The roving critic

The Cosmic Ironies sat on a bright island in the midst of the Galaxy, holding a caucus over the universe’s affairs. Boötes flamed, Orion glowed, Scorpio glittered, Ursa Major sulked, Eridanus sprawled and yawned, Canis Major and Canis Minor eyed each other distrustfully, Centaurus and Pegasus huddled close and whispered at intervals. Boötes, it appeared, had just been speaking, and there were still reverberations of his great voice in the ether, while the glare of difference or assent with which he had been greeted by his fellows played upon him from every quarter and illuminated the enormous scene, now red with fire, now blue with space, now opaline with shifting moods of the Ironies.

Into this circle, before one of those present had had time to break the meditative silence, came a brisk invader in burning yellow who walked round the seated group and was obviously chagrined to find that no place had been kept for him.

“I say, brothers of the universe,” he began, “it seems to me this committee has been closed long enough. It needs new blood. One of you move over and let me in.”

If any heard him, at least there was no sign. The reverberations of Boötes’s words travelled farther away and the light from his listeners gradually ceased playing upon him; but the charmed occasion was not apparently disturbed.

“Well, it doesn’t seem very hospitable. I sent word I was coming, and look how you receive me. And, as they say on the Earth, I think it isn’t representative. The Solar System has a right to be here and a right to be heard. Perhaps we are a little younger than some of you, but that excuse won’t hold for ever. Youth, as they say on Jupiter, is no crime.”

Somewhere a star exploded and threw a momentary brilliance over the caucus, so that the gems on the brows of the Ironies sparkled as if they were actually Betelgeux and Aldebaran and Spica and Arcturus and Capella and Sirius and Altair. None of the brooding figures started at the explosion, however, much less at the accusations of the Solar Irony.

“Have I got to repeat all I told you before about the ironic work I and my helpers have done in the Solar System? I must say I am tired of telling it. You ought not to close your minds the way you do to new inventions and discoveries. The first thing you know you’ll all be so out of date that this radical doctrine about the moral government of the world will spread and ruin all your schemes. If you don’t wake up pretty soon it won’t matter whether you ever wake.”

From one of the Ironies a red glow and from another a blue flame and from yet another a white radiance swept around the circle as if looking to see who would speak next, but, settling upon no one, they mingled in the centre and there rested quietly, splashing the pavement with gorgeous colours.

“Take what’s going on in Mars today if you want to test my right to sit in this conclave. I have bilked the Martians into thinking that their everlasting messages to Earth are understood. So those philanthropists have wasted a mountain of treasure making instruments to carry their pompous flashes, and they babble wisdom into the void—as if their wisdom actually mattered or as if Earth would or could pay any attention to it if it ever reached there! You strike me as glum enough, but if you could only see the prophets and poets crowding around that transmitter and pouring all they have and are into it, and then going back to their business with the thick smirk of a duty performed—if you could see that you would laugh a month. That’s what I’ve done in the Solar System: I’ve trained the higher beings to prattle wisdom till they are hoarse and then not to practise it any more than if they were deaf and had never heard of it.”

It may have been some vibration of sympathy which ran through the Ironies or it may have been merely deeper thoughts stirring them to resume the huge discourse.

“For that matter, take Earth alone as evidence of what I can do when I try. The scrawny race of bipeds who think they manage Earth have come up from the slime by the exercise of their wits, trampling the slower races under their heels for thousands of years to make a bare living, and yet, now they have explored all the paths of Earth and dug up its riches and learned to cultivate its fruits, they are acting as if they couldn’t imagine any better future than to take the path back again into the slime. But do they listen to even the petty wisdom a few of them have got at? No, they strut about as they always have, blown up with pride that they are human and not like the other beasts which they have driven into the wilds or else made into slaves. Man, proud man! You should see him. And I have taught him both to be all this and to admire himself. Now why can’t I come into the caucus?”

Surely something was stirring in the moods of the Ironies. Ursa Major, who had been almost grey in his sullenness, darted awakened glances around the circle, coruscating, it seemed, with thought. Orion sent out an iridescent gleam, fanned by quicker and quicker breath. The whole place grew so bright that each ironic countenance shone in comparison with the waves of the Galaxy which beat upon the island.

“But I have done more than all that to win my seat. Those same bipeds, who have been clever enough to map and weigh the stars, have made them gods in their own scrawny image and have laid out heavens on the plan of their desires. And I have taught them to lay the blame of their follies on their gods and to call the consequences their just punishment; I have taught them, moreover, to endure whatever comes, no matter how much the fault of men, in the confidence that they will shortly die and be born again into a world which will make good their wrongs and agonies; I have, in fact, persuaded that tiny race, on its mortal star, that it is the heart and heir and purpose and crown of the universe.”

