THE ISLANDS OF THE BLESSED

(Read at a Conference on the National Life of the Allied Countries, Stratford-on-Avon, August, 1916.)

I suppose there are Britons who have never seen the sea; thousands, perhaps—unfortunate. But is there a Briton who has not in some sort the feeling that he is a member of a great ship’s crew? Is there one who never rejoices that his Land sails in space, unboarded, untouched by other lands? It must be strange to be native of a country where, strolling forth, one may pass into the fields or woods of another race. In all that we are, have been, and shall be, the sea comes first—the sea, sighing up quiet beaches, thundering off headlands, the sea blue and smiling under our white cliffs, or lashing the long sands, the sea out beyond foreshore and green fields, or rolling in on wind-blown rocks and wastes. The sea with its smile, and its frown, and its restless music; the grim, loyal, protecting sea—our mother and our comrade, our mysterious friend!

The ancients dreamed of “the islands of the blessed”; we of these green and misty isles almost, I think, believe that we inhabit them.

A strange and abiding sense is love of Country! Though reason may revolt, and life here be hard, ugly, thankless, though one may even say, “I care no more for my own countrymen than for those of other lands; I am a citizen of the world!” No use! A stealing love has us fast bound; a web of who knows what memories of misty fields, and scents of clover and turned earth; of summer evenings, when sounds are far and clear; of long streets half-lighted, and town sights, not beautiful but homely; of the skies we were born beneath, and the roads we have trodden all our lives. What memories, too, of names and tales, small visions all upside down perhaps, yet true and warm to us because we listened and saw when we were no older than foals at their dams’ heels. It is not our actual Country, but its halo, that we love—the halo each one of us has made for it. There are evenings under the moon, dewy mornings, late afternoons, when over field and wood, over moor or park or town, unearthliness hovers; so, over our native land hovers a glamour that burns brighter when we are absent, and flames up in glory above her when we see her driven or hard pressed. No man yet knows the depths of our love for these islands of the blessed. May no man ever know it!

And to each of us there will be some ingle-nook where the spirit of our country most inhabits, where the fire of hearth and home glows best, and draws us with its warmth from wanderings bodily or spiritual. To know that in these isles no native-born but has a quiet shrine, be it lovely, or devoid of earthly beauty, where he or she in fancy worships the whole land, gives reality to the word Patriotism.

This love of country is so deep and sacred that we cannot utter it; let us not forget that it is as deep and sacred to the natives of other lands!

Looking back into the dark of history, how quaint is our origin—offspring of invading robbers, wave after wave, for some two thousand years before the Norman Conquest! If these be not in truth the blessed islands that the ancients dreamed of, they seem to have been sufficiently attractive. Who our Neolithic forerunners were, whence they came, or whether they were here before our isles cut loose from the mainland and set out on an endless voyage, we shall never, I suppose, know. A strain of their blood, more than we think perhaps, must still be alive within us; the rest of it is freebooting fluid—Celts and Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans, all robbers; blent at last—and in Ireland not yet quite blent—to the observance of honour among thieves.

Ever since the sea brought us here—all but the Neolithic few—in the long-ships of the past, what a slow, ceaseless fusing has gone to the making of the modern Briton—that most singular among men! I hold the theory—how far scientifically tenable I know not—that the continued vitality of a race depends on two main conditions: the presence of many strains of blood not too violently differing one from the other, and the absence of too much sun. I hold that nations may become too inbred; or may have the sap dried out of them by heat. In Britain we cannot yet have reached the point of perfect fusion—are not in danger for a long time of becoming too inbred. Nor can the sun be called a desperate peril. We are “game,” as they say, for centuries yet; unless——! For our besetting danger is another.

How many of us realize that far beyond all other nations we are town dwellers, subject to town blight? That is a new, an insidious, malady, whose virulence we have hardly yet appreciated or had time to study. Can it be arrested by homœopathy—or must sweeping allopathic remedies be applied? Will town blight be cured by better town conditions, and our gradual adaptation—or by going back to the land? By both. But, if not by both within the next half-century, then—I fear—by neither. Town blight has had as yet but two full generations to lay its grip on us. We have time for its defeat if we have courage and sense. But it is an enemy more deadly than the Germans; not so easy to see and to fight against!

