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NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS
THE WORKS OF
Joseph Conrad THE RESCUE
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A PERSONAL RECORD
THE SHADOW LINE
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J. M. DENT ^ SONS LTD.
NOTES ON
LIFE & LETTERS
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JOSEPH CONRAD
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AUTHOR'S NOTE
I DON^T know whether I ought to offer an apology for this collection which has more to do with life than with letters. Its appeal is made to orderly minds. This, to be frank about it, is a process of tidying up, which, from the nature of things, caiihof "5e~ regarded as premature. The fact is that I wanted to do it myself because of a feeling that had nothing to do with the considerations of worthiness or unworthiness of the small (but unbroken) pieces collected within the covers of this volume. Of course it may be said that I might have taken up a broom and used it without saying anything about it. That, certainly, is one way of tidying up.
But it would have been too much to have expected me to treat all this matter as removable rubbish. All those things had a place in my life. Whether any of them deserve to have been picked up and ranged on' the shelf — this shelf — I cannot say, and, frankly, I havejiot allowed my rnindjto dwell on thequestio_n,_J_was afraid_jaL.thinJdng- myielFlntoainood that would hurt my JeeHngsj^ foF those" pieces of writing, whatever may be the
vi AUTHOR'S NOTE
comment on their display, appertain to the char- acter of the man.
And so here they are, dusted, which was but a decent thing to do, but in no way polished, ex- tending from the year ''98 to the year '20, a thin array (for such a stretch of time) of really innocent attitudes : Conrad literary, Conrad political, Conrad reminiscent, Conrad controversial. Well, yes! A one-man show — or is it merely the show of one man?
The only thing that will not be found amongst those Figures and Things that have passed away, will be Conrad en fantoiifles. It is a constitutional inability. Schlafrock und fantofeln ! Not that!
Never! ... I don't know whether I dare boast
*- --- , . -
Hke a certain South American general who used t6~say that no emergency of war or peace had ever foun3riiim ^^^ith his boots off "; but I may say~that whenever the various periodicals men- tioned in this book called on me to come out and blow the trumpet of personal opinions or strike the pensive lute that speaks of the past, I a^^ys tried to pull on my boots first. I didn't want to 3o it, God knows! Their Editors, to whom I beg to offer zxiy thanks here, made me perform mainly by kindness but partly by bribery. Well, yesl Bribery? What can you expect? I^ never _prer_ tended to be better than the~peQple_in__the__nexL street, or even in the same street.
AUTHOR'S NOTE vii
This volume (including these embarrassed intro- ductory remarks) is as near as I shall ever come to deshabille in pubHc; and perhaps it will do something to help towards a better vision of the man, if it gives no more than a partial view of a piece of his back, a little dusty (after the process of tidying up), a little bowed, and receding from the world not because of weariness or misanthropy but for other reasons that cannot be helped: because the leaves fall, the water flows, the clock ticks with that horrid pitiless solemnity which you must have observed in the ticking of jthe hall crock at Tiome^ For reasons like that. Yes I It rece3es! And this was the chance to afford one more view of it — even to my own eyes.
The section within this volume called Letters explains itself, though I do not pretend to say that it justifies its own existence. It claims nothing in its defence except the right of speech which I believe belongs to everybody outside a Trappist monastery. The part I have ventured, for short- ness' sake, to call Life, may perhaps justify itself by the emotional sincerity of the feehngs to which the various papers included under that head owe their origin. And as they relate to events of which everyone has a date, they are in the nature of sign-posts pointing out the direction m}- thoughts were compelled to take at the various cross-roads. If anybody detects any sort of consistency in the
viii AUTHOR'S NOTE
choicejjhis^will be only proof positive that wisdom had nothing to do^with it. WTiether right or wrong, instinct alone is invariable; a fact which only adds_a deeper shade to^ts^inherent mystery. The appearance of intellectuality these pieces ^ may present at first sight is mef ely^the "result ^f the arrangement of w^ords. The logic that may be found there is only the logic of the language. But I need not labour the point. There will be plenty of people sagacious enough to perceive the absence of all wisdom from these pages. But I believe sufficiently in human sympathies to imagine that very few will question their sincerity. Whatever delusions I may have suffered from I have had no delusions as to the nature of the facts commented on here. I may have misjudged their import: but that is the sort of error for which one may expect a certain amount of toleration.
The only paper of this collection which has never been pubhshed before is the Note on the PoHsh Problem. It was written at the request of a friend to be shown privately, and its " Protectorate " idea, sprung from a strong sense of the critical nature of the situation, was shaped by the actual circumstances of the time. The time was about a month before the entrance of Roumania into the war, and though, honestly, I had seen already the shadow of coming events I could not permit my misgivings to enter into and destroy the
AUTHOR'S NOTE ix
structure of my plan. I still believe that there was some sense in it. It may certainly be charged with the appearance of lack of faith and it lays itself open to the throwing of many stones; but my object was practical and I had to consider warily the preconceived notions of the people to whom it was impHcitly addressed, and also their unjustifiable hopes. They were unjustifiable, but who was to tell them that ? I mean who was wise enough and convincing enough to show them the inanity of their mental attitude ? The whole atmo- sphere was poisoned with visions that were not so much false as simply impossible. They were also the result of vague and unconfessed fears, and that made their strength. For myself, with a very definite dread in my heart, I was careful not to allude to their character because I did not want the Note to be thrown away unread. And then I had to remember that thejmpossible has sometimes tIie""trKk_of_coming to pass to the confusion of minds and often to the crushing of hearts.
Ut the other papers I have nothing special to say. They are what they are, and I am by now too hardened a sinner to feel ashamed of insigni- ficant indiscretions. And as to their appearance in this form I claim that indulgence to which all sinners against themselves are entitled.
J. c.
1920.
CONTENTS
PART I. — LETTERS
PAGE
Books Speaker 3
Henry James . . . North American Review 13
Alphonse Daudet . . . Outlook 25
Guy de Maupassant 33
Anatole France . (I.) Speaker ; (II.) English Review 43
Turgenev ....
Stephen Crane : A Note With- out Dates
Tales of the Sea .
An Observer in Malaya
A Happy Wanderer
The Life Beyond .
The Ascending Effort .
The Censor of Plays .
61
|
London Mercury |
67 |
|
Outlook |
73 |
|
Academy |
79 |
|
Daily Mail |
83 |
|
Daily Mail |
89 |
|
Daily Mail |
95 |
|
Daily Mail |
lOI |
CONTENTS
PART II. — LIFE
Autocracy and War .
The Crime of Partition
A Note on the Poush Problem
Poland Revisited
First News .
Well Done .
Tradition
Confidence ,
Flight
Some Reflections on Loss of the
Certain Aspects of the Ad- mirable Inquiry .
Protection of Ocean Liners .
A Friendly Place
Fortnightly Review Fortnightly Review
THE
Titanic".
Daily News
Reveille
Daily Chronicle
Daily Mail
Golden Daily Mail
Fledgling
English Review
PAGE III
179 189
241 261 271 281
287
English Review 309
Illustrated London News 335 Daily Mail 351
PART I
LETTERS
BOOKS
1905
I
'' I HAVE not read this author's books, and if I have read them I have forgotten what they were about."
These words are reported as having been uttered in our midst not a hundred years ago, pubHcly, from the seat of justice, by a civic magistrate. The words of our municipal rulers have a solemnity and importance far above the words of other mortals, because our municipal rulers more than any other variety of our gover- nors and masters represent the average wisdom, temperament, sense and virtue of the community. This generaHsation, it ought to be promptly said in the interests of eternal justice (and recent friend- ship), does not apply to the United States of America. There, if one may believe the long and helpless indignations of their daily and weekly Press, the majority of municipal rulers appear to be thieves of a particularly irrepressible sort. But this by the way. My concern is with a statement issuing from the average temperament and the
3
BOOKS
average wisdom of a great and wealthy community, and uttered by a civic magistrate obviously with- out fear and without reproach.
I confess I am pleased with his temper, which is that of prudence. " I have not read the books," he says, and immediately he adds, " and if I have read them I have forgotten." This is excellent caution. And I Hke his style: it is unartificial and bears the stamp of manly sincerity. As a reported piece of prose this declaration is easy to read and not difficult to believe. Many books have not been read; still more have been forgotten. As a piece of civic oratory this declaration is strikingly eftective. Calculated to fall in with the bent of the popular mind, so familiar with all forms of forget- fulness, it has also the power to stir up a subtle emotion while it starts a train of thought — and what greater force can be expected from human speech ? But it is in naturalness that this declara- tion is perfectly deHghtful, for there is nothing more natural than for a grave City Father to for- get what the books he has read once — ^long ago — in his giddy youth maybe — were about.
And the books in question are novels, or, at any rate, were written as novels. I proceed thus cau- tiously (following my illustrious example) because being without fear and desiring to remain as far as possible without reproach, I confess at once that I have not read them.
BOOKS
I have not; and of the million persons or more who are said to have read them, I never met one yet with the talent of lucid exposition sufficiently developed to give me a connected account of what they are about. But they are books, part and parcel of humanity, and as such, in their ever increasing, josthng multitude, they are worthy of regard, admiration, and compassion.
Especially of compassion. It has been said a long time ago that books have their fate. They have, and it is very much like the destiny of man. They share with us the great incertitude of igno- miny or glory — of severe justice and senseless per- secution— of calumny and misunderstanding— the shame of undeserved success. Of all the inanimatCHv objects ^ofaU men^s creations^books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thought, our amBi- tions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning towards error. \ But most of all they resemble us in their precarious hold on hfe. A bridge constructed according to the rules of the art of bridge-building is certain of a long, honourable and useful career. But a\ book as good in its way as the bridge may perish / obscurely on the very day of its birth. The art of their creators is not sufficient to give them more than a moment of life. Of the books born from , the restlessness, the inspiration, and the vanity of j human minds, those that the Muses would love best (
BOOKS
lie more than all others'\inder the menace of an early death. Sometimes their defects will save them. Sometimes a book fair to see may — to use a lofty expression — have no individual soul. Obviously a book of that sort cannot die. It can only crumble into dust. But the best of books drawing sustenance from the sympathy and memory of men have Hved on the brink of de- struction, for men's memories are short, and their sympathy is, we must admit, a very fluctuating, unprincipled emotion.
No secret of eternal life for our books can be found amongst the formulas of art, any more than for our bodies in a prescribed combination of drugs. This is not because some books are not worthy of enduring life, but because the formulas of art are dependent on things variable, unstable and untrustworthy; on human sympathies, on prejudices, on likes and disHkes, on the sense of virtue and the sense of propriety, on beliefs and theories that, indestructible in themselves, always change their form — often in the lifetime of one fleeting generation.
BOOKS
II
Of all books, novels, which the Muses should love, make a serious claim on our compassion. The art of the novelist is simple. At the same time it is the most elusive of all creative arts, the most Hable to be obscured by the scruples of its ser- vants and votaries, the one pre-eminently destined to bring trouble to the mind and the heart of the artist. AitQi all, the creation of a world is not a small undertaking except perhaps to the divinely gifted. In truth every noveHst must begin by creating for himself a world, great or little, in which he can honestly beheve. This world cannot be made otherwise than in his own image: it is fated to remain individual and a little mysterious, and yet it must resemble something already fami- Har to the experience, the thoughts and the sensa- tions of his readers. At the heart of fiction, even the least worthy of the name, some sort of truth can be found — if only the truth of a childish theatrical ardour in the game of life, as in the novels of Dumas the father. But the fair truth of human deHcacy can be found in Mr. Henry James's novels; and the comical, appaUing truth of human rapacity let loose amongst the spoils of existence lives in the monstrous world created by Balzac. The pursuit of happiness by means lawful and
8 BOOKS
unlawful, tlirough resignation or revolt, by the clever manipulation of conventions or by solemn hanging on to the skirts of the latest scientific theory, is the only theme that can be legitimately developed by the novehst who is the chronicler of the adven- tures of mankind amongst the dangers of the king- dom of the earth. And the kingdom of this earth itself, the ground upon which his individuaHties stand, stumble, or die, must enter into his scheme of faithful record. To encompass all this in one harmonious conception is a great feat; and even to attempt it deliberately with serious intention, not from the senseless prompting of an ignorant heart, is an honourable ambition. For it requires some courage to step in calmly where fools may be eager to rush. As a distinguished and successful French novelist once observed of fiction, ** C'est un art trop difiicile."
It is natural that the novelist should doubt his ability to cope with his task. He imagines it more gigantic than it is. And yet literary creation being only one of the legitimate forms of human activity has no value but on the condition of not excluding the fullest recognition of all the more distinct forms of action. This condition is sometim^es forgotten by the man of letters, who often, especially in his youth, is inchned to lay a claim of exclusive superiority for his own amongst all the other tasks of the human mind. The mass of verse and
BOOKS
prose may glimmer here and there with the glow of a divine spark, but in the sum of human effort it has no special importance. There is no justifi- cative formula for its existence any more than for any other artistic achievement. With the rest of them it is destined to be forgotten, without, per- haps, leaving the faintest trace. Where a novelist has an advantage over the workers in other fields
of thought is in his privilege of freedom — the free-
dom of expression and the freedom of confessing his innermost behefs — which should console him for the hard slavery of the pen.
Ill
Liberty of imagination should be the most t precious possession of a novelist. To try volun- tarily to discover the fettering dogmas of some romantic, realistic, or naturalistic creed in the free work of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of human perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors. It is a weakness of in- ferior minds when it is not the cunning device of those who, uncertain of their talent, would seek to add lustre to it by the authority of a school. Such, for instance, are the high priests who have proclaimed Stendhal for a prophet of Naturalism. But Stendhal himself would have accepted no
lo BOOKS
limitation of his freedom. Stendhal's mind was of the first order. His spirit above must be raging with a peculiarly Stendhalesque scorn and indigna- tion. For the truth is that more than one kind of intellectual cowardice hides behind the hterary formulas. And Stendhal was pre-eminently cour- ageous. He wrote his two great novels, which so few people have read, in a spirit of fearless liberty. It must not be supposed that I claim for the artist in fiction the freedom of moral NihiHsm. I would require from him many acts of faith of which the first would be the cherishing of an un- dying hope; and hope, it will not be contested, imphes all the piety of effort and renunciation. It is the God-sent form of trust in the magic force and inspiration belonging to the life of this earth. We are inclined to forget that the way of excel- lence is in the intellectual, as distinguished from emotional, humility. What one feels so hopelessly barren in declared pessimism is just its arrogance. It seems as if the discovery made by many men at various times that there is much evil in the world were a source of proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern writers. That frame of mind is not the proper one in which to approach seriously the art of fiction. It gives an author — goodness only Tcnows why — an elated sense of his own superiority. And there is nothing more dangerous than such an elation to that absolute loyalty towards
BOOKS II
his feelings and sensations an author should keep hold of in his most exalted moments of creation.
To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not neces- • sary to think that the world is good. It is enough to beHeve that there is no impossibihty of its being made so. If the flight of imaginative thought may * be allowed to rise superior to many moraHties current amongst mankind, a noveHst who would think himself of a superior essence to other men would miss the first condition of his calHng. To • have the gift of words is no such great matter. A man furnished with a long-range weapon does not become a hunter or a warrior by the mere posses- sion of a fire-arm; many other qualities of char- • acter and temperament are necessary to make him either one or the other. Of him from whose armoury of phrases one in a hundred thousand may perhaps hit the far-distant and elusive mark of art I would ask that in his deaHngs with mankind he should • be capable of giving a tender recognition to their obscure virtues. I would not have him impatient . with their small faihngs and scornful of their errors. I would not have him expect too much gratitude from that humanity whose fate, as illustrated in individuals, it is open to him to depict as ridiculous or terrible. I would wish him to look with a large • forgiveness at men's ideas and prejudices, which are by no means the outcome of malevolence, but depend on their education, their social status, even
12 BOOKS
their professions. The good artist should expect no recognition of his toil and no admiration of his genius, because his toil can with difficulty be appraised and his genius cannot possibly mean anything to the illiterate who, even from the dreadful wisdom of their evoked dead, have, so far, culled nothing but inanities and platitudes. _I^ would wish him to enlarge his sympathies by patient and loving observation while he grows Jn mental power. It is in the impartial practice of life, if anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art can be found, rather than in the absurd formulas trying to prescribe this or that particu- lar method of technique or conception. Let him mature the strength of his imagination amongst the things of this earth, which it is his business to cherish and know, and refrain from calling down his inspiration ready-made from some heaven of perfections of which he knows nothing. And I would not grudge him the proud illusion that will come sometimes to a writer: the illusion that his achievement has almost equalled the greatness of his dream. For what else could give him the serenity and the force to hug to his breast as a thing dehghtful and human, the virtue, the recti- tude and sagacity of his own City, declaring with simple eloquence through the mouth of a Conscript Father : '' I have not read this author's books, and if I have read them I have forgotten . . ."
HENRY JAMES
An Appreciation 1905
The critical faculty hesitates before the magnitude of Mr. Henry James's work. His books stand on my shelves in a place whose accessibility proclaims the habit of frequent communion. But not all his books. There is no collected edition to date, such as some of " our masters " have been provided with; no neat rows of volumes in buckram or half calf, putting forth a hasty claim to completeness, and conveying to my mind a hint of finality, of a surrender to fate of that field in which all these victories have been won. Nothing of the sort has been done for Mr. Henry James's victories in England.
In a world such as ours, so painful with all sorts of wonders, one would not exhaust oneself in bar- ren marvelling over mere bindings, had not the fact, or rather the absence of the material fact, prominent in the case of other men whose writing counts (for good or evil) — ^had it not been, I say, expressive of a direct truth spiritual and intel-
13
14 HENRY JAMES
lectual; an accident of — I suppose — the publishing business acquiring a symbolic meaning from its negative nature. Because, emphatically, in the body of Mr. Henry James's work there is no sug- gestion of finality, nowhere a hint of surrender, or even of probabihty of surrender, to his own vic- torious achievement in that field where he is a master. Happily, he will never be able to claim completeness; and, were he to confess to it in a moment of self-ignorance, he would not be believed by the very minds for whom such a confession naturally would be meant. It is impossible to think of Mr. Henry James becoming " complete " otherwise than by the brutality of our common fate whose finality is meaningless — in the sense of its logic being of a material order, the logic of a faUing stone.
I do not know into what brand of ink Mr. Henry James dips his pen; indeed, I heard that of late he had been dictating; but I know that his mind is steeped in the waters flowing from the fountain of intellectual youth. The thing — a privilege — a miracle — what you will — is not quite hidden from the meanest of us who run as we read. To those who have the grace to stay their feet it is manifest. After some twenty years of attentive acquaintance with Mr. Henry James's work, it grows into abso- lute conviction which, all personal feeHng apart, brings a sense of happiness into one's artistic exist-
HENRY JAMES 15
ence. If gratitude, as someone defined it, is a lively sense of favours to come, it becomes very easy to be grateful to the author of l^he Ambassadors — ^to name the latest of his works. The favours are sure to com^e; the spring of that benevolence will never run dry. The stream of inspiration flows brimful in a predetermined direction, unaffected by the periods of drought, untroubled in its clearness by the storms of the land of letters, without languor or violence in its force, never running back upon itself, opening new visions at every turn of its course through that richly inhabited country its fertiht)^ has created for our delectation, for our judgment, for our exploring. It is, in fact, a magic spring.
\Vith this phrase the metaphor of the perennial spring, of the inextinguishable youth, of running waters, as applied to Mr. Henry James's inspira- tion, may be dropped. In its volume and force the body of his work may be compared rather to a majestic river. All creative art is magic, is evoca- tion of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlighten- ing, famihar and surprising, for the edification of mankind, pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reahty.
Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of fiction may be compared to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross gusts of wind swaying
i6 HENRY JAMES
the action of a great multitude. It is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a Hght where the strugghng forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in this world of relative values — the permanence of memory. And the multitude feels it obscurely too; since the demand of the individual to the artist is, in effect, the cry, " Take me out of myself! " meaning really, out of my perishable activity into the light of imperishable consciousness. But everything is relative, and the Hght of consciousness is only enduring, merely the most enduring of the things of this earth, imperish- able only as against the short-Hved work of our industrious hands.
When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last airship fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance to misery and pain, shall set this undiminished Hght of his eyes against the feeble glow of the sun. The artistic faculty, of which each of us has a minute grain, may find its voice in some in- dividual of that last group, gifted with a power of expression and courageous enough to interpret the ultimate experience of mankind in terms of his temperament, in terms of art. I do not mean to say that he would attempt to beguile the last
HENRY JAMES 17
moments of humanity by an ingenious tale. It would be too much to expect — from humanity. I doubt the heroism of the hearers. As to the heroism of the artist, no doubt is necessary. There would be on his part no heroism. The artist in his calUng of interpreter creates (the clearest form of demon- stration) because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death; and the postulate was, that there is a group alive, clustered on his threshold to watch the last flicker of light on a black sky, to hear the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the earth. It is safe to affirm that, if anybody, it will be the imaginative man who would be moved to speak on the eve of that day without to-morrow — whether in austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic comment, who can guess ?
For my own part, from a short and cursory ac- quaintance with my kind, I am inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate, strange as it may appear, some hope now to us utterly incon- ceivable. For mankind is delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity. It will sleep on the battlefield among its own dead, in the manner of an army having won a barren victory. It wiU not know when it is beaten. And perhaps it is right in that quality. The victories are not, perhaps, so barren as it may appear from a purely strategical, utilitarian point of view. Mr. Henry
i8 HENRY JAMES
James seems to hold that behef. Nobody has ren- dered better, perhaps, the tenacity of temper, or knowTi how to drape the robe of spiritual honour about the drooping form of a victor in a barren strife. And the honour is always well won; for the struggles Mr. Henry James chronicles with such subtle and direct insight are, though only perosnal contests, desperate in their silence, none the less heroic (in the modern sense) for the absence of shouted watchwords, clash of arm.s and sound of trumpets. Those are adventures in which only choice souls are ever involved. And Mr. Henry James records them with a fearless and insistent fidehty to the feri'peties of the contest, and the feehngs of the combatants.
The fiercest excitements of a romance de cape et d^epee, the romance of yard-arm and boarding pike so dear to youth, whose knowledge of action (as of other things) is imperfect and Hmited, are matched, for the quickening of our maturer years, by the tasks set, by the difficulties presented, to the sense of truth, of necessity — before all, of conduct — of Mr. Henr\' James's men and women. His mankind is dehghtful. It is dehghtful in its tenacity; it refuses to own itself beaten; it will sleep on the battlefield. These warhke images come by them- selves under the pen; since from the duahty of man's nature and the competition of individuals, the life-history of the earth must in the last
HENRY JAMES 19
instance be "a history of a really very relentless warfare. Neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone. In virtue of these allies and enemies, he holds his precarious dominion, he possesses his fleeting significance; and it is this relation in all its manifestations, great and little, superficial or profound, and this rela- tion alone, that is commented upon, interpreted, demonstrated by the art of the novelist in the only possible way in which the task can be performed: by the independent creation of circumstance and character, achieved against all the difficulties of expression, in an imaginative effort finding its in- spiration from the reality of forms and sensations. That a sacrifice must be made, that something has to be given up, is the truth engraved in the inner- most recesses of the fair temple built for our edification by the masters of fiction. There is no other secret behind the curtain. All adventure, all love, every success is resumed in the supreme energy of an act of renunciation. It is the utter- most limit of our power; it is the most potent and effective force at our disposal on which rest the labours of a solitary man in his study, the rock on which have been built commonwealths whose might casts a dwarfing shadow upon two oceans. Like a natural force which is obscured as much as illuminated by the multiplicity of phenomena, the power of renunciation is obscured by the mass of
20 HENRY JAMES
weaknesses, vacillations, secondary motives and false steps and compromises which make up the sum of our activity. But no man or woman worthy of the name can pretend to anything more, to anything greater. And Mr. Henry James's men and women are worthy of the name, within the limits his art, so clear, so sure of itself, has drawn round their activities. He would be the last to claim for them Titanic proportions. The earth itself has grown smaller in the course of ages. But in every sphere of human perplexities and emo- tions, there are more greatnesses than one — not counting here the greatness of the artist himself. Wherever he stands, at the beginning or the end of things, a man has to sacrifice his gods to his passions, or his passions to his gods. That is the problem, great enough, in all truth, if approached in the spirit of sincerity and knowledge.
In one of his critical studies, published some fifteen years ago, Mr. Henry James claims for the novelist the standing of the historian as the only adequate one, as for himself and before his audi- ence. I think that the claim cannot be contested, and that the position is unassailable. Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that ; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the obser- vation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and
HENRY JAMES 21
handwriting — on second-hand impression. Thus- fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. A his- torian may be an artist too, and a novehst is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience. As is meet for a man of his descent and tradition, Mr. Henry James is the historian of fine consciences.
Of course, this is a general statement; but I don't think its truth will be, or can be questioned. Its fault is that it leaves so much out; and, besides, Mr. Henry James is much too consider- able to be put into the nutshell of a phrase. The fact remains that he has made his choice, and that his choice is justified up to the hilt by the success of his art. He has taken for himself the greater part. The range of a fine conscience covers more good and evil than the range of conscience which may be called, roughly, not fine; a conscience, less troubled by the nice discrimination of shades of conduct. A fine conscience is more concerned with essentials; its triumphs are more perfect, if less profitable, in a worldly sense. There is, in short, more truth in its working for a historian to detect and to show. It is a thing of infinite com- pHcation and suggestion. None of these escapes the art of Mr. Henry James. He has mastered the country, his domain, not wild indeed, but full of romantic glimpses, of deep shadows and sunny places. There are no secrets left within his range.
22 HENRY JAMES
He has disclosed them as they should be disclosed — that is, beautifully. And, indeed, ugliness has but little place in this world of his creation. Yet, it is always felt in the truthfulness of his art ; it is there, it surrounds the scene, it presses close upon it. It is made visible, tangible, in the struggles, in the contacts of the fine consciences, in their per- plexities, in the sophism of their mistakes. For a fine conscience is naturally a virtuous one. What is natural about it is just its fineness, an abiding sense of the intangible, ever-present, right. It is most visible in their ultimate triumiph, in their emergence from miracle, through an energeticact of remmciation. Energetic, not violent: the dis- tinction is wide, enormous, like that between substance and shadow.
Through it all Mr. Henry James keeps a firm hold of the substance, of what is worth having, of what is worth holding. The contrary opinion has been, if not absolutely affirmed, then at least impHed, with some frequency. To most of us, living wilHngly in a sort of intellectual moonlight, in the faintly reflected light of truth, the shadows so firmly renounced by Mr. Henry James's men and women, stand out endowed with extraordinary value, with a value so extraordinary that their re- jection offends, by its uncalled-for scrupulousness, those business-Hke instincts which a careful Pro- vidence has implanted in our breasts. And, apart
HENRY JAMES 23
from that just cause of discontent, it is obvious that a solution by rejection must always present a certain lack of finality, especially startling when contrasted with the usual methods of solution by rewards and punishments, by crowned love, by fortune, by a broken leg or a sudden death. Why the reading public which, as a body, has never laid upon a story-teller the command to be an artist, should demand from him this sham of Divine Omnipotence, is utterly incomprehensible. But so it is; and these solutions are legitimate inasmuch as they satisfy the desire for finaHty, for which our hearts yearn with a longing greater than the longing for the loaves and fishes of this earth. Perhaps the only true desire of mankind, coming thus to Hght in its hours of leisure, is to be set at rest. One is never set at rest by Mr. Henry James's novels. His books end as an episode in life ends. You remain with the sense of the Hfe still going on; and even the subtle presence of the dead is felt in that silence that comes upon the artist-creation when the last word has been read. It is eminently satisfying, but it is not final. Mr. Henry James, great artist and faithful historian, never attempts the impossible.
ALPHONSE DAUDET
1898
It is sweet to talk decorously of the dead who are part of our past, our indisputable possession. One must admit regretfully that to-day is but a scramble, that to-morrow may never come; it is only the precious yesterday that cannot be taken away from us, A gift from the dead, great and little, it makes hfe supportable, it almost makes one beheve in a benevolent scheme of creation. And some kind of belief is very necessary. But the real knowledge of matters infinitely more pro- found than any conceivable scheme of creation is with the dead alone. That is why our talk about them should be as decorous as their silence. Their generosity and their discretion deserve nothing less at our hands; and they, who belong already to the unchangeable, would probably disdain to claim more than this from a mankind that changes its loves and its hates about every twenty-five years — at the coming of every new and wiser generation.
One of the most generous of the dead is Daudet, who, with a prodigality approaching magnificence,
25
26 ALPHONSE DAUDET
gave himself up to us without reserve in his j/ work, with all his qualities and all his faults. Neither his qualities nor his faults were great, though they were by no means imperceptible. It is only his generosity that is out of the common. Whsit strikes one most in his work is the disin- terestedness of the toiler. With more talent than many bigger men, he did not preach about him- self, he did not attempt to persuade mankind into a belief of his own greatness. He never posed as a scientist or as a seer, not even as a prophet; and he neglected his interests to the point of never propounding a theory for the purpose of giving a tremendous significance to his art, alone of all things, in a world that, by some strange oversight, has not been supplied with an obvious meaning. "^^ Neither did he affect a passive attitude before the spectacle of life, an attitude which in gods — and in a rare mortal here and there — may appear godlike, but assumed by some men, causes one, very un- willingly, to think of the melancholy quietude of an ape. He was not the wearisome expounder of this or that theory, here to-day and spurned to-morrow. He was not a great artist, he was not an artist at all, if you like — but he was Alphonse Daudet, a man as naively clear, honest, and vibrating as the sunshine of his native land; that regrettably undiscriminating sunshine which matures grapes and pumpkins alike, and cannot,
ALPHONSE DAUDET 27
of course, obtain the commendation of the very select who look at Hfe from under a parasol.
Naturally, being a man from the South, he had a rather outspoken behef in himself, but his small distinction, worth many a greater, was in not being in bondage to some vanishing creed. He was a worker who could not compel the admira- tion of the few, but who deserved the affection of the many; and he may be spoken of with tender- ness and regret, for he is not immortal — ^he is only dead. During his hfe the simple mian whose busi- ness it ought to have been to climb, in the name of Art, some elevation or other, was content to remain below, on the plain, amongst his creations, and take an eager part in those disasters, weaknesses, and joys which are tragic enough in their droll way, but are by no means so momentous and profound as some writers — ^probably for the sake of Art — would hke to make us beheve. There is, when one thinks of it, a considerable want of candour in the august view of hfe. Without doubt a cautious reticence on the subject, or even a delicately false suggestion thrown out in that direction is, in a way, praiseworthy, since it helps to uphold the dignity of man — a matter of great importance, as anyone can see; still one cannot help feehng that a certain amount of sincerity would not be wholly blamable. To state, then, with studied moderation a behef that in unfortunate moments of lucidity
28 ALPHONSE DAUDET
is irresistibly borne in upon most of us — ^the blind • agitation caused mostly by hunger and compli- cated by love and ferocity does not deserve either by its beauty, or its morality, or its possible results, the artistic fuss made over it. It may be consoling — for human folly is very bizarre — but it is scarcely honest to shout at those who struggle drowning in an insignificant pool: You are indeed admirable and great to be the victims of such a profound, of such a terrible ocean !
And Daudet was honest; perhaps because he knew no better — but he was very honest. If he saw only the surface of things it is for the reason that • most things have nothing but a surface. He did not pretend — perhaps because he did not know how — ^he did not pretend to see any depths in a Hfe that is only a film of unsteady appearances stretched over regions deep indeed, but which have nothing to do with the half-truths, half- thoughts, and whole illusions of existence. The • road to these distant regions does not lie through the domain of Art or the domain of Science where well-known voices quarrel noisily in a misty empti- ness; it is a path of toilsome silence upon which travel men simple and unknown, with closed lips, or, maybe, whispering their pain softly— -only to themselves.
But Daudet did not whisper; he spoke loudly, with animation, with a clear felicity of tone — as a
ALPHONSE DAUDET 29
bird sings. He saw life around him with extreme clearness, and he felt it as it is — thinner than air and more elusive than a flash of lightning. He hastened to offer it his compassion, his indigna- tion, his wonder, his sympathy, without giving a moment of thought to the momentous issues that are supposed to lurk in the logic of such sentiments. He tolerated the little foibles, the small ruffianisms, the grave mistakes; the only thing he distinctly would not forgive was hard- ness of heart. This unpractical attitude would have been fatal to a better man, but his readers have forgiven him. Withal he is chivalrous to exiled queens and deformed sempstresses, he is pityingly tender to broken-down actors, to ruined gentlemen, to stupid Academicians; he is glad of the joys of the commonplace people in a common- place way — and he never makes a secret of all this. No, the man was not an artist. What if his creations are illumined by the sunshine of his temperament so vividly that they stand before us infinitely more real than the dingy illusions sur- rounding our everyday existence ? The misguided man is for ever pottering amongst them, lifting up his voice, dotting his i's in the wrong places. He takes Tartarin by the arm, he does not conceal his interest in the Nabob's cheques, his sympathy for an honest Academician plus bete que nature, his hate for an architect plus mauvais que la gale;
30 ALPHONSE DAUDET
he is in the thick of it all. He feels with the Due de Mora and with Felicia Ruys — and he lets you see it. He does not sit on a pedestal in the hieratic and imbecile pose of some cheap god whose great- ness consists in being too stupid to care. He cares immensely for his Nabobs, his kings, his book- keepers, his Colettes, and his Saphos. He vibrates together with his universe, and with lamentable simplicity follows M. de Montpavon on that last walk along the Boulevards.
" Monsieur de Montpavon marche a la mort," and the creator of that unlucky gentilhomme follows with stealthy footsteps, with wide eyes, with an impressively pointing finger. And who wouldn't look ? But it is hard; it is sometimes very hard to forgive him the dotted i's, the pointing finger, this making plain of obvious mysteries. " Monsieur de Montpavon marche a la mort," and presently, on the crowded pavement, takes off his hat with punctiHous courtesy to the doctor's wife, who, elegant and unhappy, is bound on the same pil- grimage. This is too much! We feel we cannot forgive him such meetings, the constant whisper of his presence. We feel we cannot, till suddenly the very naivete of it all touches us with the revealed suggestion of a truth. Then we see that the man is not false; all this is done in trans- parent good faith. The man is not melodramatic; he is only picturesque. He may not be an artist.
ALPHONSE DAUDET 31
but he comes as near the truth as some of the greatest. His creations are seew, you can look into their Ytiy eyes, and these are as thoughtless as the eyes of any wise generation that has in its hands the fame of writers. Yes, they are seen, and the man who is not an artist is seen also commiser- ating, indignant, joyous, human and alive in their very midst. Inevitably they marchent a la mort — and they are very near the truth of our common destiny: their fate is poignant, it is intensely interesting, and of not the slightest consequence.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT^
1904
To introduce Maupassant to English readers with apologetic explanations as though his art were re- condite and the tendency of his work immoral would be a gratuitous impertinence.
Maupassant's conception of his art is such as one would expect from a practical and resolute mind; but in the consummate simpHcity of his technique it ceases to be perceptible. This is one of its greatest qualities, and Hke all the great • virtues it is based primarily on self-denial.
To pronounce a judgment upon the general tendency of an author is a difficult task. One could not depend upon reason alone, nor yet trust solely to one's emotions. Used together, they would in many cases traverse each other, because emotions have their own unanswerable logic. Our* capacity for emotion is Hmited, and the field of our intelligence is restricted. Responsiveness to every feehng, combined with the penetration of every intellectual subterfuge, would end, not in judgment, but in universal absolution. Tout com--
» Yvette and Other Stories. Translated by Ada Galsworthy.
34 GUY DE MAUPASSANT
-prendre c^est tout pardonner. And in this benevolent neutrality towards the warring errors of human nature all light would go out from art and from hfe.
We are at liberty then to quarrel with Maupas- sant's attitude towards our world in which, Hke the rest of us, he has that share which his senses are able to give him. But we need not quarrel with him violently. If our feehngs (which are tender) happen to be hurt because his talent is not exer- cised for the praise and consolation of mankind, our intelligence (which is great) should let us see that he is a very splendid sinner, like all those who in this valley of compromises err by over-devotion • to the truth that is in them. His determinism, barren of praise, blame and consolation, has all__ the merit of his conscientious art. The worth of . every conviction consists precisely in the stead- fastness with which it is held.
Except for his philosophy, which in the case of so consummate an artist does not matter (unless to • the solemn and naive mind), Maupassant of all writers of fiction demands least forgiveness from his readers. He does not require forgiveness because he is never dull.
The interest of a reader in a work of imagina- tion is either ethical or that of simple curiosity. * Both are perfectly legitimate, since there is both a moral and an excitement to be found in a faithful rendering of life. And in Maupassant's work there
GUY DE MAUPASSANT 35
is the interest of curiosity and the moral of a point of view consistently preserved and never obtruded for the end of personal gratification. The spectacle of this immense talent served by exceptional facul- ties and triumphing over the most thankless subjects by an unswerving singleness of purpose is in itself an admirable lesson in the power of artistic honesty, one may say of artistic virtue. The inherent great- ■ ness of the man consists in this, that he will let none of the fascinations that beset a writer working in loneHness turn him away from the straight path, from the vouchsafed vision of excellence. He will not be led into perdition by the seductions of senti- ment, of eloquence, of humour, of pathos; of all that splendid pageant of faults that pass between the writer and his probity on the blank sheet of paper, hke the ghttering cortege of deadly sins before the austere anchorite in the desert air of Thebaide. This is not to say that Maupassant's austerity has never faltered; but the fact remains that no tempting demon has ever succeeded in hurling him down from his high, if narrow, pedestal. It is the austerity of his talent, of course, that is in question. Let the discriminating reader, who at times may well spare a moment or two to the consideration and enjoyment of artistic excellence, be asked to reflect a Httle upon the texture of two stories included in this volume : " A Piece of String," and " A Sale." How many openings the
36 GUY DE MAUPASSANT
last offers for the gratuitous display of the author's wit or clever buffoonery, the first for an unmea- sured display of sentiment! And both sentiment and buffoonery could have been made very good too, in a way accessible to the meanest intelligence, at the cost of truth and honesty. Here it is where Maupassant's austerity comes in. He refrains from setting his cleverness against the eloquence of the facts. There is humour and pathos in these stories; but such is the greatness of his talent, the refine- ment of his artistic conscience, that all his high qualities appear inherent in the very things of which he speaks, as if they had been altogether independent of his presentation. Facts, and again facts are his unique concern. That is why he is not always properly understood. His facts are so perfectly rendered that, Hke the actuahties of life itself, they demand from the reader the faculty of observation which is rare, the power of apprecia- tion which is generally wanting in most of us who are guided mainly by empty phrases requiring no effort, demanding from us no qualities except a vague susceptibility to emotion. Nobody has ever gained the vast applause of a crowd by the simple and clear exposition of vital facts. Words alone strung upon a convention have fascinated us as worthless glass beads strung on a thread have charmed at all times our brothers the unsophisti- cated savages of the islands. Now, Maupassant, of
GUY DE MAUPASSANT 37
whom it has been said that he is the master of the mot juste, has never been a dealer in words. His wares have been, not glass beads, but polished gems; not the most rare and precious, perhaps, but of the very first water of their kind.