Now for the first time the great silence was broken by bursts of laughter which shook the zenith and perturbed the Galaxy. From each of the giant faces leaped rays of fearful brilliance, revolving like wheels, interlacing in an ineffable net of light. The Cosmic Ironies rocked in their seats with mirth, smote one another on knee and shoulder, tossed their giant arms in paroxysms of delight, and shouted genial invitations to the candidate.

The Solar Irony stepped forward and sat down between Canis Major and Canis Minor, who unhesitantly made room for him.

JUSTICE OR MELODRAMA?

Notions about justice, in the heads of dull or selfish or angry men, have done so much harm that I sometimes despairingly inquire whether it would not be better if the very principle itself had never been discovered. Dull men follow paths which they have been told are just until they ruin them with ruts. Selfish men are just only to themselves with a complacency denied to those who have no doctrine to sustain them. Angry men vindicate their rages and unreason by pointing to the primitive sense—father of revenge and vendetta—from which we with so much difficulty free ourselves in the long progress toward civil conditions. If justice, according to an enthusiastic hyperbole of Emerson’s, is the rhyme of things, then the vulgar conceptions of it are no more than tinkling couplets. A blow struck must rhyme instanter with a blow received; an eye rhymes with an eye, a tooth with a tooth, burning with burning, and strife with strife. Or, to allude to another mode of literature, justice in its primitive aspects is merely melodrama, wherein virtue is always rewarded with prosperity and evil is always fatally punished.

The mood which followed the war was the mood of melodrama, on a larger scale, perhaps, than ever before in human history. Germany, seen solely as a bully and a brute, had been beaten at her own foul game; therefore let her be joyously annihilated, while the gallery gods who filled the theatre of the world almost from top to bottom hooted and gloried at the justice weighed out to her. What made it harder to contend against the uproar was that the uproar at first thought seemed justifiable. Nemesis never looks like so righteous a doctor as when he feeds a poisoner his own poison. But I always suspect first thoughts. For civilization, after all, is but the substitution for first thoughts of second or third or hundredth thoughts, reason supplanting passion, and polity guiding anarchic instinct. Melodrama is what commonly occurs to us first, in the form of those too neat or too hasty moral conclusions to which we are all more or less prone to jump when we allow ourselves to indulge too amply the sense of primitive justice which we share with all the savages of our ancestry.

Men do not, of course, jump too hastily to conclusions merely by reason of their ruder sense of justice. There is involved also a certain obscure instinct toward art, toward rounding out and completing and closing a chapter. Paradox cheerfully says, not forgetting Oscar Wilde, that affairs in 1918-1920 were trying to conform to dramaturgy, that the war was trying to shape itself a good fifth act. But paradox is not needed, for few things are clearer than that centuries of literature were then indeed influencing the world’s attitude toward the peace and the treaty. Obscurely, again let it be emphasized, men had felt that they were witnessing, or acting, the vastest of dramas. The curtain, for them, rose sharply with the Austrian ultimatum and the invasion of Belgium. The sinking of the Lusitania, say, was the villain’s fatal blunder, which brought against him a fresh, powerful enemy. The odds then deserting him, he hazarded all on a single blow, lost, and came down in a fearful wreck with the spent world falling about him. Was it not due and natural that there should descend another curtain to hide the bloody stage, and that the lights should flash sharply on, and that the spectators should turn away, contented though somewhat subdued, to eat, drink, and make love, possibly commenting upon the actors and their art? Of course the peace on which the curtain fell had to be dramatically satisfying, the villain dead or prostrate and the hero in the ascendant. The sense of form must be served, the taste for melodramatic finality gratified. If the piece ended happily for the victors, justice had been done.

Justice or melodrama? It is only in art, and that not always the truest, that things come out so right. History has no beginning, no middle, no end, but moves everlastingly in some dim direction of which mankind at least does not know the secret. Poets and dramatists may honourably pilfer from history such materials as they require, and may of course work them into forms more compact or conclusive than life itself. But history cannot be handled so masterfully, for one can never be sure at what point in it one is standing. When the Lusitania went down, no one knew whether her loss opened the first act or the last. When America entered the war no one could be sure whether the fourth act of five or of fifty acts had ended. And no one could say that the peace absolutely concluded the drama. The business of the treaty was not to close the war but to open the peace, not to avenge those who died but to preserve those who still lived, not to crown events past with poetic justice, which belongs to the technique of melodrama, but to prepare for events to come by trusting to the higher and humaner justice which is less concerned with righting old wrongs than with trying to foresee and prevent new wrongs—the justice, let me call it, of plain prose.

