What is the way out? The question that was universal during the war, “How has this thing come?” gives place to the other that is no less poignant and no less universal, “What is the way out?” There must be a way; this coil of uttermost confusion must be solvable, must be solved—if only we knew the way! There can be no going back, of that we are sure, and the industry of the serious-minded men, busy with set faces and a brave optimism, in their cheerful efforts to restore the old course of events after an accidental interlude, fills us with a kind of shame that people who have lived through the war should have learned so little both of the war and from it. Four years have ended the work of four centuries and—there is no going back. “Finis” has been written at the end of a long episode and there is no way by which we can knit together again the strands that are severed forever. There is even less desire than ability. It does not show very well in the red light of war, that act in the great world-drama that opened with the dissolution of Mediævalism and the coming of the Renaissance; that developed through the Reformation, the revolutions of the eighteenth century and the sequent industrialism, to its climax and catastrophe in war. There is little in it we would have back if we could, but the unstable equilibrium in which we hang for the moment, poised between reactionism and universal anarchy, cannot last; already the balance is inclining towards chaos, and in the six months that will intervene between the writing of this and its publication it may very well be that the decision of inertia will be made and the plunge effected that will bring us down into that unintelligent repetition of history now so clearly indicated in Russia, Austria, Germany. We can neither return nor remain but—would we go on, at least along the lines that are at present indicated? Are we tempted by the savage and stone-age ravings and ravenings of Bolshevism? Have we any inclination towards that super-imperialism of the pacifist-internationalist-Israelitish “League of Free Nations” that comes in such questionable shape? Does State Socialism with all its materialistic mechanisms appeal to us? Other alleviation is not offered and in these we can see no encouragement.
It is the eternal dilemma of the Two Alternatives, which is nevertheless no more than a vicious sophism: “Either you will take this or you must have that,” the starling-cry of partizan politics by which “democracies” have lived. In all human affairs there are never only two alternatives, there is always a third and sometimes more; but this unrecognized alternative never commands that popular leadership which “carries the election,” and it does not appeal to a public that prefers the raw obviousness of the extremes. Yet it is the third alternative that is always the right one, except when the God-made leaders, the time having come for a new upward rush of the vital force in society, put themselves in the vanguard of the new advance and lift the world with them, as it were by main force. Reactionism or Bolshevism: “Under which king, Bezonian? Speak or die!” We are told that the old world of before-the-war must be restored in its integrity or we must fall a victim to the insane anarchy of a proletariat in revolt, and for many of us there is little to choose between the two. We have seen how fragile, artificial and insecure is civilization, how instantly and hopelessly it can crumble into a sort of putrid dissolution the moment its conventions are challenged and the ultimate principles of democracy are put in practice, and we do not like it. We have seen Russia, Germany, Hungary, and sporadic but disquieting examples in every State, no matter how conservative it may be or how successful in a first stamping out of the flame. On the other hand, we saw the triumph of “Modern Civilization” in the twenty-five years preceding the Great War, and as we realize now what it was, through the revelations it has made of itself during the last five years, we like it quite as little as the other. We see it now as an impossible farrago of false values, of loud-mouthed sentimentality and crude, cold-blooded practices; of gross, all-pervading injustice sicklied o’er with the pale cast of smug humanitarianism; a democracy of form that was without ideal or reality in practice; imperialism, materialism and the quantitative standard. Is there no alternative other than this, restored in its unvarying ugliness of fact and of manifestation, or the imitative era of a new Dark Ages which will be brought to pass by the new hordes of Huns and Vandals that again, after fifteen centuries, menace a greater Imperialism than Rome with an identical fate? There is a third alternative; there may be more, but the one which makes its argument for acceptance on the basis of history and experience is here put forward for consideration.
In three books already published in this series which has been issued from time to time during the Great War—“The Nemesis of Mediocrity,” “The Great Thousand Years” and “The Sins of the Fathers”—I have tried to determine certain of the causes which led to the tragical débâcle of modern civilization at the very moment of its highest supremacy; and now while mediocrity pitifully struggles to meet and solve an avalanche of problems it cannot cope withal, and anarchy, like Alaric and Attila and Genseric at the head of their united hosts, beat against the dissolving barriers of a forlorn and impotent and discredited culture, I would try to find some hints of the saving alternative, and if possible discover some way out of the deadly impasse in which the world finds itself.