When children first discover gooseberries or other kindly fruits of the earth, they eat too quickly and too much. We were the first people to discover the means to “happiness” known as modern industrialism. With huge appetite we set upon it, and are caught by surfeit. I have heard this view of our case seriously countered—the Cockney and the northern townsman are thought to be our most vital types. Verily they have a pretty courage; but to such as are light-hearted on this matter I would say: “Go, in summer, to some seaside place where humble townsfolk have come to make holiday, as healthy and little pallid as they ever are, and—watch. Then wing off to some remote fishing village, or countryside where such peasants as are left are not too badly off, and—watch. Then summon your candour, and tell in which of your two fields of observation you have seen more vigour of limb, beauty of face, or at all events more freedom from petty distortions and a look of dwindling.”

I cannot explain exactly what I mean by town blight. It is not mere pallor or weakliness, but rather a loss of balance—a tendency to jut here and be squashed in there; an over-narrowness of head; an over-development of this feature at the expense of that; with a look of living too fast, of giving out more than is taken in. The modifications of the Briton through town life are countless, and all the time subtly going on. I do not deny that there is much good, too, in the transformation—the quickening of a temperament by no means quick; a widening of sympathies in a character not too sympathetic; the deepening of humaneness and the love of justice in a nature with an old Adam in it of brutality. A frank humanitarian and humanist, like myself, dwells cheerfully on that, for it does seem, while other changes in human life are always arguable—such as the increase of efficiency purchased by loss of breadth and kindliness; economic gain by loss of health and balance; greater will-power by loss of understanding and tolerance—that the increase of humane instinct, with which is bound up the love of justice, is alone sheer gain. Some, I know, think it bought at the expense of what is called “virility.” To those I recommend a steady glimpse at the modern British sailor. Of late years I have been reading accounts of Arctic and Antarctic exploration. There is no better study for those who doubt whether men can be brave and hard and at the same time chivalrous and gentle. One returns from mental travel with those heroes convinced that true humanity and gentleness and justice actually depend on bravery and stoicism. Picked men, you say! Well, go to the British Fleet, or the British Army—in a word, to the British male population of robust age—and you will come back, I believe, with the same general conviction—that where the truest bravery is there also is humaneness—that these qualities grow naturally twined together. All evidence from the war proves that the Briton is as hard a fighter, and far better behaved, than he ever was. Better behaviour under war conditions means nothing but increase in each individual fighter, of just and humane instinct, and that sense of personal responsibility which is the other main advantage coming to us from town life. In towns a man finds his level, acquires the corporate sense, sees himself as part of the civic whole, learns that his own ills are shared by too many, to bear thinking of save with a touch of humour and contempt. The British sailor whose shattered arm was being dressed in the battle of Jutland well summed up what I mean: “To hell with my arm, doctor; I want to get up there again and give the boys a hand!” That would seem very much the spirit of the modern town-bred British.

Now, is there anything which in some sort differentiates this Britain of ours from other lands?

A country is such a huge conglomeration of types and qualities; such a seething mass of energies! It seems sometimes as impossible to thread one’s way to the heart of that maze as to fix the pattern of a thousand gnats dancing in a sunlit lane! One turns eyes here, there, follows this movement and that, thinks one has the clue, falls back gaping. Is there any essence which sets the British soul apart, as an oak is set apart from beech or lime tree? Can there, indeed, be any single essence in a land where Iberian and Celt, Saxon and Norseman, still quarrel in the blood? I think there is, and will hazard an attempt to throw on the screen some faint shadow of the elusive thing.

