The World Set Free Page 20
discredited thing. Contentious professions cease to be an
honourable employment for men. The peace between nations is also
a peace between individuals. We live in a world that comes of
age. Man the warrior, man the lawyer, and all the bickering
aspects of life, pass into obscurity; the grave dreamers, man the
curious learner, and man the creative artist, come forward to
replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a less ignoble
adventure.
There is no natural life of man. He is, and always has been, a
sheath of varied and even incompatible possibilities, a
palimpsest of inherited dispositions. It was the habit of many
writers in the early twentieth century to speak of competition
and the narrow, private life of trade and saving and suspicious
isolation as though such things were in some exceptional way
proper to the human constitution, and as though openness of mind
and a preference for achievement over possession were abnormal
and rather unsubstantial qualities. How wrong that was the
history of the decades immediately following the establishment of
the world republic witnesses. Once the world was released from
the hardening insecurities of a needless struggle for life that
was collectively planless and individually absorbing, it became
apparent that there was in the vast mass of people a long,
smothered passion to make things. The world broke out into
making, and at first mainly into aesthetic making. This phase of
history, which has been not inaptly termed the 'Efflorescence,'
is still, to a large extent, with us. The majority of our
population consists of artists, and the bulk of activity in the
world lies no longer with necessities but with their elaboration,
decoration, and refinement. There has been an evident change in
the quality of this making during recent years. It becomes more
purposeful than it was, losing something of its first elegance
and prettiness and gaining in intensity; but that is a change
rather of hue than of nature. That comes with a deepening
philosophy and a sounder education. For the first joyous
exercises of fancy we perceive now the deliberation of a more
constructive imagination. There is a natural order in these
things, and art comes before science as the satisfaction of more
elemental needs must come before art, and as play and pleasure
come in a human life before the development of a settled
purpose…
For thousands of years this gathering impulse to creative work
must have struggled in man against the limitations imposed upon
him by his social ineptitude. It was a long smouldering fire
that flamed out at last in all these things. The evidence of a
pathetic, perpetually thwarted urgency to make something, is one
of the most touching aspects of the relics and records of our
immediate ancestors. There exists still in the death area about
the London bombs, a region of deserted small homes that furnish
the most illuminating comment on the old state of affairs. These
homes are entirely horrible, uniform, square, squat, hideously
proportioned, uncomfortable, dingy, and in some respects quite
filthy, only people in complete despair of anything better could
have lived in them, but to each is attached a ridiculous little
rectangle of land called 'the garden,' containing usually a prop
for drying clothes and a loathsome box of offal, the dustbin,
full of egg-shells, cinders, and such-like refuse. Now that one
may go about this region in comparitive security-for the London
radiations have dwindled to inconsiderable proportions-it is
possible to trace in nearly every one of these gardens some
effort to make. Here it is a poor little plank summer-house,
here it is a 'fountain' of bricks and oyster-shells, here a
'rockery,' here a 'workshop.' And in the houses everywhere there
are pitiful little decorations, clumsy models, feeble drawings.
These efforts are almost incredibly inept, like the drawings of
blindfolded men, they are only one shade less harrowing to a
sympathetic observer than the scratchings one finds upon the
walls of the old prisons, but there they are, witnessing to the
poor buried instincts that struggled up towards the light. That
god of joyous expression our poor fathers ignorantly sought, our
freedom has declared to us…
In the old days the common ambition of every simple soul was to
possess a little property, a patch of land, a house uncontrolled
by others, an 'independence' as the English used to put it. And
what made this desire for freedom and prosperity so strong, was
very evidently the dream of self-expression, of doing something
with it, of playing with it, of making a personal delightfulness,
a distinctiveness. Property was never more than a means to an
end, nor avarice more than a perversion. Men owned in order to
do freely. Now that every one has his own apartments and his own
privacy secure, this disposition to own has found its release in
a new direction. Men study and save and strive that they may
leave behind them a series of panels in some public arcade, a row
of carven figures along a terrace, a grove, a pavilion. Or they
give themselves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in
phenomena as once men gave themselves to the accumulation of
riches. The work that was once the whole substance of social
existence-for most men spent all their lives in earning a
living-is now no more than was the burden upon one of those old
climbers who carried knapsacks of provisions on their backs in
order that they might ascend mountains. It matters little to the
easy charities of our emancipated time that most people who have
made their labour contribution produce neither new beauty nor new
wisdom, but are simply busy about those pleasant activities and
enjoyments that reassure them that they are alive. They help, it
may be, by reception and reverberation, and they hinder nothing.
