Looking back at those times, of all the thunderous events which then loosened excited tongues, caused by high-minded men of action expertly conjuring crisis after crisis while their docile followers scrambled out of one sublime trouble into another, heated and exhausted, but still gaping with obedience and respect, we can see that nothing remains but the burial parties, whose work is yet uncompleted in France. What good does persist out of those days is the light in which Gilbert"s tortoise sunned itself. It is a light which has not gone out. And it makes us wonder, not how much of our work in these years will survive to win the grat.i.tude of those who will follow us, but just what it is they will be grateful for. Where is it, and what happy man is doing it? And what are we thinking of him? Do we even know his name?
XXIII. Ruskin
APRIL 19, 1919. Some good people have been celebrating Ruskin, whose centenary it is. And to-day a little friend of mine left her school books so that I might wonder what they were when I saw them on my table. One of them was _The Crown of Wild Olive_. It put me in a reminiscent mood. I looked at Ruskin"s works on my shelves, and tried to recall how long it was since they interested me. Nevertheless, I would not part with them.
In my youth Ruskin"s works were only for the wealthy, and I remember that my purchase of those volumes was an act of temerity, and even of sacrifice. And who but an ingrate would find fault with Ruskin, or would treat him lightly? With courage and eloquence he denounced dishonesty in the days when it was not supposed that cheating could be wrong if it were successful. He did that when minds were so dark that people blinked with surprise at a light which showed as a social iniquity naked children crawling with chains about them in the galleries of coal-mines. Was it really wrong to make children do that? Or was Ruskin only an impossible idealist? They were the happy years, radiant with the certain knowledge of the British that the Holy Grail would be recognized immediately it was seen, for over it would be proudly floating the confirmatory Union Jack.
We had not even begun to suspect that our morals, manners, and laws were fairly poor compared with the standards of the Mohawks and Mohicans whom our settlers had displaced in America a century before. And Ruskin told that Victorian society it had an ugly mind, and did ugly things. When Ruskin said so, with considerable emotion, Thackeray was so hurt that he answered as would any clever editor to-day about a contribution which convinced him that it would make readers angry; he told Ruskin it would never do. Thackeray"s readers, of course, were a.s.sured they were the best people, and that worldly cynic did well to reject Ruskin, and preserve the _Cornhill Magazine_.
"Ruskin," it says in the introduction to _The Crown of Wild Olive_ which my little friend reads at school, "is certainly one of the greatest masters of English prose." That has often been declared. But is he? Or is our tribute to Ruskin only a show of grat.i.tude to one who revealed to us the unpleasant character of our national habits when contrasted with a standard for gentlemen? It ought not to have required much eloquence to convince us that Widnes is unlovely; the smell of it should have been enough. It is curious that we needed festoons of chromatic sentences to warn us that cruelty to children, even when profit can be made of it, is not right. But I fear some people really enjoy remorseful sobbing. It is half the fun of doing wrong. Yet I would ask in humility--for it is a fearful thing to doubt Ruskin, the literary divinity of so many right-thinking people--whether English children who are learning the right way to use their language, and the n.o.blest ideas to express, should run the risk of having Ruskin"s example set before them by softhearted teachers? I think that a parent who knew a child of his, on a certain day, was to take the example of Ruskin as a prose stylist on the subject of war, would do well, on moral and aesthetic grounds, to keep his child away from school on that day to practise a little roller-skating. For humility and grat.i.tude should not blind us to the fact that few writers in English of Ruskin"s reputation have ever considered such a rosy cloud of rhetoric as is his lecture on war, in which a reasonable shape no sooner looms than it is lost again, to be worth preserving. The subject of war is of importance, inflammable humanity being what it is, and the results of war being what we know; and the quality of the critical attention we give to so great a matter is unfortunately clear when we regard the list of distinguished critics of letters who have accepted, apparently without difficulty, as great prose, Ruskin"s heedless rush of words upon it. Perhaps his language appears n.o.ble because the rhythmic pour of its sentences lulls reason into a comfortable and benignant sleepiness.
