Chapter II: Part 2

When I read of some great new American invention, or of a Lord Leverhulme converting an island of Lewis into a commercial Paradise, I confess to trembling. Gentlemen, it is a melancholy fact that the complete man does not live by invention and trade alone. At the risk of being laughed out of Paradise, I dare put in a plea for Beauty. Both our peoples, indeed, are so severely practical that I do feel we run the risk of getting machine-made, and coming actually to look down on those who give themselves to anything so unpractical as the love of Beauty. Now, I venture to think that the spirit of the old builders of Seville cathedral: ‘Let us make us a church such as the world has never seen before!’ ought to inspire us in these days too. ‘But it does, my dear Sir.’ I shall be answered: ‘We make flying machines, and iron foundries, Palace hotels, stock-yards, self-playing pianos, film pictures, cocktails, and ladies’ hats, such as the world has never seen before. A fig for the Giralda, the Sphynx, Shakespeare, and Michael Angelo! They did not elevate the lot of man. We are for invention, industry, and trade.’ Far be it from me to run down any of those things, so excellent in moderation; but since I solemnly aver that man’s greatest quality is the sense of proportion, I feel that if he neglects Beauty (which is but proportion elegantly cooked)――the ‘result of perfect economy’ Emerson had it――he sags backwards, no matter how inventive and commercially successful he may be.

But this is to become grave, which is detestable, even in a country which has just been taking its ticket for the Garden of Eden.

I believe I shall yet see (unless I perish of public speaking) America taking the long cut to Beauty――for there are no short cuts to Her, no cheap nostrums by which she can be conjured from the blue. Beauty and Simplicity are the natural antidotes to the feverish industrialism of our age. If only America will begin to take them freely she has it in her power to re-inspire in us older peoples, just now rather breathless and exhausted, the belief in Beauty, and a new fervour for the creation of fine and rare things. If on the other hand America turns Beauty down as a dangerous ‘bit of fluff’ and Simplicity as an impecunious alien, we over there, one behind the other, will sink into a soup of utilitarianism so thick that we may never get out.

Gentlemen, I long to see established between the English-speaking peoples a fellowship, not only in matters political and commercial, important as these are, but in philosophy and art. For after all those laughing-stocks, philosophy and art――the beautiful expression of our highest thoughts and fancies――are the lanterns of a nation’s life, and we ought to hang them in each others’ houses.

IV

FROM A SPEECH TO THE SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, NEW YORK

I do not know what your chief thought is now; for me the overmastering thought is that of Creation――Re-creation. You know when we look at a bit of moorland where the gorse and heather have been burned――swaled we call it in Devon――how we delight in the green, pushing up among the black shrivelled roots. I long to see the green pushing up, the creative impulse at work in its thousand ways all over the world again; each of us on both continents in his own line doing creative work; and not so much that wealth and comfort, as that health and beauty may be born again.

But, confronting as I do to-night, the Arts and Sciences, let me divide my words. You sciences have no need to listen. You have never had such a heyday as this; in engineering, in chemistry, in surgery, in every branch except perhaps ‘star-gazing,’ you have been shooting ahead, earning fresh laurels, putting new discoveries at the service of bewildered Man. Science drags no lame foot, it dances along like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I had better not pursue the simile. But the Arts, with faces muffled to the eyes, stand against the walls of life, and gaze a little enviously, a little mournfully at the passing rout. This is not their time for carnival; their lovers sleep, heavy with war and toil. It is to those poor wallflowers the Arts, that I would speak: Drop your veils, have the courage of your charms; you shall break many a heart yet, make many a lover happy.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have all noticed as I have the difference between a town by daylight and a town by night; well, the daylight town belongs to the Sciences, the night-lit town to the Arts. I don’t mean that artists are night-birds, though I have heard of such a case; I mean that the Arts live on Mystery and Imagination. Have you ever thought how we should get through if we had to live in a town which never put on the filmy dark robe of night, so that hour-in, hour-out we had to stare at things garbed in the efficient overalls of Science, with their prices properly pinned on? How long would it be before we found ourselves in Coney Hatch? Well, we are in a fair way to abolish Night――Mystery and Imagination are ‘off,’ as they say, and that way sooner or later madness lies.

It is time the Arts left off leaning against the wall, and took their share of the dance again. We want them to be as creative, nay, as seductive as the Sciences. We have seen Science work miracles of late; now let Art work her miracles in turn.

People are inclined to smile at me when I suggest that you in America are at the commencement of a period of fine and vigorous Art. The signs, they say, are all the other way. Of course you ought to know best; all the same, I stick to my opinion with British obstinacy, and I believe I shall see it justified.