…
Section 11
Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and
appearances of human life which is going on about us, a change as
rapid and as wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to
manhood after the barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral
and mental changes at least as unprecedented. It is not as if old
things were going out of life and new things coming in, it is
rather that the altered circumstances of men are making an appeal
to elements in his nature that have hitherto been suppressed, and
checking tendencies that have hitherto been over-stimulated and
over-developed. He has not so much grown and altered his
essential being as turned new aspects to the light. Such turnings
round into a new attitude the world has seen on a less extensive
scale before. The Highlanders of the seventeenth century, for
example, were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the nineteenth
their descendants were conspicuously trusty and honourable men.
There was not a people in Western Europe in
the early twentieth
century that seemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that
had not been guilty of them within the previous two centuries.
The free, frank, kindly, gentle life of the prosperous classes in
any European country before the years of the last wars was in a
different world of thought and feeling from that of the dingy,
suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable existence of the
respectable poor, or the constant personal violence, the squalor
and naive passions of the lowest stratum. Yet there were no real
differences of blood and inherent quality between these worlds;
their differences were all in circumstances, suggestion, and
habits of mind. And turning to more individual instances the
constantly observed difference between one portion of a life and
another consequent upon a religious conversion, were a standing
example of the versatile possibilities of human nature.
The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities
and businesses and economic relations shook them also out of
their old established habits of thought, and out of the lightly
held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.
To borrow a word from the old-fashioned chemists, men were made
nascent; they were released from old ties; for good or evil they
were ready for new associations. The council carried them
forward for good; perhaps if his bombs had reached their
destination King Ferdinand Charles might have carried them back
to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a
harder one than the council's. The moral shock of the atomic
bombs had been a profound one, and for a while the cunning side
of the human animal was overpowered by its sincere realisation of
the vital necessity for reconstruction. The litigious and trading
spirits cowered together, scared at their own consequences; men
thought twice before they sought mean advantages in the face of
the unusual eagerness to realise new aspirations, and when at
last the weeds revived again and 'claims' began to sprout, they
sprouted upon the stony soil of law-courts reformed, of laws that
pointed to the future instead of the past, and under the blazing
sunshine of a transforming world. A new literature, a new
interpretation of history were springing into existence, a new
teaching was already in the schools, a new faith in the young.
The worthy man who forestalled the building of a research city
for the English upon the Sussex downs by buying up a series of
estates, was dispossessed and laughed out of court when he made
his demand for some preposterous compensation; the owner of the
discredited Dass patents makes his last appearance upon the
scroll of history as the insolvent proprietor of a paper called
The Cry for Justice, in which he duns the world for a hundred
million pounds. That was the ingenuous Dass's idea of justice,
that he ought to be paid about five million pounds annually
because he had annexed the selvage of one of Holsten's
discoveries. Dass came at last to believe quite firmly in his
right, and he died a victim of conspiracy mania in a private
hospital at Nice. Both of these men would probably have ended
their days enormously wealthy, and of course ennobled in the
England of the opening twentieth century, and it is just this
novelty of their fates that marks the quality of the new age.