That he took trouble with his gems, taking them up in the rough and polishing each facet patiently, the pubhcation of the two posthumous volumes of short stories proves abundantly. I think it proves also the assertion made here that he was by no means a dealer in words. On looking at the first feeble drafts from which so many perfect stories have been fashioned, one discovers that what has been matured, improved, brought to perfection by unwearied endeavour is not the diction of the tale, but the vision of its true shape and detail. Those first attempts are not faltering or uncertain in expression. It is the conception which is at fault. The subjects have not yet been adequately seen. His proceeding was not to group expressive words, . that mean nothing, around misty and mysterious shapes dear to muddled intellects and belonging neither to earth nor to heaven. His vision by a more scrupulous, prolonged and devoted attention to the aspects of the visible world discovered at last the right words as if miraculously impressed for him upon the face of things and events. This was the particular shape taken by his inspiration: it came to him directly, honestly in the Hght of his day,
38 GUY DE MAUPASSANT
not on the tortuous, dark roads of meditation. His realities came to him from a genuine source, from this universe of vain appearances wherein we men have found everything to make us proud, sorry, exalted, and humble.
Maupassant's renown is universal, but his popu- larity is restricted. It is not difficult to perceive why. Maupassant is an intensely national writer. He is so intensely national in his logic, in his clearness, in his aesthetic and moral conceptions, that he has been accepted by his countrymen without having had to pay the tribute of flattery either to the nation as a whole, or to any class, sphere or division of the nation. The truth of his art tells with an irresistible force; and he stands excused from the duty of patriotic posturing. He is a Frenchman of Frenchmen beyond question or cavil, and with that he is simple enough to be universally comprehen- sible. What is wanting to his universal success is the mediocrity of an obvious and appealing tender- ness. He neglects to qualify his truth with the drop of facile sweetness; he forgets to strew paper roses over the tombs. The disregard of these common decencies lays him open to the charges of cruelty, cynicism, hardness. And yet it can be safely affirmed that this man wrote from the fulness of a compassionate heart. He is merciless and yet gentle with his mankind; he does not rail at their prudent fears and their small artifices ; he does not
GUY DE MAUPASSANT 39
despise their labours. It seems to me that he looks with an eye of profound pity upon their troubles, deceptions and misery. But he looks at them all. He sees — and does not turn awa_y_his head. As a matter of fact he is courageous. --— ^—
Courage and justice are not popular virtues. The practice of strict justice is shocking to the multi- tude who always (perhaps from an obscure sense of guilt) attach to it the meaning of mercy. In the majority of us, who want to be left alone with our illusions, courage inspires a vague alarm. This is what is felt about Maupassant. His quahties, to use the charming and popular phrase, are not lovable. Courage being a force will not masquerade in the robes of affected delicacy and restraint. But if his courage is not of a chivalrous stamp, it can- not be denied that it is never brutal for the sake of effect. The writer of these few reflections, inspired by a long and intimate acquaintance with the work of the man, has been struck by the appreciation of Maupassant manifested by many women gifted with tenderness and intelligence. Their more deUcate and audacious souls are good judges of courage. Their finer penetration has discovered his genuine mascuHnity without display, his viriHty without a pose. They have discerned in his faithful deaHngs with the world that enterprising and fear- less temperament, poor in ideas but rich in power, which appeals most to the feminine mind.
40 GUY DE MAUPASSANT
It cannot be denied that he thinks very little. In him extreme energy of perception achieves great results, as in men of action the energy of force and desire. His view of intellectual problems is perhaps more simple than their nature warrants; still a man who has written Tvette cannot be accused of want of subtlety. But one cannot insist enough upon this, that his subtlety, his humour, his grim- ness, though no doubt they are his own, are never presented otherwise but as belonging to our hfe, as found in nature, whose beauties and cruelties alike breathe the spirit of serene unconsciousness.
Maupassant's philosophy of Hfe is more tem- peramental than rational. He expects nothing from gods or men. He trusts his senses for information and his instinct for deductions. It may seem that he has made but little use of his mind. But let me be clearly understood. His sensibility is really very great; and it is impos- sible to be sensible, unless one thinks vividly, unless one thinks correctly, starting from intelli- gible premises to an unsophisticated conclusion.
This is Hterary honesty. It may be remarked that it does not differ very greatly from the ideal honesty of the respectable majority, from the honesty of law-givers, of warriors, of kings, of bricklayers, of all those who express their funda- mental sentiment in the ordinary course of their activities, by the work of their hands.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT 41
The work of Maupassant's hands is honest. He thinks sufficiently to concrete his fearless conclu- sions in illuminative instances. He renders them with that exact knowledge of the means and that absolute devotion to the aim of creating a true effect — which is art. He is the most accompHshed of narrators.
It is evident that Maupassant looked upon his mankind in another spirit than those writers who make haste to submerge the difficulties of our holding-place in the universe under a flood of false and sentimental assumptions. Maupassant was a true and dutiful lover of our earth. He says him- self in one of his descriptive passages : " Nous autres que seduit la terre . . ." It was true. The earth had for him a com.peUing charm. He looks upon her august and furrowed face with the fierce insight of real passion. His is the power of detect- ing the one immutable quality that matters in the changing aspects of nature and under the ever- shifting surface of Hfe. To say that he could not embrace in his glance all its magnificence and all its misery is only to say that he was human. He lays claim to nothing that his matchless vision has not made his own. This creative artist has the true imagination; he never condescends to invent anything; he sets up no empty pretences. And he stoops to no littleness in his art — least of all to the miserable vanity of a catching phrase.
ANATOLE FRANCE
1904
I
" Crainquebille "
The latest volume of M. Anatole France purports, by the declaration of its title-page, to contain several profitable narratives. The story of Crain- quebille's encounter with human justice stands at the head of them; a tale of a well-bestowed charity closes the book with the touch of playful irony characteristic of the writer on whom the most dis- tinguished amongst his hterary countrymen have conferred the rank of Prince of Prose.
Never has a dignity been better borne. M. Ana* tole France is a good prince. He knows nothing of tyranny but much of compassion. The detachment of his mind from common errors and current super- stitions befits the exalted rank he holds in the Commonwealth of Literature. It is just to suppose that the clamour of the tribes in the forum had little to do with his elevation. Their elect are of another stamp. They are such as their need of precipitate action requires. He is the Elect of the
43
44 ANATOLE FRANCE
Senate — the Senate of Letters — whose Conscript Fathers have recognised him as primus inter pares \ a post of pure honour and of no privilege.
It is a good choice. First, because it is just, and next, because it is safe. The dignity will suffer no diminution in M. Anatole France's hands. He is worthy of a great tradition, learned in the lessons of the past, concerned with the present, and as earnest as to the future as a good prince should be in his pubhc action. It is a RepubHcan dignity. And M. Anatole France, with his sceptical insight into all forms of government, is a good RepubHcan. He is indulgent to the weaknesses of the people, and perceives that political institutions, whether contrived by the wisdom of the few or the ignor- ance of the many, are incapable of securing the happiness of mankind. He perceives this truth in the serenity of his soul and in the elevation of his mind. He expresses his convictions with measure, restraint and harmony, which are indeed princely quaHties. He is a great analyst of illusions. He searches and probes their innermost recesses as if they were reaUties made of an eternal substance. And therein consists his humianity; this is the ex- pression of his profound and unalterable compas- sion. He will flatter no tribe, no section in the forum or in the market-place. His lucid thought is not beguiled into false pity or into the common weakness of affection. He feels that men born
ANATOLE FRANCE 45
in ignorance as in the house of an enemy, and condemned to struggle with error and passions through endless centuries, should be spared the supreme cruelty of a hope for ever deferred. He knows that our best hopes are irreahsable; that it is the almost incredible misfortune of mankind, but also its highest privilege, to aspire towards the impossible; that men have never failed to defeat their highest aims by the very strength of their humanity which can conceive the most gigantic tasks but leaves them disarmed before their irremediable littleness. He knows this well because he is an artist and a master; but he knows, too, that only in the continuity of effort there is a refuge from despair for minds less clear- seeing and philosophic than his own. Therefore he wishes us to beheve and to hope, preserving in our activity the consohng illusion of power and intelligent purpose. He is a good and politic prince.
" The majesty of Justice is contained entire in each sentence pronounced by the judge in the name of the sovereign people. Jerome Crainque- bille, hawker of vegetables, became aware of the august aspect of the law as he stood indicted before the tribunal of the higher PoHce Court on a charge of insulting a constable of the force." With this exposition begins the first tale of M. Anatole France's latest volume.
46 ANATOLE FRANCE
The bust of the RepubHc and the image of the Crucified Christ appear side by side above the bench occupied by the President Bourriche and his two Assessors; all the laws divine and human are suspended over the head of Crainquebille.
From the first visual impression of the accused and of the court the author passes by a charac- teristic and natural turn to the historical and moral significance of those two emblems of State and Religion whose accord is only possible to the confused reasoning of an average man. But the reasoning of M. Anatole France is never confused. His reasoning is clear and informed by a profound erudition. Such is not the case of Crainquebille, a street hawker, charged with insulting the con- stituted power of society in the person of a police- man. The charge is not true, nothing was further from his thoughts; but, amazed by the novelty of his position, he does not reflect that the Cross on the wall perpetuates the memory of a sentence which for nineteen hundred years all the Christian peoples have looked upon as a grave miscarriage of justice. He might well have challenged the President to pronounce any sort of sentence, if it were merely to forty-eight hours of simple imprison- ment, in the name of the Crucified Redeemer.
He might have done so. But Crainquebille, who has hved pushing every day for half a century his hand-barrow loaded with vegetables through the
ANATOLE FRANCE 47
streets of Paris, has not a philosophic mind. Truth to say he has nothing. He is one of the disinherited. Properly speaking, he has no existence at all, or, to be strictly truthful, he had no existence till M. Anatole France's philosophic mind and human sympathy have called him up from his nothing- ness for our pleasure, and, as the title-page of the book has it, no doubt for our profit also.
Therefore we behold him in the dock, a stranger to all historical, political or social considerations which can be brought to bear upon his case. He remains lost in astonishment. Penetrated with respect, overwhelmed with awe, he is ready to trust the judge upon the question of his trans- gression. In his conscience he does not think himself culpable; but M. Anatole France's philo- sophical mind discovers for us that he feels all the insignificance of such a thing as the con- science of a mere street-hawker in the face of the symbols of the law and before the ministers of social repression. Crainquebille is innocent; but already the young advocate, his defender, has half persuaded him of his guilt.
On this phrase practically ends the introductory chapter of the story which, as the author's dedica- tion states, has inspired an admirable draughtsman and a skilful dramatist, each in his art, to a vision of tragic grandeur. And this opening chapter with- out a name — consisting of two and a half pages,
48 ANATOLE FRANCE
some four hundred words at most — is a master- piece of insight and simpHcity, resumed in M. Anatole France's distinction of thought and in his princely command of words.
It is followed by six more short chapters, concise and full, dehcate and complete hke the petals of a flower, presenting to us the Adventure of Crain- quebille — Crainquebille before the Justice — An Apology for the President of the Tribunal — Of the Submission of Crainquebille to the Laws of the Republic — Of his Attitude before the Public Opinion,, and so on to the chapter of the Last Consequences. We see, created for us in his out- ward form and innermost perplexity, the old man degraded from his high estate of a law-abiding street-hawker and driven to insult, really this timie, the majesty of the social order in the person of another poHce-constable. It is not an act of revolt, and still less of revenge. Crainquebille is too old, too resigned, too weary, too guileless to raise the black standard of insurrection. He is cold and homeless and starving. He remembers the warmth and the food of the prison. He per- ceives the means to get back there. Since he has been locked up, he argues with himself, for utter- ing words which, as a matter of fact he did not say, he will go forth now, and to the first police- man he meets wiU say those very words in order to be imprisoned again. Thus reasons Crainque-
ANATOLE FRANCE 49
bille with simplicity and confidence. He accepts facts. Nothing surprises him. But all the pheno- mena of social organisation and of his own life remain for him mysterious to the end. The de- scription of the policeman in his short cape and hood, who stands quite still, under the Hght of a street ]amp at the edge of the pavement shining with the wet of a rainy autumn evening along the whole extent of a long and deserted thoroughfare, is a perfect piece of imaginative precision. From under the edge of the hood his eyes look upon Crainquebille, who has just uttered in an uncertain voice the sacramental, insulting phrase of the popu- lar slang — Mort aux vaches I They look upon him shining in the deep shadow of the hood with an expression of sadness, vigilance, and contempt.
He does not move. Crainquebille, in a feeble and hesitating voice, repeats once more the insult- ing words. But this policeman is full of philosophic superiority, disdain, and indulgence. He refuses to take in charge the old and miserable vagabond who stands before him shivering and ragged in the drizzle. And the ruined Crainquebille, victim of a ridiculous miscarriage of justice, appalled at this magnanimity, passes on hopelessly down the street full of shadows where the lamps gleam each in a ruddy halo of faUing mist.
M. Anatole France can speak for the people. This prince of the Senate is invested with the
so ANATOLE FRANCE
tribunitian power. M. Anatole France is some- thing of a Socialist; and in that respect he seems to depart from his sceptical philosophy. But as an illustrious statesman, now no more, a great prince too, with an ironic mind and a Hterary gift, has sarcastically remarked in one of his pub- lic speeches : " We are all Socialists now." And in the sense in which it may be said that we all in Europe are Christians that is true enough. To many of us Socialism is merely an emotion. An emotion is much and is also less than nothing. It is the initial impulse. The real Socialism of to-day is a religion. It has its dogmas. The value of the dogma does not consist in its truthfulness, and M. Anatole France, who loves truth, does not love dogma. Only, unlike rehgion, the cohesive strength of Socialism lies not in its dogmas but in its ideal. It is perhaps a too materiahstic ideal, and the mind of M. Anatole France may not find in it either com- fort or consolation. It is not to be doubted that he suspects this himself; but there is something re- poseful in the finality of popular conceptions. M. Anatole France, a good prince and a good Repub- lican, will succeed no doubt in being a good Socialist. He will disregard the stupidity of the dogma and the unlovely form of the ideal. His art will find its own beauty in the imaginative presentation of wrongs, of errors, and miseries that call aloud for redress. M. Anatole France
ANATOLE FRANCE 51
is humane. He is also human. He may be able to discard his philosophy; to forget that the evils are many and the remedies are few, that there is no universal panacea, that fatality is invincible, that there is an implacable menace of death in the triumph of the humanitarian idea. He may forget all that because love is stronger than truth.
Besides " Crainquebille " this volume contains sixteen other stories and sketches. To define them it is enough to say that they are written in M. Anatole France's prose. One sketch entitled " Riquet " may be found incorporated in the volume of Monsieur Bergeret a Paris, *' Putois " is a remarkable little tale, significant, humorous, amusing, and symboHc. It concerns the career of a man born in the utterance of a hasty and untruthful excuse made by a lady at a loss how to decline without offence a very pressing invitation to dinner from a very tyran- nical aunt. This happens in a provincial town, and the lady says in effect: '^ Impossible, my dear aunt. To-morrow I am expecting the gardener." And the garden she glances at is a poor garden; it is a wild garden; its extent is insignificant and its neglect seems beyond remedy. " A gardener! What for \ " asks the aunt. " To work in the garden." And the poor lady is abashed at the transparence of her evasion. But the He is told, it is beheved, and she sticks to it. When the
52 ANATOLE FRANCE
masterful old aunt inquires, " What is the man's
name, my dear ? " she answers brazenly, " His name is Putois." " Where does he live ? " " Oh, I don't know; anywhere. He won't give his address. One leaves a message for him here and there." *' Oh! I see," says the other; "he is a sort of ne'er do well, an idler, a vagabond. I advise you, my dear, to be careful how you let such a creature into your grounds; but I have a large garden, and when you do not want his services I shall find him some work to do, and sec he does it too. Tell your Putois to come and see me." And thereupon Putois is born; he stalks abroad, invisible, upon his career of vagabondage and crime, steaHng melons from gardens and tea- spoons from pantries, indulging his Hcentious proclivities; becoming the talk of the town and of the countryside; seen simultaneously in far- distant places ; pursued by gendarmes, whose brigadier assures the uneasy householders that he " knows that scamp very well, and won't be long in laying his hands upon him." A detailed de- scription of his person collected from the informa- tion furnished by various people appears in the columns of a local newspaper. Putois lives in his strength and malevolence. He Hves after the manner of legendary heroes, of the gods of Olym- pus. He is the creation of the popular mind. There comes a time when even the innocent originator of
ANATOLE FRANCE 53
that mysterious and potent evil-doer is induced to believe for a moment that he may have a real and tangible presence. All this is told with the wit and the art and the philosophy which is familiar to M. Anatole France's readers and admirers. For it is difficult to read M. Anatole France without ad- miring him. He has the princely gift of arousing a spontaneous loyalty, but with this difference, that the consent of our reason has its place by the side of our enthusiasm. He is an artist. As an artist he awakens emotion. The qaahty of his art remains, as an inspiration, fascinating and inscrutable; but the proceedings of his thought compel our intel- lectual admiration.
In this volume the trifle called "The Military Manoeuvres at Montil," apart from its far-reaching irony, embodies incidentally the very spirit of auto- mobiHsm. Somehow or other, how you cannot telj, the flight over the country in a motor-car, its sensations, its fatigue, its vast topographical range, its incidents down to the bursting of a tyre, are brought home to you with all the force of high imaginative perception. It would be out of place to analyse here the m^eans by which the true im- pression is conveyed so that the absurd rushing about of General Decuir, in a 30-horse-power car, in search of his cavalry brigade, becomes to you a more real experience than any day-and-night run you may ever have taken yourself. Suffice it to
54 ANATOLE FRANCE
say that M. Anatole France had thought the thing worth doing and that it becomes, in virtue of his art, a distinct achievement. And there are other sketches in this book, more or less slight, but all worthy of regard — the childhood's recollections of Professor Bergeret and his sister Zoe; the dialogue of the two upright judges and the conversation of their horses; the dream of M. Jean Marteau, aim- less, extravagant, apocalyptic, and of all the dreams one ever dreamt, the most essentially dreamlike. The vision of M. Anatole France, the Prince of Prose, ranges over all the extent of his realm, indulgent and penetrating, disillusioned and curious, finding treasures of truth and beauty concealed from less gifted magicians. Contemplating the exactness of his images and the justice of his judgment, the freedom of his fancy and the fidelity of his pur- pose, one becomes aware of the futihty of literary watch-words and the vanity of all the schools of fiction. Not that M. Anatole France is a wild and untrammelled genius. He is not that. Issued legitimately from the past, he is mindful of liis high descent. He has a critical temperament joined to creative power. He surveys his vast domain in a spirit of princely moderation that knows nothing of excesses but much of restraint.