V

ADDRESS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

A doubter of the general divinity of our civilisation is labelled ‘pedant.’ Anyone who questions modern progress is tabooed. And yet there is no doubt, I think, that we are getting feverish, rushed, complicated, and have multiplied conveniences to such an extent that we do little with them but scrape the surface of life.

We were rattling into a species of barbarism when the war came, and unless we check ourselves shall continue to rattle now that it is over. The underlying cause in every country is the increase of herd-life, based on machines, money-getting, and the dread of being dull. Everyone knows how fearfully strong that dread is. But to be capable of being dull is in itself a disease.

And most of modern life seems to be a process of creating disease, then finding a remedy, which in its turn creates another disease, demanding fresh remedy, and so on. We pride ourselves, for example, on scientific sanitation; but what is scientific sanitation if not one huge palliative of evils which have arisen from herd-life enabling herd-life to be intensified, so that we shall presently need even more scientific sanitation? The true elixirs vitæ――for there be two, I think――are open-air life, and a proud pleasure in one’s work, but we have evolved a mode of existence in which it is comparatively rare to find these two conjoined. In old countries such as mine, the evils of herd-life are at present vastly more acute than in a new country such as yours. On the other hand, the further one is from hades, the faster one drives towards it, and machines are beginning to run along with America even more violently than with Europe.

When our Tanks first appeared, they were described as snouting monsters creeping at their own sweet will. I confess that this is how my inflamed eye sees all our modern machines――monsters running on their own, dragging us along, and very often squashing us.

We are, I believe, awakening to the dangers of this ‘Gadarening,’ of rushing down the high cliff into the sea, possessed and pursued by the devils of――machinery. But if any would see how little alarmed he really is――let him ask himself how much of his present mode of existence he is prepared to alter. Altering the modes of other people is delightful; one would have great hope of the future if we had nothing before us but that. The mediæval Irishman, indicted for burning down the cathedral at Armagh, together with the Archbishop, defended himself thus: “As for the cathedral, ’tis true I burned it; but indeed an’ I wouldn’t have, only they told me himself was inside.” We are all ready to alter our opponents, if not to burn them. But even if we were as ardent reformers as that Irishman, we could hardly force men to live in the open, or take a proud pleasure in their work, or enjoy beauty, or not concentrate themselves on making money. No amount of legislation will make us “lilies of the field” or “birds of the air,” or prevent us from worshipping false gods, or neglecting to reform ourselves.

I once wrote the unpopular sentence: “Democracy at present offers the spectacle of a man running down a road followed at a more and more respectful distance by his own soul.” For democracy read rather the words modern civilisation which prides itself on redress after the event, foresees nothing and avoids less; is purely empirical if one may use so high brow a word.

I look very eagerly and watchfully to America in many ways. After the war she will be more emphatically than ever, in material things, the most important and powerful nation of the earth. We British have a legitimate and somewhat breathless interest in the use she will make of her strength, and in the course of her national life, for this will greatly influence the course of our own. But power for real light and leading in America will depend, not so much on her material wealth, or her armed force, as on what her attitude towards life, and what the ideals of her citizens are going to be. Americans have a certain eagerness for knowledge; they have also, for all their absorption in success, the aspiring eye. They do want the good thing. They don’t always know when they see it, but they want it. These qualities, in combination with material strength, give America her chance. Yet, if she does not set her face against “Gadarening,” we are all bound for downhill. If she goes in for spreadeagleism, if her aspirations are towards quantity, not quality, we shall all go on being commonised. If she should get that purse-and-power-proud fever which comes from national success, we are all bound for another world flare-up. The burden of proving that democracy can be real and yet live up to an ideal of health and beauty will be on America’s shoulders, and on ours. What are we and Americans going to make of our inner life, of our individual habits of thought? What are we going to reverence, and what despise? Do we mean to lead, in spirit and in truth, not in mere money and guns? Britain is an old country, though still in her prime, I hope; America is yet on the threshold. Is she to step out into the sight of the world as a great leader? That is for America the long decision, to be worked out, not so much in her Senate and her Congress, as in her homes and schools. On America, now that the war is over, the destiny of civilisation may hang for the next century. If she mislays, indeed if she does not improve the power of self-criticism――that special dry American humour which the great Lincoln had――she might soon develop the intolerant provincialism which has so often been the bane of the earth and the undoing of nations. Above all, if she does not solve the problems of town life, of Capital and Labour, of the distribution of wealth, of national health, and attain to a mastery over inventions and machinery――she is in for a cycle of mere anarchy, disruption, and dictatorships, into which we shall all follow. The motto “noblesse oblige” applies as much to democracy as ever it did to the old-time aristocrat. It applies with terrific vividness to America. Ancestry and Nature have bestowed on her great gifts. Behind her stand Conscience, Enterprise, Independence, and Ability――such were the companions of the first Americans, and are the comrades of American citizens to this day. She has abounding energy, an unequalled spirit of discovery, a vast territory not half developed, and great natural beauty. I remember sitting on a bench overlooking the Grand Canyon of Arizona; the sun was shining into it, and a snow storm was whirling down there. All that most marvellous work of Nature was flooded to the brim with rose and tawny-gold, with white, and wine-dark shadows; the colossal carvings as of huge rock-gods and sacrificial altars, and great beasts along its sides, were made living by the very mystery of light and darkness, on that violent day of Spring; I remember sitting there, and an old gentleman passing close behind, leaning towards me and saying in a sly, gentle voice: “How are you going to tell it to the folks at home?” America has so much, that one despairs of telling to the folks at home, so much grand beauty to be to her an inspiration and uplift towards high and free thought and vision. Great poems of Nature she has, wrought in the large, to make of her and keep her a noble people. In my beloved Britain――all told, not half the size of Texas――there is a quiet beauty of a sort which America has not. I walked not long ago from Worthing to the little village of Steyning, in the South Downs. It was such a day as one seldom gets in England; when the sun was dipping and there came on the cool chalky hills the smile of late afternoon, and across a smooth valley on the rim of the Downs one saw a tiny group of trees, one little building, and a stack, against the clear-blue, pale sky――it was like a glimpse of heaven, so utterly pure in line and colour so removed, and touching. The tale of loveliness in our land is varied and unending, but it is not in the grand manner. America has the grand manner in her scenery and in her blood, for in America all are the children of adventure, every single man an emigrant himself or a descendant of one who had the pluck to emigrate. She has already had past-masters in dignity, but she has still to reach as a nation the grand manner in achievement. She knows her own dangers and failings; her qualities and powers; but she cannot realise the intense concern and interest, deep down behind our provoking stolidities, with which we of the old country watch her, feeling that what she does reacts on us above all nations, and will ever react more and more. Underneath surface differences and irritations we English-speaking peoples are fast bound together. May it not be in misery and iron! If America walks upright, so shall we; if she goes bowed under the weight of machines, money, and materialism, we too shall creep our ways. We run a long race, we nations; a generation is but a day. But in a day a man may leave the track, and never again recover it! Nations depend for their health and safety on the behaviour of the individuals who compose them.