THE CORRUPTION OF COMFORT

Someone lately asked me by what image I would represent the age that began with the use of steam and ended with the World War. I was not sure that any age had actually ended then, but an image did occur to me. It came from the story of the fisherman in the Thousand Nights and a Night who let the Jinni out of the jar and then found him fierce and uncontrollable. But upon second thought I saw that the image was not accurate: the fisherman by using his wits did persuade the spirit back into his copper prison and made a bargain with him which saved the man from death. Then another image occurred to me. It was that of a crew of pirates who chanced upon an unexpected island and there found such incalculable treasure that they went mad with their good fortune, raged up and down the island, extended their fury to a whole archipelago, and at last wound up in a debauch of robbery and slaughter. But neither did this image satisfy me: the people of the last age were not criminals to start with; they were as virtuous as those of any other age on—or not on—record. A better image would be that of some tribe of anthropoids who, after long subsisting on a more or less difficult plane of life, suddenly got hold of a hundred tricks and secrets which gave them power over earth, air, fire, and water, endowing them with human riches without human discipline.

And yet it is less than fair to make this distinction between men and their lagging cousins of the tree-tops. Not monkeys too abruptly promoted to be men but men come too abruptly into wealth—that is the analogy. Thinking in terms of the long history of the race, look what happened. Never before, to put it broadly, had men been warm enough except in those regions of the earth where the sun warmed them; now they dug up mountains of coal and drew off rivers of oil and fashioned whole atmospheres of gas for fuel; and with these, besides warming themselves, they made such tools and weapons as had not even been dreamed of. Never before, still to put it broadly, had men had food enough; now they discovered how to coax unprecedented crops out of the soil and how to breed new armies of beasts to be devoured and how to catch what the depths of forests and oceans had hitherto denied them and how to create all sorts of novel foods by manufacture. Never before had men, except in dangerous, communal migrations, moved much from their native places; now they made vehicles and ships to go like the wind and in time took to the wind itself for their trafficking until restless tides of human life flowed here and there over the surface of the earth as if men and nations had no such things as homes. Long naked, they covered themselves with preposterous garments and strutted up and down; long hungry, they stuffed their bellies till they were sick with surfeit; long home-bound, they ran wild till they were lost.

Meanwhile their minds could not keep pace with this enormous increase of their goods. Their ancestors, it may be guessed, had taken centuries to accustom themselves to the use of fire and of the successive machines they had invented; they had taken centuries to find out those parts of the earth they knew. In the last age such processes were accelerated to a dash and a scramble. Things poured in upon minds and overwhelmed them. The century in retrospect has a bewildered look, like a baby at a circus: some art which it could hardly comprehend had brought a universe into a tumbling, twisting focus and the century’s head ached with the effort to find a meaning in it. To vertigo succeeded what was probably an actual madness of the race—but a madness with the least possible method. Everywhere a wild activity occupied the faculties of those who followed affairs; and—though the finest intelligences dissented—among the sophists who encouraged such activity was an even greater frenzy of bewilderment.

Call what happened the corruption of comfort. Men had so long been cold and starved and isolated that they clutched at the chance to wrest every advantage from stubborn nature, and they clutched it faster than they could put it to sound uses. Discomfort was one of the penalties of their madness. Nerves in the loud din of the new age learned new agonies. Confusions grew and desperations thrived till the whole earth was on a tension out of which anything might develop. What did develop was the war which wrapped the world in horror. To ascribe it to this or that particular cause or guilt is to see it in terms too small. The race of man was gorged and could not digest its meal; it was drunk and could not control its motions; it was mad and could not understand its course. In the long run the observer of mankind must look back upon the last age as one of the several moments in the history of the race when it has blundered into mania and cruelly hurt itself before it could find its head again.

The race is very old and it doubtless has many aeons still to live before the cooling of the planet sends it back to its aboriginal state. Nor is there use or sense in imagining that the race might return to the simpler conditions that existed before the era of superfluous things. Things are. Hope must be seen to lie in the direction of their assimilation by the human mind. Here and there different prophets insist that the mind is on the verge of some discovery as large as Columbus’s which will establish a truer balance between it and the matter which now outweighs it. But why put trust in miracles? The madness of the age is more likely to subside gradually, under quiet counsels, as the debauch wears out its influence. Slowly the mind must lift its faith in itself up above its temporary obsession with mere things. It must learn to hold and master all of them which are capable of being held and mastered. It must become accustomed to live among the rest of them as a mountaineer becomes accustomed to live in the city streets after the panic which overcomes him when first he enters them from the high silences and pure outlooks of his native hills.