I remember the solemn voice of a lecturer on English literature, years ago, moving me to buy _The Crown of Wild Olive_. Such obvious ignorance as I knew mine to be could not be tolerated. Whatever I went without, it could not be that book. I put it in my hold-all when, as was my duty, I went for my training with the artillery volunteers. I read in camp the essay on war, when bombardiers no longer claimed my attention, and the knightly words of sergeant instructors were taking a needed rest. I pondered over that essay, and concluded that though plainly I was very young and very wrong to feel puzzled and even derisive over English prose which fascinated a learned lecturer into solemnity, yet I would sooner learn to make imitation flowers of wool than read that essay to a critical audience, especially if I had written it myself.
Ruskin, in fact, with no more experience of war than a bishop"s wife, did not know what he was talking about. Throughout the essay, too, he is in two minds. One is that of a gentleman who knows that war is the same phenomenon, artistically, ethically, and socially, as a public-house riot with broken bottles caused by a dispute over one of those fundamental principles which are often challenged in such a place. Those riots are natural enough. They are caused by the nature of man. They continue to happen, for it has taken the Church longer to improve our manners than it has taken stock-raisers to improve the milking qualities of kine. And Ruskin"s other mind is still in the comical Tennysonian stage about war, dwelling with awe on swords and shields, glory, honour, patriotism, courage, spurs, pennants, and tearful but resolute ladies who wave their handkerchiefs in the intervals of sobbing over their "loved ones."
He calls war "n.o.ble play." He scorns cricket. As for his "style" and his "thought": "I use," says Ruskin, "in such a question, the test which I have adopted, of the connexion of war with other arts, and I reflect how, as a sculptor, I should feel if I were asked to design a monument for Westminster Abbey, with a carving of a bat at one end and a ball at the other. It may be there remains in me only a savage Gothic prejudice; but I had rather carve it with a shield at one end and a sword at the other."
I cannot tell whether Ruskin reflected so because of a savage Gothic prejudice, but I am certain he wrote like that moved by what we feel--the feeling goes deeper into time even than the Goths--about the victim for sacrifice. We must justify that sacrifice, and so we give it a ceremonial ritual and dignity. Otherwise, I think, Ruskin would not have suggested the shield and sword as the symbolic decorations. He felt instinctively and because of a long-accepted tradition that those antique symbols were the only way to hide the ugly look of the truth. For certainly he could have used a ball at one end--a cannon-ball--and a mortar at the other.
Just as we might use an aerial torpedo at one end, and the image of a mutilated child at the other; or a gas cylinder at one end, and a gas-mask at the other. But the artist is not going to be deprived of his romance through a touch of the actual, any more than the lady with the handkerchief can be expected to forego her anguished sob over her hero as he goes forth to battle.
We saw that in our Great War. The ancient appeal of the patriots rushed us away from reason with "last stands," and the shot-riddled banners wavering in the engulfing waves of barbarians, till an irresistible cavalry charge scattered the hordes. All this replaced the plumes, the shining armour, and the chivalrous knights. Ruskin, however, was a subtle improvement even on the last stand with the shot-riddled banner. He antic.i.p.ated those who have been most popular because they made our War entrancing and endurable. He went to the heart of the matter. He knew that the audience which would the more readily agree with him when he made an emotional case for the enn.o.bling nature of war would be mainly of reclused women. He addressed them. So did, of late, some of our most successful writers on war. They, like Ruskin, made their appeal to that type of mind which obtains a real satisfaction, a sensuous pleasure, from contemplating the unseen sufferings of the young and vicarious victim sobbing, and feeling n.o.ble and enduring.
XXIV. The Reward of Virtue
MAY 9, 1919. The Treaty of Peace is published. Compared with what the innocent in 1915 called the "objects of the War," this treaty is as the aims of Captain Morgan"s ruffians to those of the Twelve Apostles. The truth is, some time ago the Versailles drama fell to the level of an overworked newspaper story which shrewd editors saw was past its day.
Those headlines, Humiliate the Hun, Hang the Kaiser, and Make Germany Pay, had become no more interesting than a copy of last week"s _Morning Mischief_ in a horse-pond. The subject was old and wet. Because five months ago we thoughtfully elected men of the counting-house to the work of governing the State, of late we have been too indignant over the cost and difficulty of living to spare a thought for the beauty of Peace; that is why we are now examining the clauses of the famous Treaty with about as much care for what they may mean to us as if they concerned the movements of the Asteroids. A year ago the German attacks seemed near to making guns the deciding voice in the affairs of unhappy humanity. On the chill and overcast spring morning when the Treaty was published, it was significant that those very few men to whom we could go for courage a year ago were the only people dismayed by the terms of the Peace Treaty.
