MOUNTAINMEDITATIONS

AND SOME SUBJECTS OFTHE DAY AND THE WAR

_By_ L. LIND-AF-HAGEBY

AUTHOR OF "AUGUST STRINDBERG:THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT"

[Illustration: Publisher's device]

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W. C. 1

_First published in 1917_

(_All rights reserved_)

CONTENTS

 PAGE

MOUNTAIN-TOPS 7

THE BORDERLAND 44

REFORMERS 84

NATIONALITY 131

RELIGION IN TRANSITION 179

MOUNTAIN-TOPS

 Frères de l'aigle! Aimez la montagne sauvage! Surtout à ces moments où vient un vent d'orage. VICTOR HUGO. 

I belong to the great and mystic brotherhood of mountain worshippers. We are a motley crowd drawn from all lands and all ages, and we arecertainly a peculiar people. The sight and smell of the mountain affectus like nothing else on earth. In some of us they arouse excessivephysical energy and lust of conquest in a manner not unlike that whichsuggests itself to the terrier at the sight of a rat. We must master theheights above, and we become slaves to the climbing impulse, itinerantpurveyors of untold energy, marking the events of our lives on peaks andpasses. We may merit to the full Ruskin's scathing indictment of thosewho look upon the Alps as soaped poles in a bear-garden which we setourselves "to climb and slide down again with shrieks of delight, " wemay become top-fanatics and record-breakers, "red with cutaneouseruption of conceit, " but we are happy with a happiness which passeththe understanding of the poor people in the plains. 

Others experience no acceleration of physical energy, but a strangerousing of all their mental faculties. Prosaic, they becomepoetical--the poetry may be unutterable, but it is there; commonplace, they become eccentric; severely practical, they become dreamers andloiterers upon the hillside. The sea, the wood, the meadow cannotcompete with the mountain in egging on the mind of man to incredibleefforts of expression. The songs, the rhapsodies, the poems, theæsthetic ravings of mountain worshippers have a dionysian flavour whichno other scenery can impart. 

Yesterday I left the turmoil of a conference in Geneva and reached homeamongst my delectable mountains. I took train for the foot of the hillsand climbed for many hours through drifts of snow. This morning I havebeen deliciously mad. First I greeted the sun from my open chalet windowas it rose over the range on my left and lit up the great glacier beforeme, throwing the distant hills into a glorious dream-world of blue andpurple. Then I plunged into the huge drifts of clean snow which thewind had piled up outside my door. I laughed with joy as I breathed thepure air, laden with the scent of pines and the diamond-dust of snow. Inever was more alive, the earth was never more beautiful, the heavenswere never nearer than they are to-day. Who says we are prisoners ofdarkness? Who says we are puppets of the devil? Who says God must onlybe worshipped in creeds and churches? Here are the glories of themountains, beauty divine, peace perfect, power unfathomable, loveinexhaustible, a never failing source of hope and light for ourstruggling human race. I am vaguely aware of the unreasonableness of mydelirium of mountain joy, but I revel in it. And I sing with Sir LewisMorris--

 More it is than ease, Palace and pomp, honours and luxuries, To have seen white presences upon the hills, To have heard the voices of the eternal gods. 

The emotions engendered by mountain scenery defy analysis. They may beclassified and labelled, but not explained. I turn to my library ofbooks by mountain-lovers--climbers, artists, poets, scientists. Thoughwe are solitaries in our communion with the Deity, though we worship ingreat spaces of solitude and silence and seek rejuvenescence in utterhuman loneliness, we do not despise counsels of sympathy and approval. The strife rewarded, the ascent accomplished, we are profoundly gratefulfor the yodel of human fellowship. And--let me whisper it inconfidence--we do not despise the cooking-pots. For the mountains have acurious way of lifting you up to the uttermost confines of the spiritand then letting you down to the lowest dominions of the flesh. 

"Examine the nature of your own emotion (if you feel it) at the sight ofthe Alps, " says Ruskin, "and you find all the brightness of that emotionhanging like dew on a gossamer, on a curious web of subtle fancy andimperfect knowledge. " Such a result of our examination would but add toour confusion. Ruskin's mind was so permeated with adoration of mountainscenery that his attempts at cool analysis of his own sensations failed, as would those of a priest who, worshipping before the altar, tried atthe same time to give an analytical account of his state of mind. Ruskin is the stern high priest of the worshippers of mountains; to himthey are cathedrals designed by their glory and their gloom to lifthumanity out of its baser self into the realization of high destinies. The fourth volume of _Modern Painters_ was the fount of inspiration fromwhich Leslie Stephen and the early members of the Alpine Club dranktheir first draughts of mountaineering enthusiasm. But the disciplesnever reached the heights of the teacher. Listen to the exposition bythe Master of the services appointed to the hills:

"To fill the thirst of the human heart for the beauty of God'sworking--to startle its lethargy with a deep and pure agitation ofastonishment--are their higher missions. They are as a great and noblearchitecture, first giving shelter, comfort, and rest; and covered alsowith mighty sculpture and painted legend. "

There is a solemn stateliness about Ruskin's descriptions of themountains, which in the last passage of the chapter on _The MountainGloom_ rises to the impassioned cadences of the prophet. 

He could tolerate no irreverent spirits in the sanctuary of themountain. Leslie Stephen's remark that the Alps were improved bytobacco smoke became a profanity. One shudders at the thought of thereprimand which Stevenson would have drawn down upon himself had hisflippant messages from the Alps come before that austere critic. In aletter to Charles Baxter, Stevenson complained of how "rotten" he hadbeen feeling "alone with my weasel-dog and my German maid, on the top ofa hill here, heavy mist and thin snow all about me and the devil to payin general. " And worse still are the lines sent to a friend--

 Figure me to yourself, I pray-- A man of my peculiar cut-- Apart from dancing and deray, Into an Alpine valley shut;

 Shut in a kind of damned hotel, Discountenanced by God and man; The food?--Sir, you would do as well To cram your belly full of bran. 

The soul of Ruskin was born and fashioned for the mountains. His firstvisit to Switzerland in 1833 brought him to "the Gates of theHills--opening for me a new life--to cease no more except at the Gatesof the Hills whence one returns not. It is not possible to imagine, " headds of his first sight of the Alps, "in any time of the world a moreblessed entrance into life for a child of such temperament as mine. .. . Iwent down that evening from the garden terrace of Schaffhausen with mydevotion fixed in all of it that was to be sacred and useful. "[1]

 [Footnote 1: _Life of Ruskin_, by Sir Edward Cooke (George Allen and Unwin Ltd. ). ]

That profound stirring of the depths of the soul which Ruskin avowed asthe impetus to his life's work is only possible when the mind is firedby a devotion to the mountains which brooks no rival. "For, to myself, mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery, " hewrote in _The Mountain Glory_; "in them, and in the forms of inferiorlandscape that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up. " And hecompletely and forever reversed Dante's dismal conception of scenerybefitting souls in purgatory by saying that "the best image which theworld can give of Paradise is in the slope of the meadows, orchards, andcornfields on the sides of a great Alp, with its purple rocks andeternal snows above. "

No lover of mountains has approached Ruskin in intensity of veneration. Emile Javelle is not far away. Javelle climbed as by a religiousimpulse; his imagination was filled by Alpine shapes; he, like Ruskin, had forfeited his heart to the invisible snow-maiden that dwells abovethe clouds. When Javelle was a child his uncle showed him a collectionof plants, and amongst them the "Androsace . .. Rochers du Mont Blanc. "This roused the desire to climb; the faded bit of moss with the portionof earth still clinging to the roots became a sacred relic beckoning himto the shrine of the white mountain. In the same way Ruskin, mature anddidactic, yet withal so beautifully childlike, tells us "that a wild bitof ferny ground under a fir or two, looking as if possibly one might seea hill if one got to the other side, will instantly give me intensedelight because the shadow, the hope of the hills is in them. " Bothlovers showed the same disdain of the mere climber. Javelle's Alpinememories record his sense of aloofness from the general type of memberof the Alpine Club. 

Whilst Ruskin's communion with the mountains found an outlet in prolificliterary output, and a system of art and ethics destined to leaven themass of human thought, the infinitude and grandeur of mountain sceneryhad a dispersive effect on Javelle's mind. I can so well understand him. He wandered over the chain of Valais--my mountains (each worshipper hashis special idols)--the Dent du Midi, the Vaudois Alps, and the BerneseOberland in search of beauty, more and more beauty. He ascended peakafter peak, attracted by an irresistible force, permeated by a desirefor new points of view, forgetful of the haunts of men. 

And when, between times, Javelle tried to write a book, a great andlearned book on rhetoric, he could never finish it. For seven years helaboured at preparing it, collecting notes, seeking corroborativeevidence. His Alpine climbing had taught him the elusiveness of isolatedpeaks of knowledge. He saw that rhetoric is dependent on æsthetics andæsthetics on psychology and sociology and philosophy, and all onanthropology; that there are no frontiers and no finality and noknowledge which is not relative and imperfect. It was all a question ofdifferent tops and points of view, and so the book was not finished whenhe died, still in search of the super-mountain of the widest andlargest view, still crying out his motto, "Onward, higher and higherstill! You must reach the top!"

Beware, O fellow mountaineers, of such ambitions. For that way madnesslies. I know the lure and the shock. As I write this I sit gazing acrossthe valley upon the mountain on my right. It is known by the name of theBlack Head; it has a sombre shape, it has never been known to smile. Ittowers above me with a cone-shaped top, a figure of might and dominion. For a dozen years it has checked my tendency to idealistic flights byreminding me of the inexorable laws of Nature. It is true it does notconceal the smiling glacier in front of me, with its ceaseless play oflight and shadow, colour and form, but it arrests the fancy by itsmassive immovability. And yet, when I leave my little abode of bliss andwander forth into the heights above (ah, humiliation that there shouldbe heights above), I find my black top subjected to a process ofshrinking. As I reach the top it ignominiously permits itself to beflattened out to a mere ridge without a head, a Lilliputian hillbemoaning its own insignificance. 

Such are the illusions of the mountain play. Yet the climb and theheights have ever served man as a symbol of the search for certainty. Lecky invokes the heights as the only safe place from which to viewhistory and discover the great permanent forces through which nationsare moved to improvement or decay. Schopenhauer compares philosophy toan Alpine road, often bringing the wanderer to the edge of the chasm, but rewarding him as he ascends with oblivion of the discords andirregularities of the world. Nietzsche's wisdom becomes pregnant uponlonely mountains; he claims that whosoever seeks to enter into thiswisdom "must be accustomed to live on mountain-tops and see beneath himthe wretched ephemeral gossip of politics and national egoism. "

But the mountain-tops make sport of the certainties of philosophers aswell as of those of fools. The safest plan is to ascend them without tooheavy an encumbrance of theories. You may then meet fairies and goblinswho beckon you to the caves of mystery, you may stray into the hills ofArcadia and meet Pan himself. "Sweet the piping of him who sat upon therocks and fluted to the morning sea. " You may even find yourself onOlympus, the mount of a thousand folds, listening to the everlastingassault upon the Gods by the Titans, sons of strife. And if you are verypatient you may witness Zeus, the lightning-gatherer, pierce the blackclouds and rend the sky, illuminating hill and vale with the fiercelight which makes even the battle of Troy intelligible. 

You may bathe your soul in that Natura Maligna which only reveals itsblessings to pagans and poets. Byron is the chosen bard of thedestructive might of the mountains--

 Ye toppling crags of ice! Ye avalanches, whom a breath draws down In mountainous o'erwhelming, come and crush me! . . . . . The mists boil up around the glaciers; clouds Rise curling fast beneath me, white and sulphury, Like foam from the roused ocean of deep Hell, Whose every wave breaks on a living shore, Heaped with the damned like pebbles. 

He had the nature-mystic's thirst for a touch of the untamed power ofNature, for communion with the magnificence of death, shaking themountain with wind and falling snow, with leaping rock and earth-eatingtorrent. Such would fain die that they may experience the joys of beingpossessed by Nature. For they have entered on the marriage of life anddeath, heaven and hell, and out of the roaring cataclysm of destructionthey rise winged with a new life. 

Whilst the poets chant the awful power of the distant mountain, Byroncomes to us out of the mountain, fashioned by its force, intoxicated bythe wine of its wild life. Mountain climbers meet with strange andunexpected bedfellows in the course of their wanderings. In his cry forthe baptism of the wild winds of the mountain, Matthew Arnold approachesByron closely--

 Ye storm-winds of Autumn . . . . . Ye are bound for the mountains-- Ah, with you let me go . . . . . Hark! fast by the window The rushing winds go, To the ice-cumber'd gorges, The vast seas of snow. There the torrents drive upward Their rock-strangled hum, There the avalanche thunders The hoarse torrent dumb. --I come, O ye mountains! Ye torrents, I come!

Shelley sings exquisitely of its grandeur, its ceaseless motion; hevoices the wonderment of man before the complex problem of Mont Blanc. But his mind has never participated in the revels on the mountain, hehas not lost and barely recovered his soul in adventurous crevasses. Heretains something of the old horror of the desolate heights--

 A desert peopled by the storms alone, Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone, And the wolf tracks her there. How hideously, Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high, Ghastly, and scarred, and riven. --Is this the scene Where the old Earthquake-dæmon taught her young Ruin?

There is a trace of the same awe in Coleridge's deathless hymn to MontBlanc--

 On thy bald, awful head, O sovran Blanc, . . . . . O dread and silent mount!

Nearly all the poets have been moved by the primitive sense of theirawe-commanding power. Wordsworth never forgets the blackness, though heis, above all, the bard of mountain light and sweetness, of warblingbirds and maiden's haycocks. The poet does not lose the blessed gift ofwonder possessed by children and savages. And nothing in Nature canstartle the mind like the sight of a mighty range of mountains. Theyrecall primitive feelings of fear before the great unknown, they towerabove the human form with a colossal imperturbability which withers ourimportance and confuses our standards of value. Victor Hugo never quitefreed himself from the mediæval dread of the mountains or the mediævalspeculation on their meaning. His letters to his wife from the Alps andPyrenees record his impressions with a painstaking and detailed accuracywhich does not forget the black-and-yellow spider performing somersaultson an imperceptible thread hung from one brier to another. The emotionafter an hour on the Rigi-Kulm "is immense. " "The tourist comes here toget a point of view; the thinker finds here an immense book in whicheach rock is a letter, each lake is a phrase, each village is an accent;from it arise, like a smoke, two thousand years of memories. "

Here speaks the true panoramic man, the man whose mind attains tofulness of expression on mountain-tops from which the whole landscape oflife may be contemplated. And yet he notes the "ominous configurationof Mount Pilatus" and its terrible form, and writes of adjoiningmountains as "these hump-backed, goitred giants crouching around me inthe darkness. " The Rigi appears as "a dark and monstrous perpendicularwall. "

His mind is occupied with the presence of idiots in the Alps. He findsan explanation: "It is not granted to all intelligences to co-habit withsuch marvels and to keep from morning till evening without intoxicationand without stupor, turning a visual radius of fifty leagues across theearth around a circumference of three hundred. " On the Rigi his musingson the magnificence of the view are checked by the presence of a cretin. Behold the contrast! An idiot with a goitre and an enormous face, ablank stare, and a stupid laugh is sole participator with Victor Hugo inthis "marvellous festival of the mountains. "

"Oh! abysm!" he cries; "the Alps were the spectacle, the spectator wasan idiot! I forgot myself in this frightful antithesis: man face to facewith nature; Nature in her superbest aspect, man in his most miserabledebasement. What could be the significance of this mysterious contrast?What was the sense of this irony in a solitude? Have I the right tobelieve that the landscape was designed for him--the cretin, and theirony for me--the chance visitor?"

The idiot and the mountain shared, no doubt, a supreme indifference tothe commotion which their proximity had set up in the poet's mind. Withhis love of antithesis Hugo had seized the picture of the glories of themountain wasting themselves before the gaze of the senseless idiot. Apart from geographical conditions and hygienic defects there is aninteresting æsthetic problem connected with the presence of idiots inthe mountains. It is not only the idiot who is indifferent to thebeauties of the Alps; the sane and healthy peasant whose eyes wanderover the glaciers and snow-fields as he rests for a few minutes fromhoeing his potatoes is not moved by the sight to ecstatic delight. 

I have many dear friends amongst peasants. They are richly endowed withcommon sense and kindness of heart; their brains can compete favourablywith those of the folk of any other country. Their hard struggle with arebellious soil has given them a quiet determination and tenacity ofpurpose which are the root of Alpine enterprise and resourcefulness. They possess character and independence in a high degree--mentalreflexes of the peaks of freedom, ever before their eyes. But they, children of the mountain, born and bred amidst its beauties, aresurprisingly insensitive to beauty. 

I remember one exquisite sunset--one of those superlative sunsets thatburn themselves into the consciousness with a joy akin to pain, and ofwhich only a few are allotted to each human life. I stood watching thesinking sun throw a crimson net over the snow mountains as the shadow ofnight crept slowly up the hillside. The sky took on an opal light inwhich were merged and transcended all the colours of the day. Everypinnacle and rock was lit up as by a heavenly fire, the pines wereoutlined like black sentinels against the sky, guardians of thatmerciful green life from which we spring and to which we return. My oldfriend the goat-herd and daily messenger from the highest pastures stoodbeside me. "Beautiful, Pierre, " I said, "and in this you have lived allyour life. "

"Yes, " he said, slowly shifting the pipe from the left side of hismouth to the right; "the cheese is fat and good in the mountains, andthe milk is not poisonous as it is in the plains, but it is hard workfor the back to carry it down twice a day. " He looked at me as ifsearching for better understanding. "But I will tell you somethingnice, " he added, by way of stirring up my sluggish imagination; "thelittle brown cow has calved, and this autumn we are going to kill theold cow, and we shall have good meat all the winter. "

Far be it from me to join in the thoughtless generalizations about theobtuseness of the Alpine peasant which have disfigured some of theliterature of climbing. These climbers have shown infinitely greaterobtuseness before Alpine realities than the peasants derided by them. True, a star may compete in vain with a cheese in suggesting visions ofjoy, but our supercilious climbers forget that their admiration ofnature's marvels is generally built up on a substratum of cheese--or theequivalent of cheese--plentifully supplied by the labour of others. There is another class of climbers who idealize the peasant and theguide, and who write of Alpine peasant-life as if it were nothing but aseries of perilous ascents nobly undertaken for the advancement ofhumanity. 

I can understand the indifference of the peasant to the visions aroundhim. After a hard day's scything or woodcutting on slopes so steep thatthe resistance of one's hob-nailed boots seems like that of soft soap, Ihave felt profoundly healthy and ready to go to bed without listening toany lyrics on the Alps. And even the thought of Tennyson's "awful roseof dawn" would not have roused me before the labour of the next day. 

But we--how proud I am of that "we"!--who have chosen hard labour on themountain know something which the mere visitors (though they be membersof many Alpine Clubs) know not. We have a sense of home which no otherhabitation can impart--a passionate love of the soil, a unity with thelittle patch that is our own, bringing joys undimmed by any descriptionsof other-worldly possessions. Our trees may be wrecked by an avalanche, our garden plot may be obliterated by a land slip; the stone walls webuild up in defiance of the snow are always pulled down by mountainsprites. Our agriculture is precarious, and every carrot is bought bythe sweat of our brow. The struggle keeps pace with our love--there is atenfold sweetness in the fruit we reap. And when fate compels us toleave our mountains we are pursued by restlessness. We know no peace, nohome elsewhere. We do assume the airs of Victor Hugo's cretin when weare placed face to face with the riches of Croesus or the splendoursof Pharaoh. 

We must reluctantly admit that the phenomenon of cold indifference tomountain scenery may occur without any corresponding degree of idiocy. In the _Playground of Europe_, Leslie Stephen told us that a man whopreserves a stolid indifference in face of mountain beauty must be ofthe "essentially pachydermatous order. " He commented at length on thepeculiar temperament of those who have expressed dislike of his perfectplayground--Chateaubriand, Johnson, Addison, Bishop Berkeley. BishopBerkeley, who crossed Mont Cenis on New Year's Day 1714, complained thathe was "put out of humour by the most horrible precipices. " There ishuge comfort to be drawn from Stephen's pages descriptive of the"simple-minded abhorrence of mountains, " and from his categoricaldeclaration that love of the sublime shapes of the Alps springs from "adelicate and cultivated taste. " But we are puzzled by the presenceoutside the pale of some who cannot rightly be called "pachydermatous. "I am turning over the pages of Sarah Bernhardt's autobiographicalrevelations. "I adore the sea and the plain, " she writes, "but I neithercare for mountains nor for forests. Mountains seem to crush me, andforests to stifle me. " Strange that the high priestess of expression, the interpreter of every phase of human passion and sorrow, she who diesterribly twice a day, and mercilessly conducts us to the attenuated airand dizzy heights of intense emotion, should feel no kinship with themountains. It may be that they are antagonistic to the fine arts ofsimulation and will brook no companionship of feeling that is not real. And her stage-worn heart is certainly not in alliance with FionaMacleod's _Lonely Hunter_. 

 But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on A lonely hill. 

We might assume that the traditional wildness of the great tragediennewould have found a chord of sympathy in the avalanche or in the fiercetorrent breaking over the rocks. Rousseau's hysteria and wild assaultson the conventions of Society and literature have been traced to themountains. Lord Morley emphasizes that Rousseau "required torrents, rocks, dark forests, mountains, and precipices, " and that no plains, however beautiful, ever seemed so in his eyes. There is naturally acomplete divergence of opinion between lovers and haters of mountains asto their effect on the literary mind. We like to associate peaks ofgenius with peaks of granite. Ruskin found fault with Shakespeare's lackof impression from a more sublime country as shown by the sacrilegiouslines--

 Rush on his host, as doth the melted snow Upon the valleys whose low vassal seat The Alps doth spit, and void his rheum upon. 

There are anomalies in the capacity for æsthetic enjoyment of mountainscenery which exclude some minds which we should expect to find amongstthe devotees and include others for whom we might look amongst thescoffers. Dickens was profoundly affected by the mountain-presence. Hisletters show the true rapture. Of the scenery of the St. Gothard hewrites: "Oh God! what a beautiful country it is. How poor and shrunken, beside it, is Italy in its brightest aspect!" He sees "places ofterrible grandeur unsurpassable, I should imagine, in the world. " Goingup the Col de Balme, he finds the wonders "above and beyond one'swildest expectations. " He cannot imagine anything in nature "morestupendous or sublime. " His impressions are so prodigious that he wouldrave were he to write about them. At the hospice of the Great St. Bernard he awakes, believing for a moment that he had "died in the nightand passed into the unknown world. " Tyndall's scientific ballast cannotkeep him from soaring in a similar manner. His _Glaciers of the Alps_contains some highly strung sentences of delight. "Surely, " he writes ofsunset seen near the Jungfrau, "if beauty be an object of worship, theseglorious mountains with rounded shoulders of the purest white, snow-crested, and star-gemmed, were well calculated to excite sentimentsof adoration. " His wealth of words increases with the splendour of theviews in which he revels; he becomes a poet in prose, he calls up symboland simile, he strains language to express the inexpressible. The skyof the mountain is "rosy violet, " which blends with "the deep zenithalblue"; it wears "a strange and supernatural air"; he sees clear spacesof amber and ethereal green; the blue light in the cave of the glacierpresents an aspect of "magical beauty. " There is true worship of theidol in the following lines descriptive of sunrise on Mont Blanc:

 The mountain rose for a time cold and grand, with no apparent stain upon his snows. Suddenly the sunbeams struck his crown and converted it into a boss of gold. For some time it remained the only gilded summit in view, holding communion with the dawn, while all the others waited in silence. These, in the order of their heights, came afterwards, relaxing, as the sunbeams struck each in succession, into a blush and smile. 