Take certain salient British characteristics: Our peculiar national under-emphasis and stolidity; our want of imagination; that desire to have things both ways—which is generally called our “hypocrisy”; our turn of ironic humour; our bulldog grip; our lack of joie de vivre; our snobbishness—dying, but dying very hard; our perpetual desire for the moral in action or art; our regard for “good form”; our slow dumb idealism, hand in hand with our profound distrust of ideas; our propensity for grumbling under prosperity, and our cheeriness under hardship; our passion for games, and our creed of “playing the game”; our love of individual liberty—even our perversity and crankiness. . . . Take them all, and consider whether there is not some fundamental underlying instinct.

I believe that the mainspring of the British soul, concealed by a layer of mental laziness from superficial scrutiny, is nothing but an inveterate instinct for competition. The Briton is the most competitive creature on the face of the earth—save possibly the American of British descent. True—we would, as they phrase it on the turf, make a race with a donkey, for our climate has certainly sluggarded the circulation of our blood. None the less, we have a perpetual secret itch for competition, so bone deep that most of us do not even know of it. All through our lives we are playing a match. When the Briton is not secretly pitting himself against somebody or something, he can hardly be said to be alive. I do not think, speaking racially, that he cares so much for what he gets by the game as for the game itself and victory in it. He sets little store by the perfection of his handiwork so long as it beats the handiwork of others; or—and this is the saving grace—so long as in the accomplishment he has defeated the slackness or cowardice in his own nature—won the match within himself.

Let us turn them over one by one, those salient British characteristics:

Stolidity! Under-emphasis! It is surely nothing but contempt of fuss; and what is fuss but allowing too much importance to the task or person you are up against? The instinct of competition forbids that in the Briton; he is so competitive that he does not deign to let people see that he is stretching himself.

Want of imagination! That is partly the mental laziness, no doubt, engendered by our thick climate; but much of it, I think, is only the subconscious refusal by our competitive natures to see too quickly and clearly what we have before us, lest we be discouraged. A great help—to have muddled through most of the battle before you are aware of the size and length of it!

Our rather grim turn of humour! Is it not generally a jest at the expense of a fate which thought it could set us down?

Our hypocrisy! One would not admit a physical defeat, but clench the teeth and have at it again; then, how admit moral defeat? Impossible! Face must be saved—instinctively again, unconsciously—for the last thing we plead guilty to is our “hypocrisy.”

The bulldog grip—speaks for itself.

Our lack of joie de vivre! We are playing a match—we have no chance or time to relax, to lie on our backs and let the sunlight warm our faces. We have not time to give ourselves up to life; there is so much to beat—we are playing a match.

Our veneration for rank of every kind! Snobbishness! This is surely nothing but our recognition of the value of attainment; acknowledgment of victories won, if not in the present, in the past; tacit confession that we, too, want to win such victories.

Our craving for a moral! Well, what is a moral, if not the triumph of what we call “good” over what we call “evil”? We crave that triumph—not only in action, but also, I fear, in art. Art must not merely excite within us impersonal emotion; it must be useful to us in our match with life—a pity!

Our worship of “good form” is partly dread of that ridicule which would be a proof of our having fallen short, and partly recognition by a people who have long lived an exceptionally stable social life, that this competitive instinct of ours, unchecked by rules, becomes a nuisance to ourselves and others. In the same way, “playing the game” is but the necessary check on our passion for a match.

Our inveterate dumb idealism is of course a primary constituent element in the fighting nature; and our distrust of ideas a natural lazy dread of being pushed on too fast by that idealism.

Our grumbling habits, when there is little or nothing to grumble at, show, I think, that in slackness and prosperity we are really out of our element; while our ironic cheerfulness under hardship—the cry “Are we down-hearted? No-o!” proves that times of stress suit our competitive temperament.

Our love of individual liberty! A man, the joy of whose life is winning an event over himself or others, naturally desires the utmost latitude for these perpetual contests. And so the Briton becomes “a crank” more often than members of any other race.

