Rare stories, page 3
Very diverse are the prophets of this militant faith, and often they reject one another. Their doctrines range from a modernised kind of theism and vitalism to Marxian materialism and its consequent proletarianism, and again from the crudest evolutionism to the most sophisticated humanism. Sometimes man is regarded as the blind instrument through which a hidden creative energy progressively achieves a goal not patent to men themselves. Thus the movement draws inspiration from Samuel Butler, and later from Bergson and Driesch, and comes in line with those modem champions of instinct and the unconscious who follow Jung rather than Freud; while in literature the movement contributes something to the inspiration of such writers as Mr. D. H. Lawrence, with his cult of "the dark god." Sometimes, on the other hand, it is claimed that man himself must take charge of his own evolution, directing the "blind" biological forces towards whatever end is progressively revealed as good to his own consciousness. Thus contact is made with social meliorism, and even with Comte's essentially non- mystical religion of humanity, with its motto, "Love, order, progress." Sometimes, with an optimism inherited from the churches, it is claimed that in the long run life must of necessity triumph. Sometimes, however, in view of the spatial and temporal immensity of the cosmos, and all the difficulties that confront man in his own planet and in his own nature, it is recognised that the victory of mind is very far from certain, that such success as has hitherto been won has been mostly accidental, and that in the modem world new forces are coming into play which may well result in the suicide of civilization, if not actually in the destruction of mankind.
But though very diverse theories may be assumed by this mood of moral zeal, one conviction is essential to it. Always it emphatically declares life or mind or spirit to be good absolutely, and their negation absolutely bad; always it renders whole-hearted allegiance to one side in a universal conflict. Always it is blind to the possibility of any kind of excellence other than the value of the fulfilment of vital teleology. It would spurn a universe in which life were ultimately to fail.
One poet of the movement is Meredith, with his devotion to the Spirit of Earth. And he also links it both with earlier romanticism and with a later classicism. He admired nature less for her appearance, as Wordsworth did, than for her vitality. And man he admired less for his individuality, as Browning did, than for being Earth's self-conscious intelligence. But Meredith is more than an apostle of the faith in Earth and Man. His Comic Spirit gropes towards the mood of detachment which I shall presently describe. Meanwhile we may note in Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells the same dualism of good and evil grounded in the dynamic nature of life, the same fervent championship, the same sense that man's real importance lies not in his individuality but in his instrumentality to the achievement of a goal which he himself has not yet clearly conceived. These writers have contributed to the faith which inspires militant "Labour" today, which distinguishes so sharply between the elect and the damned, which claims from the individual a puritanical loyalty to a certain social ideal or formula, which in fact is the modem, popular, and social-democratic form of Calvinism. Shaw, like Meredith, is saved by humour from rigid sectarianism, and gropes sometimes beyond the moral view; but Wells is more strictly confined within his faith. Bertrand Russell in his social writings, and in spite of his professed ethical scepticism, sometimes assumes the mood of righteous indignation; but though he renders allegiance to the ideal of cultural development he is also detached, and capable of dispassionate salutation.
The movement of moral zeal, then, which directs itself now in worship of a Life Force, now in loyalty to the awakening consciousness of man himself, has many sources and many expressions; and sometimes it has seemed to promise a widespread though new-fangled "religious revival." Indeed for many persons it is in fact to-day a living religion. But it is not distinctive of the modern spirit, and its original minds belong to yesterday rather than to-day. Not that it is outworn; on the contrary it should make an extremely important contribution to the culture of to-morrow. Shame to us if we evade that whole- hearted obligation to the advancement of mentality on this planet. But there is also another and more difficult lesson to learn, a lesson which in our day at least, it is seldom possible to grasp at all save through complete disillusion from all our most cherished ends.
And disillusion is the third of the four movements of thought which we have to record in our sequel to Professor Whitehead's study of the mental climate. It is a movement that is distinctively modem. Not only have we in these latter days doubted the existence of anything worthy to be called God, not only have we despaired of man's capacity to achieve his ends in an unfriendly universe, but also we have tasted complete cynicism with regard to those ends themselves, and about man's very nature. The virtues and the heaven of an earlier generation are now scribbled over with jibes; yet we have little to put in their place, little that can withstand any better the point of our own criticism. And so it comes that the modern young so often seem to belie the very nature of youth by their cynicism; for they can find nothing better to do than evade all serious activities and seek conventional pleasures, suppressing a yawn. Who can blame them? There is nothing better to do in a world of disillusion. But it is well known that a life of undirected "pleasure" leads nowhere but to nightmare, such as Mr. Noel Coward has epitomised in his sketch, "Dance Little Lady."
Few would deny that disillusion, sometimes rising to disgust and horror, is the dominant mood of our age. When the plain man has time to look up from his work he sees a world in disorder; society strained and rocking; authority concerned chiefly to keep its seat; nations devising slaughter while they chatter of peace; churches seemingly bankrupt of divinity, and forced desperately to speculate in pew-filling attractions; prophets on all sides trading in questionable doctrines; the live and intricate thought of our time soaring further and further beyond the comprehension of the unspecialised, and shedding abroad only vague and dismal rumours of man's insecurity, futility, and insincerity. Such is the panorama that confronts any unprejudiced and intelligent observer. It is a view so familiar that to state it is to speak platitudes.