Tyndall holds the mastership of polychromatic description of thebeauties of the mountain; he makes us feel his own response to theircall to the depths of æsthetic perception in the human soul. Words gushforth from him in a fervour of gratitude for the pleasures of the eye. He may measure and weigh, he may set out as an emissary of coldscientific investigation: he returns hot with admiration and raving ofthe marvels of God upon the hills. But even he reaches a point wherethe realization of the utter inadequacy of expression paralyses thedesire to convey the emotion to others. "I was absolutely struck dumb bythe extraordinary majesty of this scene, " he writes of one evening, "andwatched it silently till the red light faded from the highest summits. "

Verestchagin astonished his wife by painting his studies of snow in theHimalayas at an altitude of 14, 000 feet, tormented by hunger and thirstand supported by two coolies, who held him on each side. She had thepluck and the endurance to follow him on his long climbs, but being aless exalted mortal, her sense of fitness was unduly strained by theintensity of Verestchagin's devotion to clouds and mountain-tops. "Hisface is so frightfully swollen, " she tells us, "that his eyes lookmerely like two wrinkles, the sun scorches his head, his hand canscarcely hold the palette, and yet he insists on finishing his sketches. I cannot imagine, " she reflects, "how Verestchagin could make suchstudies. " There were, nevertheless, occasions when the inaction, following on intense æsthetic emotion, stayed Verestchagin's busy brush. One day, relates Madame Verestchagin, he went out to sketch the sunset:

 He prepared his palette, but the sight was so beautiful that he waited in order to examine it better. Several thousand feet below us all was wrapped in a pure blue shadow; the summits of the peaks were resplendent in purple flames. Verestchagin waited and waited and would not begin his sketch. "By and by, by and by, " said he; "I want to look at it still; it is splendid!" He continued to wait, he waited until the end of the evening--until the sun was set and the mountains were enveloped in dark shadows. Then he shut up his paint-box and returned home. 

As I read these lines I find myself wondering how many paint-boxes havebeen shut up by the sight of the mountains. I know many have beenopened, and, amongst these, not a few which might have served humanitybetter by remaining shut. But we may safely assume that despite thegeneral tendency of mountain worshippers to attempt to paint--in coloursstrong and language divine--the effect on their minds, there areexceptional instances of noble and self-imposed dumbness. Not thedumbness which is practising the old device of--

 Reculer pour mieux sauter, but a genuine silence of humility before the mysteries of nature. Wesigh in vain for a glimpse of these exceptional souls. They resist ourbest climbing qualifications and are as inaccessible as the mists aboveour highest tops. And we prefer, naturally, our talking companions, those who shrink not from the task of ready interpretation. 

"The Alps form a book of nature as wide and mysterious as Life, " saysFrederic Harrison in his _Alpine Jubilee_, in one of those clear-cut andwell-measured passages of mountain homage, which are balm to thetormented hearts of those who feel themselves afloat on the clouds ofmystery. "To know, to feel, to understand the Alps is to know, to feel, to understand Humanity. "

I am not at all sure this is true; it is probably entirely untrue. Humanity--in the abstract--is apt to suffer an enforced reduction inmagnitude and importance when seen from Alpine heights. But it is one ofthose phrases which we hug instinctively as the bearers of food forhungry hearts. We do not want Leslie Stephen's reminder of metaphysicalriddles, "Where does Mont Blanc end and where do I begin?" We do notwant to be paralysed by philosophic doubt for the rest of our mortallives on the hills. We prefer to be stirred to emotional life by thosewho are transported by love of beauty to the realms of unreason. 

In the autobiography of Princess Hélène Racowitza--the tragicallybeloved of Ferdinand Lassalle--there is evidence of such transport. Shehas but reached one of the commonplaces of tourist ventures. From theWengern Alp she watches the play of night and dawn on the Jungfrau:

 Again and again the glory of God drew me to the window. In the immense stillness of the loneliness of the mountains, the thundering of the avalanches that crashed from time to time from the opposite heights was the only sound. It was as if one heard the breath of God, and in deepest reverence one's heart stood almost still. 

She beholds the moon pale and the summit of the Jungfrau glitter in "athousand prismatic colours" from the rising sun:

 Once more I was shaken to the depths of my soul, thankful that I was allowed to witness this and to enjoy it thus. A great joy leapt up in my heart, which more surely than the most fervent prayer of thanks penetrated to the infinite goodness of the great Almighty. 

The sincerity of the religious feeling is enhanced by its simplicity. The more complex experiences of the true mystical nature retain the sameintensity of devotional fervour. Anna Kingsford, whose interpretationsof the inner meaning of Christianity place her in the foremost rank ofmodern mystics, was caught up to God by the beauty of the mountains. Herfriend and biographer, Edward Maitland, describes their effect on one inwhom a fiercely artistic soul did combat with a frail and sufferingbody. It was whilst near the mountains that she conceived her beautifulutterance on the Poet:

 But the personality of the Poet is Divine: and being Divine, it hath no limits. 

 He is supreme and ubiquitous in consciousness: his heart beats in every Element. 

 The Pulses of all the infinite Deep of Heaven vibrate in his own: and responding to their strength and their plenitude, he feels more intensely than other men. 

 Not merely he sees and examines these Rocks and Trees: these variable Waters, and these glittering Peaks. 

 Not merely he hears this plaintive Wind, these rolling Peals:

 But he IS all these: and with them--nay, IN them--he rejoices and weeps, he shines and aspires, he sighs and thunders. 

 And when he sings, it is not he--the Man--whose Voice is heard: it is the voice of all the Manifold Nature herself. 

 In his Verse the Sunshine laughs; the Mountains give forth their sonorous Echoes; the swift Lightnings flash. 

 The great continual cadence of universal Life moves and becomes articulate in human language. 

 O Joy profound! O boundless Selfhood! O Godlike Personality!

 All the Gold of the Sunset is thine; the Pillars of Chrysolite; and the purple Vault of Immensity!

Anna Kingsford did not consciously seek the mountains to find there therelease of imprisoned powers of utterance. The mountains sought her bytheir beauty and called forth the true mystic's ecstasy of communion. Mystics of all times and all religions have found inspiration andstrength of spirit on the hilltops; they have forsaken the haunts of menfor the silence of the heights, preparing themselves by meditation andself-purification to receive the Beatific Vision. They have gone upalone in anguish and uncertainty, they have come down inspired bearersof transcendental tidings to men. These messengers of the spirit haveknown the joys of illumination and the secret of the strength of thehills. 

Others have sought in agony and mortification of mind the vision whichwas denied them. For in chasing away the images of sin they forgot tomake room for the images of beauty. With Simeon Stylites, they point totheir barren sojourn on the hills:

 Three winters that my soul might grow to thee, I lived up there on yonder mountain-side, My right leg chained into the crag, I lay Pent in a roofless close of ragged stones. 

It is to the rarefied perception of beauty that we may trace thequickening of spirit which artists and poets experience on themountains. Heine, going to the Alps with winter in his soul, "witheredand dead, " finds new hope and a new spring. The melodies of poetryreturn, he feels once again his valour as a soldier in the war ofliberation of humanity. 

The process of unburdening hearts has been continuous since wediscovered the boundless capacity of the hills to hide our shame anddischarge our thunder. Petrarch set the example on the top of MontVentoux when he deliberately recollected and wept over his pastuncleanness and the carnal corruptions of his soul. I never tire of thatdearly sentimental mixture of world-weariness and nature-study whichElisée Reclus called the _History of a Mountain_. "I was sad, downcast, weary of my life. Fate had dealt hardly with me: it had robbed me of allwho were dear to me, had ruined my plans, frustrated all my hopes. People whom I called my friends had turned against me when they beheldme assailed by misfortune; all mankind with its conflicting interestsand its unrestrained passions appeared repulsive in my eyes. " Thus heinvites us to follow him towards the lofty blue peaks. In the course ofhis wanderings he finds Nature's peace and freedom, and as his love ofthe mountains expands, kind tolerance returns to his heart. He takesgeological and meteorological notes, he studies men and beasts on thepeaks, and never forgets to draw moralizing comparisons. The climb is tohim the symbol of "the toilsome path of virtue, " the difficult passes, the treacherous crevasses reminders of temptations to be overcome by asanctified will. 

I am afraid modern climbers show scant regard for Elisée Reclus' rulesfor moral exercises. Many are moved by an exuberance of physical energywhich rejoices in battle with Nature. They love the struggle and thedanger, the exercise and the excitement. They find health and goodtemper, jollity and good-fellowship, through their exertions. They gloryshamelessly in useless scrambles which demand the sweat of their browand the concentrated attention of their minds. They seek to emulate thechamois and the monkey in hanging on to rocks and insecure footholds. When they do not climb, they fill libraries with descriptions of theirachievements, dull and unintelligible to the uninitiated, bloodstirringand excellent to the members of the brotherhood. They write in a jargonof their own of chimneys and buttresses and basins and ribs, of bouldersand saddles and moraine-hopping. They become rampant at the thought ofthe stout, unworthy people who are now dragged to the tops by the helpof rope-chains and railings. They sarcastically remark that they mayhave to abandon certain over-exploited peaks through the danger offalling sardine-tins. They issue directions for climbing calculated tochase away the poet from the snow-fields, as when Sir Martin Conway saysthat a certain glacier must be "struck at the right corner of itssnout, " and "its drainage stream flows from the left corner. "

They do not hesitate to admit that they would continue to climb even ifthere were no views to be enjoyed from the tops. "I am free to confess, "wrote A. F. Mummery, "that I would still climb, even though there wereno scenery to look at. " And Mrs. Aubrey Le Blond echoes this sentimentin a defiant challenge to their uncomprehending critics. "To furtherconfound the enemy, " she writes, "we do not hide the fact that were noview obtainable from the summit a true climber would still continue toclimb. "

Why do they climb? The motives are many--the result joy. Yes, joy, evenin the providential escapes and the "bad five minutes, " beloved by ournaïve scribes of the ice-axe, in the perils and death which they courtfor the sake of adventure and exploration. Sir Martin Conway speaks ofthe systematic climber as the man for whom climbing takes the place offishing and shooting. How depressingly banal! Yet Sir Martin Conway haswritten some of the finest tributes to the glories of the Alps, and hasshown himself a master of artistic interpretation of their wealth ofbeauty. Whymper excels in matter-of-fact history of climbs, yet there isan undercurrent of reverence for the mysteries of Nature's beauty. 

The expert cragsman climbs to attain acrobatic efficiency, and may aimat nothing higher than inspired legs. Mrs. Peck climbed to establish theequality of the sexes. Mr. And Mrs. Bullock Workman climbed in theHimalayas with strong determination to name a mountain Mount BullockWorkman. They did, and the mountain, which attains 19, 450 feet, is nonethe worse. Climbers are exceedingly human in their love of getting tothe top before fellow-climbers. Here they follow the ordinary rules forhuman conduct in commerce, politics, and literature. There have beensome loud and unseemly quarrels as to honours and fame attendant on thefirst successful conquest of a desirable peak. It has been generallyheld that if you cannot get a mountain to yourself you can at any ratedevise a new route. But I cannot bring myself to speak harshly of suchfailings. The utmost I will say is that it were better if suchenthusiasm were tempered with a little humour. 

Mark Twain saw through that deadly seriousness of the pure climber. Hesaw the fatuity of mere peak-hunting. It impressed him strongly even onthe Rigi-Kulm. "We climbed and climbed, " he writes in _A Tramp Abroad_, "and we kept on climbing; we reached about forty summits: there wasalways another one just ahead. "

But the pure climber is always a fountain of delight, even though hedoes not see himself as others see him. The pages of Conway, Mummery, Sir Claud Schuster, and Bruce abound in gems of nature-lore, ever freshand ever alluring. As I search for more self-revelation in my books bymountain-lovers, I find myself observed through the window. It is only acow on her way to the hollow tree into which the water courses out ofthe earth. But the cow brings me back to the strenuous Alpine life, andI find myself concluding, as I replace the books on their shelves, thatI do not care why men climb so long as they climb in spirit and body. 

THE BORDERLAND

This evening the blind man came up the path from the village. I wassitting on a stump of pine listening to the merry peal of the bells ofthe little village church below. He carried a milk-can, and felt his waywith a long staff, with which he tapped the stones in front of him. Hehesitated for a moment as he passed me, as if vaguely conscious of adisturbing presence. We have been good friends, the blind man and I, andhave had many a talk on this, our common path. But to-night I satsilent, wondering. For a message had reached me that a friend had beenkilled in battle. A man strong and active in body, intensely alive andsensitive in soul. One of those whom we can never think of as dead, sowholly do they belong to life. 

The blind man stopped at a little distance. He chose a place where thetrees have been cleared and the snow mountains spread themselves forthe feast of the eyes of those who can see. He put his milk-can and hisstaff on the ground, and stood for a moment with head bowed as ifcrushed by his infirmity. Then he threw up his hands and raised hishead, as though a sudden vision had come to him--his whole body tenseand expectant, like that of a man who strains every nerve to catch amessage from the hills across the valley. For a minute he remainedstill, as if receiving something in his hands borne by the silence. Thenhe picked up his staff and his can. He turned round and faced me for amoment before resuming his journey. There was a smile on his lips and astrange radiance in his sightless eyes, and I wished that I, too, mightsee what he had seen. 

For the darkness with which we are afflicted lay heavily around me, andseemed greater even than the blindness of the eyes. The war has broughtthe mystery of death to our hearts with pitiless insistence. Everybullet that finds its mark kills more than the soldier who falls. Tiesof love and friendship are shattered hour by hour and day by day, as theguns of war roar out their message of destruction. We are all partnersin a gigantic Dance of Death such as Holbein never imagined. To himDeath was the wily and insistent enemy of human activity and hope, a spywatching in the doorway for an opportunity to snap the thread of life. We have cajoled and magnified Death until he has outgrown all naturalproportions; through centuries of war and preparation for war we haveappealed to him to settle our national differences. We have outdone theearthquake and the cyclone in valid claims upon his power and presence;we have outwitted pestilence and famine in our efforts to hold hisattention. We, of the twentieth century, have attained mastery in theart of killing. We kill by fire and bursting shell, we kill by mine andgas. We dive under the surface of the water to surprise our enemy, wefly in the air and sow fire and devastation upon the earth. We havechained science to our chariot of Death, we have made giant tools ofkilling which mow down regiments of men at great distances. We send outfumes of poison which envelop groups of human beings, killing themgently, and emphasizing the triumph of art by leaving them in attitudessimulating life. We project shells so powerful that men disappear inthe explosion, melted, disintegrated by its destructive force. 

And when long-distance scientific methods of man-killing fall short ofthe passions of the fray or the exigencies of the fight, we return tothe primitive ways of savages, and kill by dagger and knife, by bayonetand fist. Thus millions of men are slain in this war, which has achievedsuperiority over all other wars in history by the number of its dead andits gigantic destructiveness. And other millions of men and women areplunged into sorrow and mourning for the dead, and to them the meaningof life is hidden behind a veil of tears and blood. 

There is an incongruity about death on the battlefield which assails themind. The incongruity is there notwithstanding the probability that thesoldier who faces the fire of the enemy will be killed. It defies themathematical calculation of chances. It rises naturally as a protestagainst the sudden termination of life at its fullest. Death after along illness, at the eventide of life, partakes of the order of fallingleaves and autumnal oblivion. It may come softly as sleep when the day'swork is done; it may come mercifully to end bodily pain andwretchedness. There are moments in every life when the ebb of physicalforce is so low that death seems but a step across the border--a changeby which we desire to cure the weariness of thought. The soldier goesinto battle charged with youth and life, buoyant with energy of muscleand nerve. Death seizes him at the noontide of life and leaves usblindly groping for other-worldly compensation. 

The present war is being fought against a background of questions whichcannot be suppressed by discipline or the mere fulfilment of patrioticduty. The old acceptance of the social order is passing away. The oldacceptance of religious nescience is passing away; there is a newimpatience to reach the foundation of things, a popular clamour forexplanation of the riddles of life. Out of the decivilizing forces ofwar, its tumult and wreckage, there emerges a new quest for truth. Simple souls are troubled with a warlike desire for evidence ofimmortality. The parson's exhortations to live by faith and unreasoningacceptance of ecclesiastical doctrine fall on inattentive ears. "Thereis a shocking recrudescence of superstition and devil-worship, " said aclergyman to me the other day; "people consult fraudulent mediums andfortune-tellers. "

I listened to him and remembered an afternoon's visit to a bereavedmother. She is a charwoman endowed with the scientific mind. Her son hadbeen killed by an exploding shell. Only a fragment or two had beennecessary for the task. Jimmy had no chance. Courage and energy hadnever failed him. The spirit that dwelt within his thin and somewhatstunted body would have rejoiced in battle with a lion. But shells areno respecters of spirit. Jimmy had successfully fought poverty andill-health; he had risen from a newspaper-boy's existence to the dizzyheights of a milkman's cart. His pale face with its prominent eyes andrich, chestnut forelock bore an expression of indomitable Cockneyconfidence in the ultimate decency of things. He had always been kind tohis mother. "More like a girl than a boy, " she said, "in the way hecared for his home and looked after me. " And now Jimmy was dead: themessage had come that he would not return. "And why is he dead, " saidthe mother to me, "and where is he?" She was sitting in her kitchen, which bore its usual aspect of order and cleanliness. But her facelooked as if some disordering power had passed over her. "I asked ourcurate to explain where Jimmy is, " she continued, "and he told me thatdoubt is a sin, and that we shall meet again on the day of resurrection. And when I told him that I felt Jimmy quite close to me in this kitchen, a week after his death, and that I thought I heard his voice calling me, the curate said I ought not to think of such things. Faith and hard workwere the best cure for such fancies, he said. "

"But do you know what I did?" she added in a whisper, intended todeceive the curate, "I went to one of those mediums that Mrs. Jonesknows about. I paid a shilling, and we all sat in a ring, and the mediumsaw Jimmy and described him, just as he is in his uniform and cap, alittle over the right ear, and the scar across his nose--you know, thescar from the fall down the front steps when he was nine--and allsmiling, and showing the missing tooth. 'Jimmy wants you to know that heis happy, very happy, ' she said, and then Jimmy came and spoke throughthe medium. 'Mother, ' he said to me, 'I want you to give my pipe withthe silver band to Charlie, and don't make no bones about it. ' Then Iknew it was Jimmy, for Jimmy always used to say 'don't make no bonesabout it. ' And now I feel he is alive somewhere, and I shall go again tothe medium and find out more. "

I thought of this when the clergyman complained of the prevalence ofsuperstition and visits to mediums. I suggested that he shouldinvestigate the subject of spiritualism and the reasons for its appealto sorrow-stricken relatives and friends of soldiers. The suggestion wasindignantly rejected. Religion was to him a theory based on revelationvouchsafed thousands of years ago; it was now a system of stereotypedbelief and conduct, strangely removed from the perplexities and anguishof the individual soul. His academic mind recoiled from the grotesqueand trivial messages associated with séances and the performances ofprofessional psychics. 

We are wont to contemplate immortality in much the same manner as wecontemplate the moon. It is something remote and incapable of activeinterference in our daily life and tasks. It sheds a pale and pleasantlight on our earthly pilgrimage, and we in our turn render homage tothe mellow beauty which it imparts to our poetic imagination. Onlychildren cry for the moon. We know it is unattainable. 

The rejection of the crude theories of spiritualism is not altogetherthe result of wilful blindness. In our innermost minds, in the regionbeyond the grasp of the brain and its ready generalizations, we hungerfor inexpressible reality, for life beyond the stars. We have eaten ofthe tree of sense-knowledge: we have seen, heard, felt, tasted. We wanta reality above the traffic and deception of the senses. Vaguely, butinsistently we feel the call to the life of the spirit, and when itsdefinition eludes us, we prefer silence and faith. It is then that thefamiliar prattle of the séance-room offends us. We sought freedom, light, absolution from the trammels of personality, and we are told thatthe dead appear in bodies and clothes, that they toil and fret, thatthey inhabit houses and cities. Our plains Elysian suffer an invasion oflawyers and physicians, of merchants and moneylenders. The weariness ofrepetition pursues us. 

And yet we may be more completely the victims of illusion than ourvendor of spiritualistic revelation. We who cherish the belief inimmortality forget that death can be naught but the shedding of a form. The substance is unchanged. The fabric of the mind is woven day by dayby impressions and ideas, by experience and action. Nobody questions thecommonplace phenomena of the shaping of individuality and character. Habits, occupation, tastes, and desires mould a distinct personality outof the common clay. The experience of death cannot dissolve thepersonality. The death-process can neither whitewash a man's sin norexalt him beyond his virtue. 

And thus it is that he who dearly loved a joke may joke still, and hewho thought he was collecting fine old pictures may still indulge histaste. Delusions! Not impossible or even unlikely. Kant demonstratedonce for all our complete enslavement by phenomena and our inability toapproach things-in-themselves. Spiritualistic interpretation ofpost-mortem conditions offers no exception. Imagination continues tomaster our souls. Spiritualism offends us by offering bread-and-butterwhen we expect moonshine. 

We are loath to part with the belief that death transforms thecharacter by one great stroke of spiritual lightning. Vanity, envy, meanness, greed, the foibles and frailties of human nature, repel uswhen we imagine their persistence in others after death. We infinitelyprefer the thought that they should be purged and radiant with spiritualeffulgence. We are not so sure about ourselves, for the objectiveclassification of the qualities which go to form our own character is adifficult achievement. And the idea of dispensing with essential partsof our mental equipment does not commend itself to us. There is a pointin all our philosophy where speculation seeks the natural repose of theunknowable. It is quickly reached when we attempt to probe the mysteryof selfhood. 

The plain question whether the dead can communicate with the livingpersists in spite of the imperfections of the answer. The war has madeit paramount, and only second in importance to the crucial query: Dothey live? There is a clamour for evidence, signs, messages, testimony. The human heart cries out for comfort. "Yesterday he breathed the sameair, felt and thought as I do. To-day he lies dead, his body shattered, his hopes wrecked, his happy laughter silent. Does he know? Does hefeel and remember? Is there an eternal gulf of silence between us?"

 O! for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still. 

The Church tries vainly to ban the new inquisitiveness. The intercoursewith familiar spirits is condemned as a theological offence, avainglorious and futile storming of the citadel of God. The secret ofthe tomb must be preserved, though the masses of Christendom have ceasedto believe in the long and mouldering sleep of the centuries before thesummons to the Judgment. They are no longer scorched by the threat ofeternal fire, nor soothed by the hope of clouds and harps. The love thatis in them would not tolerate the infliction of an eternity of tortureon a fellow-soul, and their conception of the love of God cannot placeHim below the promptings of human mercy. The reason that is in them isnot attracted by the promise of a heaven of rosy inaction and strifelessrest. The contrast of heaven and hell, so powerful a corrective of humanwaywardness in mediæval times, fails to impress the modern mind. Thewindows of experience and knowledge have been opened too widely, thepowers and manifold possibilities of the earth lie open and tempt to thesearch for a super-mundane world, not poorer and more complex, butricher and more lavish in creative force. 

The law supports the opposition of the Church and frowns on the practiceof mediumship and clairvoyance. The law denies the possibility of spiritintercourse and forbids the exercise of supernormal faculties inexploring the untrodden realms of the future. Prosecutions areinstituted under the old Witchcraft and Vagrancy Acts, and psychicpractitioners are fined or sent to prison in the hope of stemming thetide of inquiry. The law and the spirit were ever at variance. But it isdifficult to understand why those who mourn, and who ask questions, should be deprived of the comfort which they may find through visits toprofessional mediums. The risk of deception and false pretences isthere, it is true, but that risk exists everywhere. There are lawyers, politicians, and physicians who tell "fortunes" and practise"witchcraft" of their own brand, decidedly more harmful and disruptivethan the visions of the unlettered clairvoyant. 

The magistrate, who sends a clairvoyant to prison because he isconvinced that all claims to psychic gifts and to communion withdiscarnate spirits are fraudulent, is not troubled by his ignorance, andthe evidence of psychic research is not acceptable in his court. Hetypifies the perpetual official, ever ready to suppress new andevolutionary thought. After all, psychic science fares no worse than thephysical sciences in the judgment of respectable mediocrity. Theprogress of science in the nineteenth century was one long conquest ofterritory in the land of the impossible. Inventors and inventions havemet with incredulity and mockery. Railways, steamships, aeroplanes, telegraphy, telephony and cinematographs have all emerged from theregion of "impossibilities. " Röntgen-rays and radium have descended fromthe sphere of miracles. 

