Chapter VII: Part 7

From these main premises, then, we come to what the Englishman really is.

When, after months of travel, one returns to England, he can taste, smell, and feel the difference in the atmosphere, physical and moral—the curious damp, blunt, good-humoured, happy-go-lucky, old-established, slow-seeming formlessness of everything. You hail a porter; if you tell him you have plenty of time, he muddles your things amiably with an air of, “It’ll be all right,” till you have only just time. But if you tell him you have no time—he will set himself to catch that train for you, and catch it faster than a porter of any other country. Let no foreigner, however, experiment to prove the truth of this, for a porter—like any other Englishman—is incapable of taking a foreigner seriously (after a year of war he is not even yet taking the Germans seriously); and, quite friendly, but a little pitying, will lose him the train, assuring the unfortunate that he can’t possibly know what train he wants to catch.

The Englishman must have a thing brought under his nose before he will act; bring it there and he will go on acting after everybody else has stopped. He lives very much in the moment because he is essentially a man of facts and not a man of imagination. Want of imagination makes him, philosophically speaking, rather ludicrous; in practical affairs it handicaps him at the start; but once he has “got going”—as we say—it is of incalculable assistance to his stamina. The Englishman, partly through this lack of imagination and nervous sensibility, partly through his inbred dislike of extremes and habit of minimising the expression of everything, is a perfect example of the conservation of energy. It is very difficult to come to the end of him. Add to this his unimaginative practicality, and tenacious moderation, his inherent spirit of competition—not to say pugnacity—a spirit of competition so extreme that it makes him, as it were, patronize Fate; add the sort of vulgarity that grows like fungus on people who despise ideas and analysis, and make a cult of unintellectuality; add a peculiar, ironic, “don’t care” sort of humour; an underground humaneness, and an ashamed idealism—and you get some notion of the pudding of English character. It has a kind of terrible coolness, a rather awful level-headedness—by no means reflected in his Press. The Englishman makes constant small blunders; but few, almost no, deep mistakes. He is a slow starter, but there is no stronger finisher, because he has by temperament and training the faculty of getting through any job he gives his mind to with a minimum expenditure of vital energy; nothing is wasted in expression, style, spread-eagleism; everything is instinctively kept as near to the practical heart of the matter as possible. He is—to the eyes of an artist—distressingly matter-of-fact; a tempting mark for satire. And yet he is at bottom an idealist, though it is his nature to snub, disguise, and mock his own inherent optimism. To admit enthusiasm is “bad form” if he is a “gentleman”; and “swank,” or mere waste of good heat, if he is not a “gentleman.” England produces more than its proper percentage of cranks and poets; this is Nature’s way of redressing the balance in a country where feelings are not shown, sentiments not expressed, and extremes laughed at. Not that the Englishman is cold, as is generally supposed in foreign countries—on the contrary, he is warm-hearted and feels strongly; but just as peasants, for lack of words to express their feelings, become stolid, so does the Englishman, from sheer lack of the habit of self-expression. The Englishman’s proverbial “hypocrisy”—that which I myself have dubbed his “island Pharisaism”—comes chiefly, I think, from his latent but fearfully strong instinct for competition which will not let him admit himself beaten, or in the wrong, even to himself; and from an ingrained sense of form that impels him always to “save his face”; but partly it comes from his powerlessness to explain his feelings. He has not the clear and fluent cynicism of expansive natures, wherewith to confess exactly how he stands. It is the habit of men of all nations to want to have things both ways; the Englishman wants it both ways, I think, more strongly than any; and he is unfortunately so unable to express himself, _even to himself_, that he has never realized this truth, much less confessed it—hence his “hypocrisy.”

He is sometimes abused for being over-attached to money. His island position, his early discoveries of coal, iron, and processes of manufacture have made him, of course, a confirmed industrialist and trader; but he is more of an adventurer in wealth than a heaper-up of it. He is far from sitting on his money-bags—has no vein of proper avarice (the humble Englishman is probably the least provident man in the world)—and for national ends he will spill out his money like water, if convinced of the necessity.

In everything it comes to that with the Englishman—he must be convinced; and he takes a lot of convincing. He absorbs ideas slowly; would rather not imagine anything decidedly till he is obliged; but in proportion to the slowness with which he can be moved, is the slowness with which he can be removed! Hence the symbol of the bulldog. When he does see and seize a thing, he holds fast.

For the particular situation which the Englishman has now to face, he is terribly well adapted. Because he has so little imagination, so little power of expression, he is saving nerve all the time. Because he never goes to extremes he is saving energy of body and spirit. That the men of all nations are about equally endowed with courage and self-sacrifice, has been proved in these last six months; it is to other qualities that one must look for final victory in a war of exhaustion. The Englishman does not look into himself; he does not brood; he sees no further forward than is necessary; and he must have his joke. These are fearful and wonderful advantages. Examine the letters and diaries of the various combatants, and you will see how far less imaginative and reflecting (though often shrewd, practical, and humorous) the English are than any others; you will gain, too, a deep, a deadly conviction that behind them is a fibre like rubber, that may be frayed and bent a little this way and that, but can neither be permeated nor broken.