And the timid, who once went to those stout hearts for a.s.surance--to have, as the soldiers used to say, their cold feet ma.s.saged--were the bright and cheerful souls. It was ominous. Yet those careless and happy hearts are not so trying to me as the amiable but otherwise sensible men who were sure our statesmen would not betray the dead, and who are incredulous over the Treaty now they see what it clearly intends to convey. They cannot believe that the War, which they thought began as a war of liberation, a struggle of Europe to free itself from the intolerable bonds of its past, continues in the Peace Treaty as a force malignantly deflected to the support of the very evils out of which August, 1914, arose. Then did they imagine the well-meaning leopard would oblige by changing his spots if spoken to kindly while he was eating the baby?
XXV. Great Statesmen
MAY, 31, 1919. What is wrong with our statesmen? I think the answer is simple. Success in a political career can be understood by all of us. It attracts the attention which applauds the owner of a Derby winner, or the Bishop who began as a poor, industrious, but tactful child. John the Baptist failed to attract the publicity he desired; and Christ drew it as a criminal, for the religious and political leaders of his day recognized what his teaching would lead to as easily as would any magistrate to-day who had before him a carpenter accused of persuading soldiers that killing is murder. Politicians move on the level of the common intelligence, and compete there with each other in charging the ignorance of the commonalty with emotion. A politician need be no more than something between a curate and a card-sharper. If he knows anything of the arts, of history, of economics, or of science, he had better forget it, or else use it as a forestaller would a knowledge of the time when prices should be raised. A confident man with a blood-shot voice and a gift for repartee is sure to make a success of politics, especially if he is not too particular. This did not matter once, perhaps, when politics merely afforded excitement for taverns and a career for the avid and meddlesome. The country was prosperous, and so it was difficult to do it serious harm.
But to-day, just when we must have the leading of moral, judicious, and well-informed minds, or perish, we have only our statesmen. It never occurs to the crowd that its business would be more successfully transacted by a chance group, say of headmasters of elementary schools, than by the statesmen who, at Versailles recently, dared not face the shocking realities because these could not be squared with a Treaty which had to frame the figments of the hustings. The trouble with our statesmen is that they have been concerned hitherto merely to attend to the machinery, running freely and with little friction, of industrial society. They did not create that machinery. They but took it over. They knew nothing of the principles which motived it. Our statesmen were only practical politicians and business men. They held in contempt the fine abstract theories of physics, mechanics, and dynamics. It was safe for them to do so. The machinery went on running, apparently of its own volition. All went well until the War. Now the propeller-shaft of industrial society is fractured, our ship is wallowing in the trough of the seas, and the men who should put things right for us do not even know that it is the main shaft on which they should concentrate. They are irritating the pa.s.sengers by changing the cabins, confiscating luggage, insisting on higher fares, cutting down the rations, and instructing the sailors in the goose-step; but the ship has no way on her, and the sound of breakers grows louder from a sombre, precipitous, and unknown coast.
XXVI. Joy
JULY 19, 1919. It has come. This is the great day of the English. Many have doubted whether we should ever have it, for faith had been weak and the mind weary while the enemy was still fixed in his fanatic resolution.
But here it is, half my window-blind already bright with its first light.
To-day we celebrate our return to peace, to an earth made the fairer for children, fit for the habitation of free men, safe for quiet folk ... the day that once had seemed as remote as truth, as inaccessible as good fortune; a day, so we used to think in France, more distant even than those incredible years of the past that were undervalued by us, when we were happy in our ignorance of the glory men could distil from misery and filth; when we had not guessed what wealth could be got from the needs of a public anxious for its life; nor that sleeping children could be bombed in a n.o.ble cause. Yes, it had seemed to us even farther off than our memories of the happy past. Yet here it is, its coffee-cups tinkling below, and I welcome its early shafts of gold like the fortune they are.
The fortune seems innocent and unaware of its nature. It does not know what it means to us. I had often been with soldier friends across the water when with mock rapture they had planned an itinerary for this day.
They spoke of it where their surroundings made the thought of secure leisure or unremarkable toil only a painful reminder of what was beatific, but might never be. This day had not come to them. But it had come to me.