Experience should endow us with cautiousness in proclaimingimpossibilities of the future. The study of psychic science has imposedno greater strain on my reason than the attempt to explain the mysteriesof biology and astronomy. Observation and classification do notnecessarily imply elucidation. The miracle of the foetus taking humanshape and soul, or of the oak rising out of the acorn and the brownearth is to me as baffling as the materialization of a spirit. Themarvels of the cell-life and the daily chemistry which maintain the bodycharm my attention as much as the mysterious clouds of light with whichspirits are wont to signalize their presence in the séance-room. I havesat for hours on a summer night by the Mediterranean watching thephosphorescent waves throw a luminous spray over the shore, andmeditating on the inexhaustible fertility of the sea. And I have watchedwith the same intense wonder the phenomena of the soul illuminated bythe _daimon_ of inner vision and the infinite manifestations of thepower of spirit over matter. From the point of view of science there isno clearly defined frontier between the natural and the supernatural, the commonplace and the miraculous. All is soil for the plough, alldefies our designs for complete explanation. From the point of view ofreligious emotion, there is the greatest possible difference between thesciences of psychic force and those that seek to probe the mysteries ofthe physical world. The question of the immortality of the human soul isinfinitely more engrossing than that of the formation of the skull ofneolithic man. The strictly evidential demonstration of communionbetween the living and the dead might be almost negligible in quantity, and yet the importance of one rap from the world of discarnate spirits, scientifically demonstrated, would outweigh tomes of theories inphysics. 

True, those who live in the spirit need no demonstrations provided byscientific investigators of psychic problems. The mystic consciousnesswith its intuition of immortality, its sensitiveness to the vibration oflife on all planes and in all forms _knows_, and in knowledge transcendsalike the boundaries of religionists and scientists. The mystic maysmile at the labour expended during the last fifty years on establishinga strictly evidential basis for the study of transcendental facts. Hehas conquered the inherited blindness of our race, and sees spirit notas a supernatural demonstration, vouchsafed now and then to doubtinghumanity, but as the living Presence of which he is joyously a part. Hedoes not fall into the common error of forgetting that we are spiritssheathed in flesh, but bearing within ourselves the power over matterwhich is destined to achieve the miraculous. He can dispense with amedium, being himself a fountain of light, and experiencing the wondrousself-illumination of which Thomas Treherne sang--

 O Joy! O wonder and delight! O sacred mystery! My soul a spirit infinite! An image of the Deity! A pure substantial light! That being greatest which doth nothing seem! . . . . . O wondrous Self! O sphere of light, O sphere of joy most fair; O act, O power infinite; O subtile and unbounded air! O living orb of sight! Thou which within me art, yet me! Thou eye And temple of His whole infinity!

But the spiritual raptures of the mystics of all ages have not movedsouls struggling in the outer darkness for tangible proofs ofimmortality. To them the application of the methods approved by reasonand tested by scientific application will ever be welcome. They knowthat the mind of man has wrested secret after secret from the earth byobservation, by experiment, by deduction. They know that the greatgeneralizations of science--the theories of the indestructibility ofmatter, of gravitation, of the conservation of energy--are but countersof mind exchanged in default of elusive realities. They know that thepressure of research has reduced many of the lesser generalizations andtheories to a fluid and amorphous state. "Immutable" laws have beenturned into faulty conclusions, hastily drawn and readily abandonedbefore the advance of new facts. The fixity of the elements inchemistry, the undulatory movement of light, the stability of theplanetary orbits, the indestructibility of the atom, are allabstractions which have been subjected to the reforming processes of newthought. 

Progress in physics has been marked by bold hypotheses dealing withimponderable forces, and by experiments disclosing hidden properties ofmatter. The hypothetical ether has been as fruitful in the liberation ofthought as the demonstration of the existence of the X-rays. 

The application of methods of scientific accuracy to the physicalphenomena of spiritualism involves no revolution in mental processes orreversal of the laws of logic. The publication of the results of theclassical experiments in materialization undertaken in 1874 by SirWilliam Crookes with the medium Florence Cooke caused incredulousamazement, for the simple reason that the custodians of science had notapplied themselves to the lessons afforded by the continuous shifting oftheir frontiers. Crookes' report that Katie King, the spirit who tookmaterial form during the séances, was a perfect, though mysteriousreplica of the natural-born human being, roused no general scientificinterest. He asserted that Katie was physiologically complete. That shewalked, talked, expressed intelligence and feeling, that she had aregularly beating heart and sound lungs. He further pointed out that thepersonality of Katie in appearance and character differed considerablyfrom that of the medium, and that it was impossible to regard thematerialized form as but a phantasm of the living. A stupendousdiscovery or a pitiful figment of a lunatic brain! But no flash oflightning rent the halls of learning; Sir William Crookes' researchesinto radiant matter could safely be accepted as workable intellectualground, but not his researches into spiritual dynamics. 

And yet there was no unorthodoxy in his methods of research; he imposedstrict conditions of experimental control. There is a strange reluctancein accepting the necessity for "mediums" in psychic manifestations. Ifthese things are possible, we are told, why not here, now, anywhere, inbroad daylight? Why mystifying circles, cabinets, and subdued light? Ourscoffers forget that scientific investigation always requires a mediumand method. The need of the telescope and the microscope is notquestioned, but the thought of the planchette evokes ridicule. Thepractical success of wireless telegraphy depends on the use of anadequate medium for the transmission of electricity. The most meagretraining suffices to prevent the declaration that if wireless messagescannot be sent without apparatus they cannot be sent at all. 

Notwithstanding the indifference of the majority of scientists, theproblems of spirit intercourse have proved sufficiently attractive tostimulate a vast amount of experimentation and theorizing. The study ofmediumship has necessarily become the study of consciousness and theoccult powers of the human mind. In the centre a handful of fearlessscientists: Crookes, Wallace, Richet, Flammarion, Morselli, Baraduc, Myers, Lombroso, Lodge, and Barrett; in the inner circle a number ofacademic investigators, disdaining alike the premature proclamation ofphenomenal results and the obstinate denial of facts; in the outercircle an ever-growing mass of souls clamouring for the crumbs ofevidence, hungry for something personal and soul-warming in our dealingswith the Divine dispensation. 

The annals of psychic science--in different tongues and of differentcontinents--are largely devoted to the investigation of trance, clairvoyance, clairaudience, telepathy, hypnotism, dreams, premonitions, automatic writing, visions, and messages from the dying, multiplepersonality, and all the phenomena associated with the subconsciousself. Many students have dispensed with the spirit hypothesis as anunnecessary and embarrassing complication in a subject alreadyoverburdened with difficulties. Spirit messages are to them examples ofthe activity of the subliminal self, and a medium is a person gifted--orcursed--with extraordinary subconscious force and lucidity. Materializations, they argue, are produced through the effluvia of theliving and controlled by the subliminal forces of the participators inthe séance. Spirits are nothing but thought-forms. The painstakinginvestigation recorded in the _Proceedings_ and _Journal of the Societyfor Psychical Research_ has to a great extent been carried on byinquirers unencumbered by any bias towards "spookery. " But the theoriesin elaboration of psycho-pathological vagaries and dissociation ofpersonality which have been substituted for the spirit hypothesiscertainly do not err on the side of intelligible explication. They havebut deepened the mystery and show the vista of new and unexplored pathsin psychic science. 

Others, again, who are not unwilling to believe that the phenomena areproduced by the action of intelligences other than that of the medium, abandon further study because of the meagreness of the intellectualresults. They have waited on the visitors from another world, notebookin hand, plying them with careful questions intended to increase ourmodest store of knowledge. The replies were unsatisfactory, commonplace, sometimes ludicrous. Attempts to write a passable textbook on life inthe spirit world have failed lamentably. The indignation of the sorelydisappointed scientist was voiced by the late Professor HugoMünsterberg, of Harvard, in his _Psychology of Life_:

 Thousands and thousands of spirits have appeared; the ghosts of the greatest men have said their say, and yet the substance of it has always been the absurdest silliness. Not one inspiring thought has yet been transmitted by this mystical way; only the most vulgar trivialities. It has never helped to find the truth; it has never brought forth anything but nervous fear and superstition. 

His denunciation embraces the whole subject of spiritualistic evidenceand ends in utter pessimism--

 Our belief in immortality must rest on the gossip which departed spirits utter in dark rooms through the mouths of hypnotized business mediums, and our deepest personality comes to light when we scribble disconnected phrases in automatic writing. Is life then really still worth living?

I have every sympathy with the complaint. But our psychologist forgotthat life is largely made up of trivialities, and that the spirits ofthe dead, if they really wish to make themselves known to us, can do sowith greater certainty of being recognized by reminding us of eventsand objects with which they are associated in our memory than bypresenting us with a corrected version of the nebular theory. Theaverage medium and the average gathering of inquirers are notdistinguished by any great intellectual achievement. The generaleducational level may be low and the total capacity to sift and weighevidence may fall short of that of an undergraduates' debating society. Yet the evidence produced may not only be entirely soul-satisfying tothe participants, but perfectly acceptable to a critic contented withthe average quality of evidence current in a court of law. It may evenbe true that the evidential value rises with the number of trivialitiesrecorded. 

And "the truth" which Professor Münsterberg sought in vain isdemonstrated to others through the same trivial evidence, as is shown bythe verdict of Alfred Russel Wallace:

 Spiritualism demonstrates by direct evidence, as conclusive as the nature of the case admits, that the so-called dead are still alive; that our friends are often with us, though unseen, and give direct proof of a future life--proof which so many crave, but for want of which so many live and die in anxious doubt. How valuable the certainty to be gained from spiritual communications! A clergyman, a friend of mine, who witnessed the phenomena, and who before was in a state of the greatest depression, caused by the death of his son, said to me, "I am now full of confidence and cheerfulness. I am a changed man. "

It is not unnatural that the answers given to those who ask foradmittance to the closed door of the mysteries of the human soul shouldbe pitched in the same key as the inquiry. Disappointment is notuncommon. I have taken part in séances of every kind, with cautiousinvestigators devoid of all spiritualistic bias, with unsophisticatedbelievers in a supernatural source of all psychic phenomena, withscoffers convinced that every medium is an impostor, and that nothingbut a little common sense is needed for the exposure. The results havebeen largely dependent on the mentality of the investigators. Failure tounderstand this is responsible for much of the disappointment andcontempt with which otherwise intelligent critics have dismissed thesubject. The accumulated thought-power, the collective mind of those whoparticipate, profoundly influence the medium and the quality of thecommunications received. One stubborn soul may wreck the meeting. Iremember an evening at the house of Mr. W. T. Stead. There had been aseries of highly successful demonstrations of "spirit voices, "distinctly audible and perfectly intelligible. A well-known minister ofthe Church visible joined the circle--a man clothed in all the outwardsigns of spirituality, uniting clerical decorum with an emotionalfervour in preaching which had made him a popular favourite. Thoughfeeling has now and then led him into unconventional paths oftheological thought, fate has surely marked him for the adornment of abishopric. He came to study the alleged powers of the medium. He doubtedeverything and everybody. The easy faith and unquestioning acceptance ofmiraculous events of which he was not ashamed whilst in the pulpit hadnow been exchanged for vigilant suspicion and impatient analysis. Heplied the medium with questions, bludgeoned her with requests forevidence that she was not deluded or deluding. He turned himself intocross-examining counsel, proud of his discrimination and his immunityagainst the insidious appeal of the supernatural. He succeeded. Themedium was confounded, she lost her power; the phenomena did not occur. The atmosphere was chilled. Some of us felt we would rather have beenvisited by the village blacksmith than by this priestly exponent ofsweet-faced materialism. 

I do not deny that I have often been struck with the intellectualpoverty of messages from the spirit world. They are often silly, and notseldom untruthful. The silliness and the untruthfulness are faithfulreflections of common human failings, and only show that heavenly wisdomis as unattainable through the average spiritualistic channels as it isin the Houses of Parliament or the courts of law. 

I can imagine a radiant and purely spiritual being attempting to conveya true description of the state of spiritual bliss to a circle of menand women representative of cultured thought, and practical efficiencyin the affairs of the world. Let the circle include a few universityprofessors, some successful men of business, a couple of judges, asprinkling of journalists, an archdeacon or two, and some authors ofrepute. Let them all be actuated by a strong desire to obtain reliableinformation and to give a fair and unprejudiced hearing to the visitor. 

The visitor is necessarily hampered by the necessity for a medium. Itmay be that the senior judge is gifted with psychic powers and that themethod of communication chosen is that of trance. 

The learned brain-cells would transmit the message up to a certainpoint, but when an effort was made to depict unfathomed depths andheights of transcendental experience, the judicial mind would rebel. The sense of logic would be strained. The conception of the possiblewould be violated. A fearful consciousness of being guilty of utteringlies would persist, in spite of efforts to subdue reason. Languagewould break in the attempt to find words for the inexpressible, themessage would be blurred and incoherent. The judge might pull himselftogether, feeling that the turbulent thought-waves of contendingcounsel form a much safer ground on which to pronounce truth than thefourth-dimensional hurricane with which he had just battled. And theaudience might turn with relief to the thought of dinner outside Bedlam. 

By some wild flights of imagination we may picture another kind ofcircle. Let a poet be the medium; Swedenborg, Dante, Blake, Socrates, Jacob Böhme, Tasso, Milton, Eckart, Ruysbroek, St. Teresa, Joan of Arc, Emerson, Shelley, and a few more visionaries, and dreamers be of thecircle. Let our Radiant Being try again. The vibrations of the combinedpsychic force would respond more readily to the world-strangeness of thevisitor. There would be fewer mental obstacles raised by the sense ofthe impossible. The restraints of logic would be more easily overcome. The avenues of supersensual impressions would be open. The medium wouldtransmit the message to a point far beyond that possible to our psychicjudge, and the audience would encourage him by their readiness to graspthe revelations made. The language of mysticism, philosophy, andpoetry would be strained to its utmost capacity. Then a sense ofincompleteness, of deficiency, of hopeless relativity would overcome theaudience. The medium had exerted every spiritual faculty to receive thetruth. But the visitor could not convey celestial realities to terreneminds. 

Every true artist in words, or colour, or sound is always haunted by theinexpressible--by spiritual impotence to overcome the laws ofimprisonment in the flesh. He clutches at symbol and suggestion, atparable and fable, conscious of the truth that the unreal is the mostreal. 

The goats have gathered round me as I sit musing in the gloaming. Theleading goat is a handsome animal, generally respected and feared by therest of the herd. He has excellent knowledge, inherited and acquired, ofthe uses of mountains, and his venerable beard adorns a head ofundisputed male ascendancy in the tribe. I bear him a grudge. He is inthe habit of eating my sapling pines, carefully planted by me andcarelessly nipped in the bud by him. I have expostulated with him in avariety of ways--some gentle, others forceful, but he is incorrigible. He will not understand that my young pines are beautiful, and that theyare expected to grow into fine trees. He has no sense of beauty, ofsymmetry, of fitness. He is only a beast. He has no soul--I pause, remembering the ineffectual attempts of my Radiant Being to inspirehuman souls with a greater vision. Are we not all goats before the gazeof more finely organized creatures?

The evolutionist need not be disheartened by the thought. Nature isunexhausted. Desire and experience are ever creating new forms, neworgans. A child's book of beasts will supply the requisite suggestion:the neck of the giraffe, the stripes of the tiger, the tail of thebeaver may, without offence, provide analogies for the faith in organichuman perfectibility. The processes of natural selection and variationcannot have been brought to a standstill; they must be at work now andmay yet--should surroundings and necessity create the demand--halve theneck of the giraffe, give snow-white lamb's clothing to the tiger, andturn the rudder of the beaver into the prehensile tail of the monkey. There is no biological completion, no finitude. It is only a matter oftime--sufficient time--and our bodies may become as strangelyinteresting to posterity as are to us the dinosaurs and mammoths of theremote past. 

Mind is not arrested by formal obstacles. It builds, destroys, andrebuilds. It may take a million years to fashion a useful organ. Slowness is no deterrent. The powers that shaped the genius ofMichelangelo and Shakespeare out of the rude brain of savage man neededtime, but the achievement was worthy of the labour. To-day there aresigns and portents that psychic faculties once possessed by the veryfew are in process of development in the many, that new senses areawakened which will find contact with realities hitherto unperceived. The imperfections of mediumship and the remoteness of a psychicsuper-humanity, godlike in wisdom and ethereal in constitution, do notconceal the trend of mental evolution. The medium is often a strangeblend of spiritual and carnal tendencies, of knowledge and ignorance, ofdelicate perception and denseness. Those who expect saintliness as thefirst attribute of psychic advancement will certainly be disillusioned. These gifts and graces may appear, not only without any correspondingdegree of culture and learning, but associated with a certain vulgarityof thought and conduct. The psychic is essentially impressionable, liable to mental contagion, easily stirred by suggestion. The tendencyto instability, to emotional excess, is part of this receptivity whichculminates in the state of being "controlled. " An untrained psychic whois mastered by his impressions, instead of being their master, mayeasily be induced to tell lies and give false messages by a visitor whois determined to discover fraud. The same psychic may rise tounaccustomed levels of spiritual clearsight in the presence of a visitorwho demands the truth only. 

The ladder of psychic development is long and arduous to mount. Thenumber of the climbers steadily diminishes as the top is reached. Here, as elsewhere, there is a common crowd, content with the steps nearestthe earth, in morals a faithful reflection of average humanity. They areneither better nor worse, they are merely different. They are the masonsof the mind, a race of builders, addicted to a workmanship of their own. 

To a discerning psychologist they are profoundly interesting, heralds ofa new race and a new age; to an unsophisticated alienist they are merelyinsane, dangerous victims of sick brains. The whole fabric of evidencerelating to lunacy would be broken up by the admission that thesestrange people who fall into trance and speak unknown tongues or conveymessages from the dead are sane. Current theories of psycho-pathologywould be hopelessly disturbed by the admission that there may be asuper-sanity in which clairvoyance and clairaudience are normal andhealthy manifestations of life. A person who professes to be an exponentof psychometry, who recalls circumstances and events from the "aura" ofinanimate objects, such as a letter or a glove, is naturally classedwith the insane. Hallucinations _en masse_ are proffered as explanationof the physical phenomena which take place. Thus only can orthodoxpsychiatry remain unperturbed when heavy objects are lifted without anyapparent cause, when unearthly sounds and voices are produced, whenhuman forms take shape, are seen, and disappear. 

The study of psychic faculties is above all a study of consciousness. Maeterlinck speaks of "the gravest problem that can thrill mankind, theknowledge of the future. " The knowledge of the present, of the hiddenpowers and graces within our souls, is even more thrilling. I canimagine no science of greater importance, no investigation more worthyof devotion. The profundity of the problems is but an incitement. Wehave not hesitated to tabulate the stars, to weave precious conjecturesas to their courses and destinies. Is the human soul more remote andinscrutable? We are assured that it has five windows and no more, thatit is useless to look for others. But when an increasing number ofexplorers in the house of life tell us that there are six or seven ormore, we may at any rate listen and follow their directions. Obscurantism is revelling in proclaiming prohibited areas ofinvestigation. 

I recognize that the problem is complicated by the mixture of truth andfalsehood, of genuine psychic powers and counterfeit practices. Thereare impostors and parasites who by dint of glib tongues and nimble witdeceive the foolish and the credulous. Browning's Sludge is not entirelyextinct. Honest workers who turn their gifts to professional uses andwho depend on the patronage of the public are subject to peculiartemptations. They are visited by the worldly and the covetous, they areexploited by sensation-mongers and fraud-hunters, they are subjected toconditions entirely inimical to spiritual poise and lucidity. Someresort to fraud. The report that the medium failed to satisfy the clientis apt to interfere with business, and failure is, therefore, shunned. But the law does not trouble to distinguish between the honest and thedishonest person who claims psychic gifts. From the legal point of viewit is all pretence. It is imperatively necessary that genuine psychicgifts should be protected from the depredations of frivolity as well asfrom the interference of an obsolete law. We have some idea ofprotecting great and uncommon gifts in music, mathematics, and poetry, but we leave psychic gifts without help or training. An institute forthe study of Psychic Science in all its branches, with facilities fortraining and assisting individual gifts, would remove some of the worstfeatures of the present system. A genuine psychic should be the holderof some form of certificate or licence entitling him to use his giftsfor the benefit of others. 

Of course, the subject bristles with difficulties, but I do not see thatthey are more insuperable than those which presented themselves whenfirst the idea of registering and licensing the medical and legalprofessions presented itself. And those who are indignant at the thoughtof the clairvoyant charging a fee may profitably reflect on the generalassumption that the labourer is worthy of his hire. The deans andbishops who discourse so eloquently on the sins of the necromancers arenot, I believe, renouncing the material benefits and emoluments oftheir priestly calling. 

I do not look to visits to professional mediums for initiation into thehigher mysteries of the human spirit. They may show the casket--preciousas an indication of the contents, but of little value to those who arebent on finding the jewel within. And I agree that no advanced soul is"controlled" by a discarnate spirit, but rises through aspiration andself-restraint to union with higher intelligences. I can see no light orlove in the attitude of those professors of Christianity who denounceall spiritualistic tendencies as anti-Christian. It seems to me that thewhole Christian faith is spiritualistic in the widest sense of the word. The Old and the New Testaments are permeated with the belief in thereality of communication between the living and the dead. The injunctionin the Old Testament against sorcerers and wizards was intended to checktendencies to unreasonable and dangerous superstition. 

Moses may have had excellent reasons for forbidding occult practicesamongst the Jews. Saul, who had put away those that had familiar spiritsand the wizards out of the land, was not unlike some modern adversariesof spiritualism when in the day of his trouble and fear he consulted themedium of Endor. The accepted prophets of Israel were, after all, typical of mediumship. "And the Spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into anotherman. " They practised bold fortune-telling in matters large and small, national and cosmic. To-day they would surely be imprisoned as roguesand vagabonds under the Vagrancy Act. The New Testament contains nodirect prohibition of the use of psychic powers and many stories ofdreams, visions, and premonitions. 

"Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit, " wrote St. Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians. "For to one is given, bythe Spirit, the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge, by thesame Spirit. .. . To another the working of miracles; to another prophecy;to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; toanother the interpretation of tongues. .. . And God hath set some in theChurch; first, apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, afterthat miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversitiesof tongues. " The praises of charity and prophecy are sung by theApostle--a strange combination in harmony to those who now seek toseparate the Christian faith from its supernatural origins. Christianityexhorts us not to believe every spirit, but to "try the spirits whetherthey are of God, " whilst the ecclesiastic bids us chase away thespirits, which he assumes to be of Satan. 

The dull materialism which smothers all signs of independent spiritualexperience is the negation of all the forces which animated the Master. The earthly life of Christ, with its supernatural manifestations, itsmiracles, and its wonders, was the supreme demonstration of thespiritualistic conception of the power of transcending matter. Theappearance of Moses and Elias on the Mount of Transfiguration, whetherregarded as a vision or as a materialization, was of the order of thephenomena which are now banned as anti-Christian. 

No; those who, having wandered in the darkness of death and blindness, find a ray of light within their own being need not fear the judgment ofthe Mediator. Here in the freedom of the mountains I feel something ofthe inscrutable certainty, the joy of a secret conviction, that wisdomwaits on our tortuous paths in the Borderland. 

REFORMERS

Of all generalizations--false and semi-false--the one dividing humanbeings into those who are content with the world as it is and those whowish to reform it is the most comforting to me. No division of sheepand goats was ever more blatantly simple. Some are born dull-witted, conservative, insensitive, unimaginative--they cling passive to theold planet, content to be whirled round in the purposeless danceof the heavenly bodies. Others are chronic sufferers from divinediscontent--they open their eyes with critical intent, they are alwaysconscious of the oblique, the unrighteous, the worthless in theirsurroundings. They have a sense of power, a will to change things. Tothem the world is a lump of dough, to be shaped and trimmed into good, serviceable bread. 

I know the division is unreal and that reformatory ardour in onedirection is not seldom combined with flint-hearted indifference inanother. But the proposition is good and sufficient for everydaypurposes, and acts as an admirable stimulus in the Camp of theChallengers. 

Who can deny that reformers are more interesting than preservers? Theyvibrate with life and creative energy, they defy impossibilities, theycarry enthusiasm aloft on their banners of assault on the existing orderof things. Our preservers seem tame and stale indeed. They hobble aboutthe borders of the well-cultivated garden of custom and propriety, theyfind admirable shelter against the fierce winds of revolt in the officesof bureaucracy. Officialdom is their divinity and respectability theirkey to life. They may be necessary--as buffers--but they depress us bytheir dulness. 