“GOD IS NOT DEAD OF OLD AGE”

It is a pleasant literary speculation, and not without its moral bearings, to inquire whether the disorder and discontent and chaos now ominous among men may not arise from the fact that the world has grown too large for us to manage—like a lion cub which can no longer be played with or like another mechanical monster which indeed we have created but which refuses to do our bidding any longer. A man of affairs, a financier certainly not acclimated to philosophic despair and certainly accustomed to govern wherever his hand turns, lately ventured such an explanation. It may be, he said, that there is no solution which our reason can arrive at. We look about us for authentic leaders and see none; we pass in review hundreds of counsels but find none that seem in all ways to suit—unless we are doctrinaires; assuredly of all the schemes we have tried no one has been successful. By what right do we assume that some such device for salvation exists? Plagues have come before for which there was no cure. Our crisis may be one of them. It may be that the day of solutions is over. H. G. Wells would have us search history to find our future there—or at least some track pointing to a future we can reasonably confide in. But perhaps he was just as near the truth in his younger scientific days when he gave us vivid pictures of men who travelled beyond the known areas of our kind, no longer the engineers of their own destiny but drifting about at the convenience of fate. We think of Anatole France, voluptuously contemplating the age when our earth shall have grown too cold for human habitation and men have gradually died away among the ice hummocks of a universal frozen sea. Or, bitterest of all, we remember Thomas Hardy’s fancy of the delegate sent up to God to ask about the direful state of the planet, only to learn that God had utterly forgotten us and but dimly recollects that He had made us so long ago and had meant to destroy His experiment when He saw how contemptible it was. Beyond Hardy on that path of reflection lies merely such madness as drove Swift to his Yahoos and Houyhnhnms. And if we dare the path the only escapes from madness are some Asiatic discipline of the will to the peace of acquiescence or some sleek optimism shutting its eyes to all the evidences of horror and chattering and eating and wooing merrily among them.

Along that path lies madness—but we need not take that path. Nor is it a trivial optimism alone that can hold us back. Without doubt too many men and women in the world are too optimistic. After the excessive and artificial strain imposed upon them by the war their spirits have relapsed, their consciences have grown dull, and they have sat down for a vacation among the ruins. This is one of the innumerable prices which mankind pays for the mad luxury of war. But it is still too early to conclude that civilization is a wreck. Civilization is very old, and every new exploration among its ancient monuments makes clear that it is older than we thought before. The Mousterian, the Aurignacian, the Solutrian, the Magdalenian, the Azilian, the Neolithic ages must each have seen in its particular downfall the end of mankind; and yet thousands of years were still to elapse before there followed what we have till recently called the dawn of civilization. The destruction of the great Minoan city of Cnossus, Havelock Ellis maintains, may have been a more memorable event in the history of human affairs than the catastrophe from which we are trying to recover. To certain types of mind a view of history so extensive as this is like a first realization of the vastness of the physical universe. If time is so long and space so wide we are but momentary and infinitesimal insects whom it is scarcely worth any one’s efforts, even our own, to preserve. Yet the advances of civilization have been largely effected through just this enlarging vision of our natures and our cosmic residence. After the first despair, not unlike that of a child strayed from the nursery into a crowd, comes a sense of greater dignity at being part of a structure so vast, a new hopefulness that what has endured from everlasting will still endure. The Spanish peasants have a proverb with which they console themselves when there seems no other consolation: “God is not dead of old age.” In such a saying Sancho Panza touches Aristotle. Aristotle could think of a universe without beginning or end, moving indeed toward no definite point but moving always through successions of being. Less metaphysical, the peasant knows as truly that rain follows sunshine and harvest the time for planting, and that in each new season the old labours come back to be done again.

In the midst of our worst distresses we have need of some such cooling wisdom. It is, of course, the faith of men who have not hoped for too specific a mortal or immortal career. We do not hasten to console the lover who has lost his mistress by telling him that for ages there will still be love and mistresses. We do not hasten to assure the man who has just failed of a fortune that though he is poor the sum of the world’s wealth is still the same. And yet both these things are true. The truth to be remembered is that in the very world where thrive the ardours of the lover and the seeker of his individual fortune, and where tragedy goes with defeat, there exist also such perennial processes as the patience of the grass and the slow healing of time. There is a spacious rule of life which has rarely been formulated but which is probably held by most enlightened men and which better than any other combines ardour with ripeness of reflection—a rule which in effect says that though we should work at our appointed tasks as if everything hung upon success we should afterwards regard each success or failure as something which really does not matter. Thus only can we advance with our fullest power; thus only can we free ourselves from the past when we are done with it, not moaning too loudly over defeat or being too vainly elated by some little victory. To extremists such an attitude will seem a frivolous compromise. It is the solemn hallucination of the hopeful that by ardour and by ardour alone can the world be saved, and that each defeat of each plan he follows will mean disaster. It is the cheerful prejudice of the desperate that in spite of temporary oscillations here and there nothing is really to be gained by ardours, for when they have cooled the world will continue its decreed procession down a road paved with ardours flattened under its solid tread. But between them is that temperate zone where men are continually warmed by the fires that keep mankind alive and yet draw from the long records of civilization the wisdom that shows them how to keep the fire within its bounds, that it may do its work without waste and destruction.