I was luckier than they. Yet when luck comes to us, does it ever look quite as we had imagined it when it was not ours? I lift the curtain on this luck, and look out. From an upper window of the house opposite the national emblem of the American Republic is hanging like an ap.r.o.n. Next door to it a man is decorating his windowsills with fairy lamps, and from his demeanour he might be devising a taboo against evil. I see no other sign that the new and better place of our planet was being acknowledged.
The street is as the milkman and the postman have always known it on a quiet morning.
A c.o.c.k crowed. It was then I knew that, though the morning was like all good sunrises, which are the same for the unjust and the righteous, I, somehow, was different. Chanticleer was quite near, but his confident and defiant voice, I recognized with a start, was a call from some other morning. It was the remembered voice of life at sunrise, as old as the jungle, alert, glad, and brave. Then why did it not sound as if it were meant for me? Why did it not accord, as once it did, with the coming of a new day, when the renewed and waiting earth was veritably waiting for us?
Yet the morning seemed the same, its sounds the familiar confidences, its light the virgin innocence of a right beginning. Was this new light ours?
While looking at it I thought that perhaps there is another light, an aura of something early and rare, which, once it is doused, cannot be re-kindled, even by the sun which rises to shine on a great victory.
I began to feel that this early confusion of thought, over even so plain a cause for joy as morning, might be a private hint that it would be as hard to tell the truth about peace as it used to be about battle. And how difficult it is to tell the truth about war, and even how improper, some of us know. For what a base traitor even truth may be to good patriots, when she insists that her mirror cannot help reflecting what is there!
Why should the best instincts of loyal folk be thus embarra.s.sed? If they do not wish to know what is there, when that is what it is like, is it right, is it gentlemanly, to show them?
How easy it would be to write of peace in the Capital, where the old highways have been decorated for many kings, marshals, and admirals, and the flags have been hung for victories since England first bore arms. So why should one be dubious of a few unimportant suburban byways, where the truth is plain, and is not charged with many emotions through the presence of an emperor and his statesmen and soldiers, all of them great, all of them ready for our superlatives to add to their splendour?
But perhaps the more you know of a place, the greater is your perplexity.
That old vicarage wall, lower down my street, is merely attractive in the sun of Peace Day. A stranger, if he noticed it, might at the most admire its warm tones, and the tufts of hawkweed and snapdragon which are scattered on its ledges. But from this same window, on a winter morning, when affairs were urgent in France, I have seen youth a.s.sembled by that wall. Youth was silent. There was only a sergeant"s voice in all the street. I think I hear now the diminishing trampling of quick feet marching away; and see a boy"s face as he turned near the top of the rise to wave his hand. But look now, and say where are the shades on a bright morning!
I went out, a dutiful citizen, to celebrate. No joy can be truthfully reported till just this side of the High Street, where there were three girls with linked arms dancing in lax and cheerful oblivion, one of them quite drunk. Near them stood a cart with a man, a woman, and a monkey in it. The superior animals were clothed in red, white, and blue, and the monkey was wearing a Union Jack for a ruff. The ape was humping himself on the tail-board, and from his expression he might have been wondering how long all this would last. His gay companions were rosily chanting that if they caught some one bending it would be of no advantage to him.
The main thoroughfare was sanded, and was waiting for the official procession. Quiet citizens were strolling about with their children, and what they were thinking is as great a mystery as what the populace at Memphis thought when the completion of the Great Pyramid was celebrated by the order of Cheops. In a room of an upper storey near the town hall a choir was singing the Hallelujah Chorus, and below, on the pavement, a hospital nurse, in a red wig, stood gravely listening, swaying to and fro, holding her skirts high, so that we saw beneath the broad slacks of an able seaman.
The chorus ceased, and in grat.i.tude for the music the nurse embraced a Highland soldier, who was standing near and who was secretly amused, I believe, by the nurse"s trousers. Then we heard the bands of the military procession in the distance, and it was in that moment I saw a young officer I knew, who was out as early as Neuve Chapelle, gazing, like everybody else, in the direction of the martial sounds. Before I could reach him through the press he had turned, and was walking hurriedly down a side street, as though in flight. I could not follow him. I wanted to see the soldiers. My reason was no better than some sentimental emotion; for I saw the original Contemptibles march off for Mons; and was with a battalion of the 9th Division, the first of Kitchener"s men to go into the line; and saw the Derby men come out and begin; and at the last discovered that the conscripts were as good as the rest. Some of the survivors were marching towards me.