Reformers can be dull too, but they are redeemed by the homage whichthey pay to spiritual adventures. They are narrow-minded, but theirnarrow-mindedness is relieved by intensity of purpose. They are notseldom aggressive, argumentative, unpleasant, but they refresh the dryworld by being thoroughly alive. It seems, indeed, as if life were onlymade tolerable through the ferment of the desire to reform. Even themost stagnant pools of the human soul are sometimes stirred by thebreeze of change. We all hope, we all look forward, we all grope for afuture which will be better than the present. In some the hope is firmlyrooted to earth and man-made conventions, in others it soars toother-worldly perfection. 

The world teems with causes and movements that rouse the imagination andpress human lives into the service of the future. The genesis anddevelopment of causes show similar features wherever and whenever theyappear. A soul is astir with an idea, a resentment, a call for change. Others heed the message, respond to the cry for action, feel that thisidea, this one idea, is the most important in the world. Societies andleagues are formed, opposition is encountered, and the leader becomessanctified through abuse and resentment. The idea is embraced byhundreds and thousands; it becomes a doctrine, a creed, a mentalatmosphere in which men live and have their being. Fierce battles takeplace between the adherents of the idea and the opponents. Blindprejudice and hatred are encountered. Martyrs are made. The crusade ishallowed by suffering and sacrifice. It becomes an impelling spiritualnecessity, an expression of religion. Gradually the forces of theopposition are weakened. Concessions and compromises are offered. Thereare signs of the contagiousness of the idea even in the house of theadversaries. The triumph comes with time, and the turbulent waves ofcontroversy recede into gentle ripples of approval. And for many a causefor which men have suffered and died, posterity has but a yawn. "Justthink of it--all that fuss and all that turmoil over something soobvious. "

Seen superficially, this is a fairly accurate account of the fate ofmovements for the reform of some glaring injustice, some hoary crueltyof the past. But is it true? Is the world slowly but surely gettingbetter--are the monsters of ignorance and tyranny slain one by one byour great reformers and laid to rest for ever in a grave of ignominy? Weaccept the axiom that slavery has been abolished. Of all causes thatcommanded devotion, struggle, persistency, the anti-slavery movementstands forth as a moral protest of supreme import. Wilberforce andLincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Clarkson fought for a principlewhich may well be regarded as the very soul of civilization. The CivilWar brought the ideals of human rights and equality into bloody conflictwith the forces of oppression and commercial exploitation. The newconsciousness of human fellowship made white men lay down their livesfor the freedom of black men. A worthy cause, a sublime offering, a taskto which we would like to say "Done, done, once and for all time!" Butis it done? Slavery is not only inherent in every savage and barbaricrace, it is not only paramount in the mind of the Arab trader. Once thesocial bulwark of the ancient civilizations of Babylon, Egypt, andIndia, of Greece and Rome, it persisted in Europe throughout the MiddleAges, and survived as serfdom of one kind or another through centuriesof advancing culture. The desire for power over fellow-beings, foropportunities to control their lives and exploit their labour, isapparently irradicable. Slavery is still amongst us in a hundred formsand under new names. All military conquest involves the ancientpractices of serfdom. The conquered nations become slaves of theinvader; by obedience they live, by disobedience they die. Thepersistence of slavery seems, then, to be a demonstration of theunchangeability of human nature and of the ultimate hopelessness ofidealist causes. In every reform accomplished the practical applicationis local, transitory, dependent on racial and geographical conditions. There is obviously a great change in our penal methods. We do notmutilate our criminals or scalp them for the preservation of theirsouls, and we have lost confidence in the rack and the thumb-screw. Butwe need only transport ourselves to other lands and study other people'sviews of judicial necessities, and we shall find that the punitivesystems of the thirteenth or the eighteenth centuries are still with us. Theoretically the blood of the black and the white man is of the samegood quality, and yet very little provocation is needed for the outbreakof race riots. Negroes and negresses who have given offence to whitepeople need harbour no illusions concerning the restraining influencesof our Western civilization. 

Like a mountain in eruption the war has thrown up the sordid passions, the hidden reserves of destructive hate and cruelty in our common humansoul. In war all things are permissible. To murder, to maim, todestroy, to deceive, to make hideous waste of fertile land, to causeweeping and wailing amongst the innocent--these are the necessities ofwarfare. They are the commonplace incidents of war. There are others. Itbrings to the surface strata of human nature to which culture has neverdescended. It explodes our humanitarian theories by a series ofwell-directed mines. The ancient horrors of devices for the punishmentof the enemy are feeble competitors with our modern inventions. Ourpoison gas, our burning oil, our metallic monsters that spit death onthe enemy and crush his fine defences, our flying bomb-throwers, allshow that we have not as yet succumbed to humanitarian or Christianethics. There have been some startling illustrations of the folly ofassuming that we have safely and irrevocably traversed certain stages ofhuman indifference. We shuddered at the revelations which calledFlorence Nightingale to the Crimea; we now shudder at the heartlesscarelessness revealed by Commissions and Reports. The triumph of RedCross organization, the mass of charitable and voluntary effort torelieve suffering, the heroism and splendour of individual sacrifice, soften, but do not reverse, the impression of a general humanitariandébâcle. 

We may, of course, take shelter behind the jejune explanation that thereare two worlds with two moralities. One is war and the other is peace. We may affectionately survey the hospitals and orphanages, theinstitutions for the blind and the mute, the asylums and the charitieswith which each belligerent country pays tribute to the virtues of themerciful life. Whatever we do, we cannot dispel the darkness by afrenzied denunciation of war. The monster is not outside ourselves; itis created and sustained by the hardness of our hearts and theobtuseness of our brains. The responsibility is ours in war as well asin peace. Reformers of all ages have battled with the wickedness of theworld, they have stormed stronghold after stronghold of social iniquity. Their failures are no less conspicuous than their successes. Humannature is infinitely pliable and infinitely resistant. 

Is it, then, all a matter of change and recurrence? Do culture andmorality grow like flowers in a garden, obedient to the will and tasteof the gardener, but destined to fade and die with the turn of theseason? Do not the civilizations of the past with their perfection ofknowledge and art mock our faith in the permanency of human achievement?Babylon and Egypt, Athens and Rome carried the seed of corruption withintheir husk of glory. They had elaborate systems of social organization, of laws, of elucidation of the mysteries of life. They saw beauty andpursued it, in colour and sound, by word and chisel. The gods were kindto them, and now and then dispensed with altar and temple. Divinepresences revealed themselves in brook and cornfield, on mountain-topsand in the faces of animals. Reformers of all kinds were amongst them:men of the sword with dreams of Empire and conquest for the good of thenation, priests who demanded sacrifice in the name of a god, orators whoby skilful laying of words taught the art of philosophic calm. Problemsfaced them, social iniquities troubled them; they grappled with moralsand strove to build up a better and happier future. 

I was sinking into a reverie over the fall of Babylon and the problemsof recurrence when Marie-Joseph arrived. Marie-Joseph is my oldest anddearest peasant friend. She is over seventy and devoted to hard work. Her face is rosy and wrinkled, and when she laughs it becomes a mass ofmerry furrows. Her body gives one the impression of an animated board. It is strikingly flat and stiff, and proudly erect. She works in thefields and tends the cows, and when she bends down to hoe the potatoesor cut the grass, she just folds herself in two. The stiff straight backin the neat black dress is different from all the other toiling backs onthe slopes. When I look down from the mountain-tops to the pastures andplots below, I can always distinguish the back of Marie-Joseph from theothers. To-day she brought me a present of milk and potatoes, and we satdown to chat over a cup of coffee--nay, four cups of coffee, forMarie-Joseph has no cranky ideas about abstinence from food and drink, and I must, perforce, pretend I have none. I love her and her ways, though she always manages to disturb me when I wish to work or think. Writing and thinking are not work to Marie-Joseph. She is whollyinnocent of the former dissipation and carries out the latter functionwithout any trouble or fuss. She is, therefore, justified in disposingof my painful efforts with a contemptuous shrug of her woodenshoulders. 

"Marie-Joseph, " I said cautiously, when I had watched the third cup ofcoffee disappear, and duly discussed butter and cheese, wine and cows, "do you think the world is getting better?" She was slicing a chunk ofbread with her capacious pocket-knife, and stopped short. Her smallbright blue eyes peered at me curiously. "I mean, do you believe thereis real progress--that we are better than we used to be?"

The knife came dancing down on the plate. "Better?" she said; "not atall; we are worse. Why, when I was young we used constantly to haveprocessions and carry le Bon Dieu, and I tell you the harvest wasdifferent from what it is now. And the young girls were modest then;they all wore aprons, and our curé used to insist on them wearingaprons, for, said he, all women should wear aprons. "

"All women should wear aprons, " I repeated mechanically, as my thoughtsflitted back to Babylon. 

Marie-Joseph saw and misinterpreted my disappointment. "Did you graspwhat I said?" she asked; "there is no modesty nowadays. And you peoplewho come from England, " she added sternly, "with your short skirts andyour peculiar ways, don't improve matters. "

I felt duly rebuked, and during the rest of the hour which Marie-Josephwasted on me, I sought to re-establish myself in her opinion bydiscoursing on the merits of _soupe au fromage_. 

We all have our chosen test of moral worth, and perhaps our judgment ofthe decline and rise of social virtue is as easily swayed by personalpredilection as was that of Marie-Joseph. To me the persistence of thesame cruel and stupid customs throughout the centuries is a source ofperplexed pessimism. I cannot brush aside the problem by a facilereference to reincarnation. If John the brigand was a cut-throat and arobber in his twentieth appearance on this planet, why should he persistin these idiosyncrasies in his twenty-third return as George thepolitician and successful captain of industry? This is not at all a fairrepresentation of the theory of reincarnation, I shall be told. It isnot, but it is one of those to which we are driven in the desperationof impatience. A friend of mine, a high authority on matterstheosophical, knows of a potent explanation and anodyne for moralimpatience. Humanity, he tells me, is always being recruited from Mars. Mars, in spite of its canals, is a low and wicked planet, with areptilian population. When the Martians advance a little beyond themoral status of their fellow-creatures and close their bloodthirsty eyesin death, their spirits are wafted to our planet, there to take on newgarments of flesh. The influx of brutal souls is perennial. Thisexplains why, Churches and missionary effort notwithstanding, we havealways savages, cannibals, and barbarians (and Prussian militarists?)with us. But there is comfort in the other side of the picture. When wein our turn have learnt all the lessons of this miserable globe offolly, when we have mastered all the virtues and shed all the vices, when we long to be free from the trammels of sense and appetite andsickness and ambition, we are transferred to Mercury. Mercury is ahighly evolved planet, a spiritualized existence, free from theobsessions of sex and greed, an abode of love and freedom. 

Oh, how I sigh for Mercury!

Supposing this sinful earth is only a school for reformed Martians;supposing human nature and history always repeat themselves, and the endis as the beginning and the beginning as the end? The first steps ineducation accomplished, the scholars would be removed to betterpremises, and to a more advanced course of instruction. But the oldschool would receive new pupils and go on in the same humdrum way. Therewould be the same harsh teachers, the same ignorance and obstinacy, thesame punishment and suffering. The worst of it is that Mercury does notseem exempt from the general curse of nothingness which seems to broodover all physical existence. There is no stability even in solarsystems. Even we puny creatures can divine something of their birth anddeath. Out of whirling nebulæ suns and planets are born; souls slowlyevolve on worlds which were once balls of fire. There are endlessdiversity and specialization, myriads of creatures rise out of thefurnace of life. Some gain ascendancy and lay claim to mental supremacy, to science and religion and the overlordship of the universe. I am sureMars, Mercury, and Tellus are equally prone to this weakness. Oneday--in the uncountably many of solar mornings--there is a collision, abreaking up of all the old forms through contact with some mysteriousroving mass of burning matter. The planets with their kings and prophetsdisappear in fire and gas, The perturbation in the vast Cosmos of Changeis probably not greater than that caused by the fall of an old androtten tree before the cleansing winds of spring. 

All mankind clings to the hope that something escapes destruction andrises unchangeable and eternal above the domain of nothingness. In thathope we strive for better things and go forth to reform life, and in thestriving we find our spirit. We know we are shortsighted and sometimesblind, and that the fight is often hopeless. But the joy, theimperishable joy, lies in the struggle. Don Quixote is inexpressiblydear to us because he personifies the ridiculous tasks which we attempt, though we know them to be ridiculous. 

There is a human need which is always paramount, yet surprisingly littlerecognized. It is the need of an enemy. Life is a perpetual lookingforward to a time when we shall have conquered. We are happiest when wesee the enemy in all his ugliness and wickedness, and can draw ourswords without any doubt as to his presence. We prefer solid dragons ofevil to flitting butterflies of sin. We are ever in search of the enemyin our schemes of reform, our political wrangles, our moral crusades. The growth of individuality is indissolubly bound up with cognizance ofthe enemy. He may be hiding in the bowels of the earth, defying theattempt to tame the soil to our advantage; he may be mocking our effortsto find scientific solutions to the riddles of nature; he may beencamped in our own souls, confounding our goodness and demolishing ourmoral defences. But he must be there. Without him life would bestagnant, energy and virtue purposeless. 

War satisfies the human hunger for a sight of the enemy. All the vaguesense of evil which in peace-time makes the morality of our next-doorneighbour a matter of anxious concern to us is now solidified in hatredof the foe of the country. Smaller enmities are patched, nationalbrotherhood is recognized. The country at war with us becomes thetarget of all our moral bullets. Tyranny, cruelty, lust, greed, and allmanner of abomination dwell there; its people are the servants ofAntichrist. 

The evil seen in the enemy stimulates unseen good in the masses, to whomthe sacrifices of war would be impossible but for the conviction thatthe nations have been sharply divided into sheep and goats. Theabolition of war will come about when we have learnt to eliminate shamenemies and to recognize the real one within our own hearts. In ourpresent stage of cosmic education, the idea of a negative peace isentirely repellent. Now and then, after a bout of too much talking ortoo much doing, we may dwell tenderly on the thought of completeinaction and stillness. A nightmare is an excellent means of inducing adesire for dreamless sleep. But normal, natural humanity shuns completerest. Hence the notorious failure--mental and physical--of completeholidays. We must attack something, and if there is no work to attack, we attack the inanimate stupidity of our surroundings. It is strangethat the laborious task once achieved should so often become the thingabhorred. Scales fall from our eyes, perspective is restored, and we seewhat a trumpery affair held us enthralled. I have often thought withdismay of the effect on scores of reformers, whom I know, if the reformto which they have sworn allegiance should be accomplished. To many thiswould be a personal disaster of the gravest kind. For years they havepoured their mental energy and their devotion into one channel. Theenemy was always there, to be beaten at sunrise and cursed at sunset. The cause inspired high ideals and hard work; self and selfish matterswere neglected in the pursuit of victory. Life eventually becameidentified with the cause and its vicissitudes, and, like the picture inOlive Schreiner's story, the work took on brighter and more wonderfulcolour, whilst the painter became paler and paler. Narrowness of visionand purpose became essential conditions of efficiency, and graduallyhuman attributes became sharpened into fanatical weapons of assault. Fewreformers live to see the triumph of their cause, and fewer stillsucceed in preserving equilibrium of judgment. 

There is, verily, every excuse for the pointed energy of reformers. Theworld is full of horrors that cry aloud for extirpation; one headcannot easily harbour knowledge of all the strongholds of wickedness. True, those who are called by the spirit to become missionaries of mercycan harbour a greater measure of sympathy than the average man. Theaverage man suffers through incapacity to reach the fountain ofspiritual replenishment at which the saints refresh their parchedthroats. An acute sensitiveness to the suffering of others, without acorresponding power to reach the sources of comfort, leads to the abyssof madness. Nature imposes limits to sympathy in most minds, barriers offorgetfulness without which healthy thought is impossible. The danger tothe mind of indulging in unlimited sympathy has been emphasized by themost divergent students of psychological law. Herbert Spencer analysedit with characteristic thoroughness. Nietzsche went farther. He reactedviolently against the onslaughts of pity in his own soul, and inphilosophical self-defence inverted the promptings of compassion. Thewar has shown the human need of self-defence against excessive sympathy. We are surfeited with horrors on land and sea; the ghastly truth of acarnage which exceeds anything known in history, of maimed and brokenlives, of starving and homeless people, is shunned lest we lose ourreason in impotent and disruptive pity. The man of bayonet and bomb, whoa short time ago spent mildly exciting days over his desk in the City, and who was anxiously concerned over the indisposition of hisneighbour's cat, has made himself a heart of steel for the purposes ofthe war. If sympathy interfered with the issue of every bullet and thethrust of every bayonet, there would be an end to military efficiency. The civilian has not seldom gone far beyond the needs of emotionalself-defence and equipped himself with a heart of stone. The perfect Manof Sympathy--controlling His sympathy, yet radiating it to all the worldand its sins--was Jesus Christ. His compassion had none of the corrosivequalities which drove Nietzsche to distraction. He could retain theconsciousness of all the suffering which men inflict on fellow-creaturesand yet keep ever abundant the measure of His pity and the regeneratingpower of His love. He saw the root of our evil, the one cause and theone remedy. He is the catholic and consistent reformer, whilst we--weof the smaller measure--flounder in the web of a hundred causes. 

Each cause can be endowed with an importance which outdoes all theothers. Education--can any one deny the overwhelming need of properconcentration on its possibilities? "Here we have a generation ofignorant, selfish, immoral creatures, devoid of a sense of socialresponsibility, " says our first reformer; "why, the remedy is obvious:let us begin with the children in the schools. Is any one so dense asnot to perceive the all-pervading importance of the guidance we give tothe young?"

"It is no use beginning with the children whilst those who teach themare so hopelessly sunk in materialism and stupidity, " says our secondreformer. "Look at the education laws; they are all ill-conceived andill-administered. Education is not only a failure; it is a dead-weightof falsehood and class tyranny which hampers progress. Let us gostraight for socialism and equal human rights and opportunities. Youreducation is only used to perpetuate industrial slavery and to keep thechildren of the working classes ignorant of the blood-sucking systeminto whose meshes they will be thrown unless we combine and make ourinfluence felt now. "

"You are neglecting the most obvious duties which should come first, "says the quiet and motherly voice of the third reformer; "infants die bythe hundred thousand owing to neglect. There will soon be no babies foryou to instruct either in materialism or socialism. The race will dieout whilst you talk. Look at the slums and the careless, ignorantmothers; we want infant-welfare work, we want a new baby cult, we wantto teach people parental responsibility. "

"Nonsense, " breaks in the virile voice of the fourth reformer; "what youwant is to take people away from the slums, to bring them back to thecountry. Land nationalization is what we need--a free, healthy life, farremoved from the factories that kill soul and body by the grindingmonotony of existence. Man was made for life on the soil, for contactwith sun and wind, flowers and trees. They will give health and life toyour babies. "

"Your schemes have only a secondary importance"--the voice of aprominent suffragist is now heard. "Give women the vote and thesereforms will follow. Men have made all these abominable laws andcustoms; women will bring in just and human laws and change all sociallife. As for the suggestion that country life will improve the standardof living, I can only say that it is made in ignorance of the realconditions. Look at the farm labourer's wife and her home-life. She isoften the most miserable, worn-out creature, who tries in vain to keepthe children and herself properly fed and clothed. Her life is a longtravesty of the laws of health. "

"Naturally, " comments the temperance reformer, "whilst you allow thelabourer to soak himself in drink and to spend his money at thepublic-house. Drink is the root of all our social troubles: it ruins thebody and corrupts the mind, it poisons the unborn children, fills ourprisons and asylums. You may legislate and equalize opportunities asmuch as you please; so long as you allow the cursed liberty of drinkthere can be no health and no human decency. Prohibition is the mosturgent of all our needs. "

An athletic-looking young man, rosy-cheeked and clear-eyed, who had beenlistening with a somewhat supercilious smile, now joins in the debate. "There would be no need for you to bother about drink if you couldpersuade people to give up flesh-eating. Vegetarianism is the cure ofall ills. It drives away disease and the craving for stimulants, itgives you pure blood and a desire for the really simple life. I live ina tent on ninepence a day and sleep in the open. I grow my own fruit andvegetables and do my own cooking. Thoreau is my master and Carpenter myfriend. I hate smoky cities with their slums and their shambles and yourwhole sickly civilization. "

"Sickly!" repeats a Christian Scientist, with reproachful emphasis onthe word. The speaker is a woman of sixty, whose face bears the stamp ofsuccessful self-discipline and a sound physique. "I have seenvegetarians who looked extremely sickly. Before I became a ChristianScientist I, too, sought health by various systems of diet. Now I knowthat all disease is but an error of mortal mind, and in _Science andHealth_, by Mrs. Eddy, we are told----"

She was not allowed to finish her sentence, for a Congregationalminister, famous for his pulpit denunciations of sin, has risen andgravely waves his hand to ensure a respectful hearing. "All you people, "he says, in a voice vibrating with solemn indignation, "are pursuingfleeting shadows. The kingdom of God is within. This false cult ofhealth by self-hypnotism, or health by living like the beasts in thefield, gives undue weight to things which, after all, relate to thebody. It is the _soul_ of man that is important, not where he lives orwhat he eats. We need the fear of God and the thirst for His mercy; weneed the Divine guidance which will transform and sanctify our socialrelations. "

"And pray how has the Church dealt with the war?" cries the pacifist whohas now risen, his eyes ablaze with denunciation of the minister. "TheChristian Church--established or unestablished--is nothing but thehandmaid of the politician and the State, the servile echo ofcapitalists and diplomatists. You talk of Divine guidance and thesanctification of life. How do you respect life and the teaching ofJesus Christ? Jesus said, 'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, pray for them that despitefully use youand persecute you. ' You, His professed followers, bless war and itsorgies of hate. You stand by hypocritically thanking God for your ownsanctity, whilst Christians drench battlefields with the blood ofChristians. The abolition of war is the reform to which you should allbend your lives and direct your prayers. Even now you have not learntyour lesson. Your social order, your laws, your constitution, yourpersonal liberties, your lives and those of your children, are thrown tothe Juggernaut of war, and yet you continue your futile pursuit ofshadows. Without peace there can be no reform. "

I have joined in the debate, I have heard all these voices. They arefamiliar to me with the familiarity of the songs of our childhood. Theirsentiment is true, oh so true! yet so sadly inadequate. The reformersare valiant and true, and every one has hitched his waggon to his petstar. Happiest are those who do not encounter the cross-influence ofrival stars or see the irony of our human limitation of sight andachievement. The blood-red cross of the crusader will stand no admixtureof colour. The soul dominated by one idea gains ground. Henri Dunant, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry, General Booth, JosephineButler--these succeed by dint of their singleness of purpose. Thenarrowness serves to concentrate the strength and accelerate the work. 

The reformer may be bigoted and unreasonable, but he must be an optimistwhilst pursuing his object. He must believe in life and in the inherentgoodness of the earth. He must be a stranger to the dyspeptic melancholythrough which Carlyle saw the world as a "noisy inanity" and life as anincomprehensible monstrosity. Macbeth is called to denounce life as "atale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, " and "signifyingnothing. " Macbeth must be shunned by the reformer as the monk repels thevisits of Satan in the desert. He must share the hopefulness of SirThomas More. Utopia is possible here, now, and everywhere, thoughexecution is likely to be the penalty of too close application toprinciples. 

He must not fear the companionship of the crank. He had better recognizethat he is one. What is a crank? The dictionary is somewhat vague as tothe meaning. I find that the verb is unravelled as "bend, wind, turn, twist, wind in and out, crankle, crinkle. " The last two appeal to mestrongly. How I have crankled and crinkled over wrongs and horrorswhich I have discovered on my little path! No crank can see hiscrankiness at the time of crankling, though sometimes he sees itafterwards. The crank is a person who holds views which to us seemridiculous. The man who first objected to cannibalism was a crank. Theman who first thought lunatics should not be chained to walls or leftnaked on unsavoury beds of straw was a crank. Galileo was anintellectual crank of the shameless type. Shelley is the beautiful crankof all times, champion of forlorn causes, the inspired rebel of thespirit. 

There are small and noisy and irritating cranks. I have met scores ofthem. They are intense, but shortsighted. Some are delightfullyingenuous, with the lovable simplicity of the child. Others are of amorbid and carping disposition, with an inordinate sense of their ownimportance. 