One should never drive theory too far, but I seriously believe that the foundation of the Briton’s soul is this dumb and utter refusal to admit that he ever can be beaten, either by himself or any other. He is concerned to win, rather than to understand or to enjoy. I do not know whether this is admirable, but I am pretty sure that it is true. And behind and beyond all the better reasons for pursuing this war to a victorious end, there is always the inarticulate, intense, instinctive feeling, that we must win the match, since to fail would mean not only defeat by the Germans, but the defeat within us of our will and of our own nature.

If I am right as to this essence of the British soul, what does it signify to the world of our friends and enemies? It means, of course, a rock on which our friends may build—it assures the fulfilment of all pledges, and endurance till the day of victory; but it carries with it a certain element of danger. Vice treads on the heels of Virtue in the competitive soul. How far may our nature become a peril, not only to ourselves, but to our Allies and the whole world?

Underneath all our resolution not to fall short of such measure of victory as shall free the invaded lands, and prove to all that the over-riding of a little harmless neutral country has not paid; underneath this absolute resolve, which of us does not long for a real peace, an end of a world that is like a powder magazine which malevolent or foolish hands can fire at any moment? The difficulties that lie between us and such a peace are very great; far be it from me to minimize them, or blink the seeming impasse of the situation ahead. When the end draws near, in every warring land the great dumb mass-of-the-people’s only thought will be: “For God’s sake, have done with it, and let us get back to life!” But, jutting out of this mass, in each country, and especially in our own, there will be, on the one hand, idealists and dreamers, a little band, seeing a vision too visionary, telling of it to the wind; on the other, a far larger, louder band of men of affairs, judging of matters with the immediate eye, for immediate profit, or, as they will rather phrase it, for permanent profit, under the waving flags of patriotism; of men talking of a lasting peace and genuinely wishing for it—so long as it does not mean foregoing anything, so long as they may let go no advantage so dearly bought. Already the cry on both sides is for a commercial war starting from the final battle. All that is stupendously natural! But in this medley of demand, how will statesmen steer? Will they, who have to remake the world, have a large vision, and see that, vital before all else, is the seizing of a chance—that has never come before and may never come again—to establish and set going a Court of Nations, backed this time by real force? Will they grasp the wisdom implicit in the feeling of the great dumb multitudes: “For God’s sake have done with it, and let us live!”

We have not yet got to the moment on which the whole future will hang. When we do, I fancy that this competitive soul of ours may want too much to have things both ways. Whatever the terms of the peace that comes, that peace will not last without a League of Nations to guarantee it; and such a League we cannot have unless impartiality be its backbone; unless we mean that it shall judge justly, and enforce judgment without fear or favour; unless we are willing to accept its judgments in all matters, and not merely when it suits us. A man does not guarantee the health of his body just by holding his neighbour down; and the true path to security and a great future lies in the efforts we make to improve ourselves, rather than in those we make to injure others. The freedom and fair opportunity which are vital to a lasting peace need not bar us from national preparedness, from intelligent effort to save ourselves and our Allies from unfair commercial competition, need not prevent us from assuring our safety and improving our corporate life. But they do mean that we must keep free of a militarist and tyrannical spirit. How far will our competitive British soul, when peace comes, be proof against that virus? Are we, in the winning of military victory, going quietly to accept moral defeat, letting our ideals turn turtle and float with their keels to the stars? I wonder.

This League for Peace we talk of—that even statesmen talk of—will not be born of violent minds, but out of level and long-headedness, and the desire to benefit not only our own country, but the world. It is an undertaking fraught with the most poignant difficulty. If you imagine it fledged from birth, with wings full grown—if you imagine a world disarmed, immediately responsive to law—it is but an Utopian dream. The world will assuredly remain armed; at a single stride one cannot step from hell to heaven. But armedness need not prevent the nations from establishing procedure for the delay of warlike action—a tribunal to which all disputes must be referred; need not prevent them from pledging themselves to forcible support of its decisions, from declaring commerce sacro-sanct between members of the League, and punishing by blockade and ostracism any nation that betrays its membership, or flouts a decision, so that the sanctity of a nation’s commerce may in future depend on that nation’s loyalty to other nations; nor need it prevent States from taking the manufacture of war material out of private hands. Only on the proved efficacy of such measures as these will the disarmament of nations follow, slowly, surely, equally; for man will then be acting, as he loves to act, not by rote and theory, but on the evidence of facts.