But I did not recognize them. Many were elderly men who were displaying proud tunics of volunteer regiments as old as Hyde Park Parades by Queen Victoria. One looked then for the sections from the local lodges of the Druids, Oddfellows, Buffaloes, and the He-Goats. There was the band of the local cadets, spontaneous in its enthusiasm, its zest for martial music no different, of course. Just behind these lads a strange figure walked in the procession, a bent and misshapen old man, whose face had no expression but a fixed and hypnotic stare. He was keeping time to the measure of the boys" music by snapping the spring of a mouse-trap which he held aloft. I could not find him in the program. Was he also drunk? Or was he a terrible jest? Most of our triumphant display followed this figure. If our illusions go, what is left to us? Ah, our memories of the Somme! That young officer who turned away when he saw Triumph approaching acted on a right instinct.
There is a hilltop near us. It looks to other hills over a great s.p.a.ce of southern England, and at night on the far promontories of the Downs bonfires were to be lighted. I have no doubt signals flared from them when the Romans were baffled. Again to-night they would signal that the latest enemy had been vanquished.
It was raining gently, and from our own crest the lower and outer night was void. A touch of distant phosph.o.r.escence that waned, and intensified again to a strong white glow, presently gave the void one far and lonely hilltop. A cloud elsewhere appeared out of nothing, and persisted, a lenticular spectre of dull fire. These aerial spectres became a host; some were so far away that they were faint smears of orange, and others so near and great that they pulsed and revealed the shapes of the clouds.
It was all impersonal, it was England itself that was reflected, the hills that had awakened. It was the emanation of a worthy tradition, older than ourselves, that was re-kindled and was glowing, and that would be here when we are not. It was so receptive, it was so s.p.a.cious, that our gravest memories could abide there, as if night were kind to the secrets we dare not voice, and understood folly and remorse, and could protect our better visions, and had sanctuary and consolation for that grief which looks to what might have been, but now can never be.
A spark glittered near, a spark that towered and hovered overhead, and burst into coiling volumes of lurid smoke with a moving heart of flame.
Light broke on a neighbouring hill that had been unseen and forgotten; the hill was crowned with fantastic trees that danced, and a wavering tower. From our own valley below there came a vicious tearing that gave me a momentary chill (so sounds a stream of machine-gun lead, going over), and a group of coloured stars expanded over us. Their bright light showed the night reticulated with thin lines of smoke, like veins of calcite in a canopy of black marble. Our immediate country, pallid and tremulous, faded again, but in that brief prospect of a shadow land I glimpsed a road, the presentment of the long road to Bapaume. So the Bapaume road showed at night by inconsequential and unexpected lights.
That hill-crest of leaping trees could be the ridge of Loupart with its wood, and Achete in flames beyond. The notion gave me enough of our hill top. I descended from it.
There is a public-house at the foot of the hill, and a lane of harsh noises and a beam of light projected together from its open door across the road. Beyond it I turned into a house, for I knew I should find there an aged and solitary man who would have his own thoughts on such a night as this; for he had a son, and the spectre of the Bapaume road had reminded me where that boy was celebrating whatever peace he knew. His father was not communicative; and what could I say? He sat, answering me distantly and austerely, and he might have been a bearded sage seeing in retrospect a world he had long known, and who at last had made up his mind about it, though he would not tell me what that was. Outside we could hear revellers approaching. They paused at our door; their feet began to shuffle, and they sang:
"If I catch you bending, I"ll turn you upside down, Knees up, knees up, Knees up, knees up, Knees up, Father Brown."
XXVII. The Real Thing
JANUARY 9, 1920. There was a country town of which we heard wonderful tales as children. But it was as far as Cathay. It had many of the qualities that once made Cathay desirable and almost unbelievable. We heard of it at the time when we heard of the cities of Vanity Fair and Baghdad, and all from a man with a beard, who once sat by a London fire, just before bedtime, smoking a pipe and telling those who were below him on the rug about the past, and of more fortunate times, and of cities that were fair and far. Nothing was easier for us then than to believe fair reports. Good dreams must be true, for they are good. Some day, he said, he would take us to Torhaven; but he did not, for his luck was not like that.