I have for many years been the privileged though unworthy recipient ofconfidences and schemes for the elimination of all manner of cruelty andwickedness from the world. My office in Piccadilly has received withinits sympathetic walls a procession of born cranks, of souls charged withhigh missions for the betterment of the world. Faddists, eccentrics, dreamers, mystics, workers chained to lifelong slavery by their dominantidea, have poured out their plans to me. Sometimes visitors came whoclearly had crossed the unguarded frontier between sanity and insanity, interesting and pathetic and clever, yet of the great order of God'sfools. They were not unhappy, for their path was brilliantly lit by anidea, whilst the rest of the world was plunged in darkness. They wouldscold me and pity me because I refused to follow their light, but theywere never unkind. 

There is an old blue easy-chair in the office, dilapidated andspringless, in which I have deposited my cranks. I always choose a hard, uncomfortable seat opposite, from which I conduct my defence against theinsidious appeal of the visitors. Their faces do not fade from mymemory. They haunt me with a gentle refrain of the world-as-it-might-be. The world as they would like it to be is certainly not always habitable, but it is generally one of exuberant imaginative verdure. 

Here is the man who wants to abolish sex. He believes in spirit. He istimid and womanly, his mind is pure and inexpressibly shocked at thecarnal desires which disfigure the otherwise fair picture of humanity. Love, marriage, procreation, cannot these be purged from the base anddegrading obsessions of sex? By abstinence, by concentration, we mayeliminate them. Surely the story of the Fall makes it quite clear thatwe were never meant to perpetuate such gross mistakes. .. . Here is thewoman who believes sex to be the source of all good, all life, all joy. She holds a medical degree and is passionately opposed to theemancipation of womanhood. She is unmarried, and dresses withold-fashioned emphasis of the eternal feminine. With a soft and languidsmile she deprecates the fate which sent her to the medical schoolinstead of the nursery. "Why, " she tells me, with radiant eyes, "everything is sex; poetry, painting, sculpture, religion are sex. Womenwho suppress their sexual nature by pursuing the chimerical advantagesof votes and professions are guilty of race-suicide. Race-suicide mustbe stopped. " There is the believer in the immediate return of JesusChrist and the approaching end of the world. He comes as a convert witha message, and laden with books of prophecy. A year ago he was still asuccessful man of business, and a gay soul with no inclination towardsthe holy life. The merry twinkle in his eye has disappeared, and in itsplace I see the dull glow of an obsessing idea. "What is the good of allyour struggle and your agitation?" he says; "everything will come rightand the wicked will be punished. Join me in proclaiming the coming ofthe Lord. Let people be warned and repent in time. " There is the lively, mercurial lady in green who deals in statesmanship and high politics, who knows everybody of importance, and who controls the fate of nationsthrough her magic influence behind the scenes. To-day she has been tothe War Office, yesterday the Home Office trembled at her approach, to-morrow certain officials in high diplomatic circles will know totheir cost what she thinks of them. There is the pompous lady of ahundred committees. She has a passion for committees, and no sooner hasshe formed one or sat on one than she discovers the general unworthinessof the assembly. She comes to expose people, to prove how utterlyincapable they are of managing affairs. 

The priestess of some system of New Thought arrives. She is pleasant andunruffled. "Can you deny, " she asks, "that nothing exists for you butthat which you allow to enter your mind?" No, I cannot. "Very well, then, you can control the universe by thought. You can gain happiness, health, peace of mind, and long life. By thought and meditation you canmake for yourself a world of harmony, a consciousness which excludeseverything that is ugly and painful and jarring. " I murmur that this isno doubt possible, but it seems a trifle selfish whilst so many humansouls are struggling in the sea of trouble. I am sharply pulled up. "Ithought you would be too immersed in the wretched folly of agitation tounderstand, " she says; "I came to show you the better way. " She isfollowed by the clothes enthusiast. He wears sandals and has discardedthe abomination of starched linen. "We are forming a Society for theRevival of Greek Clothing, " he announces. "From the æsthetic and thehygienic points of view, nothing is more important than the clothes wewear. " I venture on a feeble Teufelsdröckh joke. He does not condescendto listen. "We must get rid of hideous trousers and feet-stranglingskirts [I am lost in admiration over the indictment of the skirt, for Iremember a certain reception in Washington in the days of thesnake-skirt when I stumbled and fell at a moment when a little dignitywould have been my most precious possession]; we must wear loose whitedraperies amenable to the air and the washtub. " I quite agree, but raisesome practical obstacles and a few conventional pegs of delay. Theyprove intolerable, and my visitor departs convinced that I am not one ofthe elect. 

Missionaries of dietetics come in a motley procession. There is the manwho believes we can eat anything provided we masticate everything withbovine thoroughness; there is the man who believes that we ought to eatnothing during long bouts of purgative fasting, and who lives cheerfullyand inexpensively on hot water during two yearly periods of twenty days. There is the woman who has found the nearest approach to nectar andambrosia in the uncooked fruits and vegetables of the earth, which, properly pounded, are digested, and make of our sluggish bodies fitreceptacles for Olympian wisdom. There are the people who havediscovered the one cause of all disease. It may be uric acid or cellproliferation or hard water--there is always a complementary cure. Ilistened one day with much interest to an exposition of the evils ofsalt. Salted food, I was told, is the cause of our troubles. We aresalted and dried until all power of recuperation is driven out of ournerves and muscles. I was asked to study the subject. The theory waswell supported by scientific reasoning and evidence, and on thefollowing evening I had thoroughly entered into the saltless ideal. Avision of the dispirited haddock had materially assisted my conclusionwhen a visitor was announced. He was preceded by a card showingimpressively that he was a man of learning in theories of disease. "Ihave come, " he said, "in the hope that you will take an interest in myexperiments and conclusions with regard to disease in general. I havediscovered that the one cure for rheumatism, consumption, and cancer issalt, plenty of common salt. "

The trouble with all these people is not that they are all wrong. Theyare probably all right. It is a question of angles and quality of thegrey matter of the brain. The trouble is the limitation of experienceand outlook imposed by fate upon each individual. 

A league or society is theoretically the one human institution which isakin to heaven. You have an object and a programme. You know you areoccupied with the most important task in the world. But you feelpowerless alone. You send out your appeal for support and kindred soulsflock to your banner. Can anything be more soul-satisfying than acommunity of those who think alike, who feel alike, and who work for thesame end? Anarchy is impossible, and you decide on a constitution andrules for the management of your spiritual brotherhood. A committee isappointed to control the affairs of the union, and officials to carryout its wishes. Now you have the ideal of which you dreamt, the purecollective force which should prove irresistible. Friends within andenemies without. 

But you have not excluded the canker of human differences. Your kindredsouls discover that, though they think alike on the one point which drewyou together, they differ strongly on others. There are other opinions, religious and political, than those which come within the purview ofyour little organization. You surprise some of your friends in the actof discussing your denseness in matters of which they have a firm andclear grasp. You begin to wonder how it is possible for people who havesuch a perfect vision of certain necessary lines of reform to manifestsuch unmitigated stupidity in regard to others. If you are wise, youresign yourself to the inevitable divergence of mind; if they are wise, they agree to pardon your shortcomings. 

Fanatics flower in a society like poppies in a wheat-field. They havelost sight of everything but the urgency of the cause. They areintolerant because they have no knowledge of human nature and noself-criticism wherewith to check the wild ideas that sprout beneaththeir immense self-confidence. They turn withering scorn on committeesand officials who refuse to give effect to their suggestions to burn theHouse of Commons, or stop the traffic of London, or commit combinedsuicide in Hyde Park as a protest against the continuance of theiniquity which they denounce. They would do things in a differentmanner. They intend to show the world and politicians that their viewscannot be ignored with impunity. For you and your lukewarm followersthey have nothing but contempt--the contempt which is earned by thecoward. The fanatic is troublesome, but comparatively easy to deal with. There is another product of organized reform on which you cannot soeasily shut the door. It is the ideologue who rides the scheme to death. It is the doctrinaire who must form systems within systems and policieswithin policies. It is not enough that you have set out to suppresssomething or to encourage something. You must follow his particularway. He is in terror of compromise and sees profligacy in sweetreasonableness. He knows the tragic failure of other movements withvacillating policies. This one must be saved at all costs. 'Twere betterto smash the whole movement than proceed along undesirable lines. Hewould scorn victory that came through avenues not recognized by him. Certain words and phrases have completely captivated his imagination. With them he fences heroically and causes a sufficiency of clatter andnoise. He is in deadly earnest and will brook no rivals. Parties withinparties are formed, and the energies which should be directed towardsfighting opponents are absorbed in combat within the society. 

There is another element of disaster which now and then gains ascendancyin the community of reformers. It is the professional agitator, theparasite who will speak for or against a principle according to theeconomic advantage which one side or the other may offer. You mayhold that such a man is not altogether undesirable, provided he can"organize" and persuade people that the society is worthy of support. You may think that he is no more blameworthy than the lawyer who pleadsyour views so eloquently and who handles the jury with such consummateskill, though his sole incentive is your fee and not your case. If youact on such a belief and allow your professional agitator to manage yoursociety, you will certainly one day find your ideals turned to ashes andyour organization for moral action turned into money-making machinery. 

Whilst life teaches you that societies are frail human institutions andthat conferences and congresses do not bring about the millennium, youare saved from despair if you keep ever fresh your sense of humour. 

There are problems in the life of the reformer which the mountains neverfail to put before me. I have so often come to them from the heat andturmoil of controversy. I have come like a soldier from battle, coveredwith mud and slightly wounded, yet exultant in the spirit of the fray. The mountains speak to me, and lo! another self appears. They speak tome of beauty, of peace, of the infinite mystery of life; they give mebroad effects of light and shade, and obliterate the small pictureswhich pursue me on the plains. Yesterday, in the stillness of Alpinemidwinter, the moon shone clear and full on the glacier. I sat gazingat the outlines of the peaks trembling in the pale light of a perfectevening. The noisy mountain torrents were held captive in prisons ofice, but here and there the sound of an irrepressible rivulet threadingits underground way through stones and earth brought to my ears a songof spring. I love the trees, the sky, the snow--all my senses respond tothe call of the solitude of Nature. I felt free and happy; I sank intothe state of bliss in which the soul is conscious of no desire. Surelythis is better than the strife and the sordid cares of the camp;surely one may walk apart and enjoy the fruits of tranquillity? Ourconsciousness can admit but an infinitesimal part of that which is: letus then fill it to the brim with the joy of beauty, with the harmony ofbeing at rest. Then I remembered the things which lay beyond my peaksand my moonlight: a vision of prisons and shambles, of battlefields andslums, passed before my eyes. How can one forget! How can one enjoypeace and beauty! Duty bids us to descend, love bids us to share thesuffering. 

And yet are there not two ways of seeking perfection, two paths clearlydefined and well trodden throughout the ages--reform of self and reformof others? What may at first sight appear as æsthetic or mystic egoismis perhaps the better way. The hermit who forsakes the world andrenounces the social ties and burdens which most men count of value isbent on the purification of his own soul. Monasticism--with all itsfaults--recognized the essential need of self-examination andself-discipline. It bade us cleanse our souls, conquer our owntemptations, by a rigid system of religious exercise. Our modernreformer is not always conscious of any need for self-reform. He lustilyattacks the misdoings of others and remains happily ignorant of theSocratic rule, _Know thyself_. "Every unordered spirit is its ownpunishment, " says St. Augustine, and the disorder is not removed byassaulting the faults of others. We have, first and last, to becaptains of our own souls. There is an element of absurdity in thethought that the aim and purpose of human life is for each soul to huntfor the sins and imperfections in others. The enjoinment ofself-criticism and self-culture seems a simpler and less circumstantialrule of life. Asceticism, abnegation, prayer, remoteness from thepassions that rend the worldly, bring peace and content. But they limitexperience and give a false simplicity to the problems of life. EarlyChristian monasticism held that as this world is the domain of thedevil, the only safety lies in flight from it. Such a view precludes thepossibility of social reform on a general and lasting basis. It has aradical consistency and a scientific precision which are only disturbedby the course of actual events. Supposing all humanity could bewithdrawn, every precious brand snatched from the burning and the wholemade into a vast monastery? The devil would be sure to slip in and causea disturbance. 

The social reformer assumes that the world is worthy of his care, andthat we are here to make it as habitable as we can. He lives in themidst of sinful humanity and accepts the inheritance of earthlyconventions. He may choose to live in the slums whilst his spiritclamours for a hermitage amongst the blue hills. His ways may becrotchety and his temper irritable--what does it matter so long as he iscarrying out his appointed task in the cosmic order?

To the true nature-lover there is no renunciation in forsaking thethings prized by most men. His virtue may be vice concealed; he gathersbliss where others find boredom. Give me a tree, a perfect tree, and youmay keep your palaces. Give me the green fields with a hundred thousandflowers, and you may keep your streets and your piles of gold. Give methe wild wind and the breath of the torrent, and I have no wish to hearyour hymns. There is a brazen self-sufficiency about the nature-loverwhich baffles and offends the mind of the crowd. The most amazing thingabout him is that he turns hardship and deprivation into pleasure. Takeaway his house and he shelters in a cave. Deprive him of your companyand he laughs to himself. Take away his possessions and he tells you heis rich because he wants so little, whilst you are poor, for you havesurrounded yourself with a hundred unnecessary wants. Like Antæus, themythical giant, he derives his strength and his power to overcomeenemies from contact with the earth. He discovers a mode of being, behind and beyond ordinary existence. He says to the busy crowds ofindustry and commerce, to the men and women who wear out their lives inthe joyless chase of success: "You will die before you know satisfactionand rest. Come and be human, come and grow in the sunshine and therain. " He finds that two-thirds of the reforms for which men labourwould not be needed if the artificialities of society were abandoned. Heis, of course, unpractical and self-centred. Listen to Thoreau, thearch-enemy of the social treadmill, and to his scorn of reformers:

 Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? If anything ail a man so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even--for that is the seat of sympathy--he forthwith sets about reforming--the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers--and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it--that the world has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimaux and the Patagonian, and embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus by a few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome to live. 

And whilst thus branding those who set out to reform others, he showshis adherence to the great order of self-reformers by the followingconclusion:

 I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself. 

Thoreau cultivates simplicity with an intense regard for the effect onhimself. He is--in spite of his seclusion--above all a prophet amongstmen. He made great discoveries in the realm of the mind--the mindattending closely to Nature, but he is too much the naturalist and theland-surveyor to lose himself in the raptures of nature love. He is astranger to the ethereal touch with which Fiona Macleod opens the magicdoor of that which is felt but not seen in earth and sky. He misses themystic hour when ghosts of the green life are about. That hour has beenseized by Algernon Blackwood, who makes us feel the fascination, thevague dread of the elemental powers. There is a dream-wood in which thesouls of all things intermingle, and once imprisoned there, thenature-lover may not escape until he has paid toll to the pixies. 

There is, after all, nothing incompatible in the life of self-enrichmentand the life of self-expenditure. They are interdependent, and rule theancient order of gnosis and praxis. Whether we go to nature or religionor science for replenishment, we must be filled. And the ironic powerwhich presides over our feasts compels the most inveterate egoistamongst us to share his treasures. Mind is for ever craving to give tomind. If we want nothing better than to boast of our superiority, theboasting imparts a lesson to others and is therefore a gift. But thereforming spirit spares few who think. It is generally believed that thepurely literary mind scorns the idea of reforming: that art is abovemoral purpose. I have yet to discover the purely literary mind. Homerand Shakespeare, Goethe and Dante are clearly not of it. Shakespeare, sosay the wiseacres, is the strictly impartial dramatist. He depicts thegood and the bad, the great and the small, with complete detachment. Naturally, the art is the detachment and the lesson is in the perfectrepresentation. The literary man may indignantly repudiate the idea of"preaching. " "To go preach to the first passer by, " wrote Montaigne, "tobecome tutor to the ignorance of the first I meet, is a thing I abhor. "He may have abhorred the idea, but through his essays he made himselftutor to innocence and the model of subjective moralizing. 

However widely we roam the Republic of Letters, we meet no citizenwithout a badge of consecrated service. Pretenders, perhaps, usurpers ofthe titles of others, men to whom literature is nothing but merchandise. These may be totally free from the impulse. Tolstoy, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Hugo are reformers of the first order, whose words are charged withrevolt. The transcendentalism of Emerson, the naturalism of Zola, thecynicism of La Rochefoucauld are all convergent streams in the torrentof reforming words which make the soul fertile. 

No; the tame and vapid acquiescents are not to be found in literature. Sometimes they furnish material for literature. Their principal use inlife is to kindle the souls of reformers with the resentment of whichgreat deeds are born. 

NATIONALITY

I can remember no time in my life when I was not addicted to the studyof humanity. The marvels of faces, types, and characteristics were, Ifeel sure, with me in my cradle. At the age of ten I had evolved a kindof astrological chart of my own, according to which all human beings, including uncles and aunts, grandmothers and children, could be placedin twelve categories. There were the long-nosed, thin-lipped, sandy-haired, over-principled people, who always knew right from wrongand who grudged me an extra chocolate because it was not the hour tohave one. There were the snub-nosed, full-lipped, dark-eyed people, whose manners were jolly and who positively encouraged illicitconsumption of fruit in the thin-lipped aunt's garden. There were theshortsighted, solemn people with bulging foreheads and studious habitswho saw print and nothing else. They bored me and belonged to myeleventh category. As far as I can see now, my categories were a floridelaboration of the four temperaments of Hippocrates, though I have noidea of the cause of my childish absorption in the subject. It wascertainly altogether spontaneous and not encouraged, for I have a vividrecollection of how an eager and eloquent description of my categories(profusely illustrated by mimicry) brought me a sharp reprimand and avery nasty tonic. The tonic was taken under compulsion, but the cure isstill unaccomplished. 

And now for many years I have sat at my chalet window and seen the worldgo by. The path from the village below to the peaks and pastures aboveruns past my nest. On it, in the summer months, there was a stragglingprocession of tourists and climbers, peasants and townsfolk. They wereof all nationalities, and their loud voices proclaimed the immutabilityof the curse of Babel. I used to be annoyed at the close proximity ofthe path, until, one day, I discovered its marvellous opportunities foranthropological research. Then I settled down, content to limit mywooing of the solitude to the early morning and the late evening, or thetime when the wild autumnal gales brush the mountains clear of trippersand paint the surrounding foliage in glorious tints of red and gold. For I assure you the proper study of man is man, and the proper study ofwoman is both man and woman. 

Here comes the Parisian youth with his charming young mamma of forty. His face is pale and _distingué_, and the black down on his upper liphas been trained with infinite care. Though his grey mountain suit isfashioned for great feats of daring, it has the rounded waist andmartial shoulder-lines with which the Parisian tailor pacifies hisconscience when he supplies English fashions. His stockings lookferocious. His dark eyes sparkle with inquisitiveness behind thepince-nez. He is vivacity incarnate, he is urbanity on a holiday. Mammatakes his arm and they trip past me. She is pretty, and would be plumpif the art of the _corsetière_ had not abolished plumpness. Her hatconveys a greeting from the Rue Lafayette, her little high-heeled bootsshow faultless ankles and the latest way of lacing up superfluous fatabove them. A hole and two uneven stones maliciously intercept theprogress of that little foot. Mamma stumbles, and is promptly andchivalrously replaced in an upright position by the son. "Mon Dieu!" shecries; "what a path!" and through my open window there floats the odourof _poudre-de-riz_ disturbed by nervous excitement. Papa follows. He isfat. No one can deny it, and I do not think he would like any one totry. Honesty is writ large on his rotund countenance. Now he is hot andsomewhat weary with the climb. He carries his hat under his arm andlarge pearls of moisture shine on the puckered forehead. His hair isthick and closely cropped, and strives upward with the even aspirationof a doormat. His cheeks are a little sallow and pendulous. He smilesunder his thin moustache, the contented smile of an honest, hardworking, successful man. I know him well; I seem to have met him in a hundrededitions in the offices of municipalities and prefectures, behind thecounters of banks and shops. He is generally amiable, but he can losehis temper, and when he loses it, it is worth your while to help him tofind it. 

Here comes the Heidelberg professor, accompanied by two fair daughters. He is tall, of commanding presence, and walks with patriarchal gravityunder a green umbrella. A large pocket, embroidered and ingeniouslydesigned with numerous compartments, is strapped to his waist. Hestrokes his long, well-trimmed beard as he admonishes the girls to payserious attention to the natural beauty of the scenery. He rummages thepocket for his field-glasses. "This, dear children, is Mont Blanc. I donot say that our Schwarzwald is not just as lovely in its way. Thismountain was first climbed by Paccard and Balmat. It stretches from theCol de Balme to the Col du Bonhomme and the Col de la Seigne. [A book isnow extracted from the fourth division of the pocket. ] There are thefollowing passes: the Col d'Argentière, the Col. .. . " His eye-glassesslip downwards on his nose. The girls are not listening. Gretchen isentirely absorbed in the fascinating appearance of an Italian who hasjust passed, and who by unmistakable signs conveyed to her that she isadorable. His flashing eyes, his jet-black hair, his lithe figure, hispointed toes, the nimble way in which he managed to press her handbehind the very back of her father, have stirred her imagination. Hedvigis shocked. The elder daughter is permeated with respect for herfather's professorial dignity. Every gesture betrays the capablehousekeeper. She seems to be made of squares--good, proper, solidsquares. She tells the smiling Gretchen, whose cheeks suggeststrawberries and cream, that she must never encourage dark Italians bylooking at them. She should look at the ground when such men pass. Sheshould be more attentive to father. The sound of their footsteps dies, and the green umbrella is but a dream. Hedvig has filled my window withvisions of a well-ordered German home, of sausages and _Sauerkraut_, ofbeer and pickled fruit, of embroideries and coffee-parties. 

Here comes a hatless representative of young Russia. His clothes areshabby and neglected; he walks with a shuffling, tired movement. But hisface is startling. It seems to light up the path with some kind ofspiritual fervour. His hair is long and golden, his beard suggests anaureole of virtue, his large blue eyes are penetrating but mild. Aconfused series of faces flash through my mind--Abraham, Tolstoy, JesusChrist? Yes, it may seem sacrilegious, but the man is like Jesus Christ. I see now that the likeness is studied, cultivated, impressive. This isone of the _intelligentsia_ who has lingered for a while in Geneva orLausanne _en route_ for the haunts of spiritual revolution. A din ofdear familiar voices now fills the path and seems to shake the tops ofthe pines. "I guess you won't try that again. I did Munich in one day, Dresden in one and a half, Berlin in two, and Europe in twenty. " Threewomen and a man stop opposite the chalet. The ladies are charminglydressed in summer frocks of white and pink and blue, and carry nothingheavier than a parasol. The man is laden with cloaks, rugs, and bags. They peer into my window and try to catch a glimpse of the interior. Ihastily draw the curtains and leave one peep-hole for myself. "Quainthouses these Swiss live in, " says one. "It isn't a bad shanty, " says theman. "Let's have a glass of milk, " says another. 

"Dew lait, " they shout through the window. I callously observe themthrough my peep-hole. The man is of a fine American type, sinewy, resolute, hawk-eyed. The mountain sunshine provides me with Röntgenrays, and I see Wall Street inside his brow. "Dew lait, " they yell. Asthere is no answer, they hammer at the door. The door is adamant. Theyleave reluctantly. "I think I saw the face of one of those Swiss idiotsthrough the curtains, " says the lady in pink; "of course he would notunderstand what we said. "

There is a delightful readiness to jump to conclusions on the part ofvisitors. Sometimes they are the reverse of flattering, but they arealways a source of delighted interest to me. I remember one day, yearsago, when I had gone to draw water at the source, which emerges as athousand diamonds from the rock and then descends into the hollow trunkof a tree and becomes tame and inclined to domesticity. The cows hadcome for a drink at the same hour, and we had just exchanged a fewpolite remarks when I found myself observed by an English clergyman. Yes, unmistakably English. His face was prim and clean-shaven, hiscollar straight and stiff, upon his lips there played a sweet and devoutsmile. He lifted up the tail of his coat ceremoniously and, selecting aclean stone, seated himself upon it. He radiated condescending kindness. 

"Lor a bun, " said he. I asked the cows to excuse me for a moment andturned to him. "Lor a bun, " he repeated, this time with a query. Istared uncomprehendingly. The sweet smile became sweeter. "Lor a bun, mapettit fille, eh?" At last I understood. "Oh, yes, the water isexcellent here, " I replied, "and freezingly cold if you put yourfingers in it. " He departed in unceremonious haste. 