No wonder the plain man turns from a prospect so dreary, and concentrates on his private problems; for these, however futile in the wider view, have their tentacles about his heart. Even while he yawns at them they constrain him. For he is breathlessly engaged in the current of his own career, and all the intricacies of his relations with his fellows. His days are a ceaseless tennis in which he is nearly always the weaker player; so that without respite he can but struggle to get the ball over the net somehow and be ready for the next stroke. To look around and ask himself seriously what it is all about is to risk losing his grip on the game. Now and then indeed he is inevitably disturbed by rumours of the great world, or by movements of the very ground on which he plays his little life. Political crises, strikes, mysterious changes of the market and a slump in his wares-all sorts of obscure and uncontrollable public events threaten him or actually embroil him. And always in our time there is the dread that there will be another war, that his whole life will be fused and cast into a new mould; and then perhaps destroyed. He can only hope that the bedrock of society will outlast his day, and even support his children. But his great- grandchildren? He shrugs his shoulders. They are beyond his ken. If ever they occur at all, of what kind will they be, and on what treadmill will they find themselves sweating? Will they remember him? Will his own children remember him only to condemn him for thoughtlessly procreating them in this squirrel- cage adrift in space?
For the modern man regards his own occurrence without enthusiasm. Reviewing his endless pursuit of a carrot that is ever removed, or which, being captured, is found to be plaster, he looks forward to death without revulsion; even perhaps with complacency, as when in a day of worries he looks forward to sleep. If only there were no old age, no rising tide of contemptible distresses; and at the end no pain. If only dying were as delicious as falling asleep.
Nothing but loyalty to some admired thing greater than oneself can render a life of drudgery tolerable; and today the old objects of loyalty are losing their power. The God whom our fathers served is now revealed to many as a tiresome old gentleman vacillating between brutality and sentimentality. Even the great phrase "God is Love" has lost much of its appeal. If it means that love is the fundamental principle of the cosmos, we doubt it. If it means that the sentiment of love is the highest of all values, we are in no mood to worship mere affection. Our allegiance is not for love but for that which is lovable. There was indeed a time, not long past, when it seemed that the greatest concrete object of love was one's nation; but the war has at least shown us that nations are but hordes of individuals behaving in the crude horde manner. And even internationalism, humanism, the religion of Life, are now suspected of being parochial fervours about matters of no real moment; for they all take for granted that man himself is a thing which ought to be preserved and can be improved; and this proposition is no longer self-evident.
Here lies the root of all modern disillusion. Having lost faith in everything that might be called God, we turned our admiration on man, and now man also is found to have feet of clay. We see him essentially a self-deceiver, a brute, pretending but never really striving to be an angel. His will we are told by the psychologists is at heart animal craving, though more cunning and less downright. Even his most generous impulses are said to draw their strength merely from the dynamics of the brute body, or at best from the itch of the brute mind. His love is mere greed; and his loyalty a response to no objective excellence but to the demands of his own tortuous nature. His intelligence, which was once thought capable of dispassionate knowledge of the thing that really is, is now said to be blinkered in the service of instincts. This view of human nature, which was so vigorously advertised by the psycho-analysts, is accepted by most psychologists, such as Professor McDougall, and many philosophers, such as Mr. Bertrand Russell, who reject other parts of the Freudian doctrine. And through their able advocacy it is likely to be incorporated in popular culture before the grain in it has been sorted from the chaff.
No wonder that we are disillusioned. All that was said to be noblest in man we suspect of being at heart motivated solely by a mere relic of the brute in him. The very distinction between noble and base fails now to ring true in our ears. Anything that anyone calls good or beautiful is suspect through the very fact that such radically insincere terms have been applied to them. Only the naive and the insincere, we feel, can use such words to-day without shame; and things which are applauded by the naive and the insincere are likely to be at heart other than they seem. And so in revulsion we affect to cherish things that no one could possibly call good or beautiful. And when it occurs to us that even this admiration is insincere, since it is the expression of a mere pose of sincerity in ourselves, we turn even from these idols and renounce admiration itself. Then our only solace lies in ridicule, and especially in jibing at whatever is commonly held sacred. Thus from disillusion we have at least distilled a refreshing draught of humour, wit and iconoclastic irony, which some would say is the best achievement of our age. But iconoclasm itself may become a cult, degenerating into a meaningless ritual of horse-play. Finally perhaps we are left with nothing but a bleak contempt for our own contemptuousness.