Is all this a wild-cat notion, or a mere natural growth out of what went before the war, and out of the terrific tragedy of the war itself—a plan tentative and experimental, that may gradually force its way to confidence, till the Court of Nations reaches the unquestioned authority and permanence of each individual nation’s courts of justice?

We of the Allied countries must surely long for such a plan; nor, I think can any neutral nation which has watched and trembled at this war be other than well-disposed towards it; and, whatever their rulers and journalists may desire, the peoples of the Central Empires will not wish to be left out. Yet when the time comes for peace discussions one sees only too well the deadlock. The Allied nations, if victorious, will not want a round table séance with their enemies and a cosy settlement. The Central Empires will not wish to accept forced membership of a League for Peace founded by their enemies, in which—however mistakenly—they believe they will always be outvoted. This vicious deadlock, however, is less real, I think, than it seems. There are new forces at work; and if a League for Peace can make even a lame and partial start, it may by these new forces soon be fortified. After this war, deep-planted in the heart of every people, whether fighting or looking on, will be the loathing of national aggressiveness! Such a feeling has never existed before because men have never before been so stirred, so injured, and so frightened. We soon forget, of course, all save that of which we are constantly reminded; but the aftermath of this war will be full of startling revelations of the ruin it has caused; the world will reek with reminder that so-called national aspirations cannot with impunity be aggressively pursued; that so-called defensive wars cannot be light-heartedly incepted. During the march of a war, however terrible, the fascination of strife colours and subdues its horror; its heroisms hypnotize, its rancours drug all reason, blur all vision. But in the cold thinned blood of a maimed future, how different it will all seem, how terrifically disproportionate!

Love of country has never before had such calls made on it; men have never so suffered for their patriotism. That, too, must bring a sweeping reaction, which will gradually force the hands of reluctant Governments into adhesion to any scheme which promises relief from a repetition of such agonies. And so, in spite of all the difficulties, I believe some sort of League for Peace will come, imperfect and experimental at first, but which, once founded, will wax and grow strong, in the real—not merely pious—horror of war which will follow this fearful carnival. Let it but hold together for a few years, survive one or two serious trials, and I think no sane nation will ever desire its dissolution.

Such a scheme will not come down to us from Heaven. From our own brains and wills it must spring; from our sense of—shall we say—the inconvenience of wars like this. If the killing and disablement of some ten million men, the waste of some ten to twenty thousand million pounds, persuades us to nothing but the leaving of the world exactly as it was, as liable to these irruptions of death and misery—then, better say with the Spanish poet, “Of all the misfortunes of man, the greatest is to have been born.”

Even before the guns cease roaring, shall not our nine Allied peoples agree informally among themselves upon the structure of a League for Peace, and secure the sympathetic understanding of America, and the other neutral countries, on whose wisdom and good-will so much depends?

I, for one, would wish my Country foremost in pursuing this great chance—wish that she might place all her power in the favouring scale; I would wish to see her as ready to submit to the decisions of an International Tribunal, as each one of us is ready as a matter of course to submit to the decisions of our judges.

We in this green Britain of ours, still free of the invader’s foot, can measure the value of freedom now, looking across to lands waiting for deliverance. No country of Europe but has suffered, during long centuries, outrage and trampling, siege and slaughter, that we have been spared—saved by our sea. It is not irony that calls these the islands of the blessed.

But Fortune is a jealous goddess; and offerings are due to her who has given us an inviolate soil. I seem to see Fortune standing apart, watching—wondering. “What have they made—what are they going to make of their Land?” I seem to see Fortune thinking: “If I grant them success once more, these islanders, are they great enough to survive it? Under my smile the empires of the past one by one went down—Assyria, Egypt, Persia, Rome, others of long, long ago. Will this empire live, or will it too rot away, and sink?”