For some years I have watched the procession of nations on my path. French, German, English, Russian, Austrian, American, Italian--they allbrought me a picture of their tribal characteristics, trivial, thumbnailsketches, but nevertheless true to life. It may be urged thatholiday-makers do not constitute reliable material for the observationof national peculiarities. I am not so sure. A man on a holidaygenerally takes his goodwill with him, and endeavours, at least, torestrain his temper and his prejudices. He may fail in the attempt, andbe a peevish thing at play, but the attempt will show him at his best. From the hotels below, where the crowds of cosmopolis stayed _enpension_ at reasonable and unreasonable terms, the sound of music andsongs visited me in the evening. The nations were waltzing. International peace reigned under the auspices of the Swiss hotelkeeper. Forgotten were the ancient feuds of dynasty and religion. Commonhumanity was uppermost. 

And now the nations are at war. The concourse of friendly strangers whoused to meet in the hotels is sharply divided into hostile groups. Travel is suspended or severely restricted. The Frenchman who a shorttime ago raised his glass in friendly salute to the German at theopposite table, who had guided him across the moraine, is now convulsedat the thought that he could ever forget the essentially brutal andinhuman character of all Germans. The German wishes he had dropped theFrenchman into the crevasse. There would then, he argues, have been oneless of these treacherous, mean people, whose love of military conquestis only checked by impotence. He remembers Napoleon and the fact thatany insignificant-looking chip of the Latin block may one day threatenthe heart of Germany. The easy and good-humoured internationalism oftourist-life is at an end. 

I do not know to what extent modern facilities for inexpensive travelhave helped to establish friendship and understanding between thenations. But I do know that a person who claims to be educated, and whohas never travelled abroad, is insufferably boresome. I prefer thesociety of a mole. The mole does not lecture me on the incalculableadvantages of remaining in one's dark passages. I do not shut my eyesto the fact that some people go abroad and come home with theirstupidity unmodified by experience. But they have been madeuncomfortable, and that is something. A series of pricks of discomfortmight dislodge the obstacles to mental circulation. A Swiss hotel mayserve to check the contempt which the Philistines of all nations (thereis a truly international bond between them) feel at the thought of aforeigner, though the shock of finding oneself amongst suchpeculiarities of clothes, or frisure, or table-manners may be almostunbearable. "Can you tell me, " said a charming but agitated old ladyfrom Bath one day, "of a hotel where there are no foreigners?" "I amafraid I cannot, " I answered. "The hotel you have in mind would be fullof foreigners in Switzerland, and you would but add to their number. "

Even the most cosmopolitan habitués of Nice, or Monte Carlo, or Homburgfeel the mildly stimulating effect of being in the presence offoreigners. You are interested or disgusted, you are attracted orrepelled; your curiosity is aroused; you guess, you weave romances, youmake conscious use of the rich material for comparison which liesbefore you. In Europe, apparently, the nations meet but do not merge. America achieves the miracle. I remember one evening in New York. I hadaddressed a meeting of good Americans and was coming home in the train. I was tired and unobservant and kept my eyes closed. Suddenly a loudremark in Danish attracted my attention. I looked up at the row ofhumanity in the long carriage. Sitting opposite me, standing at my side, hanging by the straps, were the nations of the world. The racial typeswere there: Slavonic, Latin, Teutonic; the skull dolichocephalic and theskull brachycephalic rested side by side without any attempt at mutualevacuation. I could distinguish the faces of Frenchmen, Jews, Englishmen, Japanese, Germans, Poles, negroes, Italians. They did notstudy one another. They were journeying home from the day's work. Astrange homogeneity brooded over the company. America had put hersuper-stamp on their brows. They were citizens of an all-human country. 

What, then, is this mysterious power which seems to master the OldWorld, whilst it is mastered by the New World? Nationality is clearly amundane thing. It is not generally suggested that heaven is mapped outinto national frontiers; the Christian religion and other faiths arebent on roping in all the nations. The missionaries who are sent out toAfrica and China go with the conviction that there is room in heaven forthe black and the yellow sinner. True, the black and the yellow man willfirst have to shed their somewhat irregular appearance and come forthwhite and radiant, but the belief in the possibility of such a feat isproof positive that we regard the nationality of a man as a transientbusiness. Nationality is local, spirituality universal. Nationality is aform, a mould, a means; spirituality is the essence, the force, theobject. The problems of nationality are wrapped up in the problems ofpersonality. A personality is an amalgam of likes and dislikes, of habitand prejudice, the product of circumstances and a will. There is such athing as multiple personality, and there is also multiple nationality. But the simple measure of nationality is severely natural and elemental. It is rooted in the need of understanding and being understood. Itbegins with love of self (we do love ourselves, in spite of allassurances to the contrary), family, and tribe. In a world of diversityand uncertainty it envelops us with a comforting assurance that thereare creatures who feel and think as we do. It endows us with agroup-soul, without which we, like ants and bees, cannot face life. Thesense of nationality is but an enlarged sense of personality. 

It is a realization of unity which comprises many lesser units. Ourhousehold, our village, our country, our constituency, are allindependent unities which we deliberately (though not alwayssuccessfully) press into the service of the greater unity. The lesserunities always run the danger of being superseded by the greaterunities. The conditions of soil and climate in a hamlet produce a cropof personalities similar in content and range, a type which we maydistinguish by the shape of the nose or the trend of the remarks. Tenneighbouring little hamlets may have their little ways of distinctionwhich separate one from the other, and yet one day--to theirdismay--discover that they have greater generalities in common. Once thediscovery is made, prudence and common sense demand co-operation. Thegreat nations are built up on the discovery. Italy, Germany, and GreatBritain have taken it to heart after endless trials of the smallerunities. America had one severe trial, and then settled down tocircumvent and undo the curse of Babel. The sense of separateness, onceso precious to Florence, Genoa, and Pisa, could not resist the largerconception of Italy. 

There is no reason, historical or logical, why this expansion of theconsciousness of unity should not proceed until there is nothing furtherto include. The recognition of an all-human brotherhood is followed bythe realization of an all-animal brotherhood in which the essentiallikeness of all that breathes and feels is paramount. Personally, I havenever found the slightest difficulty in accepting our near relationshipto the apes. On the contrary, every monkey I meet--and I have speciallycultivated their acquaintance--reminds me sharply of the simian originof our dearest traditions. 

The consciousness of unity and the consequent sense of separateness fromsome other body or bodies are subject to constant change andsurprisingly erratic in their application. A bare hint to the Welshman, the Scotsman, the Breton, the Provençal, or the Bavarian that hisnational idiosyncrasies do not exist, and you will speedily see ademonstration of them. And yet, a moment ago, they felt entirely Britishor French or German. Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians have each a keensense of national separateness (and superiority), but let the tongue ofslander touch their common nature, and Scandinavia rises in indignantunity. I have attended many International Congresses, and have observedhow easily the party is on the verge of grave national crises. Eachalliance musters a good-humoured tolerance of the deficiencies ofothers. But let an opponent of the whole scheme, for which they haveassembled, attack the principle which is sacred to all, and there is animmediate truce and concerted action against the intruder. Russian andGerman troops have found it necessary to suspend their fighting in orderto defend themselves against the attacks of wolves. The hungry pack ofwolves, waiting by the trenches at night, presented a force which calledfor united opposition, and the European war had to wait whilst the menof the opposite armies joined in killing them. When the slaughter ofwolves was happily over, the human battle was resumed. Supposing, instead of wolves, an airship of super-terrestrial proportions hadbrought an army of ten-armed, four-headed, and six-legged creatures, bent on dealing out death to the occupants of the trenches, what wouldhave happened? Supposing the inhabitants of a more cruel and viciousplanet than ours (cosmological specialists assure us such exist)developed powers of warfare before which the exploits of Hannibal orAttila paled into insignificance, and learnt the art of destroying lifenot only in their own world but in others as well? They might come armedwith new atmospheric weapons, trailing clouds of suffocating fumes towhich resistance with guns and bombs would be utterly ineffectual. Thehorror of the unknown danger would paralyse the war, batteries would bedeserted and the trenches would quickly be internationalized. The senseof our common humanity, outraged at the sight and the smell of themonsters, would assert itself. Generals and statesmen of the belligerentpeoples--if any were left to direct the defensive--would holdsubterranean meetings, and, forgetting the cause for which they sent mento die nobly but a few days ago, would discuss how they could save theunited remnants of humanity by strategy and simulation. 

The sense of unity is, after all, dependent on innumerable conditionsand circumstances over which we have little control. There is the unityof tradition and education, of Eton and Harrow, of Oxford and Cambridge. It moulds opinion and imposes certain restrictions of conduct andprejudices in outlook. Rivalry is an indispensable and normal adjunct ofsuch unity. Races and the honour and glory of one's school and team canstir the group-soul to incredible heights of enthusiasm and effort. There is the instinctive unity of seafarers. Who has not, when crossingthe ocean, felt that he was part of a small world independent andisolated from others, but bound together by special ties of adventure?An encounter with an iceberg will bring the common responsibilities anddangers to the notice of the most inveterate individualist, but evenwhile the ship moves uneventfully forward, he, perforce, shares thefeeling of oneness. There is the humorous unity which will seize theopposing parties in a court of law and make them join in laughter atsome feeble judicial joke just to experience the relief of forgettingthat they are there to be contentious. 

The advocates of the theory that nations and nationalities are eternallydistinct and separate can see no analogy of unity in the simple examplesof everyday life. They tell us conclusively that England is England andFrance is France, and our humble retort that we know as much andsomething besides is silenced by the further information that eachnation has a soul that will tolerate no interference from other souls. They forget, our apostles of the creed of separateness, that the Statesof to-day are built up on a vast mixture of races and nationalities. They forget, also, that nationality is not a fixed and immovablequantity. Like personality, it is alive and changing, susceptible toinfluence and experience, liable to psychic contagion from the thoughtsand emotions of others. There is no pure nationality. Hybrids areregarded as inferior creatures, as biological outlaws. The truth is, weare all hybrids. Our bluest blood has all the shades of common colour init when examined ethnically. Great Britain--and Ireland--contains amixture of Romans, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Danes, Normans, and Celts. To-day, Scotch, Welsh, and Irish are mixtures within mixtures. And whatis the British Empire? A conglomeration of races and languages, apan-national product of conquest and colonization, in which the forcesof racial modification are always at work obliterating old divisions andcreating new claims to national recognition. 

The Russian Empire, sown by Vikings, Slavs, and Mongols, has a richracial flora, including Germans, Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, Letts, Roumanians, Afghans, Tartars, Finns, and scores of others. The GreatRussians, the White Russians, and the Little Russians may each claim tohave sprung from the purest Russian stock, but no one has as yet beenable to settle satisfactorily the meaning of that claim. The Russianshave successively been proved to be of Mongol, Slav, Teutonic, Aryan, Tartar, Celto-Slav, and Slav-Norman origin. Italy, believed to be thehome of pure Latin blood, has sheltered and mingled a great number ofraces, such as Egyptians, Greeks, Spaniards, Slavs, Germans, Jews, andNormans. The Republics of Central and South America are to a largeextent peopled by half-breeds. Here the commingling is flagrant andoffensive to the partisan of the superiority of the white race. Spainin Mexico and Portugal in Brazil have produced a wild-garden crop whichis the despair of the custodian of racial law and order. The search fornational purity brings many unexpected discoveries and destroys varioustheories. It reveals the fact that America has no monopoly of racialamalgamation. 

France and Germany appear to us as opposites and irreconcilables. Yet, if you pursue Germany to the hour of her birth you will find that hermother was France. Examine France physiologically and you will find thather muscles and arteries have a German consistency. A thoroughinvestigation of the origins of Germany may prove that she is moreGaulish than Gaul. The Germanic invasions of France are matters ofelementary history. Originally a mixture of Ligurians, Celts, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans, she is only Latin in part. Cæsarconquered Gaul, but the Roman mixture has not obliterated previous orsubsequent additions. The Latin blood of France was thoroughly dilutedby Visigoths, Burgundians, Franks, Vandals, Normans, and other peoplesof Germanic stamp. When Gaul was partitioned into the Burgundiankingdom, Austrasia, and Neustria, there were already present theselective processes which, centuries later, shaped the French and theGerman souls. Neustria clung to Roman culture, whilst Austrasia nurturedthe seeds of the specific _Kultur_ which attained its full bloom in thetwentieth century. Through rivalry and war the two types persisted. Charlemagne crushed the rebellious Saxon spirit and conquered Bavaria. He unified the divergent tendencies, but only for a time. In 843 hisempire was partitioned. France grew out of the western portion, Germanyout of the eastern. Lotharingia or Lorraine was established as a middlekingdom. Did kind Fates design it as a guarantee of peace and stability?

The Germans are apt to claim for themselves a pure and Valhallic origin, an exceptionally unmixed descent of the highest attributes. Theprimogenial origin may be hidden in obscurity, but the German peoplehave absorbed Gauls, Serbs, Poles, Wends, and a medley of Slav andCeltic races which confound all claims to racial purity. Slavs settledin Teutonic countries and Teutons settled in Slavonic countries. TheGerman colonists who invaded Russia at the invitation of Catherine IIwere imported to strengthen Russia, just as the Great Elector helpedthousands of Huguenots fleeing from France to settle in Brandenburg, andgave them the rights of citizenship for the sake of the vitality whichthey would impart to his depopulated country. 

The belief in the unalloyed purity of races and the consequent battlesfor national exclusiveness seem to be founded on one of those giganticillusions which hold humanity captive for centuries. Here, as elsewhere, knowledge will spell freedom. When we realize that here and now nationsare in course of transformation, that the divisions of the past are notthe divisions of to-day, and that we, despite conservatism andresistance, are made to serve as ingredients in some great mixture ofto-morrow, momentous questions arise. Are nations made by war andconquest? Are peoples amalgamated by oppressive legislation? Dopolitical alliances between States create international unities?

Such alliances have not in the past caused any organic union. Thenations have met like partners at a ball and danced to the tune of thedynastic or religious quarrel which happened to be paramount at thetime. The grouping of nations in alliances has simply been a means ofmore effective prosecution of military campaigns, a temporaryconvenience to be discarded when no longer needed. If the example of thepast is to be followed, then Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, andAmerica, though holding hands now, will separate when the war is over, and may find it necessary to use the same hands for chastizing eachother. Alliances have been political games and devices, useful oruseless according to the shrewdness of their instigators, but of novalue in promoting love between nations. Old-time enemies becomefriends, and old-time friends become enemies at the command of thepolitical drill-sergeant. England was the hereditary enemy of France. Prussia was the ally of England. In the war of the Austrian succession, France in alliance with Prussia fought England and Austria. During theSeven Years War Prussia, allied to England, fought Austria allied toFrance. England, allied to France and Turkey, fought Russia in theCrimea. Turn the kaleidoscope of history and you see the English drivenout of Normandy, Napoleon defiling Moscow, the Russians attackingMontmartre. Any schoolboy, can trace the changing partners in the grandalliances of the past, or refuse to commit them to memory on account ofthe bewildering fluctuations in international friendship. 

A fiery common hate, though acting as a powerful cement for a time, isno guarantee of durability. Napoleon and the French were hated by thenations, as Wilhelm and the Germans are hated to-day. Rapacious designsfor hegemony have always brought about a corresponding amount ofdefensive unity on the part of those whose independence was threatened. Whether it is Spain or France or Germany that dreams of world-supremacy, the result is international combination. Richelieu and Bismarck rousethe same resentment. A great hatred cannot by itself create a lastingunity, for hatred is apt to grow out of bonds, and, having settled itslegitimate prey outside the circle, generally ends by turning on itsneighbours within it. 

Who can deny that nations have been made by conquest? Heroicself-defence, anger, bitter opposition to the violation of liberty, areof little avail if the psychological factors are favourable toamalgamation. A few decades, a few centuries, and there is fusionbetween oppressor and oppressed. Hence the loyalty of conquered nationsto their foreign masters, at times, when rivals vainly hope for trouble. Hence the indisputable fact that many a nation which but a short timeago fought valiantly for liberty now manifests not only passiveresignation, but positive contentment. If, on the other hand, thepsychological factors do not favour amalgamation, the legacy ofresentment and opposition is handed on from generation to generation andthe injury is never forgiven. Cases of contented acceptance are quotedas evidence of the ultimate blessings of war by the adherents of thetheory that efficient military measures constitute right. To me they arerather evidence of the strength and endurance of the pacifying forces inhuman life, and of the sovereignty of the greater unities which drawnations together. If, in spite of the injuries and devastations of war, it is possible for men to forgive and to labour for the same socialends, that is surely proof that the peoples erect no barrier tobrotherhood. The truth is, war sometimes achieves that which pacificsettlement and free intercourse always achieve. 

History has a cavalier way of recording the benefits of conquest. Thefeelings of the great conquered receive scant consideration. It isenough that after the passage of some centuries we contemplate thematter and declare the conquest to have been beneficial. Was not Franceinvigorated by the wild Northmen who overran her territories and settledwherever they found settlement advantageous? The Normans, originallypirates and plunderers, intermingled with the gentler inhabitants ofFrance. When they turned their eyes to England they were alreadyguardians of civilization. And we blandly record the Norman conquest ofEngland as an unqualified benefit, as an impetus to social amenity, art, learning, architecture, and religion. Protests are useless. The earthabounds in instances of the spread of knowledge, inventions, culture, through war and subjugation. The "rude" peoples who cried out at theoutrage, and who fain would have kept their rudeness, receive nosympathy from posterity. 

This, I repeat, is no argument for the perpetuation of the oldways of aggression. We have reached a new consciousness and a newresponsibility. We see better ways of spreading the fruits ofcivilization. In the past ambition and brute force, hatred andsuspicion, fear and deceit, have had full play. In spite of barbaricwarfare and Machiavellian politics the human desire for unity andco-operation has not been uprooted. 

The principle of nationality is emerging from the tortuous confusion ofthe ages. We see that it follows no arbitrary rules of state or empire. It is a law unto itself: the law of mental attraction and community. Thecentres of passionate nationhood--Poland, Finland, Ireland--withstandall attempts at suppression. You cannot break a strong will to nationalindependence by sledge-hammer blows. In all the wars of the past nationshave been treated with contemptuous indifference to the wishes of thepeople. They were there to be seized and used, invaded and evacuatedat a price, to be bought and sold for some empirical or commercialconsideration. In the treaties of peace, princes and statesmen tossedcountries and populations to each other as if they had been balls in agame of chance. 

A new conception of human dignity and of the inviolability of naturalrights now demands a revaluation of all the motives and objects forwhich governments send subjects to battle. Democracy is finding herinternational unity. A great many wars of the past are recognized ashaving been, not only unnecessary, but positively foolish. The force ofan idea is threatening to dispel the force of arms. The idea which risesdominant out of the European war is the conviction that nations have aright to choose their own allegiance or independence; that there must befreedom instead of compulsion; that real nationality is a psychologicalstate, a tribute of sympathy, a voluntary service to which the mind isdrawn by affection. To some who lightly praised the idea, treating it asan admirable prop to war, the consequences and application will bringdismay. For here you have the pivot of a social revolution such as theworld has never yet seen. It cannot only remain a question of Belgium, or Serbia, or Alsace-Lorraine. It will inevitably be retrospective andprospective. It cannot be limited to the possessions of Germany orAustria or Turkey. It will not pass over India, South Africa, and Egypt. All empires have been extended by conquest of unwilling nationalities. Bitter wars have been fought in Europe for colonial supremacy in othercontinents. The unwilling tribes of Africa, Asia, and America who havebeen suppressed or exterminated to make room for the expanding nationsof Europe knew little of the liberty of choice which has now become thebeacon of militant morality. The principle--if triumphant--will bedestructive of empire based on military force. It will be destructive ofwar, for war is national compulsion in its most logical anduncompromising form. If there is nothing and nobody to conquer, if youmay not use armies to widen your national frontiers, or to procurevaluable land for economical exploitation, the incentive to war will beremoved. The principle will be constructive of a commonwealth ofnations, and empires which have achieved a spiritual unity will survivethe change of form. 

Nationality may be merely instinctive. It is characterized by themy-country-right-or-wrong attitude, and knows not the difference betweenBeelzebub and Michael. It is primitive and unreasoning. Nationality maybe compulsory--a sore grievance and a bitter reproach to existence. Itmay be a matter of choice, free and deliberate, a source of joy andsocial energy. Such nationality--whether inborn or acquired--is the bestand safest asset which a State can possess. It is generally supposedthat the naturalized subject must be disloyal in a case of conflictbetween his country of adoption and his country of birth. Such a viewassumes that all sense of nationality is of the primitive andunreasoning kind. It precludes all the psychological factors ofattraction, education, friendship, adoption, amalgamation. It isignorant of the fact that some of the bitterest enemies of Germany areGermans, who have left Germany because they could stand her no longer. These men have a much keener knowledge of her weak spots than thevisitors who give romantic accounts in newspapers of her internal state. The whole process of naturalization may be rendered unnecessary andundesirable by future developments in international co-operation. Asthings are, it is a formal and legal confirmation of an allegiance whichmust exist before the certificate of citizenship is sought. Once given, the certificate should be honoured and the oath respected. To treat itas a scrap of paper is unworthy of a State which upholds constitutionalrights. There are doubtless scoundrels amongst naturalized people. Itwould be strange if there were not. But to proclaim that a naturalizedsubject cannot love the country of his choice as much as the country ofhis birth is as rational as the statement that a man cannot love hiswife as much as he loves his mother. Now I have touched on a delicatepoint. He may love his wife, but he must repudiate his mother, curseher, abuse her, disown her. In time of war some do, and some do not. Iam not sure that the deepest loyalty is accompanied by the loudestcurses. 

There is a class of people--I have met them in every country--who aredevotees of the simple creed that you should stay at home and notinterfere in the affairs of others. Travel you may, with a Baedeker or aCook's guide, and stay you may in hotels provided for the purpose, butyou must do it in a proper way and at proper times, and preserve astrict regard for your national prerogatives. But you should not go andlive in countries which are not your own. To such people there issomething almost indecent in the thought that any one shoulddeliberately wish to shed his own nationality and clothe himself inanother. They form the unintelligent background against which the wildand lurid nationalists of every tribe disport themselves in frenziedmovements of hate and antagonism. An irate old colonel (very gouty) saidto me the other day: "A man who forgets his duties to his own countryand settles in another is a damnable cur. So much for these dirtyforeigners who overrun England. "

I ventured to remind him that the English have settled in a good manyplaces: in America, in Australia, in spots fair and foul, friendly andunfriendly; that they have brought afternoon tea and sport and Anglicanservices to the pleasure resorts of Europe and the deserts of Africa. Meeting with no response, I embarked on a short account of the pasttravels and achievements of the Dutch, the Spaniards, and the French inthe art of settlement in foreign lands. I ended up by prophesying thatthe aeroplane of the future will transport us swiftly from continent tocontinent and make mincemeat of the last remnants of our nationalexclusiveness. He was not in the least perturbed. "That is all rubbish, "he said; "people ought to stick to their own country. "

I am afraid neither he nor anybody else can check the wanderings ofindividuals and peoples which have gone on ever since man discoveredthat he has two legs with which he can move about. And naturalization, after all, is an easy way of acquiring new and possibly useful citizens. The subjects come willingly, whilst the millions who are made subjectsby war and subjugation are sometimes exceedingly troublesome. After all, the aim of all the great kingdoms has been to increase and strengthenthe population, and differences of nationality have been treated as buttrifling obstacles in the way. If the principle of free nationalitywhich is now stirring the world and inspiring a war of liberation is totriumph, then the liberty won must include the individuals who prefer achosen to a compulsory political allegiance. 

