Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

lyle, who was really in earnest and knew what he was talking about.

About Americans Carlyle said many things as unjust as they were unpleasant. But about Britons also he said many things which were equally unpleasant, though perhaps less unjust. He was never tired of telling us, for example, that we are "mostly fools", a saying which made him hateful to the Podsnaps of his time, but which our subsequent history has, in the opinion of many, proved to be true. The few wise men among us have forgiven him that long ago; and I suggest that the time has now come when the wise men of America might forgive him for saying that their nation were "mostly bores", and hegin to meditate anew, as many of us are now doing in Britain, with somewhat rueful faces, on the Book of Prophecy he left us. Even his horrible blasphemies about the "Nigger Question" might be overlooked by generous souls in America on the ground that the light that led him astray was undoubtedly light from heaven.

The book of his that I would specially recommend for this purpose of reconciliation and enlightenment is the Latter Day Pamphlets, in which I can detect only one really important mistake, the date being given as 1850 instead of 1922. For my own part I find the bitter medicine of that book far more wholesome in our present disorders than the weird and windy prescriptions for mending the world now so plentifully hawked about on both sides of the Atlantic, "by quidnuncs with a smattering of grammar," many of which a wise man would as soon swallow as make his dinner from the witches' cauldron in Macbeth.

For example, on opening my weekly paper this morning, the very first thing I light upon (it is a headline) is the following: "The old sanctions for our society have dissolved and we know it; and we know that we must seek new and finer sanctions."

Now, I believe it would be no exaggeration to say that, since the war broke out, I have heard or read that statement, in varying forms, a thousand times. So far it has produced not the slightest effect; nor will produce any, though it be repeated fifty thousand times more, and printed in large type in every newspaper, and shouted from the roof of every house, in Europe and in Americathe reason being that it is false. The old sanctions of our society

have not dissolved: if they had, the writer of the statement would have had no breakfast, no pen or typewriter to write his empty words, no newspaper to print them, and no audience to listen to them or to read them. Whatever the old sanctions of society may have done, they have clearly not dissolved, otherwise there would be no society left to talk about, or to address; there would be nobody, even, to do the talking or the addressing; which last would be no unmitigated evil.

I said, a moment ago, that this type of statement produces no effect. I must now contradict myself. It does indeed produce no effect in the direction we all desire, but it produces a very decided effect in a direction none of us desires. It serves to put off the time when the "new and finer sanctions" come into being. For is it not clear as the sun in heaven that if we begin by treating the old sanctions as "dissolved" we have nothing whatever to guide us in seeking the new? What are the old sanctions of society? Some of them (it will be generally admitted) are to be found in the Ten Commandments; for example: Thou shalt not steal; Thou shalt not murder; Thou shalt not covet; Thou shalt not bear false witness; Thou shalt not commit adultery. There is a story told of a certain British Duke who, when the Commandments were read out to him in his private chapel, used to respond to each of them with a loud and pious "Amen!" But there was one exception-the last on my list. When the Chaplain came to this, the Duke's response was a muttered "Damn". Well, let us damn old sanctions in general. Let us treat them all as dissolved, not forgetting to include the one which forbids us to bear false witness the pivot of the whole lot in the opinion of many. A pretty posture we are now in for seeking those "new and finer sanctions", which are to bring in the millennial era and the reign of the saints! What wonder that the plain-dealing American or British citizen, as he receives his daily dose of these inanities from his newspaper or his parson, secretly confesses that he hasn't the ghost of a notion what the "new and finer sanctions" are to be; that, for his part, he will leave it to "some other fellow to find out-meanwhile "wholesomely digesting his pudding" as though nothing had happened.

[ocr errors]

Since the very outbreak of the war there has been, I repeat, an

ever increasing flood of futile eloquence pitched in this key. But worse than that. The eloquence in question would not have come into being at all, and would not have increased as it has done, had there not been a demand for it; and there would have been no demand for it had there not been a general belief, among the men and women of both continents, in the magic efficacy of mere talk; a belief, namely that the salvation of men and nations hinges on the discovery of some verbal formula, which has only to be repeated often enough and loudly enough and eloquently enough to exorcise all the devils that plague society and set mankind on its feet steadfastly marching to the Kingdom of Heaven; "mending the world while you wait" and leaving the individual members of society, namely you and me, free to damn the Ten Commandments at our pleasure, to leave our private gardens uncultivated and full of foul weeds-because, forsooth, the salvation of the world will be sufficiently provided for by the magic formula aforesaid, preached from pulpits and disseminated in millions by the printing press. Was there ever a fouler enchantment? It is the characteristic delusion of our times.

