_ that they are doing more work, and doing it better than they used to do. It is unconscious. Simply, they are twice the men they were."
And in the towns, in London, where, through the Play Centers, I know something of the London boy, how the discipline, the food, the open air, the straining and stimulating of every power and sense that the war has brought about, seems to be transforming and hardening the race! In the n.o.ble and Pauline sense, I mean. These lanky, restless lads have indeed "endured hardness."
Ah, let us take what comfort we can from these facts, for they are facts--in face of these crowded graveyards in the battle zone, and all the hideous wastage of war. They mean, surely, that a new heat of intelligence, a new pa.s.sion of sympathy and justice, has been roused in our midst by this vast and terrible effort, which, when the war is over, will burn out of itself the rotten things in our social structure, and make reforms easy which, but for the war, might have rent us in sunder.
Employers and employed, townsman and peasant, rich and poor--in the ears of all, the same still small voice, in the lulls of the war tempest, seems to have been urging the same message. More life--more opportunity--more leisure--more joy--more beauty!--for the ma.s.ses of plain men and women, who have gone so bare in the past and are now putting forth their just and ardent claim on the future.