From “The Nemesis of Mediocrity” it should be sufficiently clear that I do not believe that any mechanical devices whatever will serve the purpose: neither the buoyant plan to “make the world safe for democracy,” nor any extension and amplification of “democratic” methods onward to woman’s suffrage or direct legislation or proletarian absolutism through Russian soviets, nor socialistic panaceas varying from a mild collectivism to Marxism and the Internationale, nor a league of nations and an imposing but impotent “Covenant,” nor even a world-wide “League to Enforce Peace.” We have heard something too much of late of peace, and not enough of justice; peace is not an end in itself, it is rather a by-product of justice. Through justice the world can attain peace, but through peace there is no guaranty that justice may be achieved. There must always be the material enginery through the operation of which the ideal is put into practice, but in the ideal lies the determining force, whether for good or evil, and by just so far as this is right in its nature will the mechanism operate for good ends. The best agent in the world, even the Catholic Church or the American Republic, may be employed towards evil and vicious ends whenever the energizing force is of a nature that operates towards darkness and away from the light.
I have tried in “The Sins of the Fathers,” to prove that the marks of degeneracy and constructive evil in the modernism that went to its ruin during the Great War, and is now accomplishing its destiny in the even more tragical epoch of after-the-war, are its imperialism, its materialism and its quantitative standard—that is to say, its acceptance of the gross aggregate in place of the unit of human scale, its standard of values which rejected the passion for perfection in favour of the numerical equivalent, and its denial of spirit as a reality rather than a mere mode of material action—while the only salvation for society is to be found in the restoration, in all things, of small human units, the testing of all things by value not bulk, and the acceptance once more of the philosophy of sacramentalism.
It would be possible, I suppose, to develop a detailed scheme for the reconstruction of the world along certain definite lines that would be in accordance with these principles, but the question would at once arise, How could it be made to work? Frankly, the question is unanswerable except by a categorical negative. The nineteenth-century superstition that life proceeds after an inevitable system of progressive evolution, so defiant of history, so responsible in great degree for the many delusions that made the war not only possible but inevitable, finds few now to do it honour. The soul is not forever engaged in the graceful industry of building for itself ever more stately mansions; it is quite as frequently employed in defiling and destroying those already built, and in substituting the hovel for the palace. It is not even, except at infrequent intervals, desirous of improving its condition. As a whole, man is not an animal that is eager for enlightenment that it may follow after the right. At certain crescent periods in the long process of history, when great prophets and leaders are raised up, it is forced, even against its will, to follow after the leaders when once the prophets have been conscientiously stoned, and great and wonderful things result—Athens, Rome, Byzantium, Venice, Sicily, the cities of the Middle Ages, Flanders, Elizabethan England—but the untoward exertion is its own executioner, and always society sinks back into some form of barbarism from whence all is to be begun again.
Nor is education—free, universal, secular and “efficient”—an universal panacea for this persistent disease of backsliding; it is not even a palliative or a prophylactic. The most intensive educational period ever known had issue in the most preposterous war in history, initiated by the most highly and generally educated of all peoples, by them given a new content of disgrace and savagery, and issuing at last into Bolshevism and an obscene anarchy that would be ridiculous but for the omnipresent horror. And the same is true both of industrialism and democracy, for both have belied the promises of their instigators and have brought in, not peace and plenty and liberty, but universal warfare, outrageous poverty, and the tyranny of the ignorant and the unfit.
Before the revelations of war, while the curious superstitions of the nineteenth century were still in vogue, it was widely held that evolution, education and democracy were irresistible, and that progress from then on must be continuous and by arithmetical if not geometrical progression. When the war came and the revelations began to unfold themselves, it was held with equal comprehensiveness that even if our civilization had been an illusion, our trinity of mechanistic saviours but a bundle of broken reeds, the war itself would prove a great regenerative agency, and that out of its fiery purgation would issue forth a new spirit that would redeem the world. It is a fair question to ask whether those that once saw this bow of promise in the red skies have found the gold at the rainbow’s end or are now even sure the radiance itself has not faded into nothingness.