The new government early discovered the need of a universal
education to fit men to the great conceptions of its universal
rule. It made no wrangling attacks on the local, racial, and
sectarian forms of religious profession that at that time divided
the earth into a patchwork of hatreds and distrusts; it left
these organisations to make their peace with God in their own
time; but it proclaimed as if it were a mere secular truth that
sacrifice was expected from all, that respect had to be shown to
all; it revived schools or set them up afresh all around the
world, and everywhere these schools taught the history of war and
the consequences and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was
taught not as a sentiment but as a matter of fact that the
salvation of the world from waste and contention was the common
duty and occupation of all men and women. These things which are
now the elementary commonplaces of human intercourse seemed to
the councillors of Brissago, when first they dared to proclaim
them, marvellously daring discoveries, not untouched by doubt,
that flushed the cheek and fired the eye.
The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the
hands of a committee of men and women, which did its work during
the next few decades with remarkable breadth and effectiveness.
This educational committee was, and is, the correlative upon the
mental and spiritual side of the redistribution committee. And
prominent upon it, and indeed for a time quite dominating it, was
a Russian named Karenin, who was singular in being a congenital
cripple. His body was bent so that he walked with difficulty,
suffered much pain as he grew older, and had at last to undergo
two operations. The second killed him. Already malformation,
which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle ages so
that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature of
the human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world.
It had a curious effect upon Karenin's colleagues; their feeling
towards him was mingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that
it needed usage rather than reason to overcome. He had a strong
face, with little bright brown eyes rather deeply sunken and a
large resolute thin-lipped mouth. His skin was very yellow and
wrinkled, and his hair iron gray. He was at all times an
impatient and sometimes an angry man, but this was forgiven him
because of the hot wire of suffering that was manifestly thrust
through his being. At the end of his life his personal prestige
was very great. To him far more than to any contemporary is it
due that self-abnegation, self-identification with the world
spirit, was made the basis of universal education. That general
memorandum to the teachers which is the key-note of the modern
educational system, was probably entirely his work.
'Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,' he wrote. 'That is
the device upon the seal of this document, and the starting point
of all we have to do. It is a mistake to regard it as anything
but a plain statement of fact. It is the basis for your work.
You have to teach self-forgetfulness, and everything else that
you have to teach is contributory and subordinate to that end.
Education is the release of man from self. You have to widen the
horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their
curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge
their sympathies. That is what you are for. Under your guidance
and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they have to
shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities, and
passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of the
universe. The little circles of their egotisms have to be opened
out until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose.
And this that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously
yourselves. Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort of skill,
every sort of service, love: these are the means of salvation
from that narrow loneliness of desire, that brooding
preoccupation with self and egotistical relationships, which is
hell for the individual, treason to the race, and exile from
God…'
Section 12
As things round themselves off and accomplish themselves, one
begins for the first time to see them clearly. From the
perspectives of a new age one can look back upon the great and
widening stream of literature with a complete understanding.
Things link up that seemed disconnected, and things that were
once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be but factors in
the statement of a gigantic problem. An enormous bulk of the
sincerer writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth
centuries falls together now into an unanticipated unanimity; one
sees it as a huge tissue of variations upon one theme, the
conflict of human egotism and personal passion and narrow
imaginations on the one hand, against the growing sense of wider
necessities and a possible, more spacious life.
That conflict is in evidence in so early a work as Voltaire's
Candide, for example, in which the desire for justice as well as
happiness beats against human contrariety and takes refuge at
last in a forced and inconclusive contentment with little things.
Candide was but one of the pioneers of a literature of uneasy
complaint that was presently an innumerable multitude of books.
The novels more particularly of the nineteenth century, if one
excludes the mere story-tellers from our consideration, witness
to this uneasy realisation of changes that call for effort and of
the lack of that effort. In a thousand aspects, now tragically,
now comically, now with a funny affectation of divine detachment,
a countless host of witnesses tell their story of lives fretting
between dreams and limitations. Now one laughs, now one weeps,
now one reads with a blank astonishment at this huge and almost
unpremeditated record of how the growing human spirit, now