V ADDRESS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

A doubter of the general divinity of our civilisation is labelled ‘pedant.’ Anyone who questions modern progress is tabooed. And yet there is no doubt, I think, that we are getting feverish, rushed, complicated, and have multiplied conveniences to such an extent that we do little with them but scrape the surface of life.

We were rattling into a species of barbarism when the war came, and unless we check ourselves shall continue to rattle now that it is over. The underlying cause in every country is the increase of herd-life, based on machines, money-getting, and the dread of being dull. Everyone knows how fearfully strong that dread is. But to be capable of being dull is in itself a disease.

And most of modern life seems to be a process of creating disease, then finding a remedy, which in its turn creates another disease, demanding fresh remedy, and so on. We pride ourselves, for example, on scientific sanitation; but what is scientific sanitation if not one huge palliative of evils which have arisen from herd-life enabling herd-life to be intensified, so that we shall presently need even more scientific sanitation? The true elixirs vitæ—for there be two, I think—are open-air life, and a proud pleasure in one’s work, but we have evolved a mode of existence in which it is comparatively rare to find these two conjoined. In old countries such as mine, the evils of herd-life are at present vastly more acute than in a new country such as yours. On the other hand, the further one is from hades, the faster one drives towards it, and machines are beginning to run along with America even more violently than with Europe.

When our Tanks first appeared, they were described as snouting monsters creeping at their own sweet will. I confess that this is how my inflamed eye sees all our modern machines—monsters running on their own, dragging us along, and very often squashing us.

We are, I believe, awakening to the dangers of this ‘Gadarening,’ of rushing down the high cliff into the sea, possessed and pursued by the devils of—machinery. But if any would see how little alarmed he really is—let him ask himself how much of his present mode of existence he is prepared to alter. Altering the modes of other people is delightful; one would have great hope of the future if we had nothing before us but that. The mediæval Irishman, indicted for burning down the cathedral at Armagh, together with the Archbishop, defended himself thus: “As for the cathedral, ’tis true I burned it; but indeed an’ I wouldn’t have, only they told me himself was inside.” We are all ready to alter our opponents, if not to burn them. But even if we were as ardent reformers as that Irishman, we could hardly force men to live in the open, or take a proud pleasure in their work, or enjoy beauty, or not concentrate themselves on making money. No amount of legislation will make us “lilies of the field” or “birds of the air,” or prevent us from worshipping false gods, or neglecting to reform ourselves.

I once wrote the unpopular sentence: “Democracy at present offers the spectacle of a man running down a road followed at a more and more respectful distance by his own soul.” For democracy read rather the words modern civilisation which prides itself on redress after the event, foresees nothing and avoids less; is purely empirical if one may use so high brow a word.

I look very eagerly and watchfully to America in many ways. After the war she will be more emphatically than ever, in material things, the most important and powerful nation of the earth. We British have a legitimate and somewhat breathless interest in the use she will make of her strength, and in the course of her national life, for this will greatly influence the course of our own. But power for real light and leading in America will depend, not so much on her material wealth, or her armed force, as on what her attitude towards life, and what the ideals of her citizens are going to be. Americans have a certain eagerness for knowledge; they have also, for all their absorption in success, the aspiring eye. They do want the good thing. They don’t always know when they see it, but they want it. These qualities, in combination with material strength, give America her chance. Yet, if she does not set her face against “Gadarening,” we are all bound for downhill. If she goes in for spreadeagleism, if her aspirations are towards quantity, not quality, we shall all go on being commonised. If she should get that purse-and-power-proud fever which comes from national success, we are all bound for another world flare-up. The burden of proving that democracy can be real and yet live up to an ideal of health and beauty will be on America’s shoulders, and on ours. What are we and Americans going to make of our inner life, of our individual habits of thought? What are we going to reverence, and what despise? Do we mean to lead, in spirit and in truth, not in mere money and guns? Britain is an old country, though still in her prime, I hope; America is yet on the threshold. Is she to step out into the sight of the world as a great leader? That is for America the long decision, to be worked out, not so much in her Senate and her Congress, as in her homes and schools. On America, now that the war is over, the destiny of civilisation may hang for the next century. If she mislays, indeed if she does not improve the power of self-criticism—that special dry American humour which the great Lincoln had—she might soon develop the intolerant provincialism which has so often been the bane of the earth and the undoing of nations. Above all, if she does not solve the problems of town life, of Capital and Labour, of the distribution of wealth, of national health, and attain to a mastery over inventions and machinery—she is in for a cycle of mere anarchy, disruption, and dictatorships, into which we shall all follow. The motto “noblesse oblige” applies as much to democracy as ever it did to the old-time aristocrat. It applies with terrific vividness to America. Ancestry and Nature have bestowed on her great gifts. Behind her stand Conscience, Enterprise, Independence, and Ability—such were the companions of the first Americans, and are the comrades of American citizens to this day. She has abounding energy, an unequalled spirit of discovery, a vast territory not half developed, and great natural beauty. I remember sitting on a bench overlooking the Grand Canyon of Arizona; the sun was shining into it, and a snow storm was whirling down there. All that most marvellous work of Nature was flooded to the brim with rose and tawny-gold, with white, and wine-dark shadows; the colossal carvings as of huge rock-gods and sacrificial altars, and great beasts along its sides, were made living by the very mystery of light and darkness, on that violent day of Spring; I remember sitting there, and an old gentleman passing close behind, leaning towards me and saying in a sly, gentle voice: “How are you going to tell it to the folks at home?” America has so much, that one despairs of telling to the folks at home, so much grand beauty to be to her an inspiration and uplift towards high and free thought and vision. Great poems of Nature she has, wrought in the large, to make of her and keep her a noble people. In my beloved Britain—all told, not half the size of Texas—there is a quiet beauty of a sort which America has not. I walked not long ago from Worthing to the little village of Steyning, in the South Downs. It was such a day as one seldom gets in England; when the sun was dipping and there came on the cool chalky hills the smile of late afternoon, and across a smooth valley on the rim of the Downs one saw a tiny group of trees, one little building, and a stack, against the clear-blue, pale sky—it was like a glimpse of heaven, so utterly pure in line and colour so removed, and touching. The tale of loveliness in our land is varied and unending, but it is not in the grand manner. America has the grand manner in her scenery and in her blood, for in America all are the children of adventure, every single man an emigrant himself or a descendant of one who had the pluck to emigrate. She has already had past-masters in dignity, but she has still to reach as a nation the grand manner in achievement. She knows her own dangers and failings; her qualities and powers; but she cannot realise the intense concern and interest, deep down behind our provoking stolidities, with which we of the old country watch her, feeling that what she does reacts on us above all nations, and will ever react more and more. Underneath surface differences and irritations we English-speaking peoples are fast bound together. May it not be in misery and iron! If America walks upright, so shall we; if she goes bowed under the weight of machines, money, and materialism, we too shall creep our ways. We run a long race, we nations; a generation is but a day. But in a day a man may leave the track, and never again recover it! Nations depend for their health and safety on the behaviour of the individuals who compose them.