Modern man is a very new and marvellous creature. Without quite realising it, we have evolved a fresh species of stoic――even more stoical, I suspect, than were the old Stoics. Modern man stands on his own feet. His religion is to take what comes without flinching or complaint, as part of the day’s work, which an unknowable God, Providence, Creative Principle, has appointed. By courage and kindness modern man exists, warmed by the glow of the great human fellowship. He has re-discovered the old Greek saying: “God is the helping of man by man”; has found out in his unselfconscious way that if he does not help himself, and help his fellows, he cannot reach that inner peace which satisfies. To do his bit; and to be kind! It is by that creed, rather than by any mysticism, that he finds the salvation of his soul, for, of a truth, the religion of this age is conduct.

After all, does not the only real spiritual warmth, not tinged by Pharisaism, egotism, or cowardice, come from the feeling of doing your work well and helping others; is not all the rest embroidery, luxury, pastime, pleasant sound and incense? Modern man is a realist with too romantic a sense, perhaps, of the mystery which surrounds existence, to pry into it. And, like modern civilisation itself, he is the creature of West and North, of those atmospheres, climates, manners, of life, which foster neither inertia, reverence, nor mystic meditation. Essentially man of action, in ideal action he finds his only true comfort. I am sure that padres at the front have seen that the men whose souls they have gone out to tend, are living the highest form of religion; that in their comic courage, unselfish humanity, their endurance without whimper of things worse than death, they have gone beyond all pulpit-and-deathbed teaching. And who are these men? Just the early manhood of the race, just modern man as he was before the war began, and will be now that the war is over.

This modern world, of which we English and Americans are perhaps the truest types, stands revealed from beneath its froth, frippery, and vulgar excrescences, sound at core――a world whose implicit motto is: “The good of all humanity.” But the herd-life which is its characteristic, brings many evils, has many dangers; and to preserve a sane mind in a healthy body is the riddle before us. Somehow we must free ourselves from the driving domination of machines and money-getting, not only for our own sakes but for that of all mankind.

And there is another thing of the most solemn importance: We English-speaking nations are by chance as it were, the ballast of the future. It is _absolutely necessary_ for the happiness of the world that we should remain united. The comradeship that we now feel must and surely shall abide. For unless we work together, and in no selfish or exclusive spirit――Goodbye to Civilisation! It will vanish like the dew off grass. The betterment not only of the British nations and America, but of all mankind is and must be our object.