Sometimes the forces of attraction and repulsion create strong ties ofsympathy or lead to acts of repudiation which cross frontiersirrespectively of the indications on the barometer of foreign politics. A man may find his spiritual home in the most unexpected place. He mayirresistibly be drawn by the currents of philosophy and art to a foreigncountry. The customs in his own may drive him to bitter denunciation. No one has said harder things of Germany than Nietzsche. Schopenhauerwished it to be known that he despised the German nation on account ofits infinite stupidity, and that he blushed to belong to it. Heine fledfrom Germany in intellectual despair. "If I were a German, " he wrote, "and I am no German. .. . " His heart was captured by the French. Goetheand Frederick the Great were both profoundly influenced by the Frenchspirit. Voltaire was most useful at the Prussian Court, for he correctedthe voluminous literary and political output which his Prussian majestypenned--in French. But there was something more than mere utility in thetie between the philosopher and the monarch. Frederick was not onlytrying to handle heavy German artillery with light French esprit; hismind craved for the spices of Gallic wit, his thought was ever strivingto clothe itself in the form of France. Another "great" German, Catherine II of Russia, also moved within the orbit of the Frenchphilosophers. 

Admiration of Germany and German ways has found the strongest expressionin foreigners, and the megalomania from which her sons suffer to-daymay be traced to such outbursts of adulation. Carlyle, the mostrepresentative of pro-German men of letters in the Victorian era, wrotein 1870:

 Alone of nations, Prussia seems still to understand something of the art of governing, and of fighting enemies to said art. Germany from of old, has been the peaceablest, most pious, and in the end most valiant and terriblest of nations. Germany ought to be the President of Europe, and will again, it seems, be tried with that office for another five centuries or so. .. . This is her _first_ lesson poor France is getting. It is probable she will require many such. 

This is blasphemy indeed at the present time. Charles Kingsley was noless emphatic in his admiration of Germany. Writing on theFranco-Prussian War to Professor Max Müller, he said:

 Accept my loving congratulations, my dear Max, to you and your people. The day which dear Bunsen used to pray, with tears in his eyes, might not come till the German people were ready, has come, and the German people are ready. Verily God is just and rules too; whatever the Press may think to the contrary. My only fear is lest the Germans should think of Paris, which cannot concern them, and turn their eyes away from that which does concern them, the retaking of Alsace (which is their own), and leaving the Frenchman no foot of the Rhine-bank. To make the Rhine a word not to be mentioned by the French henceforth ought to be the one object of wise Germans, and that alone. .. . I am full of delight and hope for Germany. 

And to Sir Charles Bunbury:

 I confess to you that were I a German I should feel it my duty to my country to send my last son, my last shilling, and after all my own self, to the war, to get that done which must be done, done so that it will never need doing again. I trust that I should be able to put vengeance out of my heart, to forget all that Germany has suffered for two hundred years past from that vain, greedy, restless nation, all even which she suffered, women as well as men, in the late French war. 

The attraction of Germany is not only paramount in literature, in WalterScott and Mill and Matthew Arnold; the superiority of German blood andconstitution was an article of faith of the Victorians. The sins ofPrussia were forgiven with amazing alacrity. The base attacks on Austriaand Denmark evoked no moral indignation. German influence on Englishlife was not only welcomed; historians went so far as to proclaim theidentity of England and Germany. Thus Freeman, in a lecture in 1872, stated that "what is Teutonic in us is not merely one element amongothers, but that it is the very life and essence of our nationalbeing. .. . " Houston Chamberlain, in his reverent unravelling of thegreatness of the Germanic peoples, is merely carrying on the traditionof the Victorian age. In the application of theories he is a disciple ofGobineau, a Frenchman, who after a profound study of the inequality ofthe human race became convinced of the superiority and high destiny ofGermany. Gobineau and Chamberlain have told the Germans that they aremighty and unconquerable, and the Germans have listened with undisguisedpleasure. 

Gobineau may be set aside as a professor of a fixed idea. There areother Frenchmen who have paid glowing tribute to Germany. Taine excelledin praise of her intellectual vigour and productivity. Victor Hugoexpressed his love and admiration for her people, and confessed to analmost filial feeling for the noble and holy fatherland of thinkers. Ifhe had not been French he would have liked to have been German. ErnestRenan studied Germany, and found her like a temple--so pure, so moral, so touching in her beauty. This reminds us of the many who during thepresent war, though ostensibly enemies of Germany, spend half their timein proclaiming her perfection and the necessity for immediate imitationof all her ways. Madame de Staël and Michelet expressed high regard forGerman character and institutions. There are degrees and qualities ofattraction and absorption, varying from the amorous surrender with whichLafcadio Hearn took on Japanese form to the bootlicking flattery whichSven Hedin heaps on the Germans. (It is quite futile to seek for anexplanation of Hedin's conduct in his Jewish-Prussian descent. He wouldlackey anywhere. Strindberg dealt faithfully with Hedin's pretensions. Strindberg, alas! is dead, but his exposure of Hedin has been strangelyjustified. )

Heine is an example of the curious and insistent fascination with whichthe mind may be drawn to one nationality whilst it is repelled byanother. His judgment on England is painful in the extreme:

"It is eight years since I went to London, " he writes in the Memoirs, "to make the acquaintance of the language and the people. The deviltake the people and their language! They take a dozen words of onesyllable into their mouth, chew them, gnaw them, spit them out again, and they call that talking. Fortunately they are by nature rathersilent, and although they look at us with gaping mouths, yet they spareus long conversations. "

Can anything be more sweeping? Can anything be more untrue? "Fortunatelythey are by nature rather silent"--imagine the reversed verdict hadHeine attended a general election campaign! The unattractiveness ofEngland is softened by the women. "If I can leave England alive, it willnot be the fault of the women; they do their best. " This is praiseindeed, when placed side by side with his dismissal of the women ofHamburg. They are plump, we are told, "but the little god Cupid is toblame, who often sets the sharpest of love's darts to his bow, but fromnaughtiness or clumsiness shoots too low, and hits the women of Hamburgnot in the heart but in the stomach. "

France was as delightful as England was doleful:

"My poor sensitive soul, " he cries, "that often recoiled in shyness fromGerman coarseness, opened out to the flattering sounds of Frenchurbanity. God gave us our tongues so that we might say pleasant thingsto our fellow-men. .. . Sorrows are strangely softened. In the air ofParis wounds are healed quicker than anywhere else; there is somethingso noble, so gentle, so sweet in the air as in the people themselves. "

I suppose the only analogy to such superlative contentment is providedby the phenomenon known as falling in love. Happily we do not all choosethe same object of affection. England has a curious way of inspiringeither great and lasting love or irritation and positive dislike. Thereseems to be little or no indifference. I believe love predominates. 

From exiled kings to humble refugees, from peripatetic philosophers toindolent aborigines, the testimony of her charm can be gathered. I speakas a victim. I love England with a fervour born of admiration (withoutadmiration no one ever falls in love). I love her ways and her mind, Ilove her chilly dampness and her hot, glowing fires (attempts to analyseand classify love are always silly). In her thinkers and workers, in herschemes and efforts for social improvement, in her freedom of thoughtand speech I found my mental _milieu_. 

To me England is inexpressibly dear, not because a whole conspiracy ofinfluences--educational, conventional, patriotic--were at workpersuading me that she is worthy of affection. I myself discovered herlovableness. Your Chauvinist is always a mere repeater. He is but amember of the Bandar-Log, shouting greatness of which he knows nothing. True love does not need the trumpets of Jingoism. I have no room forlies about England: the truth is sufficient for me. Though I loveEngland, I have affection to spare for other countries. I feel at homein France, in Sweden, in America, in Switzerland. Your Chauvinist willexcuse the former affections on account of "blood. " Swedish-French byties of ancestry, such a sense of familiarity is natural when setagainst my preternatural love of England. 

Chauvinism flourishes exceedingly on the soil of national conceit. Thatconceit is prodigious and universal. The Germans are past-masters in theart of self-glorification, and their pan-German literature is certainlynot only bold but ingenious in this respect. Is any one great outsideGermany? Very well, let us trace his German origin. It may be remote, itmay be hidden by centuries of illusory nationality, but it must bethere. France has her apostles of superiority. Their style is moreflexible, their pretensions less clumsy, but they neglect no opportunityof seducing us into a belief that France, and France only, is mistressof the human mind. Russia has her fervid declaimers of holy excellenceand the superior quality of the Slav character. It does not matterwhether the country is great or small, whether it be Montenegro orCambodia, it always contains souls who feel constrained to give theworld a demonstration of their overflowing superiority. Pan-Germanism, pan-Slavism, pan-Magyarism, pan-Anglosaxism, pan-Americanism grow out ofsuch conceit, systematized by professors and sanctified by bishops. 

The conceit of nationality often fosters great deeds, and generallyfinds expression that is more aggressive than intelligent. It takes holdof the most unlikely subjects. It is a potent destroyer of balancedjudgment, and will pitilessly make the most solemn men ridiculous. Theoutbursts of Emerson when under its influence are truly amazing. "If atemperate wise man should look over our American society, " he said in alecture, "I think the first danger which would excite his alarm would bethe European influences on this country. .. . See the secondariness andaping of foreign and English life that runs through this country, inbuilding, in dress, in eating, in books. "

This rejection savours of the contempt with which some young men turntheir backs on the fathers who fashioned them. "Let the passion forAmerica, " he cried, "cast out the passion for Europe. Here let there bewhat the earth waits for--exalted manhood. " He gives a picture of thefinished man, the gentleman who will be born in America. He defines thesuperiority of such a man to the Englishman:

 Freer swing his arms; farther pierce his eyes, more forward and forthright his whole build and rig than the Englishman's, who, we see, is much imprisoned in his backbone. 

It is difficult to surmise the exact meaning of being imprisoned inone's backbone. The possession of plenty of backbone is generally heldto be a decided advantage. Emerson may have had special andtranscendental prejudices against strongly fashioned vertebræ. 

The freaks of nationalism are as remarkable as the freaks ofinternationalism. There is a constant interplay between the two, and theascendancy of the one or the other often seems strangely capricious. Nationalism is weak where it should be strong, and rigid where commonsense would make it fluid. The painful position of most royal familiesin time of war is an example of the readiness with which nations submitto foreign rulership and influence. Thrones, one would think, shouldrepresent the purely national spirit in its more intimate and sacredaspect. Yet the abundance of crowned rulers, past and present, attachedby solemn selection or marriage, who are not by blood and tradition ofthe people, shows the fallacy of this supposition. Napoleon was anItalian who learnt French with some difficulty, and who was at firsthostile to the French and somewhat contemptuous of their ways. MaréchalBernadotte--French to his finger-tips--became King of Sweden. PierreLoti, interviewing the charming and beloved Queen of the Belgians duringthe present war, remembers that the martyred lady before him is aBavarian princess. The delicate and painful subject is mentioned. "It isat an end, " says the Queen; "between _them_ and me has fallen a curtainof iron which will never again be lifted. "

Prominent statesmen, who, one would also think, should be bone of thebone of the nations for which they speak, have often been of alien birthor of mixed racial composition. Bismarck was of Slav origin;Beaconsfield was a Jew. The most picturesque example of suchirregularities of the national consciousness is perhaps the presence ofGeneral Smuts in the War Cabinet. Once the alert and brave enemy in armsagainst this country, he is now its trusted guide, philosopher, andfriend. 

Writers whom posterity classes as typical representatives of thenational genius have often been of mixed racial strain, as wereTennyson, Browning, Ibsen, Kant, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Longfellow, andWhitman. The "bastards" of internationalism, so offensive to somenationalist fire-eaters, are not produced by the simple and naturalprocesses by which races are mixed. They are self-created, their mindsare set on gathering the varied fruit of all the nations. Genealogicallythey may be as uninteresting as the snail in the cabbage-patch, spiritually they are provocative and arresting. Romain Rolland andGeorge Brandes challenge and outrage the champions of nationalism by thevery texture of their minds. Joseph Conrad, a Pole, stands side by sidewith Thomas Hardy in his mastership of contemporary English fiction. Conrad in his consummate interpretation of sea-life is, if anything, more English than Hardy. 

The future of internationalism is possibly fraught with greater wondersthan has been the past. The path will certainly not be laid out with thesmoothness which some enthusiasts imagine. The idea and the hope are oldas the hills. Cicero proclaimed a universal society of the human race. Seneca declared the world to be his country. Epictetus and MarcusAurelius declared themselves citizens of the world. St. Paul explainedthat there is neither Jew nor Greek. John Wesley looked upon the worldas his parish. "The world is my country, mankind are my brothers, " saidThomas Paine. "The whole world being only one city, " said Goldsmith, "Ido not care in which of the streets I happen to reside. "

Such complete impartiality is a little too detached for the make-up ofpresent humanity. It may suit an etherialized and mobile race of thefuture. We are dependent on conditions of space and surroundings, we arethe creatures of association and love. The master-problem ininternationalism is the elimination of the forces of prejudice andignorance that foster hostility, and the preservation of the preciouscharacteristics which are the riches of the Soul of the World. 

RELIGION IN TRANSITION

The general destructiveness of war is patent to everybody. Thedestruction of life, of property, of trade, strikes the most superficialobserver as inevitable consequences of a state of war. At the outbreakof hostilities most of us foresaw that the uprooting would not stopshort at the sacrifices of livelihood and occupation which were demandedby military necessities. We expected a sweeping revision of our habits, our prejudices, our conventions. We have got infinitely more than weexpected. Not only have we made acquaintance with the State--the Stateas a relentless master of human fate and service; not only have welearnt that individualism--philosophic or commercial--is borne like abubble on the waters of national tribulation and counts for nothing inthe mass of collective effort demanded from us. Industry, commerce, art, learning, science, energy, enthusiasm, every gift and power within therange of human capacity, is requisitioned for the efficient pursuit ofwar. Liberty of action, of speech, ancient rights which were won bycenturies of struggle, are taken away because we are more useful andless troublesome without them. We are made parts of the machinery ofState, and we have to be drilled and welded into the proper shape. 

The changes imposed on us from without are thorough and have beensurprisingly many, but the changes taking place within our own souls aredeeper and likely to surprise us more in the end. Everything has beenfound untenable. Theories and systems are shaken by the great upheaval. Civilization has become a question instead of a postulate. All humanthought is undergoing a process of retrospection, drawn by a desire tofind a new and stable beginning. Take down Spencer and Comte or Leckyand Kidd from your bookshelf and try to settle down to a contentedcontemplation of the sociological tenets of the past. You will fail, foryou will feel that this is a new world with burning problems andcompelling facts which cannot be covered by the old systems. Take downthe old books of religious comfort--Thomas à Kempis, or Bunyan, or St. Augustine, and you feel their remoteness from the new agonies of soul. But it is not only the old books of piety which fail to satisfy thehunger of to-day; the mass of devotional writings, especially producedto meet the needs of the war, are painfully inadequate. Rightly orwrongly, there is a sense of the inadequacy of the thought of the pastto meet the need of the present. It invades every recess of the mind, itinterposes itself in science as well as in religion; it leaves us nopeace. 

There can be no doubt about it: we are blighted by the greatdestructiveness. All attempts to keep the war from our thoughts aredestined to fail. Without being struck in an air-raid or torpedoed onthe high seas, there is a sufficiency of destructive force in the dailyevents and in our accommodation to live on for them or in spite of them. 

Hence the universal demand for reconstruction. It is a blessed word: wecling to it, we live by it. So many buildings have tumbled about ourears, so many foundations were nothing but running sand; a whole galaxyof truths turned out to be lies. Now we must prepare that which is solidand indestructible. Perhaps some great and wise spirit brooding over ourworld, learned with the experience of æons, of human attempts andmistakes, smiles at the deadly earnestness of the intention toreconstruct. I do not care. We have reached a pass when all life and allhope are centred in this faith: the faith that we can make anew and goodand beautiful the distorted web of human existence. 

The war has not taught us what civilization is. But it has taught uswhat it is not. We know now that it is not mechanical ingenuity orclever inventions or commercialism carried to its utmost perfection. Civilization is not railways or telephones or vast cities or materialprosperity. A satisfactory definition of civilization is well-nighimpossible. The past has born a bewildering number of different types, and it is a matter of personal taste where we place the line ofdemarcation between barbarism and culture. Our Christian civilization ispassing through catastrophic changes, and it is again a matter ofopinion whether it is in its death-throes or in the pangs of a newbirth. But we feel vaguely, yet insistently, that civilization is astate of the soul; it is the gentle life towards which we aspire. It isbased on the gradual substitution of moral and spiritual forces forsimple brute force. What is the exact relation of religion tocivilization? The answer has been as variable as the purpose of thequestioners. To some religion is civilization, to others it is merely atemporary weakness of the human mind, to which it will always be pronefrom fear of the unknown and the wish to live for ever. Comparativestudies of the great religions of the world, their past and presentforms, do not support the view that civilization is identical withreligion. Religions have on many occasions ranged themselves on the sideof brute force to the suppression of gentleness and sympathetictolerance. It is really all a question of the meaning which we attach tothe word "religion. " Do we mean the Church, set forms of worship andceremonial, or do we mean the human craving for spiritual truth with theconsequent strife to reach certainty, and, in certainty, peace of soul?There is a gulf between the two conceptions of religion. 

Religion is questioned as never heretofore. The great destructiveness ispassing over the old beliefs. In the clamour for reconstruction we mustclearly distinguish between the wider religious life and meredenominationalism. 

The vast host of rationalists are busy proclaiming the downfall ofreligion. The war serves them as material for demonstration. The failureof Christianity to avert bloodshed, and the horrors under whichChristendom is now submerged, are naturally used as a proof that theethic of Christianity is lamentably feeble. The difference betweentheoretical Christianity and the social practices which the Churchcondones is held to be damning evidence of hypocrisy and falsehood. Thequarrels between sects and divisions, the petty subjects which rouse theire of the orthodox mind, the persistent quibbling over insignificantdetails of faith and service, have strained rationalistic patience tothe breaking-point. The Church has been found fiddling whilst Romeburns. 

Our little rationalists are right, perfectly right, when they point tothe shortcomings of the Churches. But they confuse the form with thesubstance, the frailties of human nature with the irrepressible desireto find God. They have their small idols and their conventional forms ofworship, which, if put to the great social test, would prove asineffective in building the City of Light as the churchgoing of thepast. Their prime deity is Science. We are on the point of developingintelligence, they tell us; we at last see through the silly theoriesabout God and the Universe, which deluded the childish and the ignorantof past ages. Assisted by the sound of guns and the sight of generalmisery, we must at last realize that there is no God to interfere in thetroubles of man, and that Churches and creeds are hopeless failures. Science, we are assured, will take the place of religion. 

I am a patient and sympathetic student of the propagandist literature ofrationalism. I have the greatest admiration for the moral and socialidealism which is advocated. I agree that the atheological moral idea issuperior to the mere performance of religious ceremonial. But I cannotadmire the reasoning or the intelligence of those who use a smatteringof science as evidence of the decay of religion. There is somethingalmost comical in the solemnity with which they contrast thecommonplaces of scientific observation with the vast mysteries ofreligion, to the detriment of the latter. "These marvellous researchesof the human eye, " writes Sir Harry Johnston in a collection of articlesentitled _A Generation of Religious Progress_, presumably intended toportray our rationalistic progress, "so far, though they have soundedthe depths of the Universe, have found no God. " He is speaking ofastronomical investigation, and he has just emphasized the reliabilityof our five senses. 

One wonders whether he is simply echoing the well-known phrase ofLaplace, or whether he seriously believes that the non-existence of Godis proved by the inability of the human eye to see Him! Nothing could bemore unscientific--one hates using that hackneyed expression, but thereis no other--than this confidence in the reliability of the senses. Itreminds one of the young man who said he could not believe in Godbecause he had not seen Him. He could only believe in things which hecould see. "Do you believe you have a brain?" some one asked. The youngman did. "And have you seen it?" was the next question. 

I shall be told that though the young man could not--fortunately--seehis own brain, others might by opening his skull, and that no dissectionof brains or examination of stars has ever shown us God. This is exactlythe point where our easygoing rationalist misses the mark. Brains andstars do show God to those who have developed the faculties wherewithto perceive Him. 

The senses are, after all, very fallible and very variable. A littleopium, a little alcohol, a blow on the head, or some great emotion willmodify their judgment to an incredible degree. Sir Harry Johnston maynot be very representative as an exponent of scientific conclusionsabout the existence of God, but he is interesting and typical of much ofthe rough-and-ready opposition to formulated religion. I quote theupshot of his admiration for the feats of the human eye:

 Religion, as the conception of a heavenly being, or heavenly beings, hovering about the earth and concerning themselves greatly with the affairs of man, has been abolished for all thoughtful and educated people by the discoveries of science. Perhaps, however, I should not say "abolished" as being too final; I should prefer to say that such theories have been put entirely in the background as unimportant Compared with the awful problems which affect the welfare and progress of humanity on this planet. 

The honesty of the conviction is not marred by the fact that it isentirely mistaken. "God is infinitely more remote now (in 1916) from thethoughts of the educated few than he was prior to 1859, " writes SirHarry. This statement is not true. Speculation about God, the meaningof life, the social import of Christianity, was never more rife amongsteducated people. Here I must check myself: what does "educated" mean? Tobe able to read and write, and say "Hear, hear" at public meetings? Tohave a pretty idea of the positions of Huxley and Haeckel by which toconfound the poor old Bible? If by education we mean the exposition ofsome special branch of the physical sciences, the statement may be true. If we mean men and women with a general knowledge of life and letters, with a social consciousness and humanitarian sympathies, it isridiculously wide of the truth. There is everywhere a hunger for asatisfying explanation of life. There are restlessness and impatiencewith dogma and creed, there is a growing indifference to the oldsectarian exclusiveness, but there is above all a new interest in God. We need not go to Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Wells for testimony to thisinterest. They reflect the religious renaissance which is the essence ofthe reconstruction for which men crave. The symptoms are accessible tothe observation of all. Neither priestly intolerance nor rationalisticprejudice can suppress them. 

In _The Bankruptcy of Religion_, Mr. Joseph McCabe develops the caseagainst religion with the skill of a trained controversialist. Like theconverted sinner in the ranks of the Salvation Army, Mr. McCabe carriesspecial weight to the lines of rationalists and ethicists. For he wasonce a priest and lived in a monastery, and he left the priesthood andthe monastery convinced of the worthlessness of both. He is, therefore, _persona gratissima_ at the High Court of Reason. "The era of religiousinfluence closes in bankruptcy, " he informs us. He has no patience withattempts at religious reconstruction; he asks us to shake ourselves freeof the vanishing dream of heaven and to leave the barren tracts ofreligion. He exhorts us to abandon the "last illusions of the childhoodof the race":

 Linger no longer in the "reconstruction" of fables which once beguiled the Arabs of the desert and the Syrian slaves of Corinth, but set your hearts and minds to the making of a new earth! Sweep these ancient legends out of your schools and colleges, your army and navy, your code of law, your legislative houses, and substitute for them a spirit of progress, efficiency, boldness, and candour!

Fine words, brave words, honest words, but hollow within. Mr. McCabeis no psychologist. The fables and legends of old times may beabandoned, the desire for the realities round which fable and legendgrow remains and cannot be extirpated by a rationalistic operation. Supernaturalism--in the widest sense--is ineradicable. Religion will notbe suspended by the discovery that it is possible to formulate excellenttheories of social equity without the assistance of priests. The hungerof the human heart for knowledge of God persists though all the oldreligious systems may prove illusions. 

Our little rationalists imagine that they are hitting the foundations ofreligion when they successfully assail the crumbling walls of dogmas. Religious life escapes their fire. Faith and hope rise abovedisillusionment. Love knows instinctively that it is not made of dust. Through the darkness and the wilderness it calls to God, and lo! Godresponds with light and guidance which outlast earthquakes andmassacres. Reject every creed that has been offered as an explanation ofthe mysteries of life, forsake all the humiliating, joy-killing penancesfor sin, and God will reveal Himself in the beauty of Nature. He willspeak through the impulses of creative art, through music and poetry andpainting. He will attract our thought through philosophy and ouremotion through the impetus to improve the social order. Andscience--the greater science, which rejects dogmatism and lies ofself-sufficiency as it rejects the crudities of the Creed--takes us bycircuitous paths to new temples for the worship of God. 