ANATOLE FRANCE 55
II
" L'Ile des Pingouins "
M. Anatole France, historian and adventurer, has given us many profitable histories of saints and sinners, of Roman procurators and of officials of the Third Republic, of grandes dames and of dames not so very grand, of ornate Latinists and of inarticulate street hawkers, of priests and generals — in fact, the history of all humanity as it appears to his penetrating eye, serving a mind marvellously incisive in its scepticism, and a heart that, of all contemporary hearts gifted with a voice, contains the greatest treasure of charitable irony. As to M. Anatole France's adventures, these are well-known. They lie open to this prodigal world in the four volumes of the Fie Litteraire, describing the adventures of a choice soul amongst masterpieces. For such is the romantic view M. Anatole France takes of the life of a literary critic. History and adventure, then, seem to be the chosen fields for the magnificent evolutions of M. Anatole France's prose; but no material limits can stand in the way of a genius. The latest book from his pen — which may be called golden, as the lips of an eloquent saint once upon a time were acclaimed golden by the faithful — this latest book is, up to a certain point, a book of travel.
56 ANATOLE FRANCE
I would not mislead a public whose confidence I court. The book is not a record of globe-trotting. I regret it. It would have been a joy to watch M. Anatole France pouring the clear ehxir com- pounded of his Pyrrhonic philosophy, his Bene- dictine erudition, his gentle wit and most humane irony into such an unpromising and opaque vessel. He would have attempted it in a spirit of bene- volence towards his fellow men and of compassion for that Hfe of the earth which is but a vain and transitory illusion. M. Anatole France is a great magician, yet there seem to be tasks which he dare not face. For he is also a sage.
It is a book of ocean travel — not, however, as understood by Herr Ballin of Hamburg, the Ma- chiavel of the Atlantic. It is a book of exploration and discovery — not, however, as conceived by an enterprising journal and a shrewdly philanthropic king of the nineteenth century. It is nothing so recent as that. It dates much further back; long, long before the dark age when Krupp of Essen wrought at his steel plates and a German Emperor condescendingly suggested the last improvements in ships' dining-tables. The best idea of the incon- ceivable antiquity of that enterprise I can give you is by stating the nature of the explorer's ship. It was a trough of stone, a vessel of hollowed granite.
The explorer was St. Mael, a saint of Armorica.
ANATOLE FRANCE 57
I had never heard of him before, but I believe now in his arduous existence with a faith which is a tribute to M. Anatole France's pious earnestness and deHcate irony. St. Mael existed. It is dis- tinctly stated of him that his Hfe was a progress in virtue. Thus it seems that there may be saints that are not progressively virtuous. St. Mael was not of that kind. He was industrious. He evan- geUsed the heathen. He erected two hundred and eighteen chapels and seventy-four abbeys. In- defatigable navigator of the faith, he drifted casually in the miraculous trough of stone from coast to coast and from island to island along the northern seas. At the age of eighty-four his high stature was bowed by his long labours, but his sine^^y arms preserved their vigour and his rude eloquence had lost nothing of its force.
A nautical devil tempting him by the worldly suggestion of fitting out his desultory, miraculous trough with mast, sail, and rudder for swifter pro- gression (the idea of haste has sprung from the pride of Satan), the simple old saint lent his ear to the subtle arguments of the progressive enemy of mankind.
The venerable St. Mael fell away from grace by not perceiving at once that a gift of heaven cannot be improved by the contrivances of human in- genuity. His punishment was adequate. A terrific tempest snatched the rigged ship of stone in its
58 ANATOLE FRANCE
whirlwinds, and, to be brief, the dazed St. Mael was stranded violently on the Island of Penguins.
The saint wandered away from the shore. It was a flat, round island whence rose in the centre a conical mountain capped with clouds. The rain was falling incessantly — a gentle, soft rain which caused the simple saint to exclaim in great de- light : " This is the island of tears, the island of contrition! "
Meantime the inhabitants had flocked in their tens of thousands to an amphitheatre of rocks; they were penguins; but the holy man, rendered deaf and purblind by his years, mistook excusably the multitude of silly, erect, and self-important birds for a human crowd. At once he began to preach to them the doctrine of salvation. Having finished his discourse he lost no time in administer- ing to his interesting congregation the sacrament of baptism.
If you are at all a theologian you will see that it was no mean adventure to happen to a well- meaning and zealous saint. Pray reflect on the magnitude of the issues! It is easy to beHeve what M. Anatole France says, that, when the baptism of the Penguins became known in Para- dise, it caused there neither joy nor sorrow, but a profound sensation.
M. Anatole France is no mean theologian him- self. He reports with great casuistical erudition
ANATOLE FRANCE 59
the debates in the saintly council assembled in Heaven for the consideration of an event so dis- turbing to the economy of religious mysteries. Ultimately the baptised Penguins had to be turned into human beings ; and together with the privilege of subhme hopes these innocent birds received the curse of original sin, with the labours, the miseries, the passions, and the weaknesses attached to the fallen condition of humanity.
At this point M. Anatole France is again an historian. From being the Hakluyt of a saintly adventurer he turns (but more concisely) into the Gibbon of Imperial Penguins. Tracing the de- velopment of their civilisation, the absurdity of their desires, the pathos of their folly and the ridiculous httleness of their quarrels, his golden pen Hghtens by relevant but unpuritanical anec- dotes the austerity of a work devoted to a subject so grave as the Polity of Penguins. It is a very admirable treatment, and I hasten to congratulate all men of receptive mind on the feast of wisdom which is theirs for the mere plucking of a book from a shelf.
TURGENEV^
1917
Dear Edward,
I am glad to hear that you are about to pubHsh a study of Turgenev, that fortunate artist who has found so much in life for us and no doubt for himself, with the exception of bare justice. Perhaps that will come to him, too, in time. Your study may help the consummation. For his luck persists after his death. What greater luck an artist Hke Turgenev could wish for than to find in the EngHsh- speaking world a translator who has missed none of the most dehcate, most simple beauties of his work, and a critic who has known how to analyse and point out its high qualities with perfect sympathy and insight.
After twenty odd years of friendship (and my first Hterary friendship too) I may well permit myself to make that statement, while thinking of your wonderful Prefaces as they appeared from time to time in the volumes of Turgenev's com- plete edition, the last of which came into the hght of pubHc indifference in the ninety-ninth year of the nineteenth century.
^ Turgenev : A Study. By Edward Garnett. 61
r o A/ i^ A p
62 TURGENEV
(
With that year one may say, with some justice, that the age of Turgenev had come to an end too; yet work so simple and human, so independent of the transitory formulas and theories of art, belongs as you point out in the Preface to Smoke " to aU time."
Turgenev's creative activity covers about thirty years. Since it came to an end the social and political events in Russia have moved at an ac- celerated pace, but the deep origins of them, in the moral and intellectual unrest of the souls, are recorded in the whole body of his work with the unerring lucidity of a great national writer. The first stirrings, the first gleams of the great forces can be seen almost in every page of the novels, of the short stories and of A Sportsman^ s Sketches — those marvellous landscapes peopled by unforget- table figures.
Those will never grow old. Fashions in monsters do change, but the truth of humanity goes on for ever, unchangeable and inexhaustible in the variety of its disclosures. Whether Turgenev's art, which has captured it with such mastery and such gentle- ness, is for " all time " it is hard to say. Since, as you say yourself, he brings all his problems and characters to the test of love, we may hope that it will endure at least till the infinite emotions of love are replaced by the exact simpHcity of per- fected Eugenics. But even by then, I think, women
TURGENEV 63
would not have changed much; and the women of Turgenev who understood them so tenderly, so reverently and so passionately — they, at least, are certainly for all time.
Women are, one may say, the foundation of his art. They are Russian of course. Never was a writer so profoundly, so whole-souledly national. But for non-Russian readers, Turgenev's Russia is but a canvas on which the incomparable artist of humanity lays his colours and his forms in the great hght and the free air of the world. Had he invented them all and also every stick and stone, brook and hill and field in which they move, his personages would have been just as true and as poignant in their perplexed Hves. They are his own and also universal. Any one can accept them with no more question than one accepts the ItaHans of Shakespeare.
In the larger, non-Russian view, what should make Turgenev sympathetic and welcome to the Enghsh-speaking world, is his essential humanity. All his creations, fortunate and unfortunate, op- pressed and oppressors, are human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking themselves to pieces in the stuffy dark- ness of mystical contradictions. They are human beings, fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to struggle, fit to win, fit to lose, in the endless and inspiring game of pursuing from day to day the ever-receding future.
64 TURGENEV
I began by calling him lucky, and he was, in a sense. But one ends by having some doubts. To be so great without the slightest parade and so fine without any tricks of " cleverness " must be fatal to any man's influence with his contemporaries.
Frankly, I don't want to appear as quaHiied to judge of things Russian. It wouldn't be true. I know nothing of them. But I am aware of a few general truths, such as, for instance, that no man, whatever may be the loftiness of his character, the purity of his motives and the peace of his con- science— no man, I say, likes to be beaten with sticks during the greater part of his existence. From what one knows of his history it appears clearly that in Russia almost any stick was good enough to beat Turgenev with in his latter years. When he died the characteristically chicken- hearted Autocracy hastened to stuff his mortal envelope into the tomb it refused to honour, while the sensitive Revolutionists went on for a time flinging after his shade those jeers and curses from which that impartial lover of all his country- men had suffered so much in his lifetime. For he, too, was sensitive. Every page of his writing bears its testimony to the fatal absence of callousness in the man.
And now he suffers a little from other things. In truth it is not the convulsed terror-haunted Dostoievski but the serene Turgenev who is under
TURGENEV 65
a curse. For only think! Every gift has been heaped on his cradle: absolute sanity and the deepest sensibility, the clearest vision and the quickest responsiveness, penetrating insight and unfaiHng generosity of judgment, an exquisite perception of the visible world and an unerring instinct for the significant, for the essential in the life of men and women, the clearest mind, the warmest heart, the largest sympathy — and all that in perfect measure. There's enough there to ruin the prospects of any writer. For you know very well, my dear Edward, that if you had An- tinous himself in a booth of the world's fair, and killed yourself in protesting that his soul was as perfect as his body, you wouldn't get one per cent, of the crowd struggling next door for a sight of the Double-headed Nightingale or of some weak- kneed giant grinning through a horse collar.
J. c.
STEPHEN CRANE
A Note Without Dates 1919
My acquaintance with Stephen Crane was brought about by Mr. PawHng, partner in the publishing firm of Mr. William Heinemann.
One day Mr. Pawling said to me : " Stephen Crane has arrived in England. I asked him if there was anybody he wanted to meet and he mentioned two names. One of them was yours." I had then just been reading, Hke the rest of the world, Crane's Red Badge of Courage. The subject of that story was war, from the point of view of an individual soldier's emotions. That individual (he remains nameless throughout) was interesting enough in himself, but on turning over the pages of that Httle book which had for the moment secured such a noisy recognition I had been even more interested in the personality of the writer. The picture of a simple and untried youth becom- ing through the needs of his country part of a great fighting machine was presented with an earnestness of purpose, a sense of tragic issues, and an imaginative force of expression which
67
68 STEPHEN CRANE
struck me as quite uncommon and altogether worthy of admiration.
Apparently Stephen Crane had received a favourable impression from the reading of the Nigger of the Narcissus^ a book of mine which had also been published lately. I was truly pleased to hear this.
On my next visit to town we met at a lunch. I saw a young man of medium stature and slender build, with very steady, penetrating blue eyes, the eyes of a being who not only sees visions but can brood over them to some purpose.
He had indeed a wonderful power of vision, which he appHed to the things of this earth and of our mortal humanity with a penetrating force that seemed to reach, within Hfe's appearances and forms, the very spirit of life's truth. His ignorance of the world at large — ^he had seen very little of it — did not stand in the way of his imaginative grasp of facts, events, and picturesque men.
His manner was very quiet, his personaHty at first sight interesting, and he talked slowly with an intonation which on some people, mainly Americans, had, I beHeve, a jarring effect. But not on me. Whatever he said had a personal note, and he expressed himself with a graphic simpHcity which was extremely engaging. He knew little of literature, either of his own country or of any other, but he was himself a wonderful
STEPHEN CRANE 69
artist in words whenever he took a pen into his hand. Then his gift came out — and it was seen then to be much more than mere felicity of language. His impressionism of phrase went really deeper than the surface. In his writing he was very sure of his effects. I don't think he was ever in doubt about what he could do. Yet it often seemed to me that he was but half aware of the exceptional quality of his achievement.
This achievement was curtailed by his early death. It was a great loss to his friends, but perhaps not so much to Hterature. I think that he had given his measure fully in the few books he had the time to write. Let me not be mis- understood: the loss was great, but it was the loss of the delight his art could give, not the loss of any further possible revelation. As to himself, who can say how much he gained or lost by quit- ting so early this world of the living, which he knew how to set before us in the terms of his own artistic vision ? Perhaps he did not lose a great deal. The recognition he was accorded was rather languid and given him grudgingly. The worthiest welcome he secured for his tales in this country was from Mr. W. Henley in the ISIew Reviezu and* later, towards the end of his life, from the late Mr. William Blackwood in his magazine. For the rest I must say that during his sojourn in England he had the misfortune to be, as the French say, mal
/
70 STEPHEN CRANE
entoure. He was beset by people who understood not the quahty of his genius and were antagonistic to the deeper fineness of his nature. Some of them have died since, but dead or aHve they are not worth speaking about now. I don't think he had any illusions about them himself: yet there was a strain of good-nature and perhaps of weakness in his character which prevented him from shaking himself free from their worthless and patronising attentions, which in those days caused me much secret irritation whenever I stayed with him in either of his English homes. My wife and I like best to remember him riding to meet us at the gate of the Park at Brede. Born master of his sincere impressions, he was also a born horseman. He never appeared so happy or so much to ad- vantage as on the back of a horse. He had formed the project of teaching my eldest boy to ride, and meantime, when the child was about two years old, presented him with his first dog.
I saw Stephen Crane a few days after his arrival in London. I saw him for the last time on his last day in England. It was in Dover, in a big hotel, in a bedroom with a large window looking on to the sea. He had been very ill and Mrs. Crane was taking him to some place in Germany, but one glance at that wasted face was enough to tell me that it was the most forlorn of all hopes. The last words he breathed out to me were: " I am tired.
STEPHEN CRANE 71
Give my love to your wife and child." When I stopped at the door for another look I saw that he had turned his head on the pillow and was staring wistfully out of the window at the sails of a cutter yacht that glided slowly across the frame, hke a dim shadow against the grey sky.
Those who have read his little tale, " Horses," and the story, "The Open Boat," in the volume of that name, know with what fine understanding he loved horses and the sea. And his passage on this earth was like that of a horseman riding swiftly in the dawn of a day fated to be short and without sunshine.
TALES OF THE SEA
1898
It is by his irresistible power to reach the ad- venturous side in the character, not only of his own, but of all nations, that Marryat is largely human. He is the enslaver of youth, not by the Hterary artifices of presentation, but by the natural glamour of his own temperament. To his young heroes the beginning of life is a splendid and warhke lark, ending at last in inheritance and marriage. His novels are not the outcome of his art, but of his character, like the deeds that make up his record of naval service. To the artist his work is interesting as a completely successful ex- pression of an unartistic nature. It is absolutely amazing to us, as the disclosure of the spirit animating the stirring time when the nineteenth century was young. There is an air of fable about it. Its loss would be irreparable, Hke the curtail- ment of national story or the loss of an historical document. It is the beginning and the embodiment of an inspiring tradition.
To this writer of the sea the sea was not an element. It was a stage, where was displayed an
73
74 TALES OF THE SEA
exhibition of valour, and of such achievement as the world had never seen before. The greatness of that achievement cannot be pronounced im^agi- nary, since its reality has affected the destinies of nations; nevertheless, in its grandeur it has all the remoteness of an ideal. History preserves the skeleton of facts and, here and there, a figure or a name; but it is in Marryat's novels that we find the mass of the nameless, that we see them in the flesh, that we obtain a glimpse of the every- day life and an insight into the spirit animating the crowd of obscure men who knew how to build for their country such a shining monument of memories.
Marryat is really a writer of the Service. What sets him apart is his fideHty. His pen serves his country as well as did his professional skill and his renowned courage. His figures move about between water and sky, and the water and the sky are there only to frame the deeds of the Ser- vice. His novels, Hke amphibious creatures, live on the sea and frequent the shore, where they flounder deplorably. The loves and the hates of his boys are as primitive as their virtues and their vices. His women, from the beautiful Agnes to the witch-like mother of Lieutenant Vanslyperken, are, with the exception of the sailors' wives, like the shadows of what has never been. His Silvas, his Ribieras, his Shriftens, his Delmars remind us
TALES OF THE SEA 75
of people we have heard of somewhere, many times, without ever beheving in their existence. His morahty is honourable and conventional. There is cruelty in his fun and he can invent puns in the midst of carnage. His naiveties are perpetrated in a lurid light. There is an endless variety of types, all surface, with hard edges, with memorable eccentricities of outHne, with a childish and heroic effect in the drawing. They do not belong to hfe; they belong exclusively to the Service. And yet they hve; there is a truth in them., the truth of their time; a headlong, reckless audacity, an intimacy with violence, an unthinking fearlessness, and an exuberance of vitahty which only years of war and victories can give. His adventures are enthralling; the rapidity of his action fascinates; his method is crude, his sentimentahty, obviously incidental, is often factitious. His greatness is undeniable.
It is undeniable. To a multitude of readers the navy of to-day is Marryat's navy still. He has created a priceless legend. If he be not immortal, yet he will last long enough for the highest ambi- tion, because he has dealt manfully with an in- spiring phase in the history of that Service on which the Hfe of his country depends. The tradi- tion of the great past he has fixed in his pages will be cherished for ever as the guarantee of the future. He loved his country first, the Service
t6 tales of the sea
next, the sea perhaps not at all. But the sea loved him without reserve. It gave him his pro- fessional distinction and his author's fame — a fame such as not often falls to the lot of a true artist.
At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, another man wrote of the sea with true artistic instinct. He is not invincibly young and heroic; he is mature and human, though for him also the stress of adventure and endeavour must end fatally in inheritance and marriage. For James Fenimore Cooper nature was not the frame- work, it was an essential part of existence. He could hear its voice, he could understand its silence, and he could interpret both for us in his prose with all that fehcity and sureness of effect that belong to a poetical conception alone. His fame, as wide but less brilliant than that of his contemporary, rests mostly on a novel which is not of the sea. But he loved the sea and looked at it with con- summate understanding. In his sea tales the sea inter-penetrates with life; it is in a subtle way a factor in the problem of existence, and, for all its greatness, it is always in touch with the men, who, bound on errands of war or gain, traverse its immense solitudes. His descriptions have the magistral ampleness of a gesture indicating the sweep of a vast horizon. They embrace the colours of sunset, the peace of starlight, the aspects of
TALES OF THE SEA ^^
calm and storm, the great loneliness of the waters, the stillness of watchful coasts, and the alert readi- ness which marks men who live face to face with the promise and the menace of the sea.
He knows the men and he knows the sea. His method may be often faulty, but his art is genuine. The truth is within him. The road to legitimate realism is through poetical feeling, and he pos- sesses that — only it is expressed in the leisurely manner of his time. He has the knowledge of simple hearts. Long Tom Coffin is a monumental seaman with the individuality of life and the significance of a type. It is hard to beheve that Manual and Borroughchffe, Mr. Marble of Marble- Head, Captain Tuck of the packet-ship Montauk^ or Daggett, the tenacious commander of the Sea Lion of Martha's Vineyard, must pass away some day and be utterly forgotten. His sympathy is large, and his humour is as genuine — and as per- fectly unaffected — as is his art. In certain passages he reaches, very simply, the heights of inspired vision.