From all our hearts a great weight has been lifted; in those fields death no longer sweeps his scythe, and our ears at last are free from the rustling thereof――now comes the test of magnanimity, in all countries. Will modern man rise to the ordering of a sane, a free, a generous life? Each of us loves his own country best, be it a little land or the greatest on earth; but jealousy is the dark thing, the creeping poison. Where there is true greatness, let us acclaim it; where there is true worth, let us prize it――as if it were our own.

This earth is made too subtly, of too multiple warp and woof, for prophecy. When he surveys the world around――“the wondrous things which there abound,” the prophet closes foolish lips. Besides, as the historian tells us: “Writers have that undeterminateness of spirit which commonly makes literary men of no use in the world.” So I, for one, prophesy not. Still, we do know this: All English-speaking peoples will go to this adventure of Peace with something of big purpose and spirit in their hearts, with something of free outlook. The world is wide and Nature bountiful enough for all, if we keep sane minds. The earth is fair and meant to be enjoyed, if we keep sane bodies. Who dare affront this world of beauty with mean views? There is no darkness but what the ape in us still makes, and in spite of all his monkey-tricks modern man is at heart further from the ape than man has yet been.

To do our jobs really well and to be brotherly! To seek health and ensue Beauty! If, in Britain and America, in all the English-speaking nations, we can put that simple faith into real and thorough practice, what may not this century yet bring forth? Shall man, the highest product of creation, be content to pass his little day in a house like unto Bedlam?

When the present great task in which we have joined hands is really ended; when once more from the shuttered mad-house the figure of Peace steps forth and stands in the risen sun, and we may go our ways again in the wonder of a new morning――let it be with this vow in our hearts: “No more of Madness――in War, or in Peace!”

VI

TO THE LEAGUE OF POLITICAL EDUCATION, NEW YORK

Standing here, privileged to address my betters――I, the least politically educated person in the world, have two thoughts to leave on the air. They arise from the title of your League.

I wish I did not feel, speaking in the large, that politics and education have but a bowing acquaintanceship in the modern State; and I wish I did feel that either education or politics had any definite idea of what they were out to attain; in other words, had a clear image of the ideal State. It seems to me that their object at present is just to keep the heads of the citizens of the modern State above water; to keep them alive, without real concern as to what kind of life they are being preserved for. We seem, in fact, to be letting our civilisation run us, instead of running our civilisation. If a man does not know where he wants to go, he goes where circumstances and the telephone take him. Where do we want to go? Can you answer me? Have you any definite idea? What is the Ultima Thule of our longings? I suppose one ought to say, roughly, that the modern ideal is: Maximum production of wealth to the square mile of a country――an ideal which, seeing that a man normally produces wealth in surplus to his own requirements, signifies logically a maximum head of population to the square mile. And it seems to me that the great modern fallacy is the identification of the word wealth with the word welfare. Granted that demand creates supply, and that it is impossible to stop human nature from demanding, the problem is surely to direct demand into the best channels for securing health and happiness. And I venture to say that the mere blind production of wealth and population by no means fills that bill. We ought to produce wealth only in such ways and to such an extent as shall make us all good, clean, healthy, intelligent, and beautiful to look at. That is the end, and production whether of wealth or population only the means to that end, to be regulated accordingly. As things are, we confuse the means with the end, and make of production a fetich.

Let me take a parallel from the fields of Art. What kind of good in the world is an artist who sets to work to cover the utmost possible acreage of canvas, or to spoil the greatest possible number of reams of paper, in deference to the call from a vulgar and undiscriminating market for all he can produce? Do we admire him――a man whose ideal is blind supply to meet blind demand?

The most urgent need of the world to-day is to learn――or is it to re-learn?――the love of quality. And how are we to learn that in a democratic age, unless we so perfect our electoral machineries as to be sure that we secure for our leaders, and especially for our leaders of education, men and women who, themselves worshipping quality, will see that the love of quality is instilled into the boys and girls of the nation.

After all, we have some common sense, and we really cannot contemplate much longer the grimy, grinding monster of modern industrialism without feeling that we are becoming disinherited, instead of――as we are brought up to think――heirs to an ever-increasing fortune.

It seems to me that no amount of political evolution or revolution is going to do us any good unless it is accompanied by evolution or revolution in ideals. What does it matter whether one class holds the reins, or another class holds the reins, if the dominant impulse in the population remains the craving for wealth without the power of discriminating whether or not that wealth is taking forms which promote health and happiness.

A new educational charter――a charter of taste, affirming the rule of dignity, beauty, and simplicity, is wanted before political change can turn out to be anything but cheap-jack nostrums, and a mere shuffling around.

I would just cite three of the many changes necessary for any advance:

(1) The reduction of working hours to a point that would enable
men and women to live lives of wider interest.

(2) The abolition of smoke――which surely should not be beyond
attainment in this scientific age.

(3) The rescue of educational forces from the grip of vested
interests.

