Part 15 (1/2)

”You see how much easier it is to grow an evil weed than a wholesome plant,” he said. ”While this great strong wickedness has developed in Germany, what thought have we had in our English-speaking community?

What does our world of letters amount to? Clowns and dons and prigs, cults of the precious and cults of style, a few squeaking author-journalists and such time-serving scoundrels as I, with my patent Bathwick filter, my twenty editions, and my thousands a year.

None of us with any sense of a whole community or a common purpose!

Where is our strength to go against that strength of the heavy German mind? Where is the Mind of our Race?”

He looked at me with tired eyes.

”It has been a joke with us,” he said.

”Is there no power of thought among free men strong enough to swing them into armies that can take this monster by the neck? Must men be bullied for ever? Are there no men to think at least as earnestly as one climbs a mountain, and to write with their uttermost pride? Are there no men to face truth as those boys at Mons faced shrapnel, and to stick for the honour of the mind and for truth and beauty as those lads stuck to their trenches? Bliss and I have tried to write of all the world of letters, and we have found nothing to write about but posturing and compet.i.tion and sham reputations, and of dullness and impudence hiding and sheltering in the very sheath of the sword of thought.... For a little while after the war began our people seemed n.o.ble and dignified; but see now how all Britain breaks after its first quiet into chatter about spies, sentimentality about the architecture of Louvain, invasion scares, the bitter persecution of stray Germans, and petty disputes and recriminations like a pool under a breeze. And below that nothing. While still the big thing goes on, ungrasped, day after day, a monstrous struggle of our world against the thing it will not have.... No one is clear about what sort of thing we will have. It is a nightmare in which we try continually to escape and have no-whither to escape.... What is to come out of this struggle? Just anything that may come out of it, or something we mean _shall_ come out of it?”

He sat up in his bed; his eyes were bright and he had little red spots in his cheeks.

”At least the Germans stand for something. It may be brutal, stupid, intolerable, but there it is--a definite intention, a scheme of living, an order, Germanic Kultur. But what the devil do _we_ stand for? Was there anything that amounted to an intellectual life at all in all our beastly welter of writing, of nice-young-man poetry, of stylish fiction and fiction without style, of lazy history, popular philosophy, s...o...b..ring criticism, Academic civilities? Is there anything here to hold a people together? Is there anything to make a new world? A literature ought to dominate the mind of its people. Yet here comes the gale, and all we have to show for our racial thought, all the fastness we have made for our souls, is a flying scud of paper sc.r.a.ps, poems, such poems! casual articles, whirling headlong in the air, a few novels drowning in the floods....”

-- 5

There were times during his illness and depression when we sat about Boon very much after the fas.h.i.+on of Job's Comforters. And I remember an occasion when Wilkins took upon himself the responsibility for a hopeful view. There was about Wilkins's realistic sentimentality something at once akin and repugnant to Boon's intellectual mysticism, so that for a time Boon listened resentfully, and then was moved to spirited contradiction. Wilkins declared that the war was like one of those great illnesses that purge the system of a mult.i.tude of minor ills. It was changing the spirit of life about us; it would end a vast amount of mere pleasure-seeking and aimless extravagance; it was giving people a sterner sense of duty and a more vivid apprehension of human brotherhood. This ineffective triviality in so much of our literary life of which Boon complained would give place to a sense of urgent purpose....

”War,” said Boon, turning his face towards Wilkins, ”does nothing but destroy.”

”All making is destructive,” said Wilkins, while Boon moved impatiently; ”the sculptor destroys a block of marble, the painter scatters a tube of paint....”

Boon's eye had something of the expression of a man who watches another ride his favourite horse.

”See already the new gravity in people's faces, the generosities, the pacification of a thousand stupid squabbles----”

”If you mean Carsonism,” said Boon, ”it's only sulking until it can cut in again.”

”I deny it,” said Wilkins, warming to his faith. ”This is the firing of the clay of Western European life. It stops our little arts perhaps--but see the new beauty that comes.... We can well spare our professional books and professional writing for a time to get such humour and wonder as one can find in the soldiers' letters from the front. Think of all the people whose lives would have been slack and ign.o.ble from the cradle to the grave, who are being twisted up now to the stern question of enlistment; think of the tragedies of separation and danger and suffering that are throwing a stern bright light upon ten thousand obscure existences....”

”And the n.o.ble procession of poor devils tramping through the slush from their burning homes, G.o.d knows whither! And the light of fire appearing through the cracks of falling walls, and charred bits of old people in the slush of the roadside, and the screams of men disembowelled, and the crying of a dying baby, in a wet shed full of starving refugees who do not know whither to go. Go on, Wilkins.”

”Oh, if you choose to dwell on the horrors----!”

”The one decent thing that we men who sit at home in the warm can do is to dwell on the horrors and do our little best to make sure that never, never shall this thing happen again. And that won't be done, Wilkins, by leaving War alone. War, war with modern machines, is a d.a.m.ned great horrible trampling monster, a filthy thing, an indecency; we aren't doing anything heroic, we are trying to lift a foul stupidity off the earth, we are engaged in a colossal sanitary job.

These men who go for us into the trenches, they come back with no illusions. They know how dirty and monstrous it is. They are like men who have gone down for the sake of the people they love to clear out a choked drain. They have no illusions about being glorified. They only hope they aren't blood-poisoned and their bodies altogether ruined.

And as for the bracing stir of it, they tell me, Wilkins, that their favourite song now in the trenches is--

”'n.o.body knows how bored we are, Bored we are, Bored we are, n.o.body knows how bored we are, And n.o.body seems to care.'

Meanwhile you sit at home and feel vicariously enn.o.bled.”

He laid his hand on a daily newspaper beside him.

”Oh, you're not the only one. I will make you ashamed of yourself, Wilkins. Here's the superlative to your positive. Here's the sort of man I should like to hold for five minutes head downwards in the bilge of a trench, writing on the Heroic Spirit in the _Morning Post_. He's one of your gentlemen who sit in a room full of books and promise themselves much moral benefit from the bloodshed in France. Coleridge, he says, Coleridge--the heroic, self-controlled Spartan Coleridge was of his opinion and very hard on Pacificism--Coleridge complained of peace-time in such words as these: 'All individual dignity and power, engulfed in courts, committees, inst.i.tutions.... One benefit-club for mutual flattery.'... And then, I suppose, the old loafer went off to sponge on somebody.... And here's the stuff the heroic, spirited Osborn, the _Morning Post_ gentleman--unhappily not a German, and unhappily too old for trench work--quotes with delight now--_now!_--after Belgium!--

”'My spear, my sword, my s.h.a.ggy s.h.i.+eld!

With these I till, with these I sow, With these I reap my harvest field-- No other wealth the G.o.ds bestow: With these I plant the fertile vine, With these I press the luscious wine.