He wrote before the great American language was born, and he wrote as well as any novehst of his time. If he pitches upon episodes redounding to the glory of the young repubhc, surely England has glory enough to forgive him, for the sake of his excellence, the patriotic bias at her expense. The interest of his tales is convincing and unflagging;
78 TALES OF THE SEA
and there runs through his work a steady vein of friendliness for the old country which the succeeding generations of his compatriots have replaced by a less definite sentiment.
Perhaps no two authors of fiction influenced so many hves and gave to so many the initial impulse towards a glorious or a useful career. Through the distances of space and time those two men of another race have shaped also the life of the writer of this appreciation. Life is life, and art is art — and truth is hard to find in either. Yet in testimony to the achievement of both these authors it may be said that, in the case of the writer at least, the youthful glamour, the headlong vitality of the one and the profound sympathy, the artistic insight of the other — to which he had surrendered — have withstood the brutal shock of facts and the wear of laborious years. He has never regretted his surrender.
AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA' 1898
In his new volume, Mr. Hugh CJifford, at the beginning of the sketch entitled " At the Heels of the White Man," expresses his anxiety as to the state of England's account in the Day-Book of the Recording Angel " for the good and the bad we have done — both with the most excellent intentions." The intentions will, no doubt, count for some- thing, though, of course, every nation's conquests are paved with good intentions; or it may be that the Recording Angel, looking compassionately at the strife of hearts, may disdain to enter into the Eternal Book the facts of a struggle which has the reward of its righteousness even on this earth — in victory and lasting greatness, or in defeat and humiHation.
And, also, love will count for much. If the opinion of a looker-on from afar is worth anything, Mr. Hugh Clifford's anxiety about his country's record is needless. To the Malays whom he governs, instructs, and guides he is the embodi- ment of the intentions, of the conscience and
* Studies in Brown Humanity. By Hugh Clifford, 79
8o AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA
might of his race. And of all the nations con- quering distant territories in the name of the most excellent intentions, England alone sends out men who, with such a transparent sincerity of feeling, can speak, as Mr. Hugh CHfford does, of the place of toil and exile as " the land which is very dear to me, where the best years of my Hfe have been spent " — and where (I would stake my right hand on it) his name is pronounced with respect and affection by those brown men about whom he writes.
All these studies are on a high level of interest, though not all on the same level. The descriptive chapters, results of personal observation, seem to me the most interesting. And, indeed, in a book of this kind it is the author's personality which awakens the greatest interest; it shapes itself be- fore one in the ring of sentences, it is seen between the Hnes — like the progress of a traveller in the jungle that may be traced by the sound of the parang chopping the swaying creepers, while the man himself is gHmpsed, now and then, indistinct and passing between the trees. Thus in his very vagueness of appearance, the writer seen through the leaves of his book becomes a fascinating com- panion in a land of fascination.
It is when dealing with the aspects of nature that Mr. Hugh CHfford is most convincing. He looks upon them lovingly, for the land is '* very dear to him," and he records his cherished impressions
AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA 8i
so that the forest, the great flood, the jungle, the rapid river, and the menacing rock dwell in the memory of the reader long after the book is closed. He does not say anything, in so many words, of his affection for those who live amid the scenes he describes so well, but his humanity is large enough to pardon us if we suspect him of such a rare weakness. In his preface he expresses the regret at not having the gifts (whatever they may be) of the kailyard school, or — ^looking up to a very different plane — the genius of Mr. Barrie. He has, however, gifts of his own, and his genius has served his country and his fortunes in another direction. Yet it is when attempting what he professes himself unable to do, in telling us the simple story of tJmat, the punkah-puller, with un- affected simplicity and half-concealed tenderness, that he comes nearest to artistic achievement.
Each study in this Volume presents some idea, illustrated by a fact told without artifice, but with an effective sureness of knowledge. The story of Tukang Burok's love, related in the old man's own words, conveys the very breath of Malay thought and speech. In "His Little Bill," the coohe, Lim Teng Wah, facing his debtor, stands very distinct before us, an insignificant and tragic victim of fate with whom he had quarrelled to the death over a matter of seven dollars and sixty- eight cents. The story of " The Schooner with a
82 AN OBwSERVER IN MALAYA
Past "may be heard, from the Straits eastward, with many variations. Out in the Pacific the schooner becomes a cutter, and the pearl-divers are re- placed by the Black-birds of the Labour Trade. But Mr. Hugh CHfford's variation is very good. There is a passage in it — a trifle— just the diver as seen coming up from the depths, that in its dozen lines or so attains to distinct artistic value. And, scattered through the book, there are many other passages of almost equal descriptive excellence.
Nevertheless, to apply artistic standards to this book would be a fundamental error in apprecia- tion. Like faith, enthusiasm, or heroism, art veils » part of the truth of life to make the rest appear m^ore splendid, inspiring, or sinister. And this_ book is only truth, interesting and futile, truth, unadorned, simple and straightforward. The Resi- dent of Pahang has the devoted friendship of Umat, the punkah-puller, he has an individual faculty of vision, a large sympathy, and the scrupulous consciousness of the good and evil in his hands. He may as well rest content with such gifts. One cannot expect to be, at the same time, a ruler of mxcn and an irreproachable player on the flute.
A HAPPY WANDERER
1910
Converts are interesting people. Most of us, if you will pardon me for betraying the universal secret, have, at some tim.e or other, discovered in ourselves a readiness to stray far, ever so far, on the wrong road. And what did we do in our pride and our cowardice ? Casting fearful glances and waiting for a dark moment, we buried our discovery discreetly, and kept on in the old direc- tion, on that old, beaten track we have not had courage enough to leave, and which we perceive now more clearly than before to be but the arid way of the grave.
The convert, the man capable of grace (I am speaking here in a secular sense), is not discreet. His pride is of another kind; he jumps gladly off the track — the touch of grace is mostly sudden — and facing about in a new direction may even attain the illusion of having turned his back on Death itself.
Some converts have, indeed, earned immort- aUty by their exquisite indiscretion. The most illustrious example of a convert, that Flower of
83
84 A HAPPY WANDERER
chivalry, Don Quixote de la Mancha, remains for all the world the only genuine immortal hidalgo. The delectable Knight of Spain became converted, as you know, from the ways of a small country squire to an imperative faith in a tender and subHme mission. Forthwith he was beaten with sticks and in due course shut up in a wooden cage by the Barber and the Priest, the fit ministers of a justly shocked social order. I do not know if it has occurred to anybody yet to shut up Mr. Luffmann in a wooden cage.^ I do not raise the point because I wish him any harm. Quite the contrary. I am a humane person. Let him take it as the highest praise — but I must say that he richly deserves that sort of attention.
On the other hand I would not have him unduly puffed up with the pride of the exalted association. The grave wisdom, the admirable amenity, the serene grace of the secular patron-saint of all mortals converted to noble visions are not his. Mr. Luff- mann has no mission. He is no Knight subHmely Errant. But he is an excellent Vagabond. He is full of merit. That peripatetic guide, philosopher and friend of all nations, Mr. Roosevelt, would promptly excommunicate him with a big stick. The truth is that the ex-autocrat of all the States does not like rebels against the sullen order of our universe. Make the best of it or perish — he cries. A sane ^ Quiet Days in Spain. By C. Bogue Luffmann.
A HAPPY WANDERER 85
lineal successor of the Barber and the Priest, and a sagacious political heir of the incomparable Sancho Panza (another great Governor), that dis- tinguished litterateur has no mercy for dreamers. And our author happens to be a man of (you may trace them in his books) some rather fine reveries.
Every convert begins by being a rebel, and I do not see myself how any mercy can possibly be extended to Mr. Luffmann. He is a convert from the creed of strenuous hfe. For this renegade the body is of httle account; to him work appears criminal when it suppresses the demands of the inner life; while he was young he did grind vir- tuously at the sacred handle, and now, he says, he has fallen into disgrace with some people because he believes no longer in toil without end. Certain respectable folk hate him — so he says — because he dares to think that " poetry, beauty, and the broad face of the world are the best things to be in love with." He confesses to loving Spain on the ground that she is " the land of to-morrow, and holds the gospel of never-mind." The universal striving to push ahead he considers mere vulgar folly. Didn't 1 tell you he was a fit subject for the cage ?
It is a rehef (we are all humane, are we not ?) to discover that this desperate character is not alto- gether an outcast. Little girls seem to like him. One of them, after Hstening to some of his tales,
86 A HAPPY WANDERER
remarked to her mother, '' Wouldn't it be lovely if what he says were true! " Here you have Woman! The charming creatures will neither strain at a camel nor swallow a gnat. Not publicly. These operations^ without which the world they have such a large share in could not go on Jor ten minutes, are left to us — men. And then we are chided for being coarse. This is a refined objection but does not seem fair. Another little girl — or perhaps the same little girl — wrote to him in Cor- dova, " I hope Poste-Restante is a nice place, and that you are very comfortable." Woman again! I have in my time told some stories which are (I hate false modesty) both true and lovely. Yet no Httle girl ever wrote to me in kindly terms. And why ? Simply because I am not enough of a Vaga- bond. The dear despots of the fireside have a weakness for lawless characters. This is amiable, but does not seem rational.
Being Quixotic, Mr. Luffmann is no Impres- sionist. He is far too earnest in his heart, and not half sufficiently precise in his style to be that. But he is an excellent narrator. More than any Vaga- bond I have ever met, he knows what he is about. There is not one of his quiet days which is dull. You will find in them a love-story not made up, the coup-de-foudre, the lightning-stroke of Spanish love; and you will marvel how a spell so sudden and vehement can be at the same time so tragically
A HAPPY WANDERER 87
delicate. You will find there landladies devoured with jealousy, astute housekeepers, delightful boys, wise peasants, touchy shopkeepers, all the cosas de Espana — and, in addition, the pale girl Rosario. I recommend that pathetic and silent victim of fate to your benevolent compassion. You will find in his pages the humours of starving workers of the soil, the vision among the mountains of an exulting mad spirit in a mighty body, and many other visions worthy of attention. And they are exact visions, for this idealist is no visionary. He is in sympathy with suffering mankind, and has a grasp on real human affairs. I mean the great and pitiful affairs concerned with bread, love, and the obscure, unexpressed needs which drive great crowds to prayer in the holy places of the earth.
But I Hke his conception of what a " quiet " life is hke! His quiet days require no fewer than forty-two of the forty-nine provinces of Spain to take their ease in. For his unquiet days, I presume, the seven — or is it nine ? — crystal spheres of Alex- andrian cosmogony would afford but a wretchedly straitened space. A most unconventional thing is his notion of quietness. One would take it as a joke; only that, perchance, to the author of Quiet Days in Spain all days may seem quiet, because, a courageous convert, he is now at peace with himself.
How better can we take leave of this interesting
88 A HAPPY WANDERER
Vagabond than with, the road salutation of passing wayfarers : " And on you be peace ! . . . You have chosen your ideal, and it is a good choice. There's nothing Hke giving up one's Hfe to an unselfish passion. Let the rich and the powerful of this globe preach their sound gospel of palpable pro- gress. The part of the ideal you embrace is the better one, if only in its illusions. No great passion can be barren. May a world of gracious and poignant images attend the lofty solitude of your renunciation! "
THE LIFE BEYOND
1910
You have no doubt noticed that certain books produce a sort of physical effect on one — mostly an audible effect. I am not alluding here to Blue books or to books of statistics. The effect of these is simply exasperating and no more. No! the books I have in mind are just the common books of commerce you and I read when we have five minutes to spare, the usual hired books pubHshed by ordinary pubHshers, printed by ordinary printers, and censored (when they happen to be novels) by the usual circulating Hbraries, the guardians of our firesides, whose names are house- hold words within the four seas.
To see the fair and the brave of this free country surrendering themselves with unbounded trust to the direction of the circulating libraries is very touching. It is even, in a sense, a beautiful spec- tacle, because, as you know, humihty is a rare and fragrant virtue; and what can be more humble than to surrender your morals and your intellect to the judgment of one of your tradesmen ? I suppose that there are some very perfect people
89
90 THE LIFE BEYOND
who allow the Army and Navy Stores to censor their diet. So much merit, however, I imagine, is not frequently met with here below. The flesh, alas! is weak, and — from a certain point of view — so important!
A superficial person might be rendered miserable by the simple question : What would become of us if the circulating libraries ceased to exist ? It is a horrid and almost indehcate supposition, but let us be brave and face the truth. On this earth of ours nothing lasts, ^out fasse, tout casse, tout lasse. Imagine the utter wreck overtaking the morals of our beautiful country-houses should the circulating hbraries suddenly die ! But pray do not shudder. There is no occasion.
Their spirit shall survive. I declare this from inward conviction, and also from scientific in- formation received lately. For observe: the cir- culating libraries are human institutions. I beg you to follow me closely. They are human insti- tutions, and being human, they are not animal, and, therefore, they are spiritual. Thus, any man with enough money to take a shop, stock his shelves, and pay for advertisements shall be able to evoke the pure and censorious spectre of the circulating libraries whenever his own commercial spirit moves him.
For, and this is the information alluded to above. Science, having in its infinite wanderings run up
THE LIFE BEYOND 91
against various wonders and mysteries, is ap- parently willing now to allow a spiritual quality to man and, I conclude, to all his works as well.
I do not know exactly what this " Science " may be; and I do not think that anybody else knows; but that is the information stated shortly. It is contained in a book reposing under my thoughtful eyes.^ I know it is not a censored book, because I can see for myself that it is not a novel. The author, on his side, warns me that it is not philo- sophy, that it is not metaphysics, that it is not natural science. After this comprehensive warn- ing, the definition of the book becomes, you will admit, a pretty hard nut to crack.
But meantime let us return for a moment to my opening remark about the physical effect of some common, hired books. A few of them (not neces- sarily books of verse) are melodious; the music some others make for you as you read has the dis- agreeable emphasis of a barrel-organ; the tinkHng- cymbals book (it was not written by a humorist) I only met once. But there is infinite variety in the noises books do make. I have now on my shelves a book apparently of the most valuable kind which, before I have read half-a-dozen lines, begins to make a noise Hke a buzz-saw. I am in- consolable; I shall never, I fear, discover what it
^ Existence after Death Implied by Science. By Jasper B, Hunt. M.A.
92 THE LIFE BEYOND
is all about, for the buzzing covers the words, and at every try I am absolutely forced to give it up ere the end of the page is reached.
The book, however, which I have found so diffi- cult to define, is by no means noisy. As a mere piece of writing it may be described as being breathless itself and taking the reader's breath away, not by the magnitude of its message but by a sort of anxious volubihty in the delivery. The constantly elusive argument and the illustrative quotations go on without a single reflective pause. For this reason alone the reading of that work is a fatiguing process.
The author himself (I use his own words) " sus- pects " that what he has written " may be theology after all." It may be. It is not my place either to allay or to confirm the author's suspicion of his own work. But I will state its main thesis : " That science regarded in the gross dictates the spirituality of man and strongly impHes a spiritual destiny for individual human beings." This means : Existence after Death — that is, ImmortaHty.
To find out its value you must go to the book. But I will observe here that an ImmortaHty Hable at any moment to betray itself fatuously by the forcible incantations of Mr. Stead or Professor Crookes is scarcely worth having. Can you imagine anything more squaHd than an ImmortaHty at the
THE LIFE BEYOND 93
beck and call of Eusapia Palladino ? That woman lives on the top floor of a NeapoHtan house, and gets our poor, pitiful, august dead, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, spirit of our spirit, who have loved, suffered and died, as we must love, suffer, and die — she gets them to beat tambourines in a corner and protrude shadowy limbs through a curtain. This is particularly horrible, because, if one had to put one's faith in these things one could not even die safely from disgust, as one would long to do.
And to beHeve that these manifestations, which the author evidently takes for modern miracles, will stay our tottering faith; to believe that the new psychology has, only the other day, dis- covered man to be a *' spiritual mystery," is really carrying humihty towards that universal provider. Science, too far.
We moderns have complicated our old perplex-\ . ities to the point of absurdity; our perplexities \ older than religion itself. It is not for nothing that I for so many centuries the priest, mounting the I steps of the altar, murmurs, " Why art thou sad, ' my soul, and why dost thou trouble me ? " Since ^ ^""i the day of Creation two veiled figures. Doubt and Melancholy, are pacing endlessly in the sunshine of the world. What humanity needs is not the pro- mise of scientific immortality, but compassionate
94
THE LIFE BEYOND
[ pity in this life and infinite mercy on the Day of
/ Judgment.
^ And, for the rest, during this transient hour of our pilgrimage, we may well be content to repeat the Invocation of Sar Peladan. Sar Peladan was an occultist, a seer, a modern magician. He be- lieved in astrology, in the spirits of the air, in elves ; he was marvellously and deliciously absurd. Incidentally he wrote some incomprehensible poems and a few pages of harmonious prose, for, you must know, " a magician is nothing else but a great har- monist." Here are some eight lines of the magnifi- cent Invocation. Let me, however, warn you, strictly between ourselves, that my translation is execrable. I am sorry to say I am no magician.
" O Nature, indulgent Mother, forgive ! Open " your arms to the son, prodigal and weary.
" I have attempted to tear asunder the veil you " have hung to conceal from us the pain of life, " and I have been wounded by the mystery. . . . " CEdipus, half way to finding the word of the " enigma, young Faust, regretting already the " simple life, the life of the heart, I come back to " you repentant, reconciled, 0 gentle deceiver ! "
THE ASCENDING EFFORT
1910
Much good paper has been lamentably wasted to prove that science has destroyed, that it is destroy- ing, or, some day, may destroy poetry. Meantime, unblushing, unseen, and often unheard, the guile- less poets have gone on singing in a sweet strain. How they dare do the . impossible and virtually forbidden thing is a cause for wonder but not for legislation. Not yet. We are at present too busy reforming the silent burglar and planning concerts to soothe the savage breast of the yeUing hoohgan. As somebody — perhaps a pubHsher — said lately: " Poetry is of no account now-a-days."
But it is not totally neglected. Those persons with gold-rimmed spectacles whose usual occupa- tion is to spy upon the obvious have remarked audibly (on several occasions) that poetry has so far not given to science any acknowledgment worthy of its distinguished position in the popular mind. Except that Tennyson looked down the throat of a foxglove, that Erasmus Darwin wrote ^he Loves of the Plants and a scoffer The Loves of the Triangles^ poets have been supposed to be
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96 THE ASCENDING EFFORT
indecorously blind to the progress of science. What tribute, for instance, has poetry paid to electricity ? All I can remember on the spur of the moment is Mr. Arthur Symons' hne about arc lamps : " Hung with the globes of some unnatural fruit."
Commerce and Manufacture praise on every hand in their not mute but inarticulate way the glories of science. Poetry does not play its part. Behold John Keats, skilful with the surgeon's knife; but when he writes poetry his inspiration is not from the operating table. Here I am re- minded, though, of a modern instance to the con- trary in prose. Mr. H. G. Wells, who, as far as I know, has never written a line of verse, was in- spired a few years ago to write a short story, Under the Knife, Out of a clock-dial, a brass rod, and a whiff of chloroform, he has conjured for us a sensation of space and eternity, evoked the face of the Unknowable, and an awesome, august voice, like the voice of the Judgment Day; a great voice, perhaps the voice of science itself, uttering the words: " There shall be no more pain! " I advise you to look up that story, so human and so in- timate, because Mr. Wells, the writer of prose whose amazing inventiveness we all know, remains a poet even in his most perverse moments of scorn for things as they are. His poetic imagination is sometimes even greater than his inventiveness, I am not afraid to say. But, indeed, imaginative
THE ASCENDING EFFORT 97
faculty would make any man a poet — were he born without tongue for speech and without hands to seize his fancy and fasten her down to a wretched piece of paper.