I would have all educational institutions financed by the State, but give all the _directing_ power to heads of education elected by the main body of teachers themselves. I would not have education dependent on advertisement or on charity. I would not even have newspapers, which are an educational force――though you might not always think so――dependent on advertisements. A newspaper man told me the other day that his paper had printed an article drawing attention to the deleteriousness of a certain product. The manufacturers of that product sent an ultimatum drawing the editor’s attention to the deleteriousness of their advertising in a journal which printed such articles. The result was perfect peace. What chance is there of rescuing newspapers, for instance, until education has implanted in the rising generation the feeling that to accept money for what you know is doing harm to your neighbours, is not playing the game. Or take another instance: Not long ago in England a College for the training of school-teachers desired to make certain excellent advances in their curriculum, which did not meet with the approval of the municipal powers controlling the College. A short, sharp fight, and again perfect peace.

I suppose it would be too sweeping to say that a vested interest never yet held an enlightened view, but I think one may fairly say that their enlightened views are rare birds.

How, then, is any emancipation to come? I know not, unless we take to looking on Education as the hub of the wheel――the Schools, the Arts, the Press; and concentrate our thoughts on the best means of manning these agencies with men and women of real honesty and vision, and giving them real power to effect in the rising generation the evolution of ethics and taste, in accordance with the rules of dignity, beauty, and simplicity.

VII

TALKING AT LARGE

It is of the main new factors which have come into the life of the civilised world that I would speak.

The division deep and subtle between those who have fought and those who have not――concerns us in Europe far more than you in America; for in proportion to your population the number of your soldiers who actually fought has been small, compared with the number in any belligerent European country. And I think that so far as you are concerned the division will soon disappear, for the iron had not time to enter into the souls of your soldiers. For us in Europe, however, this factor is very tremendous, and will take a long time to wear away. In my country the, as it were, professional English dislike to the expression of feeling, which strikes every American so forcibly, covers very deep hearts and highly sensitive nerves. The average Briton is now not at all stolid underneath; I think he has changed a great deal in this last century, owing to the town life which seven-tenths of our population lead. Perhaps only of the Briton may one still invent the picture which appeared in _Punch_ in the autumn of 1914――of the steward on a battleship asking the naval lieutenant: “Will you take your bath before or after the engagement, sir?” and only among Britons overhear one stoker say to another in the heat of a sea-fight: “Well, wot I say is――’E ought to ’ave married ’er.” For all that, the Briton feels deeply; and on those who have fought the experiences of the battlefield have had an effect which almost amounts to metamorphosis. There are now two breeds of British people――such as have been long in the danger zones, and such as have not; shading, of course, into each other through the many who have just smelled powder and peril, and the very few whose imaginations are vibrant enough to have lived the two lives, while only living one.

In a certain cool paper called: “The Balance-sheet of the Soldier Workman” I tried to come at the effect of the war; but purposely pitched it in a low and sober key; and there is a much more poignant tale of change to tell of each individual human being.

Take a man who, when the war broke out (or had been raging perhaps a year), was living the ordinary Briton’s life, in factory, shop, and home. Suppose that he went through that deep, sharp struggle between the pull of home love and interests, and the pull of country (for I hope it will never be forgotten that five million Britons were volunteers) and came out committed to his country. That then he had to submit to being rattled at great speed into the soldier-shape which we Britons and you Americans have been brought up to regard as but the half of a free man; that then he was plunged into such a hideous hell of horrible danger and discomfort as this planet has never seen; came out of it time and again, went back into it time and again; and finally emerged, shattered or unscathed, with a spirit at once uplifted and enlarged, yet bruised and ungeared for the old life of peace. Imagine such a man set back among those who have not been driven and grilled and crucified. What would he feel, and how bear himself? On the surface he would no doubt disguise the fact that he felt different from his neighbours――he would conform; but something within him would ever be stirring, a sort of superiority, an impatient sense that he had been through it and they had not; the feeling, too, that he had seen the bottom of things, that nothing he could ever experience again would give him the sensations he had had out there; that he had lived, and there could be nothing more to it. I don’t think that we others quite realise what it must mean to those men, most of them under thirty, to have been stretched to the uttermost, to have no illusions left, and yet have, perhaps, forty years still to live. There is something gained in them, but there’s something gone from them. The old sanctions, the old values won’t hold; are there any sanctions and values which can be made to hold? A kind of unreality must needs cling about their lives henceforth. This is a finespun way of putting it, but I think, at bottom, true.

The old professional soldier lived for his soldiering. At the end of a war (however terrible) there was left to him a vista of more wars, more of what had become to him the ultimate reality――his business in life. For these temporary soldiers of what has been not so much a war as a prolonged piece of very horrible carnage, there succeeds something so mild in sensation that it simply will not fill the void. When the dish of life has lost its savour, by reason of violent and uttermost experience, wherewith shall it be salted?