From this enchantment Carlyle did his best to deliver the men of his own generation, warning them, in language hot as boiling lava, that enormous calamity was the certain alternative. He failed to convince them. For a long time no calamity arrived, save such as could be easily forgotten in an age become expert in forgetfulness; the staggering world of 1848 recovered its equilibrium; and the lightheads who had mocked the grim old Tartar from the first flung him away as a back number and went a-whoring after a new progeny of verbalisms. From 1850 to 1914 the enchantment deepened. On all sides men sprung up who declared that we must get a "world view"; world viewing accordingly became the fashion; the philosophers, the politicians, the parsons, the Scribes and the Pharisees took it up; the debating societies buzzed with it; every pickpocket was assured of Paradise provided he were equipped with a "world view". On August 1, 1914, the volcano burst and the world viewers and the world views were blown skyhigh together. The long delayed calamity foreseen by Carlyle had arrived.

There need no longer be any hesitation in ascribing the Great

War, and its horrible sequel in the so-called Peace, to the delusions of an age which had long accustomed itself both to think and to act as though talk could be made to do the business of life. The war was the product of worldwide lying, in which the "world views" formed no small part, especially those that had been worked up in Germany. Not the venial lying which speaks a word untrue to another word, but the mortal, deadly lying where all the words, while beautifully harmonizing with one another, are collectively untrue to reality or fact. The very notion of a "world view", which we were led to believe would be a kind of summarized total, or general conspectus, of all the truth that can be known, is itself a lie of this collective kind, what one might call a "mass lie", and a highly pernicious one. The wisest man that ever drew the breath of life cannot "view" more than an inconceivably small fraction of the world, a significant fraction it is true, just enough to warn him against playing tricks with the Ten Commandments, and no more; the wise man becoming unutterably foolish when he pretends otherwise. What comes of trusting to "world views" to do the business of the world may be abundantly seen in the sorry performance we have already considered, where every writer and speaker, high and low, after explaining his "world view" to admiring sight seers in that line, can think of nothing better than to bellow at his audience to "change their hearts", while making not the least effort to change his own, and with no serious intention of doing so-the world meantime mocking the view he has taken of it and visibly going from bad to worse.

This fundamental lying, which has reproduced itself in an endless progeny of abominable forms, was, I repeat, the underlying cause of the Great War and its sequent calamities. In Germany, where this sort of lying had been developed to a fine art and where the chief adepts in the practice of it were to be found, it produced the trash of Von Bernhardi, Treitschke, Houston Chamberlain and the Kaiser's speeches. In Britain (I say nothing of America) we gave it a more moralized but not less deadly version. Our notion was that the "international situation" is governed by political speeches, protocols, foreign office correspondence, interchange of diplomatic views, and paper treaties

thence resulting. So long as the "conversations" our diplomats were exchanging with their foreign antagonists were sufficiently astute, and the orations of our Foreign Ministers at Guildhall Banquets sufficiently pacific, and the sermons of our parsons sufficiently saturated in moonshine, it mattered little who broke the Ten Commandments nor how rotten were the bricks we turned out of our kilns. And if anything went wrong, could we not vote it right at the next election? "Give us," we cried, "not bricks but speeches; not bricks without straw, but bricks that are nothing but straw! Has not somebody with a world view proved that war doesn't pay? Give us more of that. Put more eloquence into it; multiply the copies; extend the propaganda; and have your votes ready to back it up. What more do you want? Bricks be damned!"

Thus we went on lying for peace, oblivious of the fact that another nation over the way was lying yet harder for war. The hardier liars carried the day; and then lost it; but not until we, with our moralized lies, had paid for them to the uttermost farthing. Yet it was something to have laid the biggest liars low. Surely we had learned at length the lesson old Thomas strove in the agony of his soul to teach us, that the one thing that never pays in this world is not war but lying! His forebodings had come true. His unheeded warning had been fulfilled. The "back number" had become the last thing out. The swift descent of Europe "into a place I had rather not name" had occurred on a scale of horror beyond his darkest vaticinations. So now we will go back to reality, will we not, to the "elemental veracities", to the Ten Commandments, and to the making of good bricks? The "windy counterfeits", the apostles of "beer and balderdash", the purveyors of "bottled moonshine", "perorating Chimæras", the prating "flunkeys out of work", the "vociferous blockheads", shall all be sent about their business, and we who have been their victims so long, and paid for it so horribly, will play the part of "enchanted human asses" no more!

the

Alas, it was not to be! The old enchantment lies upon us deeper than ever; the enchantment which so long has bemused us into believing, and into moral slumber while we believe, that the world is to be saved by phrases, formula, big words spelt with

« ZurückWeiter »