The book ^ which in the course of the last few days I have opened and shut several times is not imaginative. But, on the other hand, it is not a dumb book, as some are. It has even a sort of sober and serious eloquence, reminding us that not poetry alone is at fault in this matter. Mr. Bourne begins his Ascending Effort with a remark by Sir Francis Galton upon Eugenics that '4f the principles he was advocating were to become effective they must be introduced into the national conscience, Hke a new reHgion." " Introduced " suggests com- pulsory vaccination. Mr. Bourne, who is not a theologian, wishes to league together not science and rehgion, but science and the arts. " The in- toxicating power of art," he thinks, is the very thing needed to give the desired effect to the doc- trines of science. In uninspired phrase he points to the arts playing once upon a time a part in " popularising the Christian tenets." With pains- taking fervour as great as the fervour of prophets, but not so persuasive, he foresees the arts some day popularising science. Until that day dawns, science will continue to be lame and poetry blind. 1 The Ascending Effort. By George Bourne.
98 THE ASCENDING EFFORT
He himself cannot smooth or even point out the way, though he thinks that " a really prudent people would be greedy of beauty," and their pubHc authorities " as careful of the sense of com- fort as of sanitation."
As the writer of those remarkable rustic note- books, ^he Betteszvorth Book and Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer^ the author has a claim upon our attention. But his seriousness, his patience, his almost touching sincerity, can only command the respect of his readers and nothing more. He is obsessed by science, haunted and shadowed by it, until he has been bewildered into awe. He knows, indeed, that art owes its triumphs and its subtle influence to the fact that it issues straight from our organic vitaHty, and is a movement of life-cells with their matchless unintellectual know- ledge. But the fact that poetry does not seem obviously in love with science has never made him doubt whether it may not be an argument against his haste to see the marriage ceremony performed amid pubhc rejoicings.
Many a man has heard or read and believes that the earth goes round the sun; one small blob of mud among several others, spinning ridiculously with a waggHng motion Hke a top about to fall. This is the Copernican system, and the man be- Heves in the system without often knowing as much about it as its name. But while watching a
THE ASCENDING EFFORT 99
sunset he sheds his belief; he sees the sun as a small and useful object, the servant of his needs and the witness of his ascending effort, sinking slowly behind a range of mountains, and then he holds the system of Ptolemy. He holds it without knowing it. In the same way a poet hears, reads, and believes a thousand undeniable truths which have not yet got into his blood, nor will do after reading Mr. Bourne's book; he writes, therefore, as if neither truths nor book existed. Life and the arts follow dark courses, and will not turn aside to the brilliant arc-Hghts of science. Some day, with- out a doubt, — and it may be a consolation to Mr. Bourne to know it — fully informed critics will point out that Mr. Davies's poem on a dark woman combing her hair must have been written after the invasion of appendicitis, and that Mr. Yeats's *' Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths " came before radium was quite unnecessarily dragged out of its respectable obscurity in pitchblende to upset the venerable (and comparatively naive) chemistry of our young days.
There are times when the tyranny of science and the cant of science are alarming, but there are other times when they are entertaining — and this is one of them. " Many a man prides himself " says Mr. Bourne, " on his piety or his views of art, whose whole range of ideas, could they be investigated, would be found ordinary, if not base,
100 THE ASCENDING EFFORT
because they have been adopted in compliance with some external persuasion or to serve some timid purpose instead of proceeding authorita- tively from the living selection of his hereditary taste." This extract is a fair sample of the book's thought and of its style. But Mr. Bourne seems to forget that " persuasion " is a vain thing. The appreciation of great art comes from within.
It is but the merest justice to say that the trans- parent honesty of Mr. Bourne's purpose is undeni- able. But the whole book is simply an earnest expression of a pious wish; and, like the generality of pious wishes, this one seems of little dynamic value — besides being impracticable.
Yes, indeed. Art has served Religion; artists have found the most exalted inspiration in Chris- tianity; but the Hght of Transfiguration which has illuminated the profoundest mysteries of our sinful souls is not the light of the generating stations, which exposes the depths of our infatuation where our mere cleverness is permitted for a while to grope for the unessential among invincible shadows.
THE CENSOR OF PLAYS
An Appreciation 1907
A COUPLE of years ago I was moved to write a one-act play — and I lived long enough to accom- plish the task. We live and learn. When the play was finished I was informed that it had to be licensed for performance. Thus I learned of the existence of the Censor of Plays. I may say with- out vanity that I am intelligent enough to have been astonished by that piece of information: for facts must stand in some relation to time and space, and I was aware of being in England — in the twentieth-century England. The fact did not fit the date and the place. That was my first thought. It was, in short, an improper fact. I beg you to beHeve that I am writing in all seriousness and am weighing my words scrupulously.
Therefore I don't say inappropriate. I say improper — that is; something to be ashamed of. And at first this impression was confirmed by the obscurity in which the figure embodying this after all considerable fact had its being. The Censor
lOI
102 THE CENSOR OF PLAYS
of Plays! His name was not in the mouths of all men. Far from it. He seemed stealthy and remote. There was about that figure the scent of the far East, like the peculiar atmosphere of a Mandarin's back yard, and the mustiness of the Middle Ages, that epoch when mankind tried to stand still in a monstrous illusion of final certitude attained in morals, intellect and conscience.
It was a disagreeable impression. But I re- flected that probably the censorship of plays was an inactive monstrosity; not exactly a survival, since it seemed obviously at variance with the genius of the people, but an heirloom of past ages, a bizarre and imported curiosity preserved because of that weakness one has for one's old possessions apart from any intrinsic value; one more object of exotic virtu, an Oriental potiche, a magot chinois conceived by a childish and extravagant imagina- tion, but allowed to stand in stolid impotence in the twilight of the upper shelf.
Thus I quieted my uneasy mind. Its uneasiness had nothing to do with the fate of my one-act play. The play was duly produced, and an ex- ceptionally intelhgent audience stared it coldly off the boards. It ceased to exist. It was a fair and open execution. But having survived the freezing atmosphere of that auditorium I continued to exist, labouring under no sense of wrong. I was not pleased, but I was content. I was content
THE CENSOR OF PLAYS 103
to accept the verdict of a free and independent public, judging after its conscience the work of its free, independent and conscientious servant — the artist.
Only thus can the dignity of artistic servitude be preserved — not to speak of the bare existence of the artist and the self-respect of the man. I shall say nothing of the self-respect of the public. To the self-respect of the public the present appeal against the censorship is being made and I join in it with all my heart.
For I have Hved long enough to learn that the monstrous and outlandish figure, the magot chinois whom I beheved to be but a memorial of our fore- fathers' mental aberration, that grotesque pottche, works! The absurd and hollow creature of clay seems to be ahve with a sort of (surely) uncon- scious life worthy of its traditions. It heaves its stomach, it rolls its eyes, it brandishes a monstrous arm: and with the censorship, like a Bravo of old Venice with a more carnal weapon, stabs its victim from behind in the twihght of its upper shelf. Less picturesque than the Venetian in cloak and mask, less estimable, too, in this, that the assassin plied his moral trade at his own risk deriving no countenance from the powers of the Repubhc, it stands more malevolent, inasmuch that the Bravo striking in the dusk killed but the body, whereas the grotesque thing nodding its
104 THE CENSOR OF PLAYS
mandarin head may in its absurd unconsciousness strike down at any time the spirit of an honest, of an artistic, perhaps of a sublime creation.
This Chinese monstrosity, disguised in the trousers of the Western Barbarian and provided by the State with the immortal Mr. Stiggins's plug hat and umbrella, is with us. It is an office. An office of trust. And from time to time there is found an official to fill it. He is a pubhc man. The least prominent of public men, the most unobtrusive, the most obscure if not the most modest.
But however obscure, a public man may be told the truth if only once in his life. His office flourishes in the shade; not in the rustic shade beloved of the violet but in the muddled twihght of mind, where tyranny of every sort flourishes. Its holder need not have either brain or heart, no sight, no taste, no imagination, not even bowels of com- passion. He needs not these things. He has power. He can kill thought, and incidentally truth, and incidentally beauty, providing they seek to five in a dramatic form. He can do it, without seeing, with- out understanding, without feehng anything; out of mere stupid suspicion, as an irresponsible Roman Caesar could kill a senator. He can do that and there is no one to say him nay. He may call his cook (Moliere used to do that) from below and give her five acts to judge every morning as a
THE CENSOR OF PLAYS 105
matter of constant practice and still remain the unquestioned destroyer of men's honest work. He may have a glass too much. This accident has happened to persons of unimpeachable morality — to gentlemen. He may suffer from spells of imbe- ciHty Hke Clodius. He may . . . what might he not do! I tell you he is the Caesar of the dramatic world. There has been since the Roman Princi- pate nothing in the way of irresponsible power to compare with the office of the Censor of Plays.
Looked at in this way it has some grandeur, something colossal in the odious and the absurd. This figure in whose power it is to suppress an intellectual conception — to kill thought (a dream for a mad brain, my masters!) — seems designed in a spirit of bitter comedy to bring out the greatness of a PhiHstine's conceit and his moral cowardice.
But this is England in the twentieth century, and one wonders that there can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post. It is a matter for meditation. Having given it a few minutes I come to the conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must be either an extreme megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being.
He must be unconscious. It is one of the quali- fications for his magistracy. Other quaHfications are equally easy. He must have done nothing, ex- pressed nothing, imagined nothing. He must be
io6 THE CENSOR OF PLAYS
obscure, insignificant and mediocre- — in thought, act, speech and sympathy. He must know nothing of art, of life — and of himself. For if he did he would not dare to be what he is. Like that much questioned and mysterious bird, the phcenix, he sits amongst the cold ashes of his predecessor upon the altar of morality, alone of his kind in the sight of wondering generations.
And I will end with a quotation reproducing not perhaps the exact words but the true spirit of a lofty conscience.
*' Often when sitting down to write the notice of a play, especially when I felt it antagonistic to my canons of art, to my tastes or my convictions, I hesitated in the fear lest my conscientious blame might check the development of a great talent, my sincere judgment condemn a worthy mind. With the pen poised in my hand I hesitated, whispering to myself ' What if I were perchance doing my part in killing a masterpiece.' "
Such were the lofty scruples of M. Jules Lemaitre — dramatist and dramatic critic, a great citizen and a high magistrate in the Repubhc of Letters; a Censor of Plays exercising his august office openly in the Hght of day, with the authority of a Euro- pean reputation. But then M. Jules Lemaitre is a man possessed of wisdom, of great fame, of a fine conscience — not an obscure hollow Chinese mon- strosity ornamented with Mr. Stiggins's plug hat
THE CENSOR OF PLAYS 107
and cotton umbrella by its anxious grandmother — the State.
Frankly, is it not time to knock the im- proper object off its shelf ? It has stood too long there. Hatched in Pekin (I should say) by some Board of Respectable Rites, the little caravan monster has come to us by way of Moscow — I suppose. It is outlandish. It is not venerable. It does not belong here. Is it not time to knock it off its dark shelf with some implement ap- propriate to its worth and status ? With an old broom handle for instance.
PART II LIFE
AUTOCRACY AND WAR
1905
From the firing of the first shot on the banks of the Sha-ho, the fate of the great battle of the Russo-Japanese war hung in the balance for more than a fortnight. The famous three-day battles, for which history has reserved the recognition of special pages, sink into insignificance before the struggles in Manchuria engaging half a million men on fronts of sixty miles, struggles lasting for weeks, flaming up fiercely and dying away from sheer exhaustion, to flame up again in desperate persistence, and end — as we have seen them end more than once — -not from the victor obtaining a crushing advantage, but through the mortal weariness of the combatants.
We have seen these things, though we have seen them only in the cold, silent, colourless print of books and newspapers. In stigmatising the printed word as cold, silent and colourless, I have no in- tention of putting a shght upon the fidelity and the talents of men who have provided us with words to read about the battles in Manchuria. I only wished to suggest that in the nature of things, the war in the Far East has been made known
III
112 AUTOCRACY AND WAR
to us, so far, in a grey reflection of its terrible and monotonous phases of pain, death, sickness; a reflection seen in the perspective of thousands of miles, in the dim atmosphere of official reticence, through the veil of inadequate words. Inadequate, I say, because what had to be reproduced is beyond the common experience of war, and our imagina- tion, luckily for our peace of mind, has remained a slumbering faculty, notwithstanding the din of humanitarian talk and the real progress of human- itarian ideas. Direct vision of the fact, or the stimulus of a great art, can alone make it turn and open its eyes heavy with blessed sleep; and even there, as against the testimony of the senses and the stirring up of emotion, that saving callous- ness which reconciles us to the conditions of our existence, will assert itself under the guise of assent to fatal necessity, or in the enthusiasm of a purely aesthetic admiration of the rendering. In this age of knowledge our sympathetic imagination, to which alone we can look for the ultimate triumph of concord and justice, remains strangely imper- vious to information, however correctly and even picturesquely conveyed. As to the vaunted elo- ' quence of a serried array of figures, it has all the futihty of precision without force. It is the ex- ploded superstition of enthusiastic statisticians. An over-worked horse falling in front of our windows, a man writhing under a cart-wheel in the street.
AUTOCRACY AND WAR 113
awaken more genuine emotion, more horror, pity, and indignation than the stream of reports, ap- palling in their monotony, of tens of thousands of decaying bodies tainting the air of the Manchurian plains, of other tens of thousands of maimed bodies groaning in ditches, crawHng on the frozen ground, fiUing the field hospitals ; of the hundreds of thou- sands of survivors no less pathetic and even more tragic in being left aHve by fate to the wretched exhaustion of their pitiful toil.
An early Victorian, or perhaps a pre-Victorian, sentimentaHst, looking out of an upstairs window, I beHeve, at a street — perhaps Fleet Street itself — full of people, is reported, by an admiring friend, to have wept for joy at seeing so much life. These arcadian tears, this facile emotion worthy of the golden age, comes to us from the past, with solemn approval, after the close of the Napoleonic wars and before the series of sanguinary surprises held in reserve by the nineteenth century for our hope- ful grandfathers. We may well envy them their optimism of which this anecdote of an amiable wit and sentimentalist presents an extreme instance, but still, a true instance, and worthy of regard in the spontaneous testimony to that trust in the hfe of the earth, triumphant at last in the feHcity of her children. Moreover, the psychology of indivi- duals, even in tHe most extreme instances', reflects the general effect of the fears and hopes of its time.
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Wept for joy! I should think that now, after eighty years, the emotion would be of a sterner sort. One could not imagine anybody shedding tears of joy at the sight of much Hfe in a street, unless, perhaps, he were an enthusiastic officer of a general staff or a popular pohtician, with a career yet to make. And hardly even that. In the case of the first tears would be unprofessional, and a stern repression of all signs of joy at the pro- vision of so much food for powder more in accord with the rules of prudence; the joy of the second would be checked before it found issue in weeping by anxious doubts as to the soundness of these electors' views upon the question of the hour, and the fear of missing the consensus of their votes.
No! It seems that such a tender joy would be misplaced now as m.uch as ever during the last hundred years, to go no further back. The end of the eighteenth century was, too, a time of optim- ism and of dismal mediocrity in which the French Revolution exploded Hke a bomb-shell. In its lurid blaze the insufficiency of Europe, the inferiority of minds, of military and administrative systems, stood exposed with pitiless vividness. And there is but little courage in saying at this time of the day that the glorified French Revolution itself, except for its destructive force, was in essentials a mediocre phenomenon. The parentage of that great social and poHtical upheaval was intellectual.
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the idea was elevated; but it is the bitter fate of any idea to lose its royal form and power, to lose its " virtue " the moment it descends from its sohtary throne to work its will among the people. It is a king whose destiny is never to know the obedience of his subjects except at the cost of degradation. The degradation of the ideas of free- dom and justice at the root of the French Revolu- tion is made manifest in the person of its heir; a personaHty without law or faith, whom it has been the fashion to represent as an eagle, but who was, in truth, more Hke a sort of vulture preying upon the body of a Europe which did, indeed, for some dozen of years, very much resemble a corpse. The subtle and manifold influence for evil of the Napoleonic episode as a school of violence, as a sower of national hatreds, as the direct provocator of obscurantism and reaction, of political tyranny and injustice, cannot well be exaggerated.
The nineteenth century began with wars which were the issue of a corrupted revolution. It may be said that the twentieth begins with a war which is Hke the explosive ferment of a moral grave, whence may yet emerge a new political organism to take the place of a gigantic and dreaded phantom. For a hundred years the ghost of Russian might, overshadowing with its fantastic bulk the councils of Central and Western Europe, sat upon the gravestone of autocracy, cutting off from air, from
ii6 AUTOCRACY AND WAR
light, from all knowledge of themselves and of the world, the buried milHons of Russian people. Not the most determined cockney sentimentaHst could have had the heart to weep for joy at the thought of its teeming numbers! And yet they were Hving, they are ahve yet, since, through the mist of print, we have seen their blood freezing crimson upon the snow of the squares and streets of St. Petersburg; since their generations born in the grave are yet ahve enough to fill the ditches and cover the fields of Manchuria with their torn Hmbs; to send up from the frozen ground of battle- fields a chorus of groans calling for vengeance from Heaven; to kill and retreat, or kill and advance, without intermission or rest for twenty hours, for fifty hours, for whole weeks of fatigue, hunger, cold, and murder — till their ghastly labour, worthy of a place amongst the punishments of Dante's Inferno, passing through the stages of courage, of fury, of hopelessness, sinks into the night of crazy despair.
It seems that in both armies many men are driven beyond the bounds of sanity by the stress of moral and physical misery. Great numbers of soldiers and regimental officers go mad as if by way of protest against the pecuHar sanity of a state of war: mostly among the Russians, of course. The Japanese have in their favour the tonic effect of success; and the innate gentleness
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of their character stands them in good stead. But the Japanese grand array has yet another advan- tage in this nerve-destroying contest, which for endless, arduous toil of killing surpasses all the wars of history. It has a base for its operations; a base of a nature beyond the concern of the many books written upon the so-called art of war, which, considered by itself, purely as an exercise of human ingenuity, is at best only a thing of well-worn, simple artifices. The Japanese army has for its base a reasoned conviction; it has behind it the profound belief in the right of a logical necessity to be appeased at the cost of so much blood and treasure. And in that belief, whether well or ill founded, that army stands on the high ground of conscious assent, shouldering deliberately the bur- den of a long-tried faithfulness. The other people (since each people is an army nowadays), torn out from a miserable quietude resembling death itself, hurled across space, amazed, without starting-point of its own or knowledge of the aim, can feel nothing but a horror-stricken consciousness of having mys- teriously become the plaything of a black and merciless fate.
The profound, the instructive nature of this war is resumed by the memorable difference in the spiritual state of the two armies; the one forlorn and dazed on being driven out from an abyss of mental darkness into the red light of a conflagra-
ii8 AUTOCRACY AND WAR
tion, the other with a full knowledge of its past and its future, " finding itself " as it were at every step of the trying war before the eyes of an as- tonished world. The greatness of the lesson has been dwarfed for most of us by an often half- conscious prejudice of race-difference. The West having managed to lodge its hasty foot on the neck of the East, is prone to forget that it is from the East that the wonders of patience and wisdom have come to a world of men who set the value of Hfe in the power to act rather than in the faculty of meditation. It has been dwarfed by this, and it has been obscured by a cloud of considerations with whose shaping wisdom and meditation had Httle or nothing to do; by the weary platitudes on the mihtary situation which (apart from geograph- ical conditions) is the same everlasting situation that has prevailed since the times of Hannibal and Scipio, and further back yet, since the beginning of historical record — since pre-historic times, for that matter; by the conventional expressions of horror at the tale of maiming and killing; by the rumours of peace with guesses more or less plaus- ible as to its conditions. All this is made legitimate by the consecrated custom of writers in such time as this — the time of a great war. More legitimate in view of the situation created in Europe are the speculations as to the course of events after the war. More legitimate, but hardly more wise than
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the irresponsible talk of strategy that never changes, and of terms of peace that do not matter.