When this war began, the Englishman rubbed his eyes steeped in peace, he is still rubbing them just a little, but less and less every day. A profound lover of peace by habit and tradition, he has actually realized by now that he is “in for it” up to the neck. To any one who really knows him—that is a portent!

Let it be freely confessed that from an æsthetic point of view the Englishman, devoid of high lights and shadows, coated with drab, and superhumanly steady on his feet, is not too attractive. But for the wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business of this war, the Englishman—fighting of his own free will, unimaginative, humorous, competitive, practical, never in extremes, a dumb, inveterate optimist, and terribly tenacious—is equipped with victory.

OUR LITERATURE AND THE WAR

(From _The Times_ Literary Supplement, 1915.)

For the purpose of the following speculations the word Literature is used to describe the imaginative work of artists and thinkers—that is, of writers who have had, and will have, something to say of more or less lasting value; it leaves out the work of those who, for various reasons, such as patriotic sentiment, or the supplying of the Public with what it may be supposed to want, will, no doubt, dish up the war as a matter of necessity, whether serving it wholesale in eight courses, or merely using it as sauce to the customary meat and fish.

How will our literature, thus defined, be affected by the war? Will it be affected at all?

One must first remember that to practically all imaginative writers of any quality war is an excrescence on human life, a monstrous calamity and evil. The fact that they recognize the gruesome inevitability of _this_ war, in so far as the intervention of our country is concerned, does not in any way lessen their temperamental horror of war in itself, of the waste and the misery, and the sheer stupid brutality thereof.

The nature of the imaginative artist is sensitive, impressionable; impatient of anything superimposed; thinking and feeling for itself; recoiling from conglomerate views and sentiment. It regards the whole affair as a dreadful though sacred necessity, to be got through somehow, lest there be lost that humane freedom which is the life-blood of any world where the creative imagination and other even more precious things can flourish. The point is that there is no glamour about the business—none whatever, for this particular sort of human being. Writers to whom war is glamorous (with the few exceptions that prove the rule) are not those who produce literature. We must therefore discount at once prophecies that the war will lift literature on to an epic plane, cause it to glow and blow with heroic deeds, and figures eight feet high. They come from those who do not know the temperament of the imaginative artist, his fundamental independence, and habit of revolting against what is expected of him. But the whole thing is much deeper than that.

It seems to be forgotten by some who write on this matter that the producer of literature has been giving of his best in the past, and will be able to do no more in the future. The first thing that has mattered to him has been (in the words of de Maupassant, but which might have been those of any other first-rate writer) “to make something fine, in the form that shall best suit him according to his temperament.” No amount of wars can vary for the artist that ideal—as it was for him, so it will be. It seems also to be thought that the war has been a startling revelation to the imaginative writer of the heroism in human nature. This is giving him credit for very little imagination. The constant tragedies of peace—miners entombed, sinking liners, volcanic eruptions, outbreaks of pestilence, together with the long endurances of daily life, are always bringing home to any sensitive mind the inherent heroism of men and women. The very glut of heroism in this war is likely, as it were, to put an artist’s nature off, to blunt the edge of perceptions that are always groping after fresh sensation, that _must_ be always groping, in order that expression may be of something really felt—for novelty is, of all, the greatest spur to sharp feeling.

The top notes of human life and conduct can be but sparingly sung, or they grate on the nerves, and jar the hearing of the singer, no less than of his listener. By some mysterious law frontal attacks to capture heroism and imprison it in art are almost always failures. Few of the great imagined figures of literature are heroic.

Another thing is forgotten. The real artist does not anticipate and certainly cannot regulate the impulses that shall move his brain and heart and hand. What exactly starts him off, even he cannot tell. He will never write heroics to the order of the Public.

Ah! but he will now be influenced unconsciously in the choice of subjects by sympathy with the fine deeds of the day, a lift will come into his work, his eyes will be raised to the stars! True, perhaps, for the moment; but, then, such times as these are in many ways unfavourable to the creative instinct; moreover they will leave in restless, sensitive natures lassitude, recoil, a sense of surfeit. Quite probably the war may produce a real masterpiece or two, formed out of its very stuff, by some eager mind innocent hitherto of creative powers, for whom actual experience of the sights and feelings of war may be a baptism into art. Almost certainly there will come of it a masterpiece or two of satire. But, generally speaking, this welter of sacrifice and suffering, the sublimity and horror of these days, their courage and their cruelty, are enveloping the writer like the breath of a sirocco, whirling his brain and heart around at the moment, but likely to leave him with an intense longing for a deep draught of peace, and quiet scented winds. On one whose whole natural life is woven, not of deeds, but of thoughts and visions, moods and dreams, all this intensely actual violence, product of utterly different natures from his own, offspring of men of action and affairs, cannot have the permanent, deepening, clarifying influence that long personal experience or suffering have had on some of the world’s greatest writers—on Milton in his blindness; on Dostoevsky, reprieved at the very moment of death, then long imprisoned; on de Maupassant in his fear of coming madness; on Tolstoi in the life-struggle of his dual nature; on Beethoven in his deafness, and Nietzsche in his deadly sickness. It is from the stuff of his own life that the creative writer moulds out for the world something fine, in the form that best suits him, following his own temperament. His momentary and, perhaps, intense identification with the struggle of this war has in it something spasmodic, feverish, and almost false; a kind of deep and tragic inconsistency. It is too foreign to the real self within him. At one time it was said of certain new troops: “They’re first-rate, except for one thing—they _will not_ bayonet the Germans.” It is like that in the artist writer’s soul—with the work of his hands, the words of his lips, his thoughts and the feelings of his heart, he identifies himself with this war drama, yet in the very depths of him he recoils. What would you have? The artist-man has but one nature.