Modern literature of disillusion is of two kinds, which, though they are often difficult to distinguish and may be even blended in the same work, spring from very different motives. There is the literature which springs from disillusion solely. This is at bottom a mere gesture of disgust and revolt, a sort of spiritual vomiting-up of matter repugnant to our nature, of a whole universe, perhaps, apprehended as nauseating. This activity was wholesome at first, and was inevitably fostered by the war and its consequences. Thus in the war-verse of Siegfried Sassoon, though disgust is the dominant note, we feel it to be fired by loyalty to certain high values. But disgust itself may become a mere mannerism no less offensive than the gentility of the Victorians. In much contemporary work nausea seems an end in itself. And it is often difficult to say of any writer whether his vomiting is spontaneous or artificially induced for fashion's sake. Witness much that has appeared in certain "modernist" periodicals, often of transatlantic origin.
But there is another and more noteworthy literature of disillusion, whose motive is neither mere disgust nor mere protest against insincerity or prettiness. It is indeed concerned with disillusion, with all the defeat, pain, futility and insincerity of common life; but it is concerned with them not merely to vomit them up but to incorporate them in an organised and splendid texture. And further it is concerned, I should say, not merely to contrive aesthetic unities of light and shade, to fashion ideally formal tragedies out of the elements of a world that is merely chaotic and hideous; it is concerned with a strange and compelling attribute of the world itself. Such I take to be the spirit of the mature Shakespeare, for instance in King Lear, and again the spirit of Hardy at his best. The novels and poems of Thomas Hardy were once thought to be merely disillusioned. But does the memorable description of Egdon Heath express only the weariness of a mind trapped in a world of drab and futility; or does it symbolise the objective excellence (there is no other phrase for it) that is sometimes discovered beyond disillusion? And in Marty South and Giles Winterborne, and again in the Reddleman in The Return of the Native, do we not find a very different mood from mere world-weariness? These and others of the "strong" characters of Hardy's fiction preserve both in good times and in bad, and even during their most intense emotions, an unassailable peace of mind, such as is sometimes the expression of religious faith, but in these cases demands some other explanation. And surely this attitude of purged admiration is Hardy's own attitude, though he cannot justify it, and often adulterates it with his intellectual pessimism. Again, such tortured characters as Tess and Jude were thought once to signify nothing but futility; but surely the novels in which they are set are misread if they are regarded as protracted whimperings. More truly they are hymns of praise, spontaneous acts of adoration directed upon the world itself. Two on a Tower, even though it perhaps fails as a novel, expresses even more fervently and unambiguously that same disinterested salutation of the objective world for its own sake, quite apart from its friendliness or unfriendliness to man. Surely the whole work of Hardy is moved throughout by a spirit of admiration, even of worship, which is no less remarkable for having been perhaps unintelligible to Hardy himself.
Tennyson, harassed by the problems of his day, could but cling to the faith that somehow in the end the universe would fulfill our demands of it; but Hardy accepted the universe as it appeared to him to be, and was rewarded almost in spite of himself by a vision more splendid than Tennyson's. No doubt he was unduly influenced by a crude metaphysics; yet in spite of that he was the forerunner not merely of modern disillusion but also of modern worship. Meredith also, though chiefly humanist and optimist, could regard man with detachment. Thus, while in the myth of Earth and Man he symbolises truly the relation of the evolutionary process to human mentality, in "The Thrush in February," especially in the last two stanzas, he glimpses a value which is not dependent on the triumph of life's enterprise. In fact both Hardy and Meredith seem to have experienced, even though they failed to interpret, the second mood of the modem spirit, the fourth of those movements of thought which were started by the conflict of science and romance. Meredith dimly experienced a value other than victory, but could never distinguish it from his faith in the future. Hardy, on the other hand, saw the universe as a sorry muddle, yet worshipped it while he condemned it.
The attitude of disinterested admiration is, I suppose, an element in classicism. Certainly it derives in part from the Stoics; and again in part from the more objectivistic and classical moods of Christianity. But today it is less easily learned through classical study or devotional exercise than through such non- human interests as mathematics and physical science. Mr. Bertrand Russell has well expressed the fervour which may illuminate such activities; though sometimes, as in A Free Man's Worship, he adulterates this ecstatic detachment with an irrelevant and self-conscious romanticism over man's supposed tragic fate. This is a double error; for in the first place the mood is not focused on man at all; and secondly it does not necessarily involve a pessimistic view, though perhaps only through tragedy can it be attained to-day. In itself it is an interest, not in man for his own sake, but in the world within which man is a striving member. Consequently, it regards man neither with hopeful assertiveness nor with submissiveness or heroic resignation.
Yet, though it is in this sense a mood of complete detachment from all striving and all strivers, emphatically it is no mere apathy, nor does it consent to inactivity. But, while espousing earnestly all the values that emerge from the nature of life and mind, it yet maintains an inviolable peace; for whatever befalls, it has a vision of this actual world as excellent. Mr. George Santayana, in Platonism and the Spiritual Life, has given an account of this attitude more purified than Mr. Russell's because more dispassionate. But by describing it as a disintoxication from all values he has confused with mere apathy what is essentially a value-experience, though not merely an experience of biological fulfilment.