The American Civil War was very long and very dreadful, but it was a human and humane business compared to what Europe has just come through. There is no analogy in history for the present moment. An old soldier of that Civil War, after hearing these words, wrote me an account of his after-career which shows that in exceptional cases a life so stirring, full, and even dangerful may be lived that no void is felt. But one swallow does not make a summer, nor will a few hundreds or even thousands of such lives leaven to any extent the vast lump of human material used in this war. The spiritual point is this: In front of a man in ordinary civilised existence there hovers ever that moment in the future when he expects to prove himself more of a man than he has yet proved himself. For these soldiers of the Great Carnage the moment of probation is already in the past. They _have_ proved themselves as they will never have the chance to do again, and secretly they know it. One talks of their powers of heroism and sacrifice being wanted just as much in time of Peace; but that cannot really be so, because Peace times do not demand men’s lives――which is the ultimate test――with every minute that passes. No, the great moment of their existence lies behind them, young though so many of them are. This makes them at once greater than us, yet in a way smaller, because they have lost the power and hope of expansion. They have lived their masterpiece already. Human nature is elastic, and hope springs eternal; but a _climax_ of experience and sensation cannot be repeated; I think these have reached and passed the uttermost climax; and in Europe they number millions.

This is a veritable portent, and I am glad that in America you will not have it to any great extent.

Now how does this affect the future? Roughly speaking it must, I think, have a diminishing effect on what I may call loosely――Creative ability. People have often said to me: “We shall have great writings and paintings from these young men when they come back.” We shall certainly have poignant expression of their experiences and sufferings; and the best books and paintings of the war itself are probably yet to come. But, taking the long view, I do not believe we shall have from them, in the end, as much creative art and literature as we should have had if they had not been through the war. Illusion about life, and interest in ordinary daily experience and emotion, which after all, are to be the stuff of their future as of ours, has in a way been blunted or destroyed for them. And in the other provinces of life, in industry, in trade, in affairs, how can we expect from men who have seen the utter uselessness of money or comfort or power in the last resort, the same naïve faith in these things, or the same driving energy towards the attaining of them that we others exhibit?

It may be cheering to assume that those who have been almost superhuman these last four years in one environment will continue to be almost superhuman under conditions the very opposite. But alack! it is not logical.

On the other hand I think that those who have had this great and racking experience will be left, for the most part, with a real passion for Justice; and that this will have a profoundly modifying effect on social conditions. I think, too, that many of them will have a sort of passion for humaneness, which will, if you will suffer me to say so, come in very handy; for I have observed that the rest of us, through reading about horrors, have lost the edge of our gentleness, and have got into the habit of thinking that it is the business of women and children to starve, if they happen to be German; of creatures to be underfed and overworked if they happen to be horses; of families to be broken up if they happen to be aliens; and that a general carelessness as to what suffering is necessary and what is not, has set in. And, queer as it may seem, I look to those who have been in the thick of the worst suffering the world has ever seen, to set us in the right path again, and to correct the vitriolic sentiments engendered by the armchair and the inkpot, in times such as we have been and are still passing through. A cloistered life in times like these engenders bile; in fact, I think it always does. For sheer ferocity there is no place, you will have noticed, like a club full of old gentlemen. I expect the men who have come home from killing each other to show us the way back to brotherliness! And not before it’s wanted. Here is a little true story of war-time, when all men were supposed to be brothers if they belonged to the same nation. In the fifth year of the war two men sat alone in a railway carriage. One, pale, young, and rather worn, had an unlighted cigarette in his mouth. The other, elderly, prosperous, and of a ruddy countenance, was smoking a large cigar.

The young man, who looked as if his days were strenuous, took his unlighted cigarette from his mouth, gazed at it, searched his pockets, and looked at the elderly man. His nose twitched, vibrated by the scent of the cigar, and he said suddenly:

“Could you give me a light, sir?”

The elderly man regarded him for a moment, drooped his eyelids, and murmured:

“I’ve no matches.”

The young man sighed, mumbling the cigarette in his watering lips, then said very suddenly:

“Perhaps you’ll kindly give me a light from your cigar, sir.”

The elderly man moved throughout his body as if something very sacred had been touched within him.

“I’d rather not,” he said; “if you don’t mind.”

A quarter of an hour passed, while the young man’s cigarette grew moister, and the elder man’s cigar shorter. Then the latter stirred, took it from under his grey moustache, looked critically at it, held it out a little way towards the other with the side which was least burned-down foremost, and said:

“Unless you’d like to take it from the edge.”

On the other hand one has often travelled in these last years with extreme embarrassment because our soldiers were so extraordinarily anxious that one should smoke their cigarettes, eat their apples, and their sausages. The marvels of comradeship they have performed would fill the libraries of the world.