For all these reasons the war is likely to have little deep or lasting influence on literature. But one immediate effect it may surely have. Let who will snatch a moment in these days to be with Nature—let him go into a wood, or walk down the Flower Walk in Kensington Gardens, of a fine afternoon. On the still birch trees a pigeon will be sitting motionless among the grey twig tracery; the cedar-branches are dark and flat on the air; the sun warms the cheek, and brightens the cream and pink chestnut and maple buds just opening; the waxy hyacinths deepen in hue, and the little green shoots everywhere swell as he gazes. A sensation of delight begins to lift his heart, he takes a deep breath; and suddenly, from a bench he hears: “One of ’em’s alive an’ two’s dead.” Or: “The Germans are movin’ ’em!” Gone is the beginning of delight. The heavy hand comes down again. No good! There is no Spring! The sky is _not_ bright. The heart cannot rejoice. As with any man, so, and even more, with the artist-writer. When the war is over and the heavy hand lifted, his heart and brain will rush to that of which he has been deprived too long—will rush to the beauty which, for sheer pity and horror, he cannot now enjoy, will rush as a starved and thirsting creature. There may well be an instant outburst of joyful and sensuous imaginings; a painting of beauty, not faked but really felt, by brushes at once more searching and yet softer.

And very likely, too, there will be a spurt of zest and frankness, as from men who have been too long constrained to a single emotion under the spell of a powerful drug.

One more thought may be jotted down. Unless the national unity now prevailing lasts on into the years of peace that follow, the country will certainly pass through great internal stress. That stress will most likely have a more intimate and powerful influence upon literature than the war itself. If there is to come any startling change, it should be five or ten years after the war rather than at once.

ART AND THE WAR

(From the _Atlantic Monthly_ and _Fortnightly Review_, 1915.)

Monsieur Rodin—perhaps the greatest living artist—has lately defined art as the pursuit of beauty, and beauty as “the expression of what there is best in man.” “Man,” he says, “needs to express in a perfect form of art all his intuitive longings towards the Unknowable.” His words may serve as warning to those who imagine that the war will loosen one root of the tree of art—a tree which has been growing slowly since first soul came into men’s eyes.

This world (as all will admit) is one of the innumerable expressions of an Unknowable Creative Purpose, which colloquially we call God; that which not every one will admit is that this Creative Purpose works in its fashioning not only of matter but of what we call spirit, through friction, through the rubbing together of the noses, the thoughts, and the hearts of men. While the material condition of our planet—the heat or friction within it—remains favourable to human life, there will, there must needs be, a continual crescendo in the stature of Humanity, through the ever-increasing friction of human spirits one with the other; friction supplied by life itself, and, next after life, by those transcripts of life, those expressions of human longing, which we know as art. Art for art’s sake—if it meant what it said, which is doubtful—was always a vain and silly cry. As well contend that an artist is not a man. Art was ever the servant as well as the mistress of men, and ever will be. Civilization, which after all is but the gradual conversion of animal man into human man, has come about through art even more than through religion, law, and science. For the achieved “expression of man’s intuitive longing towards the Unknowable, in more or less perfect forms of art” has ever—after life itself—been the chief influence in broadening men’s hearts.

The aim of human life no doubt is happiness. But, after all, what is happiness? Efficiency, wealth, material comfort? Many by their lives do so affirm; few are cynical enough to say so; and on their death-beds none will feel that they are. Not even freedom in itself brings happiness. Happiness lies in breadth of heart. And breadth of heart is that inward freedom, which has the power to understand, feel with, and, if need be, help others. In breadth of heart are founded justice, love, sacrifice; without it there would seem no special meaning to any of our efforts, and the tale of all human life would still be no more than that of very gifted animals, many of whom, indeed, are highly efficient, and have unity partly instinctive, partly founded on experiences of the utility thereof; but none of whom have that conscious altruism which is without perception of benefit to self, and works from sheer recognition of its own beauty. In sum, human civilization is the growth of conscious altruism; and the directive moral purpose in the world nothing but our dim perception, ever growing through spiritual friction, that we are all bound more and more towards the understanding of ourselves and each other, and all that this carries with it. To imagine, then, that a conflagration like this war, however vast and hellish, will do aught but momentarily retard the crescendo of that understanding, is to miss perception of the whole slow process by which man has become less and less an animal throughout the ages; and to fear that the war will scorch and wither art, that chief agent of understanding, is either to identify oneself with the petty and eclectic views which merely produce æsthetic excrescences, or to be frankly ignorant of what art means.