Those empires of the past fell through prosperity, through inordinate pride, through luxury and slavery hand in hand. May Fortune hold up a mirror to us, that we see ourselves as we are! Freedom and Humanity are not mere words; nor is a people’s greatness measured in acres or in pounds, in the number of its ships on the sea, or of the rifles it can muster. A people’s greatness is in the breadth and quality of its soul, in its fortitude, alertness, justice, gentleness, within itself and to the world without; and in its faith that man has his fate in his own hands.

As the individual, so the State; the aggregate of individual virtue decides and shapes the lot of nations. May there be no slaves among us and none who fatten upon slavery; no brutes among us and none who cower under brutality! Let us not hold ourselves as the elect in a blind patriotism, but have some vision of the world beyond our shores, of its hopes and dreads and natural ambitions. A narrow national spirit never served mankind!

Let the sea be our inspiration and our reminder! For, if it is our fortification, the sea is also our link with all the world, and the greatest force of untamed Nature. It seems to me that they who live dependent on the sea should never be puffed up. Its changing moods and salt winds, its wildness, beauty, desolation, the sudden fates that lurk within it, that leap and clutch and draw away from us our best; the great spaces of it beneath sun and stars—these are constant, and to our souls should surely carry breadth, sweep out of us the littleness of Imperial complacency. The sea is never chained, and the eyes of sailors have in them a look that any man might covet—a steady fronting of something inscrutable, shifting, dangerous. They know the little worth of human strength, the need of unity; they know that when a man slackens his watch, Fate leaps upon him.

The ship of each nation sails a sea of incalculable currents and uncharted channels. Sailing that sea, may we have the eyes of sailors, lest our Fate leap upon us!

Who would not desire, rushing through the thick dark of the future, to stand on the cliffs of vision—two hundred years, say, hence—and view this world?

Will there then be this League for War, this cauldron where, beneath the thin crust, a boiling lava bubbles, and at any minute may break through and leap up, as now, jet high? Will there still be reek and desolation, and man at the mercy of the machines he has made; still be narrow national policies and rancours, and such mutual fear, that no country dare be generous? Or will there be over the whole world something of the glamour that each one of us now sees hovering above his own country; and men and women—all—feel they are natives of one land? Who dare say?

When the guns cease fire and all is still, from the woods and fields and seas, from the skeleton towns of ravaged countries, the wistful dead will rise, and with their eyes accuse us. In that hour we shall have for answer only this: We fought for a better Future for Mankind!

Did we? Do we? That is the great question. Is our gaze really fixed on the far horizon? Or do we only dream it; and have the slain no comfort in their untimely darkness; the maimed, the ruined, the bereaved, no shred of consolation? Is it all to be for nothing but the salving of national prides? And shall the Ironic Spirit fill the whole world with his laughter?

Or shall the nations take the first step in that grand march of real deliverance which will make the whole earth—at last—the islands of the blessed?

THE WHITEFRIARS PRESS, LTD., LONDON AND TONBRIDGE.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

 

Issued by William Heinemann.

 

THE ISLAND PHARISEES.

THE MAN OF PROPERTY.

THE COUNTRY HOUSE.

FRATERNITY.

THE PATRICIAN.

THE DARK FLOWER.

THE FREELANDS.

 

 

A MOTLEY.

THE INN OF TRANQUILLITY.

THE LITTLE MAN AND OTHER SATIRES.

 

 

MOODS, SONGS, AND DOGGERELS.

 

 

MEMORIES.

    Illustrated by Maud Earl.

 

 

Issued by other Publishers.

 

VILLA RUBEIN AND OTHER STORIES.

PLAYS: 3 vols.

A COMMENTARY.

Transcriber’s Notes:

The list of other works by the author has been moved from the front of the book to the end. Spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the original. A few obvious typesetting and punctuation errors have been corrected without note.

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