The second main new factor in the world’s life is the disappearance of the old autocracies.

In 1910, walking in Hyde Park with a writer friend, I remember saying: “It’s the hereditary autocracies in Germany, Austria, and Russia which make the danger of war.” He did not agree――but no two writers agree with each other at any given moment. “If only autocracies go down in the wreckage of this war!” was almost the first thought I put down in writing when the war broke out. Well, they are gone! They were an anachronism, and without them and the bureaucracies and secrecy which buttressed them we should not, I think, have had this world catastrophe. But let us not too glibly assume that the forms of government which take their place can steer the battered ships of the nations in the very troubled waters of to-day, or that they will be truly democratic. Even highly democratic statesmen have been known to resort to the way of the headmaster at my old school, who put a motion to the masters’ meeting and asked for a show of hands in its favour. Not one hand was held up. “Then,” he said, “I shall adopt it with the greater regret.” Nevertheless, the essential new factor is, that, whereas in 1914 civilisation was on two planes, it is now, theoretically, at least, on the one democratic plane or level. That is a great easing of the world-situation, and removes a chief cause of international misunderstanding. The rest depends on what we can now make of democracy. Surely no word can so easily be taken in vain; to have got rid of the hereditary principle in government is by no means to have made democracy a real thing. Democracy is neither government by rabble, nor government by caucus. Its measure as a beneficent principle is the measure of the intelligence, honesty, public spirit, and independence of the average voter. The voter who goes to the poll blind of an eye and with a cast in the other, so that he sees no issue clear, and every issue only in so far as it affects him personally, is not precisely the sort of ultimate administrative power we want. Intelligent, honest, public-spirited, and independent voters guarantee an honest and intelligent governing body. The best men the best government is a truism which cannot be refuted. Democracy to be real and effective must succeed in throwing up into the positions of administrative power the most trustworthy of its able citizens. In other words it must incorporate and make use of the principle of aristocracy; government by the best――_best in spirit_, not best-born. Rightly seen, there is no tug between democracy and aristocracy; aristocracy should be the means and machinery by which democracy works itself out. What then can be done to increase in the average voter intelligence and honesty, public spirit and independence? Nothing save by education. The Arts, the Schools, the Press. It is impossible to overestimate the need for vigour, breadth, restraint, good taste, enlightenment, and honesty in these three agencies. The artist, the teacher (and among teachers one includes, of course, religious teachers in so far as they concern themselves with the affairs of this world), and the journalist have the future in their hands. As they are fine the future will be fine; as they are mean the future will be mean. The burden is very specially on the shoulders of Public Men, and that most powerful agency the Press, which reports them. Do we realise the extent to which the modern world relies for its opinions on public utterances and the Press? Do we realise how completely we are all in the power of report? Any little lie or exaggerated sentiment uttered by one with a bee in his bonnet, with a principle, or an end to serve, can, if cleverly expressed and distributed, distort the views of thousands, sometimes of millions. Any wilful suppression of truth for Party or personal ends can so falsify our vision of things as to plunge us into endless cruelties and follies. Honesty of thought and speech and written word is a jewel, and they who curb prejudice and seek honourably to know and speak the truth are the only true builders of a better life. But what a dull world if we can’t chatter and write irresponsibly, can’t slop over with hatred, or pursue our own ends without scruple! To be tied to the apron-strings of truth, or coiffed with the nightcap of silence; who in this age of cheap ink and oratory will submit to such a fate? And yet, if we do not want another seven million violent deaths, another eight million maimed and halt and blind, and if we do not want anarchy, our tongues must be sober, and we must tell the truth. Report, I would almost say, now rules the world and holds the fate of man on the sayings of its many tongues. If the good sense of mankind cannot somehow restrain utterance and cleanse report, Democracy, so highly vaunted, will not save us; and all the glib words of promise spoken might as well have lain unuttered in the throats of orators. We are always in peril under Democracy of taking the line of least resistance and immediate material profit. The gentleman, for instance, whoever he was, who first discovered that he could sell his papers better by undercutting the standard of his rivals, and, appealing to the lower tastes of the Public under the flag of that convenient expression “what the Public wants,” made a most evil discovery. The Press is for the most part in the hands of men who know what is good and right. It can be a great agency for levelling up. But whether on the whole it is so or not, one continually hears doubted. There ought to be no room for doubt in any of our minds that the Press is on the side of the angels. It can do as much as any other single agency to raise the level of honesty, intelligence, public spirit, and taste in the average voter, in other words, to build Democracy on a sure foundation. This is a truly tremendous trust; for the safety of civilisation and the happiness of mankind hangs thereby. The saying about little children and the kingdom of heaven was meant for the ears of all those who have it in their power to influence simple folk. To be a good and honest editor, a good and honest journalist is in these days to be a veritable benefactor of mankind.