Recognition of the relativity of art is constantly neglected by those who talk and write about it. For one school the audience does not exist; for another nothing but the audience. Obviously neither view is right. Art may be very naïve and still be art—still be the expression of a childish vision appealing to childish visions, making childish hearts beat. Thus:

“Mary had a little lamb,
Its wool was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go,”

is art to the child of five, whose heart and fancy it affects. And:

“Tiger, tiger, burning bright
Through the forests of the night—
What immortal hand and eye
Framed thy fearful symmetry?”

is art to the writer and the reader of these words.

On the other hand, Tolstoi, in limiting art to such of it as might be understanded of simple folk, served his purpose of attacking the extravagant dandyisms of æstheticism, but fell lugubriously short of the wide truth. The essence of art is the power of communication between heart and heart. Yes! But since no one shall say to human nature: “Be of this or that pattern,” or to the waves of human understanding: “Thus far and no further,” so no man shall say these things to art.

Anybody can draw a tree, but few can draw a tree that others can see is like a tree, and not one in a million can convey the essential spirit of Tree. The power of getting over the footlights to some audience or other is clearly necessary before a man can be called an artist by any but himself. But so soon as he has established genuine connection between his creation and the gratified perception of others, he is making art, though it may be, and usually is, very childish art. The point to grasp is this, and again this: Art is rooted in life for its inspiration, and dependent for its existence as art on affecting other human beings, sooner or later. The statue, the picture, or the book which, having been given a proper chance, has failed to move any but its creator, is certainly not art. It does not follow that the artist should consider his public, or try to please others than his own best self; but if, in pleasing his best self, he does not succeed in pleasing others, in the past, the present, or the future, he will certainly not have produced art. Not, of course, that the size of his public is proof of an artist’s merit. The public of all time is generally but a small public at any given moment. Tolstoi seems to have forgotten that, and to have neglected the significance attaching to the quality of a public. For, if the essence of art be its power of bridging between heart and heart (as he admitted), its value may well be greater if at first it only reaches and fertilizes the hearts of other artists rather than those of the public, for through these other artists it sweeps out again in further circles and ripples of expression. Art is the universal traveller, essentially international in influence. Revealing the spirit of things lying behind parochial surfaces and circumstance, delving down into the common stuff of nature and human nature, and recreating therefrom, it passes ten thousand miles of space, ten thousand years of time, and yet appeals to the men it finds on those far shores. It is the one possession of a country which that country’s enemies usually still respect and take delight in. War—destructive outcome of the side of man’s nature which is hostile to all breadth of heart—can for the moment paralyse the outward activities of art, but can it ever chain its spirit, or arrest the inner ferment of the creative instinct? For thousands of generations war has been the normal state of man’s existence, yet alongside war has flourished art, reflecting man’s myriad aspirations and longings, and, by innumerable expressions of individual vision and sentiment, ever unifying human life, through the common factor of impersonal emotion passing from heart to heart by ways more invisible than the winds travel, carrying the seeds and pollen of herb life. If one could only see those countless tenuous bridges spun by art, a dewy web over the whole lawn of life! If for a moment we could see them, discouragement would cease its uneasy buzzing. What can this war do that a million wars have not? It is bigger, and more bloody—the reaction from it will but be the greater. If every work of art existing in the Western world were obliterated, and every artist killed, would human nature return to the animalism from which art has in a measure raised it? Not so. Art makes good in the human soul all the positions that it conquers.

When the war is over, the world will find that the thing which has changed least is art. There will be less money to spend on it; some artists will have been killed; certain withered leaves, warts, and dead branches will have sloughed off from the tree; and that is all. The wind of war reeking with death will neither have warped nor poisoned it. The utility of art, which in these days of blood and agony is mocked at, will be rising again into the view even of the mockers, almost before the thunder of the last shell has died away. “Beauty is useful,” says Monsieur Rodin. Aye! it is useful!

Who knows whether, even in the full whirlwind of this most gigantic struggle, art work may not be produced which, in sum of its ultimate effect on mankind, will outlive and outweigh the total net result of that struggle, just as the work of Euripides, Shakespeare, Leonardo, Beethoven, and Tolstoi outweighed the net result of the Peloponnesian, sixteenth century, Napoleonic, and Crimean wars? War is so unutterably tragic, because—without it—Nature, given time, would have attained the same ends in other ways. A war is the spasmodic uprising of old savage instincts against the slow and gradual humanizing of the animal called man. It emanates from restless and so-called virile natures fundamentally intolerant of men’s progress towards the understanding of each other—natures that often profess a blasphemous belief in art, a blasphemous alliance with God. It still apparently suffices for a knot of such natures to get together, and play on mass fears and loyalties, to set a continent on fire. And at the end? Those of us who are able to look back from thirty years hence on this tornado of death will conclude with a dreadful laugh that if it had never come the state of the world would be very much the same.