The tenet that science and religion are incompatible and antagonistic, so dear to the hearts of the scientists in the middle of the nineteenthcentury, and still repeated with mechanical certainty in everysecularist mission-hall, is likely to undergo a complete revision in thenear future. The antagonism between dogmatic religion and materialisticscience will never be removed. But the signs are apparent everywherethat religion is shedding its adherence to outer forms and entering intothe freedom of the living spirit, whilst science is turning to problemswhich used to lie within the domain of unexplored religion. Religionwill become scientific and science will become religious. The principleslaid down by Darwin and Huxley have lost their power of stiflingreligious aspiration; the startling pronouncements in defiantmaterialism of Büchner and Haeckel now startle none but the ignorant. The anxiety to exclude scientific facts disappears with the realizationthat all truth, all knowledge, all reason, are subservient to the searchfor God. The struggle between the wish to believe and the temptation tothink caused real distress of mind to many thinkers of the nineteenthcentury. The choice seemed to lie between atheism and blind submissionto authority. "Let us humbly take anything the Bible says without tryingto understand it, and not torment ourselves with arguments, " saidCharles Kingsley. "One word of Scripture is more than a hundred words ofman's explaining. " The modern mind does not dread the meeting of scienceand religion. It does not labour to reconcile them. It is conscious oftheir ultimate identity and their present insufficiency. Hence a newtolerance which is mistaken for indifference by the zealots on bothsides. Hence the absence of actuality in the fierce denunciations ofBradlaugh and Holyoake and Ingersoll. They did valiant battle againstreligious formalism of the past; they were champions of reason andscience at a time when religionists fought to exclude both. 

It is not science which is undermining the future of institutionalreligion. There is a new enemy, more subtle and more powerful. It isthe growing consciousness of an intolerable inconsistency betweenreligious theory and practice. The war thus becomes a stumbling-block tofaithfulness to conventional Christianity, and the glee of therationalist is pardonable. I again quote Mr. McCabe:

 What did the clergy do to prevent the conflict? In which country did they denounce the preparations for the conflict, or the incentives of the conflict? What have they done since it began to confine the conflict within civilized limits? Have they had, or used, a particle of moral influence throughout the whole bloody business? And, if not, is it not time we found other guardians and promoters of high conduct?

Apart from the fact that the Pope and some lesser religious leaders havedenounced and deplored the conflict, and that a comprehensive answer toMr. McCabe's question would somewhat modify the implied moral impotenceof the clergy, we might ask the same questions of the leaders ofsecularist morality. What have they done to prevent the conflict? Whyhave their intellectual giants failed to impress upon mankind the follyof war? They have had freedom of speech and action, they have wieldedincisive criticism and strength of invective. They have had many decadesin which to put into practice the theory of the greatest happiness ofthe greatest number. But the problem of the persistence of war hassomehow escaped atheists and rationalists, just as it has eludedtheologians and revivalists. 

We may admit that the clergy are more blameworthy than the orators ofrationalism. If the teachings of Jesus Christ are to be applied to theart of war, then the art of war is doomed to extinction. If the Churchbe an international society, based on mutual love and peace, then theperpetration of war on members of the Church is clearly wrong. If theideals of the Christian life be charity, gentleness, forgiveness, non-resistance to evil, then all war is a violation of the faith. Thequestion is not unimportant. It is not a subject which you can toy with, or put aside as having no immediate bearing on life and duty. If theliteral application of the teaching of Christ to social and politicallife be impossible, then the rationalists are right when they urge us todrop a religion which we profess on Sunday and repudiate on Monday. Ifthe fault lies not in the teaching itself but in the feebleness of theChurch, then the Church must clearly be counted a failure. If the causeof the discrepancy is to be found merely in the slowness and obstinacyof the human soul in following the path of righteousness, the practicalrealization of the Christian ideal will be but a question of time andeffort. 

The attitude of Christianity towards war may at best be described as achapter of inconsistencies. "Can it be lawful to handle the sword, "asked Tertullian, "when the Lord Himself has declared that he who usesthe sword shall perish by it?" By disarming Peter, he stated, the Lord"disarmed every soldier from that time forward. " To Origen, Christianswere children of peace who, for the sake of Jesus, shunned thetemptations of war, and whose only weapon was prayer. The difficulty ofreconciling the profession of Christianity with the practice of warconstantly exercised the minds of the early Christians. St. Basiladvocated a compromise in the form of temporary exclusion from thesacrament after military service. St. Augustine came to the conclusionthat the qualities of a good Christian and a good warrior were notincompatible. Gradually the dilemma ceased to trouble the minds ofChristians as the needs of the State and citizenship of this world wererecognized. After some centuries the Church not only approved of war, but herself became one of the most powerful instigators to militaryconquest. The Crusades and the ceaseless wars of religious intolerancebecame "holy" as the spiritual objection to bloodshed receded before thetriumphant demands of primitive passions. 

Now, as heretofore, we have episcopal reminders of the blessings of war. "May it not be, " wrote the Bishop of London soon after the outbreak ofthe war in 1914, "that this cup of hardship which we drink together willturn out to be the very draught which we need? Has there not crept asoftness over the nation, a passion for amusement, a love of luxuryamong the rich, and of mere physical comfort among the middle class?"

He leaves the questions unanswered, and incidentally omits to dwell onthe shortcomings of the poor in the direction of softness and luxury. Hecontinues:

 Not such was the nation which made the Empire, which crushed the Armada, which braved hardships of old, and drove English hearts of oak seaward round the world. We believe the old spirit is here just the same, but it needed a purifying, cleansing draught to bring it back to its old strength and purity again, and for that second reason the cup which our Father has given us, shall we not drink it?

Much has been said in justification of this view of war from thebiological point of view. Prussian militarists are experts in theexposition of similar theories. But from the Christian point of view thecomplacency with which the world-tragedy is put down as a "purifying, cleansing draught" is somewhat disconcerting. Dean Inge, writing in the_Quest_ in the autumn of 1914, shows himself to be a disciple of thesame school:

 We see the fruits of secularism or materialism in social disintegration, in the voluntary sterility and timorous acquisitiveness of the prosperous, and in the recklessness and bitterness of the lower strata. A godless civilization is a disease of which nations die by inches. I hope that this visitation has come just in time to save us. Experience is a good school, but its fees are terribly high!

Were we, then, really so bad that "this visitation" was needed to saveus from voluntary sterility (by imposing compulsory?) and the otherdelinquencies enumerated by the Dean? The nature of the punishmenthardly fits the crime. Moreover, such a conception of war as awholesome corrective is practically indistinguishable from thepanegyrics of the extreme militarists whom we are out utterly todestroy. "God will see to it, " wrote Treitschke, "that war always recursas a drastic medicine for the human race. " "War, " wrote General vonBernhardi, "is a biological necessity of the first importance, aregulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensedwith, since without it an unhealthy development will follow whichexcludes every advancement of the race, and, therefore, all realcivilization. " "A perpetual peace, " said Field-Marshal von Moltke, "is adream, and not even a beautiful dream. War is one of the elements oforder in the world established by God. The noblest virtues of men aredeveloped therein. Without war the world would degenerate and disappearin a morass of materialism. " Many perplexed souls have turned to theChurch for guidance during this time of destruction and sorrow, and thedirections given have often increased the perplexity. The Bishop ofCarlisle expressed the opinion that if we were really Christians the warwould not have happened. Archdeacon Wilberforce and Father BernardVaughan stated that killing Germans was doing service to God. Many whohave suffered at the hands of the Germans will be inclined to agree, butthe trouble from the point of view of the Christian ethic is not removedby such a simple solution. We cannot but suspect that German prelateshave been found who have seen in the killing of women and children byair-raids on London a service to the German God. Dr. Forsyth, in _TheChristian Ethic of War_, tells us that "war is not essentially killing, and killing is here no murder. And no recusancy to bear arms can herejustify itself on the plea that Christianity forbids all bloodshed oreven violence. " He reminds us that Christ used a scourge of small cords, and that he called the Pharisees "you vipers, " and Herod "you fox. " "Ifthe Christian man live in society, " he tells us, "it is quite impossiblefor him to live upon the _precepts_ of the Sermon on the Mount. But alsoit is not possible at a half-developed stage to live in actual relationsof life and duty on its _principle_ except as an _ideal_. " The Romanform of internationalism he regards "as not only useless to humanity(which the present attitude of the Pope to the war shows) but asmischievous to it. "

It is strange that whilst the war has caused a number of ordainedrepresentatives of the Christian Church to declare that practicalChristianity is an impossibility and the Sermon on the Mount a beautifulbut ineffective ideal, it has brought agnostics and heathen to aconviction that socialized Christianity is the sovereign remedy for thenational and international disease. They have reached the conclusionthat the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount is the revolutionary leavenfor which the world is waiting. In his preface on _The Prospects ofChristianity_, Mr. Bernard Shaw tells us that he is "as sceptical andscientific and modern a thinker as you will find anywhere. " Thisassurance is intended to help us to regain breath after the precedingpronouncement:

 I am no more a Christian than Pilate was, or you, gentle reader; and yet, like Pilate, I greatly prefer Jesus to Annas and Caiaphas; and I am ready to admit that after contemplating the world and human nature for nearly sixty years, I see no way out of the world's misery but the way which would have been found by Christ's will if He had undertaken the work of a modern practical statesman. 

This is one of the outstanding mental phenomena of the war: sceptics andthinkers have begun to examine Christianity as a practical way ofsocial salvation. There is a tendency to re-examine the gospel, not withintent to lay stress on historical weakness or points of similarity withother religions, but with the poignant interest which men lost in thedesert display towards possible sources of water. It may appear as acoldly intellectual interest in some who are wont to deal with thetragedies of life as mildly amusing scenes in a drama of endlessfatuity. But the coldness is a little assumed. There are others who donot attempt to disguise that their whole emotional life is stirred topassionate protest and inquiry, who, though Christians by profession andduly appointed ministers of God, call for a recommendation ofChristianity and the establishment of a social order based on theprinciples of life laid down by Jesus Christ. In _The Outlook forReligion_, Dr. W. E. Orchard condemns the way of war as the completeantithesis of the way of the Cross. "How can people be so blind?" hecries. "Has all the ethical awakening of the past century been of solittle depth that this bloody slaughter, this hellish torture, thistreacherous game of war can still secure ethical approval?"

Perhaps the great majority of the clergy deserve the indictment ofrationalists. Mr. McCabe can prove his case by citing the exceptions. After all, the accusation is neither new nor original. Voltaire set thetune. "Miserable physicians of souls, " he exclaimed, "you declaim forfive quarters of an hour against the mere pricks of a pin, and say noword on the curse which tears us into a thousand pieces. "

Voltaire's powers of satire were roused by the spectacle of thedifferent factions of Christians praying to the same God to bless theirarms. The element of comicality in this aspect of war is greatlyoutweighed by that of pathos. Those who earnestly pray to God to leadthem to victory must at any rate be firmly convinced that their cause isone of which God can approve. No believer would dare to invoke theblessing of God upon a cause which his conscience tells him is a meanand sordid enterprise. Voltaire's quarrel was really with the faith inwar as a means of determining the intentions of the Divine Will. Successin war has been held, and is held, by Christians to be a sign of thefavour of the Almighty. Bacon expounded this view to the satisfaction ofcoming generations when he referred to wars as "the highest trials ofright" when princes and States "shall put themselves on the justice ofGod for the deciding of their controversies, by such success as it shallplease Him to give on either side. " The Germans have nauseated the worldby their incessant proclamations that they are the favoured and chosenof God. The good old German God has vied with Jehovah of the Israelitesin stimulating and sustaining the will to war. 

Those atheists to whom all war is an abomination and entirelyirreconcilable with the highest human attributes have found completeunanimity in their repudiation of the idea of a presiding God ofBattles in the dissenting objections to war expressed by Quakers, Christadelphians, Plymouth Brethren, and other sects of Christianity. There can be no doubt that the faith in war, and in the Divine guidanceof war, is receding. The new conception of God, for which humanity isstruggling, will be one entirely different from the jealous and cruelMaster of Bloodshed to whom man has paid homage in the dark ages of thepast. The truth is that the spiritual objection to war, the realizationof its antisocial and inhuman qualities, is becoming a religious purposewhich unites Christians and non-Christians, atheists and agnostics, and which carries with it at once a mordant condemnation of theinterpretations of the past, and an irrepressible demand for a futurefree from the old menace and the old mistakes. All sane men and womenwant to abolish war. General Smuts believes that a passion for peace hasbeen born which will prove stronger than all the passion for war whichhas overwhelmed us in the past. President Wilson seeks a peace identicalwith the freedom of life in which every people will be left free todetermine its own polity and its own way of development, "unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful. "Statesmen see the ultimate hope for a free humanity in a change ofheart. Mr. Asquith outlines the slow and gradual process by which a realEuropean partnership, based on the recognition of equal right andestablished and enforced by a common will, will be substituted forforce, for the clash of competing ambition, for groupings and alliances, and a precarious equipoise. Mr. Lloyd George insists that there must be"no next time. " Viscount Grey warns us that if the world cannot organizeagainst war, if war must go on, "then nations can protect themselveshenceforth only by using whatever destructive agencies they can invent, till the resources and inventions of science end by destroying thehumanity they were meant to serve. " Leagues of nations are proposed, organization for peace on a scale commensurate with the pastorganization for war is recognized as the principal task ofinternational co-operation. 

This new revolt against war is inseparable from the religious revival ofthe time. The word "revival" conjures up memories of less strenuoustimes, when men were concerned with smaller problems, and uninspired bythe bitter experience of the present--Spurgeon thundering in hisTabernacle, Salvation Army meetings, small gatherings in waysidevillages, at which howling sinners were converted and revivalistscounted their game by the dozen. The present revival is something forwhich the past provides no analogy. It is not concerned so much withindividual salvation as with the salvation of the race and the world. The petty sins and shortcomings which brought men to the confessionaland to the stool of repentance lose importance when compared with theawful omissions which we now recognize as the cause of the calamitieswhich have befallen us. It is not only the existence of war that isrousing the conscience. War is seen to be but a symptom, a horribleoutbreak of malignant forces, which we have nurtured and harboured intimes of peace. These forces permeate the very structure of society. Anew and fierce light beats on our slums, our industrialism, on the olddivisions of class and quality, on the standards of comfort and success. Poverty, sickness, and child mortality--the whole hideous war of Mammonthrough which millions of our fellow-creatures are condemned to theperpetual service of Want--can no longer conveniently be left outsidethe operations of our religious consciousness. 

One thing is certain: we can no longer be satisfied with a religionwhich pays lip-service to God, and offers propitiating incense to Hiswrath, whilst it ignores the misery and the suffering of those who haveno reason to offer thanksgiving. Religious profession and religiousaction will have to be unified. The sense of social responsibility isslowly but surely taking the place of the anxiety to assure one's ownsalvation. Some churches are empty, dead; they have no message for thepeople, no vision wherewith to inspire the young. They might withadvantage close, and their clergy be employed upon some useful nationalservice. Ritual and incantations are doubtless useful aids to religiousworship and the necessary quietude of mind, but they are losing theirhold over souls to whom religious life has become a matter of socialservice. These are of the order spoken of by Ernest Crosby:

 None could tell me where my soul might be. I searched for God, but God eluded me. I sought my brother out--and found all three. 

The number of "unbelievers" is growing. There are certain doctrineswhich we cannot believe because they violate our reason, or our sense ofjustice and fair play. Centuries ago it may have been possible tobelieve them: that is no concern of ours. To each age its own mind andits own enlightenment. What is more disquieting to the rulers oforthodoxy is that we do not care, that we cannot believe in certaindoctrines. Doctrines are at a discount just now. The Church may quarrelover Kikuyu, or the Apostolic Succession, or the Virgin Birth, or marvelat the new possibility of a canon of the Church of England preaching asermon in the City Temple. We feel that it is infinitely more importantthat a few experiments in practical Christianity should be imposed onthe world. Religion in the past has been conceived as essentially amatter of suppressing the intellect, submitting to oppression andinjustice, learning to bear patiently the inflictions of Providence. Religion in the future will demand all the attention which our feebleintellect can offer it, and the conscious and willing co-operation ofmankind in the realization of God's plans for a regenerated world. 

Whilst the Churches addicted to ritualism and literalism decline, theBrotherhood movement gains in force and influence. Men meet to giveunited expression to their religious impulses. They meet for prayer andworship, but never without immediate bearing on some great socialquestion or object. Opinions are freely expressed. Heterodoxy in detailsof faith is rampant, and is no obstacle to Christian fellowship. To theSunday afternoon and evening gatherings of the Brotherhood flock themany to whom the Bible is still a source of spiritual food, and whodemand a plain and practical interpretation of its teachings. Animpromptu prayer, in which the keynote is the loving fatherhood of God, and its bearing on the brotherhood of man, precedes a homely address orsermon, closely packed with allusions to social and political questions. Or the address is entirely secular; a downright unbeliever has beeninvited to give the audience the benefit of his knowledge or experience, in connection with some great movement for the betterment of the world. There is a disinclination to criticize anybody's religious views, provided he shows by his acts and life that he is part of the newMinistry of Humanity. Here we have the pivot of the change which isovertaking the forms of religious expression. 

Men are no longer content to regard this world as a hopeless place ofsqualor and sin, as intrinsically and incurably wicked, as an abodewhich cannot be mended and which must, therefore, be despised andforsaken in spirit, even before the time when it has to be forsaken inbody. The possible flawlessness of an other-worldly state no longercompensates for the glaring faults of this. This is no sign of theweakening of the spiritual hold on reality. It is a sign of thespiritualization of the values of life. It is a sign that we begin tounderstand that we _are_ spirits here, now, and everywhere, that we seethat time in this world and the way we employ it have a profoundbearing on eternity. There is no reason, in the name of God or man, whywe should be content to let this world remain a place of torment andfoolishness, if we have reached a point when we can see the better way. There is a certain type of religious mind which dreads the idea ofsocial reconstruction, on the assumption that we shall not long forheaven if conditions here below are made less hellish. 

There is also a type of churchman whose finer sensibilities are sorelytried by the secular occupations of nonconformity in general. If once ortwice in their lives they should stray amongst Congregationalists, Baptists, or Methodists, they come away disgusted at the brutaldirectness with which social evils are exposed in the light of the wordof the Lord. They complain of the general lack of finesse and Latin; thelicence of the pulpit has usurped the reverence of the altar. It isperfectly true that statements are sometimes made in nonconformistpulpits which are bald and offensive to the ear of scholarlyaccomplishment. But the complaint of secularization is singularly inept. Nothing could be more secular in the way of complacent acceptance of theworldly reasons for leaving awkward questions alone than the attitudeof this type of critic. 

The future life of Christianity is safely vested in the _free_ Churches. The freedom will be progressive, and may possibly embrace a vista ofunfettered interpretation and application of Christian knowledge whichwill be as remote from the dogmatism of to-day as is our presentattitude from the intolerance which kindled the Inquisition and madepossible the night of St. Bartholomew. Religious intolerance has alreadylost three-fourths of its hold on faith. Catholic will now slaughterCatholic without the stimulus to hostility afforded by hereticalopinions. Protestants are not restrained from injuring each other by thecommon bond of detestation of the adherents to papacy. The decline ofintolerance is a direct consequence of the externalization of thereligious life. Rationalists constantly mistake this process for thedegeneration of religion. They fail to see the simple fact that men canafford to dispense with the paraphernalia of elaborate and artificialaids to the worship of God when they feel His presence within their ownsouls and unmistakably hear His call to action. 

Some will see in the decay of intolerance an indication of the generalevaporation of Christian articles of faith, and the possible loss ofidentity in some new form of religion. There is no danger. No religioncan live in opposition to the evolution of the human spirit. It must besufficiently deep to meet the most exacting need of individual religiousexperience, and it must be sufficiently broad and elastic to correspondto the ever-changing phenomena of social evolution. Christianity hasthis depth and this breadth. Two parallel lines of its development areclearly discernible at the present time. One is the transubstantiationof faith in social service; the other is a demand for individualizedexperience of spiritual realities. It is becoming more and moredifficult to believe a thing simply because you are told you ought tobelieve it, or because your father and grandfather believed it. Authority in matters religious is being superseded by exploration. Hewho feels with Swinburne that

 Save his own soul he has no star, and he for whom space is peopled with living souls mounting the ladderto the throne of God, share the desire to experience the truth. Mysticism is passing through strange phases of resurrection. Its moderngarb is made up of all the hues of the past, and, in addition, containssome up-to-date threads of severely utilitarian composition. The numberof those who claim direct experience of spiritual verity as against merehearsay is greater than ever. The discovery of the soul is attractingstudents of every description. The powers of suggestion, and thecreative possibilities of the subconscious mind, have opened up newfields of religious experiment and adventure. The art of controlling themind, so as to make it immune against the depredations of evil thought, or fear, or worry, is pursued by crowds of amateur psychologists whodelight in the happy results. They are learning to live in tune with theinfinite or cultivating optimism with complete success. To the objectionthat they live in an artificial paradise they reply that thought is theessence of things, and that they are but carrying into practice theoft-repeated belief that we _are_ such stuff as dreams are made of. 

"Religion, " says Professor William James in _The Varieties of ReligiousExperience_, "in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of humanegoism. The Gods believed in--whether by crude savages or by mendisciplined intellectually--agree with each other in recognizing apersonal call. " How could it be otherwise? The solitariness of eachhuman soul is the first fact in religious consciousness. Altruism andcommunion with other souls are perforce attained through concern withthe state of the ego. The spiritual egoism which demands pure thought, peace wherein to gather impressions of goodness, beauty, and truth, timefor the analysis of psychic law, direct knowledge which is proof againstthe disease of doubt, is, after all, the most valuable contributionwhich the individual can make to society. The people who are now greatlyconcerned with the exact temperature of their own minds are, at anyrate, to be congratulated on having made the discovery, which iscenturies overdue, that hygiene of the soul is more important thanhygiene of the body. 

Placid contentment with the religious systems of the past is greatlydisturbed by this assertiveness. There is a demand for a new message, couched in terms suited to the mental level of the twentieth century. Amessage delivered two thousand years ago to a small pastoral people, altogether innocent of the complicated economic, and industrialconditions of our times, must necessarily appear incomplete to mindswhich can only reproduce the simplicity by an effort of the imagination. Jesus, they maintain, was a Jew who spoke to Jews, and who had to dealwith simple fishermen and agriculturists, with Eastern merchants andnarrow-minded scribes. He never met great financiers to whose chariotsof gold whole populations are chained, or great masters of industry whoprofitably run a thousand mills where human flesh and bone are ground inthe production of wealth. He knew naught, they feel, of the history ofphilosophy, or the psychology of religion, or the researches ofphysiology and chemistry. His language, coming to us as it does throughthe medium of interpreters of a bygone age, and through the simplesymbols of less sophisticated minds, has poetic beauty, but lacks ourmodern comprehensiveness. 

There is a feeling that it is unreasonable to believe that God spokeonce or twice, thousands of years ago, and that He cannot or will notspeak now. Revelation cannot have been final; it must surely beprogressive, gradual, fitted to the needs and the receptivity of souls. The written word is not the only word. The living word must be spokennow, and will be spoken with greater effectiveness in the future. Hencethe expectation that a new world-teacher will appear, that a master willbe born who will gather up the truth and the inspiration of the creedsof the past and present them, together with a new message, suited to thehunger of to-day. Theosophists have lately made the idea of the comingof such a teacher the central hope of social regeneration. 

They assume that when the teacher comes all the world will listen andobey. It seems to me that teacher after teacher has uttered thetruth--Hermes, Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Orpheus, Jesus--and thatthe trouble is not lack of teachers but lack of disciples. In theteachings of Jesus Christ, the world has a model wherewith to mould theold order of hate and selfishness into a new rule of love andbrotherhood. The model has never been used; no serious and far-reachingattempt has as yet been made to give Christianity a politico-socialtrial. Why should a new world-teacher be more successful? What guaranteeis there that his voice would not be drowned in the general clamour ofthe truth-mongers of the marketplace? And the tendency of the modernreligious consciousness is to seek reality personally, to develop thelatent faculties by which experience can be won, and to delve fearlesslyinto the hidden depth of the soul in search of truth. 

The great religions of the past have given the bread of life tocountless souls. They have all provided ways and means for our ethicalevolution. Religious eclecticism is natural to the cultured mind, whichcan no longer be held back by any threats of excommunication. Theessence of religion, and the way of salvation, have been found alongwidely divergent paths and under many names. One thing is certain amidstinnumerable uncertainties: the secret of finding God can only beunravelled when we find our own souls. 

_Printed in Great Britain by_ UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, WOKING ANDLONDON. 

Problems of the Peace

BY WILLIAM HARBUTT DAWSON

Author of "The Evolution of Modern Germany"

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After-War Problems

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Transcriber's Note. 

Minor typographical errors and irregularities have been corrected.