Every great war exhibits at least two phenomena following on from its end: the falling back into an abyss of meanness, materialism and self-seeking, with the swift disappearance of the spiritual exaltation developed during the fight, and the emergence sooner or later of isolated personalities who have retained the ardour of spiritual regeneration, who seem indeed to epitomize it within themselves, and who struggle, sometimes with success, sometimes with failure, to bring the mass of people back to their lost ideals and embody these in a better type of society. Apparently success or failure depends on whether the particular war in question came on the rise or the fall of the rhythmical curve that conditions all history.
At the present moment the first of these two phenomena has shown itself. Whether it is in Russia or in the fragments of the despoiled Central Empires where the ominous horror of Bolshevism riots in a carnival of obscene destruction, or in the governments and “interests” and amongst the peoples of the Allies, there is now, corporately, no evidence of anything but a general break-down of ideals, and either an accelerating plunge into something a few degrees worse than barbarism, with the Dark Ages as its inevitable issue, or an equally fatal return to the altogether hopeless, indeed the pestilential, standards and methods of the fruition of modernism in the world-before-the-war. The new warfare is between these, the malignant old Two Alternatives; fear of one encompasses the other, and in each case all that is done is with the terror of Bolshevism conditioning all on the one hand, terror of reactionism on the other. Expediency, desperate self-preservation, is the controlling passion, and the principles of justice, right and reason are no longer operative.
As this is written there is no sure indication as to which of these alternatives is to prevail, but it is for the moment quite clearly indicated that it will be the one or the other,—either the tyranny of the degraded, Bolshevism, universal anarchy, with the modernist reversal of all values succeeded by the post-modernist destruction of all values, or the triumph of reaction, with a return to the world-before-the-war for a brief period of profligate excess along all materialistic, intellectual and scientific lines not unlike the Restoration period of Charles II, with the same ruin achieved in the end though after a certain interlude. And yet the third alternative is theoretically possible: escape from the Scylla and Charybdis of error through the opportune development of the second phenomenon, the reasonable certainty of which is indicated by history—the appearance of those leaders of vision and power who had been generated through the alchemy of war.
That in the end they will come we need not doubt, but in the meantime an errant world, leaderless and ungoverned, is urged swiftly on towards catastrophe of either one sort or another, nor will it wait the coming of the indispensable leaders. It is not from the men whose potential greatness was perfected and revealed by war, Cardinal Mercier, for example, or Marshal Foch, great leaders absolutely of the first class, that solution is to be sought, for in their age is sufficient inhibition. It is rather from those whose character has actually been made by war, youths perhaps, who have fought and found, either in the armies or the navies or in the air, or even in some of the non-combatant branches of the Service. Boys they are now, perhaps, in years, but into them has been poured the energizing power that leads to mastership; to them is given the first fire of progressive revelation. Somewhere, in the still active units, on the way back to their homes and to civil life, or already mingled in the activities from which they were called for their great testing, are those who sooner or later will find themselves the leaders of the quest for a new life for the world. The Divine finger-touch has been granted them, the spark of inspiration has lightened in their souls, but seldom is the generation swift; it may be years before it is effected, and meanwhile only the Two Alternatives remain.
For my own purpose in this book, perhaps indeed so far as society itself is concerned, it is a matter of indifference which is the victor in the fight for supremacy; the ultimate issue will be the same though the roads are various. Universal beastliness issuant of Russia, or universal materialism redivivus, the conditions of life will be intolerable, and in the end a new thing will be built up as different on the one hand to anarchy as on the other it is different to the industrial-democratic-materialist régime of the immediate past. With the former we are assured some five hundred years not unlike those that followed the fall of Rome; with the latter we at least are given the respite of a brief Restoration, during which the war-bred potencies may mature, and at the end of the few gross years which would be allotted to this status quo ante-civilization, become operative to avert the horror of a recrudescent Bolshevism. At least so we may hope; on the other hand it may be doubted whether, after all, a revived and intensified materialism such as that which the reactionary element is attempting, would not afford an even less favourable and stimulating soil for fostering the possible war-potentialities than would red anarchy, for the suffocating qualities of gross luxuriance are sometimes more fatal than the desperate sensations of danger, adversity and shame. In any case, the immediate future is not one to be anticipated with enthusiasm or confidence and we shall do well to consider the course to be followed by those who reject the Two Alternatives and refuse to have any part in either.