It is not the intention of these words to deny the desperate importance of this conflict _now that it has been joined_. Humanism and Democracy have been forced into a sudden and spasmodic death-grapple with their arch-enemies; and the end of that struggle must be brought into conformity with the slow, sure, general progress of mankind. But if, by better fortune, this fearful conflict had not been forced upon civilization, the same victory would have made good, in course of time, by other processes. That is the irony. For, of a surety, wars or no wars—the future is to Humanism.

But art has no cause to droop its head, nor artists to be discouraged. They are the servants of the future every bit as much as, and more than, they have been the servants of the past; they are even the faithful servants of the present, for they must keep their powers in training, and their vision keen against the time when they are once more accounted of. A true picture is a joy that will move hearts some day, though it may not sell now, nor even for some years after the war; beauty none the less “the expression of what there is best in man” because the earth is being soaked with blood.

Monsieur Sologub, the Russian poet, speaking recently on the future of art, seems to have indicated his view that after the war art will move away from the paths of naturalism; and he defines the naturalists as “people who describe life from the standpoint of material satisfaction.” With that definition I do not at all agree, but it is never good to argue about words. Confusion in regard to the meaning of terms describing art activity is so profound that it is well to sweep them out of our minds, and, in considering what forms art ought to take, go deep down to the criterion of communication between heart and heart. The only essential is, that vision, fancy, feeling should be given the concrete clothing that shall best make them perceptible by the hearts of others; the simpler, the more direct and clear and elemental the form, the better; and that is all you can say about it. To seek remote, intricate, and “precious” clothings for the imagination is but to handicap vision and imperil communication and appeal; the artists who seek them are not usually of much account. The greatness of Blake is the greatness of his simpler work. Though, in this connection, it is as much affectation to pretend that men are more childish than they are, as to pretend that they all have the subtlety of a Robert Browning. If the range of an artist’s vision, the essential truth of his fancy, and the heat of his feeling be great, then, obviously, the simpler, the more accessible the form he takes, the wider will be his reach, the deeper the emotion he stirs, the greater the value of his art.

“What is wanted,” says Monsieur Sologub, “is true art.” Quite so! What is wanted in a work of art is an unforced natural and adequate correspondence between fancy and form, matter and spirit, so that one shall not be distracted by its naturalism, mysticism, cubism, whatnotism, but shall simply be moved in a deep impersonal way by perception of another’s vision. Two instances come into the mind: A picture of Spring, by Jean François Millet, in the Louvre. Therein, by simple selection, without any departure whatever from the normal representation of life, the very essence of Spring, the brooding and the white flash of it, the suspense and stir, the sense of gathered torrents, all the special emotion, which, every Spring of the year, is sooner or later felt by every heart, has been stored by the painter’s vision and feeling, and projected from his eyes and heart to other eyes and hearts.

And: Those chapters in a novel of Monsieur Sologub’s compatriot, Turgenev—“Fathers and Children”—which describe with the simplest naturalism the death of Bazarov. There, too, is the heart-beat of emotion as universal as it well can be, rendered so vividly that one is not conscious at all of how it is rendered.

These are two cases of that complete welding of form and spirit which is all one need or should demand of art; the rest is a mere question of the artist’s emotional quality and stature. Art, in fact, will take all paths after the war just as before; and now and then the artist will fashion that true blend of form and fancy which is the achievement of beauty.

For Monsieur Rodin, beauty is the adoration of all that man perceives with his spiritual senses. Yes. And the task of artists is to kneel before life till they rive the heart from it and with that heart twine their own; out of such marriages come precious offspring, winged messengers.

There is a picture of Francesca’s in the Louvre, too much restored—some say it is not a Francesca, but if not, then neither are they Francescas in the English National Gallery, and those, so far as I know, are not disputed—a picture of the Virgin, with hands pressed together, before her naked Babe, in a landscape of hills and waters. Her kneeling figure has in it I cannot tell what of devotion and beauty, which makes the heart turn over within one. With his spiritual senses the painter has perceived, and in adoration set down what he has seen, mingling with it the longings of his own heart. And they who look on that picture know for evermore what devotion and beauty are. And if they be artists, they go away fortified again to the taking up of a long quest.

This is the utility of art. It plays between men like light, showing the heights and depths of nature, beckoning on, or warning of destruction, and ever through emotion revealing heart to heart. It is the priestess of Humanism, confirming to us our future, reassuring our faltering faith in our own approach to the Unknowable, till the tides of the Creative Purpose turn, and our world gets cold; and Man, having lived his day to the uttermost, finds gradual sleep.

TRE CIME DI LAVAREDO

(From the _Book of Italy_, 1916.)

Most of us who have lived a good long time have found some part of the world to look on as the happy hunting-ground of our spirits, the place most blessed by memory. And within that sacred circle there will be some spot, above all others, enchanted.