And above it all — unaccountably persistent — the decrepit, old, hundred years old, spectre of Russia's might still faces Europe from across the teeming graves of Russian people. This dreaded and strange apparition, bristling with bayonets, armed with chains, hung over with holy images; that some- /j^ thing not of this world, partaking of a ravenous - ghoul, of a bhnd Djinn grown up from a cloud, and of the Old Man of the Sea, still faces us with its old stupidity, with its strange mystical arrogance, stamping its shadowy feet upon the gravestone of autocracy already cracked beyond repair by the torpedoes of Togo and the guns of Oyama, already heaving in the blood-soaked ground with the first stirrings of a resurrection.
JJever before had the Western world the oppor- tunity to look so deep into the black abyss which separates a soulless autocracy posing as, and even beheving itself to be, the arbiter of Europe, from the benighted, starved souls of its people. This is the real object-lesson of this war, its unforgettable information. And this war's true mission, disen- gaged from the economic origins of that contest, from doors open or shut, from the fields of Korea for Russian wheat or Japanese rice, from the ownership of ice-free ports and the command of the waters of the East — its true mission was to lay
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a ghost. It has accomphshed it. Whether Kuro- patkin was incapable or unlucky, whether or not Russia issuing next year, or the year after next, from behind a rampart of piled-up corpses will win or lose a fresh campaign, are minor considera- tions. The task of Japan is done, the mission accomplished; the ghost of Russia's might is laid. Only Europe, accustomed so long to the presence of that portent, seems unable to comprehend that, as in the fables of our childhood, the twelve strokes of the hour have rung, the cock has crowed, the apparition has vanished — never to haunt again this world which has been used to gaze at it with vague dread and many misgivings.
It was a fascination. And the hallucination still lasts as inexplicable in its persistence as in its dura- tion. It seems so unaccountable, that the doubt arises as to the sincerity of all that talk as to what Russia will or will not do, whether it will raise or not another army, whether it will bury the Japanese in Manchuria under seventy milhons of sacrificed peasants' caps (as her Press boasted a little more than a year ago) or give up to Japan that jewel of her crown, Saghalien, together with some other things ; whether, perchance, as an inter- esting alternative, it will make peace on the Amur in order to make war beyond the Oxus.
All these speculations (with many others) have appeared gravely in print; and if they have been
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gravely considered by only one reader out of each hundred, there must be something subtly noxious to the human brain in the composition of news- paper ink; or else it is that the large page, the columns of words, the leaded headings, exalt the mind into a state of feverish credulity. The printed page of the Press makes a sort of still uproar, taking from men both the power to reflect and the faculty of genuine feeling; leaving them only the artificially created need of having something exciting to talk about.
The truth is that the Russia of our fathers, of our childhood, of our middle-age; the testamen- tary Russia of Peter the Great — who imagined that all the nations were deHvered into the hand of Tsardom — can do nothing. It can do nothing because it does not exist. It has vanished for ever at last, and as yet there is no new Russia to take the place of that ill-omened creation, which, being a fantasy of a madman's brain, could in reahty be nothing else than a figure out of a nightmare seated upon a monument of fear and oppression.
The true greatness of a State does not spring from such a contemptible source. It is a matter of logical growth, of faith and courage. Its inspira- tion springs from the constructive instinct of the people, governed by the strong hand of a collective conscience and voiced in the wisdom and counsel of men who seldom reap the reward of gratitude.
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Many States have been powerful, but, perhaps, none have been truly great — as yet. That the position of a State in reference to the moral methods of its development can be seen only historically, is true. Perhaps mankind has not lived long enough for a comprehensive view of any particular case. Perhaps no one will ever Hve long enough; and perhaps this earth shared out amongst our clashing ambitions by the anxious arrangements of statesmen will come to an end before we attain the feUcity of greeting with un- animous applause the perfect fruition of a great State. It is even possible that we are destined for another sort of bHss altogether : that sort which consists in being perpetually duped by false appearances. But whatever poHtical illusion the future may hold out to our fear or our admira- tion, there will be none, it is safe to say, which in the magnitude of anti-humanitarian effect will equal that phantom now driven out of the world by the thunder of thousands of guns; none that in its retreat will cHng with an equally shameless sincerity to more unworthy supports : to the moral corruption and mental darkness of slavery, to the mere brute force of numbers.
This very ignominy of infatuation should make clear to men's feelings and reason that the down- fall of Russia's might is unavoidable. Spectral it Hved and spectral it disappears without leaving a
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memory of a single generous deed, of a single ser- vice rendered — even involuntarily — to the polity of nations. Other despotisms there have been, but none whose origin was so grimly fantastic in its baseness, and the beginning of whose end was so gruesomely ignoble. What is amazing is the myth of its irresistible strength which is dying so hard.
Considered historically, Russia's influence in Europe seems the most baseless thing in the world; a sort of convention invented by diplo- matists for some dark purpose of their own, one would suspect, if the lack of grasp upon the reaHties of any given situation were not the main characteristic of the management of international relations. A glance back at the last hundred years shows the invariable, one may say the logical, powerlessness of Russia. As a military power it has never achieved by itself a single great thing. It has been indeed able to repel an ill-considered inva- sion, but only by having recourse to the extreme methods of desperation. In its attacks upon its specially selected victim this giant always struck as if with a withered right hand. All the cam- paigns against Turkey prove this, from Potemkin's time to the last Eastern war in 1878, entered upon with every advantage of a well-nursed prestige and a carefully fostered fanaticism. Even the
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half-armed were always too much for the might of Russia, or, rather, of the Tsardom. It was vic- torious only against the practically disarmed, as, in regard to its ideal of territorial expansion, a glance at a map will prove sufficiently. As an ally, Russia has been always unprofitable, taking her share in the defeats rather than in the vic- tories of her friends, but always pushing her own claims with the arrogance of an arbiter of military success. She has been unable to help to any pur- pose a single principle to hold its own, not even the principle of authority and legitimism which Nicholas the First had declared so haughtily to rest under his special protection; just as Nicholas the Second has tried to make the maintenance of peace on earth his own exclusive affair. And the first Nicholas was a good Russian; he held the beHef in the sacredness of his realm with such an intensity of faith that he could not survive the first shock of doubt. Rightly envisaged, the Crimean war was the end of what remained of absolutism and legitimism in Europe. It threw the way open for the hberation of Italy. The war in Manchuria makes an end of absolutism in Russia, whoever has got to perish from the shock behind a rampart of dead ukases, mani- festoes, and rescripts. In the space of fifty years the self-appointed Apostle of Absolutism and the self-appointed Apostle of Peace, the Augustus and
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the Augustulus of the regime that was wont to speak contemptuously to European Foreign Offices in the beautiful French phrases of Prince Gor- chakov, have fallen victims, each after his kind, to their shadowy and dreadful familiar, to the phantom, part ghoul, part Djinn, part Old Man of the Sea, with beak and claws and a double head, looking greedily both east and west on the confines of two continents.
That nobody through all that time penetrated the true nature of the monster it is impossible to believe. But of the many who must have seen, all were either too modest, too cautious, perhaps too discreet, to speak; or else were too insignifi- cant to be heard or believed. Yet not all.
In the very early sixties, Prince Bismarck, then about to leave his post of Prussian Minister in St. Petersburg, called — so the story goes — upon an- other distinguished diplomatist. After some talk upon the general situation, the future Chancellor of the German Empire remarked that it was his practice to resume the impressions he had carried out of every country where he had made a long stay, in a short sentence, which he caused to be engraved upon some trinket. " I am leaving this country now, and this is what I bring away from it," he continued, taking off his finger a new ring to show to his colleague the inscription inside: " La Russie, c'est le neant."
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Prince Bismarck had the truth of the matter and was neither too modest nor too discreet to speak out. Certainly he was not afraid of not being beheved. Yet he did not shout his know- ledge from the house-tops. He meant to have the phantom as his accompHce in an enterprise which has set the clock of peace back for many a year.
He had his way. The German Empire has been an accomplished fact for more than a third of a century — a great and dreadful legacy left to the world by the ill-omened phantom of Russia's might.
It is that phantom which is disappearing now — unexpectedly, astonishingly, as if by a touch of that wonderful magic for which the East has always been famous. The pretence of beHef in its exist- ence will no longer answer anybody's purposes (now Prince Bismarck is dead) unless the purposes of the writers of sensational paragraphs as to this Neant making an armed descent upon the plains of India. That sort of folly would be beneath notice if it did not distract attention from the real problem created for Europe by a war in the Far East.
For good or evil in the working out of her destiny, Russia is bound to remain a Neant for many long years, in a more even than a Bis- marckian sense. The very fear of this spectre being gone, it behoves us to consider its legacy — the
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fact (no phantom that) accompHshed in Central Europe by its help and connivance.
The German Empire may feel at bottom the loss of an old accomplice always amenable to the confidential whispers of a bargain; but in the first instance it cannot but rejoice at the fundamental weakening of a possible obstacle to its instincts of territorial expansion. There is a removal of that latent feeHng of restraint which the presence of a powerful neighbour, however implicated with you in a sense of common guilt, is bound to inspire. The common guilt of the two Empires is defined precisely by their frontier line running through the PoHsh provinces. Without indulging in excessive feehngs of indignation at that country's partition, or going so far as to believe — with a late French poHtician — in the *' immanente justice des choses," it is clear that a material situation, based upon an essentially immoral transaction, contains the germ of fatal differences in the temperament of the two partners in iniquity — whatever the iniquity is. Germany has been the evil counsellor of Russia on all the questions of her PoHsh problem. Always urging the adoption of the most repres- sive measures with a perfectly logical duphcity, Prince Bismarck's Empire has taken care to couple the neighbourly offers of mihtary assistance with merciless advice. The thought of the Polish provinces accepting a frank reconcihation with
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a humanised Russia and bringing the weight of homogeneous loyalty within a few miles of Berhn, has been always intensely distasteful to the arro- gant Germanising tendencies of the other partner in iniquity. And, besides, the way to the Baltic provinces leads over the Niemen and over the Vistula.
And now, when there is a possibility of serious internal disturbances destroying the sort of order autocracy has kept in Russia, the road over these rivers is seen wearing a more inviting aspect. At any momient the pretext of armed intervention may be found in a revolutionary outbreak pro- voked by SociaHsts, perhaps — but at any rate by the political immaturity of the enhghtened classes and by the pohtical barbarism of the Russian people. The throes of Russian resurrection will be long and painful. This is not the place to speculate upon the nature of these convulsions, but there must be some violent break-up of the lamentable tradition, a shattering of the social, of the ad- ministrative— certainly of the territorial — unity.
Voices have been heard saying that the time for reforms in Russia is already past. This is the superficial view of the more profound truth that for Russia there has never been such a time within the memory of mankind. It is impossible to initiate a rational scheme of reform upon a phase of bhnd absolutism; and in Russia there has never been
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129
anything else to which the faintest tradition could, after ages of error, go back as to a parting of ways.
In Europe the old monarchical principle stands justified in its historical struggle with the growth of political liberty by the evolution of the idea of nationality as we see it concreted at the present time; by the inception of that wider solidarity grouping together around the standard of mon- archical power these larger agglomerations of mankind. This service of unification, creating close-knit communities possessing the ability, the will, and the power to pursue a common ideal, has prepared the ground for the advent of a still larger understanding: for the solidarity of Europeanism, which must be the next step towards the advent of Concord and Justice; an advent that, however delayed by the fatal worship of force and the errors of national selfishness, has been, and remains, the only possible goal of our progress.
The conceptions of legality, of larger patriotism, of national duties and aspirations have grown under the shadow of the old monarchies of Europe, which were the creations of historical necessity. There were seeds of wisdom in their very mistakes and abuses. They had a past and a future; they were human. But under the shadow of Russian autocracy nothing could grow. Russian autocracy succeeded to nothing; it had
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no historical past, and it cannot hope for a his- torical future. It can only end. By no industry of investigation, by no fantastic stretch of bene- volence, can it be presented as a phase of develop- ment through which a Society, a State, must pass on the way to the full consciousness of its destiny. It Hes outside the stream of progress. This despotism has been utterly un-European. Neither has it been Asiatic in its nature. Oriental despotisms belong to the history of mankind; they have left their trace on our minds and our imagination by their splendour, by their culture, by their art, by the exploits of great conquerors. The record of their rise and decay has an intellectual value; they are in their origins and their course the manifestations of human needs, the instruments of racial temperament, of catastrophic force, of faith and fanaticism. The Russian autocracy as we see it now is a thing apart. It is impossible to assign to it any rational origin in the vices, the misfor- tunes, the necessities, or the aspirations of mankind. That despotism has neither an European nor an Oriental parentage; more, it seems to have no root either in the institutions or the follies of this earth. What strikes one with a sort of awe is just this something inhuman in its character. It is like a visitation, Hke a curse from Heaven falling in the darkness of ages upon the immense plains of forest and steppe lying dumbly on the confines of two
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continents: a true desert harbouring no Spirit either of the East or of the West.
This pitiful fate of a country held by an evil spell, suffering from an awful visitation for which the responsibility cannot be traced either to her sins or her follies, has made Russia as a nation so difficult to understand by Europe. From the very first ghastly dawn of her existence as a State she had to breathe the atmosphere of despotism; she found nothing but the arbitrary will of an obscure autocrat at the beginning and end of her organisa- tion. Hence arises her impenetrability to whatever is true in Western thought. Western thought, when it crosses her frontier, falls under the spell of her autocracy and becomes a noxious parody of itself. Hence the contradictions, the riddles of her national hfe, which are looked upon with such curiosity by the rest of the world. The curse had entered her very soul; autocracy, and nothing else in the world, has moulded her institutions, and with the poison of slavery drugged the national tempera- ment into the apathy of a hopeless fatalism. It seems to have gone into the blood, tainting every mental activity in its source by a half-mystical, insensate, fascinating assertion of purity and hoH- ness. The Government of Holy Russia, arrogating to itself the supreme power to torment and slaugh- ter the bodies of its subjects Hke a God-sent scourge, has been most cruel to those whom it
/
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allowed to live under the shadow of its dispensa- tion. The worst crime against humanity of that system we behold now crouching at bay behind vast heaps of mangled corpses is the ruthless destruction of innumerable minds. The greatest horror of the world — madness — walked faithfully in its train. Some of the best intellects of Russia, after struggHng in vain against the spell, ended by throwing themselves at the feet of that hopeless despotism as a giddy man leaps into an abyss. An attentive survey of Russia's literature, of her Church, of her administration and the cross-cur- rents of her thought, must end in the verdict that the Russia of to-day has not the right to give her voice on a single question touching the future of humanity, because from the very inception of her being the brutal destruction of dignity, of truth, of rectitude, of all that is faithful in human nature has been made the imperative condition of her existence. The great governmental secret of that imperium which Prince Bismarck had the insight and the courage to call Le Neant^ has been the extirpation of every intellectual hope. To pro- nounce in the face of such a past the word Evolu- tion, which is precisely the expression of the highest intellectual hope, is a gruesome pleasantry. There can be no evolution out of a grave. Another word of less scientific sound has been very much pronounced of late in connection with Russia's
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future, a word of more vague import, a word of dread as much as of hope — Revolution.
In the face of the events of the last four months, this word has sprung instinctively, as it were, on grave lips, and has been heard with solemn fore- bodings. More or less consciously, Europe is pre- paring herself for a spectacle of much violence and perhaps of an inspiring nobility of greatness. And there will be nothing of what she expects. She will see neither the anticipated character of the violence, nor yet any signs of generous greatness. Her ex- pectations, more or less vaguely expressed, give the measure of her ignorance of that Neant which for so many years had remained hidden behind this phantom of invincible armies.
Neant I In a way, yes ! And yet perhaps Prince Bismarck has let himself be led away by the seduc- tion of a good phrase into the use of an inexact form. The form of his judgment had to be pithy, striking, engraved within a ring. If he erred, then, no doubt, he erred deliberately. The saying was near enough the truth to serve, and perhaps he did not want to destroy utterly by a more severe definition the prestige of the sham that could not deceive his genius. Prince Bismarck has been really complimentary to the useful phantom of the autocratic might. There is an awe-inspiring idea of infinity conveyed in the word Neant — and in Russia there is no idea. She is not a Neant ^ she is
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and has been simply the negation of everything worth Hving for. She is not an empty void, she is a yawning chasm open between East and West; a bottomless abyss that has swallowed up every hope of mercy, every aspiration towards personal dig- nity, towards freedom, towards knowledge, every ennobling desire of the heart, every redeeming whisper of conscience. Those that have peered into that abyss, where the dreams of Panslavism, of universal conquest, mingled with the hate and contempt for Western ideas, drift impotently Hke shapes of mist, know well that it is bottomless; that there is in it no ground for anything that could in the remotest degree serve even the lowest interests of mankind — and certainly no ground ready for a revolution. The sin of the old European monarchies was not the absolutism inherent in every form of government; it was the inabiHty to alter the forms of their legality, grown narrow and oppressive with the march of time. Every form oi^ legality is bound to degenerate into oppression, and the legality in the forms of monarchical in- stitutions sooner, perhaps, than any other. It has not been the business of monarchies to be adaptive from within. With the mission of uniting and con- solidating the particular ambitions and interests of feudalism in favour of a larger conception of a State, of giving self-consciousness, force and nationahty to the scattered energies of thought and
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action, they were fated to lag behind the march of ideas they had themselves set in motion in a direc- tion they could neither understand nor approve. Yet, for all that, the thrones still remain, and what is more significant, perhaps, some of the dynasties, too, have survived. The revolutions of European States have never been in the nature of absolute protests en masse against the monarchical prin- ciple; they were the uprising of the people against the oppressive degeneration of legality. But there never has been any legality in Russia; she is a negation of that as of everything else that has its root in reason or conscience. The ground of every revolution had to be intellectually prepared. A revolution is a short cut in the rational develop- ment of national needs in response to the growth of world-wide ideals. It is conceivably possible for a monarch of genius to put himself at the head of a revolution without ceasing to be the king of his people. For the autocracy of Holy Russia the only conceivable self-reform is — suicide.
The same relentless fate holds in its grip the all- powerful ruler and his helpless people. Wi elders of a power purchased by an unspeakable baseness of subjection to the Khans of the Tartar horde, the Princes of Russia who, in their heart of hearts had come in time to regard themselves as superior to every monarch of Europe, have never risen to be the chiefs of a nation. Their authority has never
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been sanctioned by popular tradition, by ideas of intelligent loyalty, of devotion, of political neces- sity, of simple expediency, or even by the power of the sword. In whatever form of upheaval autocratic Russia is to find her end, it can never be a revolution fruitful of moral consequences to mankind. It cannot be anything else but a rising of slaves. It is a tragic circumstance that the only thing one can wish to that people who had never seen face to face either law, order, justice, right, truth about itself or the rest of the world; who had known nothing outside the capri- cious will of its irresponsible masters, is that it should find in the approaching hour of need, not an organiser or a law-giver, with the wisdom of a Lycurgus or a Solon for their service, but at least the force of energy and desperation in some as yet unknown Spartacus.