Now take the function of the artist, of the man who in stone, or music, marble, bronze, paint, or words, can express himself, and his vision of life, truly and beautifully. Can we set limit to his value? The answer is in the affirmative. We set such limitation to his value that he has been known to die of it. And I would only venture to say here that if we don’t increase the store we set by him, we shall, in this reach-me-down age of machines and wholesale standardisations, emulate the Goths who did their best to destroy the art of Rome, and all these centuries later, by way of atonement, have filled the Thiergarten at Berlin and the City of London with peculiar brands of statuary, and are always writing their names on the Sphynx.

I suppose the hardest lesson we all have to learn in life is that we can’t have things both ways. If we want to have beauty, that which appeals not merely to the stomach and the epidermis (which is the function of the greater part of industrialism), but to what lies deeper within the human organism, the heart and the brain, we must have conditions which permit and even foster the production of beauty. The artist, unfortunately, no less than the rest of mankind, must eat to live. Now, if we insist that we will pay the artist only for what fascinates the popular uneducated instincts, he will either produce beauty, remain unpaid and starve; or he will give us shoddy, and fare sumptuously every day. My experience tells me this: An artist who is by accident of independent means can, if he has talent, give the Public what he, the artist, wants, and sooner or later the public will take whatever he gives it, at his own valuation. But very few artists, _who have no independent means_, have enough character to hold out until they can sit on the Public’s head and pull the Public’s beard, to use the old Sikh saying. How many times have I not heard over here――and it’s very much the same over there――that a man must produce this or that kind of work or else of course he can’t live. My advice――at all events to young artists and writers――is: ‘Sooner than do that and have someone sitting on _your_ head and pulling your beard all the time, go out of business――there are other means of making a living, besides faked or degraded art. Become a dentist and revenge yourself on the Public’s teeth――even editors and picture dealers go to the dentist!’ The artist has got to make a stand against being exploited, and he has got, also, to live the kind of life which will give him a chance to see clearly, to feel truly, and to express beautifully. He, too, is a trustee for the future of mankind. Money has one inestimable value――it guarantees independence, the power of going your own way and giving out the best that’s in you. But, generally speaking, we don’t stop there in our desire for money; and I would say that any artist who doesn’t stop there is not ‘playing the game,’ neither towards himself nor towards mankind; he is not standing up for the faith that is in him, and the future of civilisation.

And now what of the teacher? One of the discouraging truths of life is the fact that a man cannot raise himself from the ground by the hair of his own head. And if one took Democracy logically, one would have to give up the idea of improvement. But things are not always what they seem, as somebody once said; and fortunately, government ‘of the people by the people for the people’ does not in practice prevent the people from using those saving graces――Commonsense and Selection. In fact, only by the use of those graces will democracy work at all. When twelve men get together to serve on a jury, their commonsense makes them select the least stupid among them to be their foreman. Each of them, of course, feels that he is that least stupid man, but since a man cannot vote for himself, he votes for the least dense among his neighbours, and the foreman comes to life. The same principle applied thoroughly enough throughout the social system produces government by the best. And it is more vital to apply it _thoroughly_ in matters of education than in other branches of human activity. But when we have secured our best heads of education, we must trust them and give them real power, for they are the hope――well nigh the only hope――of our future. They alone, by the selection and instruction of their subordinates and the curricula which they lay down, can do anything substantial in the way of raising the standard of general taste, conduct, and learning. They alone can give the starting push towards greater dignity and simplicity; promote the love of proportion, and the feeling for beauty. They alone can gradually instil into the body politic the understanding that education is not a means towards wealth as such, or learning as such, but towards the broader ends of health and happiness. The first necessity for improvement in modern life is that our teachers should have the wide view, and be provided with the means and the curricula which make it possible to apply this enlightenment to their pupils. Can we take too much trouble to secure the best men as heads of education――that most responsible of all positions in the modern State? The child is father to the man. We think too much of politics and too little of education. We treat it almost as cavalierly as the undergraduate treated the Master of Balliol. “Yes,” he said, showing his people round the quadrangle, “that’s the Master’s window;” then, picking up a pebble, he threw it against the window pane. “And that,” he said, as a face appeared, “is the Master!” Democracy has come, and on education Democracy hangs; the thread as yet is slender.

It is a far cry to the third new factor: Exploitation of the air. We were warned, by Sir Hiram Maxim about 1910 that a year or so of war would do more for the conquest of the air than many years of peace. It has. We hear of a man flying 260 miles in 90 minutes; of the Atlantic being flown in 24 hours; of airships which will have a lifting capacity of 300 tons; of air mail-routes all over the world. The time will perhaps come when we shall live in the air, and come down to earth on Sundays.