Tre Cime di Lavaredo! Drei Zinnen! You three rock mountains above Misurina of the Italian Tyrol—how many times have we not climbed up, to lie on your high stony slopes, steeping our eyes in wild form and colour, wherefrom even a dull spirit must take wings and soar a little! Width of thought is surely born, in some sort, of majestic sights—cloud forms, and a burning sky, rock pinnacles, and wandering, deep-down valleys, the gray-violet shadows on the hills, the frozen serenity of far snows. All the outspread miracle there lies fan-shaped to the south, south-east, south-west, having that warmth which so makes the heart rejoice the moment one passes over and looks southward from any mountain. What traveller does not feel strange loveliness steal up into his soul from southern slopes? Domodossola below the Simplon; Val d’Aosta beyond the Matterhorn; Bormio beneath the Stelvio; and many another holy place. It is not merely charm and mellowness—the South can be savage as the North—it is some added poignancy of form and colour, and a look of being blessed.

Tre Cime di Lavaredo! Music comes drifting up your slopes, from pasture far down enough to give magic to cow-bells.

But now, where but three years ago we watched a little white cow licking its herd’s sprained hand, men are fighting to the death. Batteries must be adorning that steep forcella running from the refuge hut. A new kind of thunder reverberates, in whose roar the stones that were for ever falling will have lost their voices. And the beasts, the gray, the dun, the white, mild-eyed—their pasture below must be a desert! Even the goats surely have gone. Or do they and their young masters attend placidly on these new mysteries, just pricking their ears now and again at some too raucous clap and clatter of guns?

Let those who are killed up there be buried in their tracks! Out of their bodies on the lower slopes a few more flowers will spring—gentian, mountain-dandelion, alpen-rose; and higher, nearer those peaks, they will be grateful food for root of edelweiss. And may their spirits—if men have such after death—stay up on those wild heights! Nowhere else could they have such free flitting space! Friend-spirit, foe-spirit, they will fight no more, but on the winter nights in comradeship haunt the frozen hills, where no shred of man or beast or bird or plant is left, till Spring comes again.

To fight up here, where Nature has designed one vast demonstration of her own fierce untameness, of all the stubborn face she opposes to the crafts of man! What irony! Up in this wild stony citadel, among these rock minarets and red-and-gold-stained bastions, above ravines remote from man—up here, where in winter all is ice, and even in summer no green thing grows; on these invincible outposts of an earth not yet subdued by incalculable human toil throughout a million years; among these sublime unconquered monuments, reminding us of labour and peril infinite in our long death-grip with Nature—up here man has fellow-man by the throat. Yea! Irony complete! Nor the less perfect in that each soldier on these heights who in duty clubs his fellow-Christian’s brains out, or sends forth the shell that shall mingle his body with the rock rubble and the edelweiss, and sets up a little cross, perhaps, to the departed soul, is a true hero, holding his life in his hand, throwing it down grandly for his country’s honour. Verily we are strange animals, we men—little walking magazines of too great vitality! Out of our sheer rampancy comes war; as though superfluity of vital fluid were for ever accumulating, to free ourselves of which we have found as yet no better way than this. Shall we never learn to spend the surplus of our vital force in efforts of salvation rather than destruction? If the mountains cannot teach us, and the wide night skies above them, sparkling with other worlds, then nothing will. For on mountains and beneath such skies man feels at his greatest, flies far in fancy, dreams of nobility; yet does he perceive what a puny midget of a creature walks on his two feet, glad of any little help he can get or give, glad of good-will from any living thing. In loneliness up here he would soon be frozen and starved, or slip to death. His tiny strength, his feeble cunning, would avail him but short span. Unroped to other men, he is but a sigh in the night, a cross of bleaching lime in to-morrow’s sunlight. . . .

Tre Cime di Lavaredo! Golden sounds of a golden speech! When, if ever, we see your beloved rocks again, that may be your only name; no longer perhaps will the words Drei Zinnen compete for you . . . But will you know the difference? As of old, gigantic, silent, or, clamorously, in the loosening rains and heat, casting down your stones—you will lift up your black defiance in the clear mountain nights, your grandeur to the sun by day.

Once we saw you with the young moon flying toward, like a white swallow, like an arrow aimed at your hearts, as it might be in duel between bright swiftness and dark strength. The moon was vanquished—for she flew into you that stood unmoved.

Tre Cime di Lavaredo! You will outlast the race of men upon this earth. When we, quarrelsome midget heroes that we be, are all frozen from this planet, you will be there, whitened for ever from head to foot. You will have no name, then—neither of North nor South!

SECOND THOUGHTS ON THIS WAR

(From _Scribner’s Magazine_, 1915.)

§ 1.

I went out into the wind—the first south-west wind after many days of easterly drought. All the morning it had rained, but now the gray sky was torn; the sun shone, and long white clouds were driven over pools of blue, or piled up into heavenly mountains. The land of moor and valley, the hills and fields and woods gleamed in the sunlight, or were shadowed dark by the drifting clouds. Moss on the top of the old gray walls was wet, but warm to the touch; the birds—daws, pigeons, hawks—flung themselves at the wind. And the scent! Every frond of the bracken, each sprig of the gorse and the heather, all the soughing boughs of young pine-tree and oak, and the grass, gray-powdered with rain, were exhaling their fragrance so that each breath drawn was a draught of wild perfume.

And in one’s heart rose an ecstasy of love for this wind-sweetened earth, for the sun, and the clouds, the rain, and the wind, the trees and the flowering plants, for the streams and the rocks—for this earth which breeds us all, and into which we reabsorb, a passion as untutored, wild, and natural as the love of life in the merest dumb thing that knows nothing of ideals, of country, realms and policies, nothing of war.