A brand of hopeless mental and moral inferiority is set upon Russian achievements; and the coming events of her internal changes, however appalling they may be in their magnitude, will be nothing more impressive than the convulsions of a colossal body. As her boasted mihtary force that, corrupt in its origin, has ever struck no other but faltering blows, so her soul, kept benumbed by her temporal and spiritual master with the poison of tyranny and superstition, will find itself on awakening possessed of no language, a monstrous full-grown
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child having first to learn the ways of living thought and articulate speech. It is safe to say tyranny, assuming a thousand protean shapes, will remain chnging to her struggles for a long time before her bhnd multitudes succeed at last in trampling her out of existence under their millions of bare feet.
That would be the beginning. What is to come after ? The conquest of freedom to call your soul your own is only the first step on the road to ex- cellence. We, in Europe, have gone a step or two further, have had the time to forget how little that freedom means. To Russia it must seem every- thing. A prisoner shut up in a noisome dungeon concentrates all his hope and desire on the moment of stepping out beyond the gates. It appears to him pregnant with an immense and final import- ance; whereas what is important is the spirit in which he will draw the first breath of freedom, the counsels he will hear, the hands he may find extended, the endless days of toil that must follow, wherein he will have to build his future with no other material but what he can find within himself.
It would be vain for Russia to hope for the support and counsel of collective wisdom. Since 1870 (as a distinguished statesman of the old tradition disconsolately exclaimed) " il n'y a plus d'Europe! " There is, indeed, no Europe. The
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idea of a Europe united in the solidarity of her dynasties, which for a moment seemed to dawn on the horizon of the Vienna Congress through the subsiding dust of Napoleonic alarums and excursions, has been extinguished by the larger glamour of less restraining ideals. Instead of the doctrines of soHdarity it was the doctrine of nation- ahties much more favourable to spoliations that came to the front, and since its greatest triumphs at Sadowa and Sedan there is no Europe. Mean- while till the time comes when there will be no frontiers, there are alliances so shamelessly based upon the exigencies of suspicion and mistrust that their cohesive force waxes and wanes with every year, almost with the event of every passing month. This is the atmosphere Russia will find when the last rampart of tyranny has been beaten down. But what hands, what voices will she find on coming out into the light of day ? An ally she has yet who more than any other of Russia's allies has found that it had parted with lots of sohd substance in exchange for a shadow. It is true that the shadow was indeed the mightiest, the darkest that the modern world had ever known — and the most overbearing. But it is fading now, and the tone of truest anxiety as to what is to take its place will come, no doubt, from that and no other direc- tion, and no doubt, also, it wiU have that note of generosity which even in the moments of greatest
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aberration is seldom wanting in the voice of the French people.
Two neighbours Russia will find at her door. Austria, traditionally unaggressive whenever her hand is not forced, ruled by a dynasty of uncer- tain future, weakened by her duahty, can only speak to her in an uncertain, bi-lingual phrase. Prussia, grown in something like forty years from an almost pitiful dependant into a bullying friend and evil counsellor of Russia's masters, may, in- deed, hasten to extend a strong hand to the weak- ness of her exhausted body, but if so it will be only with the intention of tearing away the long- coveted part of her substance.
Pan-Germanism is by no means a shape of mists, and Germany is anything but a Neant where thought and effort are likely to lose them- selves without sound or trace. It is a powerful and voracious organisation, full of unscrupulous self- confidence, whose appetite for aggrandisement will only be limited by the power of helping itself to the severed members of its friends and neighbours. The era of wars so eloquently denounced by the old Republicans as the peculiar blood guilt of dynastic ambitions is by no means over yet. They will be fought out differently, with lesser frequency, with an increased bitterness and the savage tooth- and-claw obstinacy of a struggle for existence. They will make us regret the time of dynastic
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ambitions, with their human absurdity moderated by prudence and even by shame, by the fear of personal responsibihty and the regard paid to cer- tain forms of conventional decency. For, if the monarchs of Europe have been derided for address- ing each other as *' brother " in autograph com- munications, that relationship was at least as effective as any form of brotherhood likely to be estabhshed between the rival nations of this con- tinent, which, we are assured on all hands, is the heritage of democracy. In the ceremonial brother- hood of monarchs the reality of blood-ties, for what little it is worth, acted often as a drag on un- scrupulous desires of glory or greed. Besides, there was always the common danger of exasperated peoples, and some respect for each other's divine right. No leader of a democracy, without other ancestry but the sudden shout of a multitude, and debarred by the very condition of his power from even thinking of a direct heir, will have any interest in calhng brother the leader of another democracy — a chief as fatherless and heirless as himself.
The war of 1870, brought about by the third Napoleon's half-generous, half-selfish adoption of the principle of nationalities, was the first war characterised by a special intensity of hate, by a new note in the tune of an old song for which we may thank the Teutonic thoroughness. Was it not that excellent bourgeoise. Princess Bismarck
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(to keep only to great examples), who was so righteously anxious to see men, women and children — emphatically the children, too — of the abomin- able French nation massacred off the face of the earth ? This illustration of the new war-temper is artlessly revealed in the prattle of the amiable Busch, the Chancellor's pet " reptile " of the Press. And this was supposed to be a war for an idea! Too much, however, should not be made of that good wife's and mother's sentiments any more than of the good First Emperor William's tears, shed so abundantly after every battle, by letter, telegram, and otherwise, during the course of the same war, before a dumb and shamefaced con- tinent. These were merely the expressions of the simpHcity of a nation which more than any other has a tendency to run into the grotesque. There is worse to come.
To-day, in the fierce grapple of two nations of different race, the short era of national wars seems about to close. No war will be waged for an idea. The " noxious idle aristocracies " of yesterday fought without mahce for an occupation, for the honour, for the fun of the thing. The virtuous, industrious democratic States of to-morrow may yet be reduced to fighting for a crust of dry bread, with all the hate, ferocity, and fury that must attach to the vital importance of such an issue. The dreams sanguine humanitarians raised almost
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to ecstasy about the year fifty of the last century by the moving sight of the Crystal Palace — crammed full with that variegated rubbish which it seems to be the bizarre fate of humanity to produce for the benefit of a few employers of labour — have vanished as quickly as they had arisen. The golden hopes of peace have in a single night turned to dead leaves in every drawer of every benevolent theorist's writing table. A swift disenchantment overtook the incredible infatua- tion which could put its trust in the peaceful nature of industrial and commercial competition.
IndustriaHsm and commercialism — wearing high- sounding names in many languages {W eli-politik may serve for one instance) picking up coins behind the severe and disdainful figure of science whose giant strides have widened for us the horizon of the universe by some few inches — stand ready, almost eager, to appeal to the sword as soon as the globe of the earth has shrunk beneath our growing numbers by another ell or so. And democ- '' racy, which has elected to pin its faith to the supremacy of material interests, will have to fight their battles to the bitter end, on a mere pittance — unless, indeed, some statesman of exceptional abiHty and overwhelming prestige succeeds in carrying through an international understanding i for the deHmitation of spheres of trade all over \ the earth, on the model of the territorial spheres
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of influence marked in Africa to keep the com- / ^ petitors for the privilege of improving the nigger (as a buying machine) from flying prematurely aF each other's throats.
This seems the only expedient at hand for the temporary maintenance of European peace, with its alliances based on mutual distrust, preparedness for war as its ideal, and the fear of wounds, luckily stronger, so far, than the pinch of hunger, its only guarantee. The true peace of the world will be a place of refugemiich less like a beleaguered fortress and more, let us hope, in the nature of an Inviol- able Temple. It_will._beJhii.ilt on less perishable foundations than those of material interests. But it must be confessed that the architectural aspect of the universal city remains as yet inconceivable — that the very ground for its erection has not been cleared of the jungle.
Never before in history has the right of war been more fully admitted in the rounded periods of pubHc speeches, in books, in public prints, in all the public works of peace, culminating in the establishment of the Hague Tribunal — that solemnly official recognition of the Earth as a House of Strife. To him whose indignation is qualifled by a measure of hope and affection, the efforts of mankind to work its own salvation present a sight of alarming comicahty. After chnging for ages to the steps of the heavenly
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throne, they are now, without much modifying their attitude, trying with touching ingenuity to steal one by one the thunderbolts of their Jupiter. They have removed war from the Hst of Heaven- sent visitations that could only be prayed against; they have erased its name from the suppHcation against the wrath of war, pestilence, and famine, as it is found in the litanies of the Roman Catholic Church; they have dragged the scourge down from the skies and have made it into a calm and regulated institution. At first sight the change does not seem for the better. Jove's thunderbolt looks a most dangerous play- thing in the hands of the people. But a solemnly estabhshed institution begins to grow old at once in the discussion, abuse, worship, and execration of men. It grows obsolete, odious, and intolerable; it stands fatally condemned to an unhonoured old age.
Therein lies the best hope of advanced thought, and the best way to help its prospects is to provide in the fullest, frankest way for the conditions of the present day. War is one of its conditions; it is its principal condition. It lies at the heart of every question agitating the fears and hopes of a humanity divided against itself. The succeeding ages have changed nothing except the watchwords of the armies. The intellectual stage of mankind ' being as yet in its infancy, and States, like most
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individuals, having but a feeble and imperfect con- sciousness of the worth and force of the inner Hfe, the need of making their existence manifest to themselves is determined in the direction of physical activity. The idea of ceasing to grow in • territory, in strength, in wealth, in influence — in anything but wisdom and self-knowledge — is odious to them as the omen of the end. Action, in which • is to be found the illusion of a mastered destiny, can alone satisfy our uneasy vanity and lay to rest the haunting fear of the future — a sentiment concealed, indeed, but proving its existence by the force it has, when invoked, to stir the passions of a nation. It will be long before w^e have learned, that in the great darkness before us there is nothing that we need fear. Let us act lest we perish — is the cry. And the only form of action open to a State can be of no other than aggressive nature.
There are many kinds of aggressions, though the sanction of them is one and the same — the magazine rifle of the latest pattern. In preparation for or against that form of action the States of Europe are spending now such moments of uneasy leisure as they can snatch from the labours of factory and counting-house.
Never before has war received so much homage at the Hps of men, and reigned with less disputed sway in their minds. It has harnessed science to its gun-carriages, it has enriched a few
K
V
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respectable manufacturers, scattered doles of food and raiment amongst a few thousand skilled work- men, devoured the first youth of whole generations, and reaped its harvest of countless corpses. It has perverted the intelligence of men, women, and chil- dren, and has made the speeches of Emperors, Kings, Presidents, and Ministers monotonous with ardent protestations of fidelity to peace. Indeed, war has made peace altogether its own, it has modelled it on its own image: a martial, over- bearing, war-lord sort of peace, with a mailed fist, and turned-up moustaches, ringing with the din of grand manoeuvres, eloquent with allusions to glorious feats of arms; it has made peace so magni- ficent as to be almost as expensive to keep up as itself. It has sent out apostles of its own, who at one time went about (mostly in newspapers) preaching the gospel of the mystic sanctity of its sacrifices, and the regenerating power of spilt blood, to the poor in mind — whose name is legion. It has been observed that in the course of earthly greatness a day of culminating triumph is often paid for by a morrow of sudden extinction. Let us hope it is so. Yet the dawn of that day of retri- bution may be a long time breaking above a dark horizon. War is with us now; and, whether this one ends soon or late, war will be with us again. And it is the way of true wisdom for men and States to take account of things as they are.
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Civilisation has done its little best by our sen- sibilities for whose growth it is responsible. It has managed to remove the sights and sounds of battlefields away from our doorsteps. But it can- not be expected to achieve the feat always and under every variety of circumstance. Some day it must fail, and we shall have then a wealth of appallingly unpleasant sensations brought home to us with painful intimacy. It is not absurd to suppose that whatever war comes to us next it will 7tot be a distant war waged by Russia either beyond the Amur or beyond the Oxus.
The Japanese armies have laid that ghost for ever, because the Russia of the future will not, for the reasons explained above, be the Russia of to-day. It will not have the same thoughts, resentments and aims. It is even a question whether it will preserve its gigantic frame un- altered and unbroken. All speculation loses itself in the magnitude of the events made possible by the defeat of an autocracy whose only shadow of a title to existence was the invincible power of military conquest. That autocratic Russia wiU have a miserable end in harmony with its base origin and inglorious life does not seem open to doubt. The problem of the immediate future is posed not by the eventual manner but by the approaching fact of its disappearance.
The Japanese armies, in laying the oppressive
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ghost, have not only accomplished what will be recognised historically as an important mission in the world's struggle against all forms of evil, but have also created a situation. They have created a situation in the East which they are competent to manage by themselves; and in doing this they have brought about a change in the condition of the West with which Europe is not well prepared to deal. The common ground of concord, good faith and justice is not sufficient to estabhsh an action upon; since the conscience of but very few men amongst us, and of no single Western nation as yet, will brook the restraint of abstract ideas as against the fascination of a material ad- vantage. And eagle-e)'ed wisdom alone cannot take the lead of human action, which in its nature must for ever remain short-sighted. The trouble of the civihsed world is the want of a common conservative principle abstract enough to give the im_pulse, practical enough to form the rallying point of international action tending towards the restraint of particular ambitions. Peace tribunals instituted for the greater glory of war will not replace it. Whether such a principle exists — who can say? If it does not, then it ought to be in- vented. A sage with a sense of humour and a heart of compassion should set about it without loss of time, and a solemn prophet full of words and fire ought to be given the task of preparing the minds.
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So far there is no trace of such a principle any- where in sight; even its plausible imitations (never very effective) have disappeared long ago before the doctrine of national aspirations. // «'y a -plus d^ Europe — there is only an armed and trading con- tinent, the home of slowly maturing economical contests for Hfe and death and of loudly pro- claimed world-wide ambitions. There are also other ambitions not so loud, but deeply rooted in the envious acquisitive temperament of the last comer amongst the great Powers of the Continent, whose feet are not exactly in the ocean — not yet — and whose head is very high up — in Pomerania, the breeding place of such precious Grenadiers that Prince Bismarck (whom it is a pleasure to quote) would not have given the bones of one of them for the settlement of the old Eastern Ques- tion. But times have changed, since, by way of keeping up, I suppose, some old barbaric German rite, the faithful servant of the Hohenzollerns was buried alive to celebrate the accession of a new Emperor.
Already the voice of surmises has been heard hinting tentatively at a possible re-grouping of European Powers. The alliance of the three Empires is supposed possible. And it may be possible. The myth of Russia's power is dying very hard — hard enough for that combination to take place — such is the fascination that a
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discredited show of numbers will still exercise upon the imagination of a people trained to the worship of force. Germany may be willing to lend its support to a tottering autocracy for the sake of an undisputed first place, and of a preponderating voice in the settlement of every question in that south-east of Europe which merges into Asia. No principle being involved in such an alliance of mere expediency, it would never be allowed to stand in the way of Germany's other ambitions. The fall of autocracy would bring its restraint automatically to an end. Thus it may be beheved that the support Russian despotism may get from its once humble friend and client will not be stamped by that thoroughness which is supposed to be the mark of German superiority. Russia weakened down to the second place, or Russia eclipsed altogether during the throes of her regeneration, will answer equally well the plans of German policy — which are many and various and often incredible, though the aim of them all is the same: aggrandisement of territory and influence, with no regard to right and justice, either in the East or in the West. For that and no other is the true note of your Welt-politik which desires to hve.
The German eagle with a Prussian head looks all round the horizon, not so much for something to do that would count for good in the records of
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the earth, as simply for something good to get. He gazes upon the land and upon the sea with the same covetous steadiness, for he has become of late a maritime eagle, and has learned to box the compass. He gazes north and south, and east and west, and is inclined to look intemperately upon the waters of the Mediterranean when they are blue. The disappearance of the Russian phantom has given a foreboding of unwonted freedom to the Welt-politik, According to the national tendency this assumption of Imperial impulses would run into the grotesque were it not for the spikes of the pickelhaubes peeping out grimly from behind. Ger- many's attitude proves that no peace for the earth can be found in the expansion of material interests which she seems to have adopted exclusively as her only aim, ideal, and watchword. For the use of those who gaze half-unbelieving at the passing away of the Russian phantom, part Ghoul, part Djinn, part Old Man of the Sea, and wait half- doubting for the birth of a nation's soul in this age which knows no miracles, the once-famous saying of poor Gambetta, tribune of the people (who was simple and believed in the " immanent justice of things "), may be adapted in the shape of a warning that, so far as a future of liberty, con- cord, and justice is concerned: " Le Prussianisme — voila I'ennemi! "
THE CRIME OF PARTITION
1919
At the end of the eighteenth century, when the partition of Poland had become an accomplished fact, the world quaHfied it at once as a crime. This strong condemnation proceeded, of course, from the West of Europe; the Powers of the Centre, Prussia and Austria, were not likely to admit that this spoliation fell into the category of acts morally reprehensible and carrying the taint of anti-social guilt. As to Russia, the third party to the crime, and the originator of the scheme, she had no national conscience at the time. The will of its rulers was always accepted by the people as the expression of an omnipotence derived directly from God. As an act of mere conquest the best excuse for the partition lay simply in the fact that it happened to be possible; there was the plunder and there was the opportunity to get hold of it. Catherine the Great looked upon this exten- sion of her dominions with a cynical satisfaction. Her poHtical argument that the destruction of Poland meant the repression of revolutionary ideas and the checking of the spread of Jacobinism in
^53
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Europe was a characteristically impudent pre- tence. There may have been minds here and there amongst the Russians that perceived, or perhaps only felt, that by the annexation of the greater part of the PoHsh Repubhc, Russia approached nearer to the comity of civihsed nations and ceased, at least territorially, to be an Asiatic Power.
It was only after the partition of Poland that Russia began to play a great part in Europe. To such statesmen as she had then that act of brigandage must have appeared inspired by great political wisdom. The King of Prussia, faithful to the ruling principle of his life, wished simply to aggrandise his dominions at a much smaller cost and at much less risk than he could have done in any other direction; for at that time Poland was perfectly defenceless from a material point of view, and more than ever, perhaps, incHned to put its faith in humanitarian illusions. Morally, the Repubhc was in a state of ferment and consequent weakness, which so often accompanies the period of social reform. The strength arrayed against her was just then overwhelming; I mean the com- paratively honest (because open) strength of armed forces. But, probably from innate inclination to- wards treachery, Frederick of Prussia selected for himself the part of falsehood and deception. Ap- pearing on the scene in the character of a friend he entered deliberately into a treaty of alhance
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with the RepubHc, and then, before the ink was dry, tore it up in brazen defiance of the com- monest decency, which must have been extremely gratifying to his natural tastes.
As to Austria, it shed diplomatic tears over the transaction. They cannot be called crocodile tears, insomuch that they were in a measure sincere. They arose from a vivid perception that Austria's allotted share of the spoil could never compensate her for the accession of strength and territory to the other two Powers. Austria did not really want an extension of territory at the cost of Poland. She could not hope to improve her frontier in that way, and economically she had no need of GaHcia, a province whose natural resources were unde- veloped and whose salt mines did not arouse her cupidity because she had salt mines of her own. No doubt the democratic complexion of Polish institutions was very distasteful to the conserva- tive monarchy; Austrian statesmen did see at the time that the real danger to the principle of autocracy was in the West, in France, and that all the forces of Central Europe would be needed for its suppression. But the movement towards a partage on the part of Russia and Prussia was too definite to be resisted, and Austria had to follow their lead in the destruction of a State which she would have preferred to preserve as a possible ally against Prussian and Russian ambitions. It may be
iS6 CRIME OF PARTITION
truly said that the destruction of Poland secured the safety of the French Revolution. For when in 1795 the crime was consummated, the Revolution