Modern man is a very new and marvellous creature. Without quite realising it, we have evolved a fresh species of stoic—even more stoical, I suspect, than were the old Stoics. Modern man stands on his own feet. His religion is to take what comes without flinching or complaint, as part of the day’s work, which an unknowable God, Providence, Creative Principle, has appointed. By courage and kindness modern man exists, warmed by the glow of the great human fellowship. He has re-discovered the old Greek saying: “God is the helping of man by man”; has found out in his unselfconscious way that if he does not help himself, and help his fellows, he cannot reach that inner peace which satisfies. To do his bit; and to be kind! It is by that creed, rather than by any mysticism, that he finds the salvation of his soul, for, of a truth, the religion of this age is conduct.

After all, does not the only real spiritual warmth, not tinged by Pharisaism, egotism, or cowardice, come from the feeling of doing your work well and helping others; is not all the rest embroidery, luxury, pastime, pleasant sound and incense? Modern man is a realist with too romantic a sense, perhaps, of the mystery which surrounds existence, to pry into it. And, like modern civilisation itself, he is the creature of West and North, of those atmospheres, climates, manners, of life, which foster neither inertia, reverence, nor mystic meditation. Essentially man of action, in ideal action he finds his only true comfort. I am sure that padres at the front have seen that the men whose souls they have gone out to tend, are living the highest form of religion; that in their comic courage, unselfish humanity, their endurance without whimper of things worse than death, they have gone beyond all pulpit-and-deathbed teaching. And who are these men? Just the early manhood of the race, just modern man as he was before the war began, and will be now that the war is over.

This modern world, of which we English and Americans are perhaps the truest types, stands revealed from beneath its froth, frippery, and vulgar excrescences, sound at core—a world whose implicit motto is: “The good of all humanity.” But the herd-life which is its characteristic, brings many evils, has many dangers; and to preserve a sane mind in a healthy body is the riddle before us. Somehow we must free ourselves from the driving domination of machines and money-getting, not only for our own sakes but for that of all mankind.

And there is another thing of the most solemn importance: We English-speaking nations are by chance as it were, the ballast of the future. It is absolutely necessary for the happiness of the world that we should remain united. The comradeship that we now feel must and surely shall abide. For unless we work together, and in no selfish or exclusive spirit—Goodbye to Civilisation! It will vanish like the dew off grass. The betterment not only of the British nations and America, but of all mankind is and must be our object.

From all our hearts a great weight has been lifted; in those fields death no longer sweeps his scythe, and our ears at last are free from the rustling thereof—now comes the test of magnanimity, in all countries. Will modern man rise to the ordering of a sane, a free, a generous life? Each of us loves his own country best, be it a little land or the greatest on earth; but jealousy is the dark thing, the creeping poison. Where there is true greatness, let us acclaim it; where there is true worth, let us prize it—as if it were our own.

This earth is made too subtly, of too multiple warp and woof, for prophecy. When he surveys the world around—“the wondrous things which there abound,” the prophet closes foolish lips. Besides, as the historian tells us: “Writers have that undeterminateness of spirit which commonly makes literary men of no use in the world.” So I, for one, prophesy not. Still, we do know this: All English-speaking peoples will go to this adventure of Peace with something of big purpose and spirit in their hearts, with something of free outlook. The world is wide and Nature bountiful enough for all, if we keep sane minds. The earth is fair and meant to be enjoyed, if we keep sane bodies. Who dare affront this world of beauty with mean views? There is no darkness but what the ape in us still makes, and in spite of all his monkey-tricks modern man is at heart further from the ape than man has yet been.

To do our jobs really well and to be brotherly! To seek health and ensue Beauty! If, in Britain and America, in all the English-speaking nations, we can put that simple faith into real and thorough practice, what may not this century yet bring forth? Shall man, the highest product of creation, be content to pass his little day in a house like unto Bedlam?

When the present great task in which we have joined hands is really ended; when once more from the shuttered mad-house the figure of Peace steps forth and stands in the risen sun, and we may go our ways again in the wonder of a new morning—let it be with this vow in our hearts: “No more of Madness—in War, or in Peace!”