Germany calls the war “this English war;” we English as fervently believe it a Prussian war, having deep root in Prussian will, and history. One thing is certain: At the last moment the world, desperately balancing, was thrust over the edge of the abyss by a sudden swoop of the Prussian war party.

“Pourtales (German Ambassador to Russia) called Sazonoff’s
attention in the most serious manner to the fact that nowadays
measures of mobilization would be a highly dangerous form of
diplomatic pressure; for in that event the purely military
consideration of the question by the General Staffs would find
expression, and that _if that button were once touched in
Germany_ the situation would get out of control.” (Count
Szapary, Austrian Ambassador to Russia. Austrian Book, No.
28.)[8]

In a Europe teeming with mutual fears a few men, perhaps not a score in all, have had the power to strip from millions their meed of life on this wind-sweetened earth! For myths conceived in a few ambitious brains, and the “strike-first” theory of a knot of strategists, the whole world must pay with grief and agony! What can we do, when this war is over, to insure that we shall not again be stampeded by professional soldiers, and those—in whatever country—who dream paper dreams of territory, trade, and glory, caring nothing for the lives of the simple, knowing nothing of the beauty of the earth which is their heritage.

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[8] Since this was written Maximilian Harden in his paper _Zukunft_ has used these words: “Germany is calumniated when it is said that she wanted war, not to defend herself, but in order to conquer. But it is equally false to suppose that England, France, or Russia, who were either not armed at all, or only half ready . . . deliberately planned an attack. The outbreak of the war could not be arrested; because at the decisive moment _the Will of the Strategists was stronger than the Will of the Statesmen_.”

§ 2.

“No corn planted, more men wanted!”—words of the Old Dalmatian song!

It is no use crying over spilt milk, and no good throwing down the instruments in the middle of an operation. But there is every use in keeping before oneself perpetually the thought that this war _is_ an operation to excise the trampling instinct; for there are many among us willing to speak of an operation while it serves their purpose, who unconsciously believe in that which they profess to be cutting out. Human nature is much the same all the world over. The Prussian Junker is but a specially favoured variety of a well-marked type that grows in every land. And the business of other men is to keep circumstances from being favourable to its development and ascendancy.

When we talk of safeguarding democracy, liberty, and the rights of small nations, we really only mean the muzzling of the Junkerism in human nature—the restraint of this trampling instinct. Who would give a rush for the immunity of any nation from the resurgence within itself of that instinct, unless it watches with lynx eyes? I cannot but think that, when peace comes and Prussian Junkerism is held harmless for a span, Junkerism in general will have a better chance of pushing up its hydra heads than it had before this war. Times will be very hard—the “have nots” and “they who have” will be very nakedly set over against each other. Circumstances will be favourable to civil strife; and civil strife, whichever side wins, fosters despotic leaderships and the trampling instinct. Those not merely hoping and meaning to try for a better world, after the war, but expecting one almost as a matter of course, forget that the devotion and unity, which men display under the shadow of a great fear and the stimulus of that most powerful and universal emotion, patriotism, will slip away from them when the fear and the emotion are removed. If before the war men were incapable of rising to great and united effort for their own betterment out of sheer desire for perfection, are they even as likely to be able when, after the war, economic stress puts a greater strain on each individual’s good-will?

The words of a certain prophet, “Literature, Art, Industry, Commerce, Politics, Statesmanship will, when this fighting day is over, come into a new and better era,” are soothing syrup. Let us by all means hope for and intend the best, but let us set ourselves to face the worst.

§ 3.

Because pens lie unused, or are but feebly wielded over the war, they would have us believe that modern literature has been found wanting. “Look,” they say, “how nobly the Greek and the Elizabethan pens rhymed the epic struggles of their ages. What a degenerate, nerveless creature is this modern pen! See how it fails when put to the touchstone of great events and the thrilling realities of war!” I think this is nonsense. The greatest pens of the past were strangers to the glamour of war. Euripides made it the subject of a dirge; Shakespeare of casual treatment; Cervantes of his irony. They were in advance of the feeling of their day about war; but now their feeling has become that of mankind at large; and the modern pen, good, bad, or indifferent, follows—_longo intervallo_—their prevision of war’s downfalling glory. In the words of a certain officer, war is now “damn dull, damn dirty, and damn dangerous.” The people of Britain, and no doubt of the other countries—however bravely they may fight—are fighting not because they love it, not because it is natural to them, but because—alas!—they must. This makes them the more heroic since the romance of war for them is past, belonging to cruder stages of the world’s journey.

In our consciousness to-day there is a violent divorce between our admiration for the fine deeds, the sacrifices, and heroisms of this war, and our feeling about war itself. A shadowy sense of awful waste hangs over it all in the mind of the simplest soldier as in that of the subtlest penman. It may be real that we fight for our conceptions of liberty and justice; but we feel all the time that we ought not to have had to fight, that these things should be respected of the nations; that we have grown out of such savagery; that the whole business is a kind of monstrous madness suddenly let loose on the world. Such feelings were never in the souls of ordinary men, whether soldiers or civilians, in the days of Elizabeth or Themistocles. They fought, then, as a matter of course. In those so-called heroic ages “the thrilling realities of war” were truly the realities of life and feeling. To-day they are but a long nightmare. We have discovered that man is a creature slowly, by means of thought and life and art, evolving from the animal he was into the human being he will be some day, and in that desperately slow progression sloughing off the craving for physical combat and the destruction of his fellow-man. This process does not apparently mean the loss of stoicism and courage, but rather the increase thereof, as millions in this war, after the most peaceful century in the world’s history, have proved. But we are a few paces farther on toward the fully evolved human being than were the compatriots of Themistocles or Elizabeth.

The true realities of to-day lie in peace. The great epic of our time is the expression of man’s slow emergence from the blood-loving animal he was. To that great epic the modern pen has long been consecrate, and is not likely to betray its trust.

§ 4.

One day we read in our journals how an enemy Socialist or Pacifist has raised his voice against the mob passions and war spite of his country, and we think: “What an enlightened man!” And the next day, in the same journals, we read that So-and-so has done the same thing in our own country, and we think: “My God! He ought to be hung!” To-day we listen with enthusiasm to orations of our statesmen about the last drop of our blood, and the last pennies in our purses, and we think: “That is patriotism!” To-morrow we read utterance by enemy notables about arming the cats and dogs, and exclaim: “What truculent insanity!” We learn on Monday that some disguised fellow-countryman has risked his life to secure information from the heart of the enemy’s country, and we think: “That was real courage!” And on Tuesday our bile rises at discovering that an enemy has been arrested in our midst for espionage, and we think: “The dirty spy!” Our blood boils on Wednesday at hearing of the scurvy treatment of one of ourselves resident in the enemy’s country. And on Thursday we read of the wrecking by our mob of aliens’ shops, and think: “Well, what could they expect, belonging to that nation!” When one of our regiments has defended itself with exceptional bravery, and inflicted great loss on the enemy, we justly call it _heroism_. When some enemy regiment has done the same, we use the word _ferocity_. The comic papers of the enemy guy us, and we think: “How childish!” Ours guy the enemy, and we cry: “Ah! that’s good!” Our enemies use a hymn of hate, and we despise them for it. We do our hate in silence, and feel ourselves the better for the practice.

Shall we not rather fight our fight, and win it, without these little ironies?

§ 5.

The first thing he does when he comes down each morning is to read his paper, and the moment he has finished breakfast he sticks the necessary flags into his big map. He began to do that very soon after the war broke out, and has never missed a day. It would seem to him almost as if peace had been declared, and the universe were suddenly unbottomed, if any morning he omitted to alter slightly three flags at least. What will he do when the end at last is reached, and he can no longer tear the paper open with a kind of trembling avidity; no longer debate within himself the questions of strategy, and the absorbing chances of the field, when he has, in fact, to sweep his flags into a drawer and forget they ever were? It would haunt him, if he thought of it. But sufficient unto his day is the good thereof. Yes! It has almost come to that with him; though he will still talk to you of “this dreadful war,” and never alludes to the days as “great” or to the times as “stirring” as some folk do. No, he sincerely believes that he is distressed beyond measure by the continuance of “the abominable business,” and would not confess for worlds that he would miss it, that it has become for him a daily “cocktail” to his appetite for life. It is not he, after all, who is being skinned; to the skinning of other eels the individual eel is soon accustomed. By proxy to be “making history,” to be witnessing the “greatest drama” known to man since the beginning of the world—after all it is something! He will never have such a chance again. He still remembers with a shudder how he felt the first weeks after war was declared; and the mere fact that he shudders shows that his present feelings are by no means what they were. After all, one cannot remain for ever prepossessed with suffering that is not one’s own, or with fears of invasion indefinitely postponed. True, he has lost a nephew, a second cousin, the sons of several friends. He has been duly sorry, duly sympathetic, but then, he was not dangerously fond of any of them. His own son is playing his part, and he is proud of it. If the boy should be killed he will feel poignant grief, but even then there is revenge to be considered. His pocket is suffering, but it is for the Country; and that almost makes it a pleasure. And he goes on sticking in his flags in spots where the earth is a mush of mangled flesh, and the air shrill with the whir of shells, the moans of dying men, and the screams of horses.

Is this pure fantasy, or does it hold a grain of truth?

§ 6.

The war brings up with ever greater insistence the two antagonistic feelings of which one was always conscious: That men are radically alike. And that there are two kinds of men, subtly but hopelessly divided from each other.

Men are radically alike in the way they meet danger and death, in their sentiment and in their laughter, in their endurance, their passions, their self-sacrifice, their selfishness, their superstitions, and their gratitude. They are radically divided by possession, or not, of that extra sensitiveness to proportion, form, colour, sound, which we call the sense of beauty. Would there still be war in a world the most of whose dwellers had the sense of beauty? I think not. And they who have it, so few by comparison, are tragically compelled to live and bear their part in this hell, created by a world of which they are not.