The End of the Tunnel
THE SPIRIT OF MAN
By CHARLES AIORGAN
WHEN opinion grows hot and language violent, whoever ventures to discuss in public contemporary events and ideas, hoping to be read patiently even by those who disagree with him, may do well to indicate plainly at the outset to what yard-stick, not of his own making, he will attempt to relate his thought. That he is a man of prejudice and that his prejudice will appear is certain and, even, desirable, but it is to be desired also that his readers shall be able to measure the degree of his prejudice in particular instances. Knowing their man and what he stands for, they will not then, if he attack a Teutonic idea, suppose him to be necessarily a fire-eater unmindful of Goethe, nor, if he criticise what he considers an act of jingoism in his countrymen, call him a traitor.
For this reason, I have chosen, as a general title for the follow- ing group of papers, " The End of the Tunnel," to suggest that their purpose is to look forward and to watch for light in the present darkness. To put " under the microscope one inch of ribbon which runs for many miles " is as great an error in an estimate of contemporary life as Mrs. Woolf has shown it to be in criticism of contemporary writing. She reminds literary critics of Lady Hester Stanhope, " who kept a milk-white horse in her stable in readiness for the Messiah, and was for ever, scanning the mountain-tops, impatiently but with confidence, for signs of his approach." She urges them, and may persuade us all, to follow Lady Hester's example, to " see the past "- and the present—" in relation to the future," and so prepare the way for what is to come.
But a general title is not enough. A writer who wishes to give himself away, to present his readers with a measure of his prejudice, cannot do so more surely than by choosing an epigraph and confessing a matured admiration. What is his point of departure? Where is the country of his faith from which his values are derived and to which, from rashness or failure of judgement, he will strive to return? " To put it briefly, man is a spiritual being, and the proper work of his mind is to interpret the world according to his higher nature, and to conquer the material aspects of the world so as to bring them into subjection to the spirit." These are Bridges' words, written in 1915, and will serve in the tunnel and at the end of it.
His great anthology, The Spirit of Man, which contains them in its preface, has come into its own again. Young men of the new armies carry with them fresh editions of this book which we of the old loved twenty-five years ago and have ever since given to our friends, begging them, perhaps tediously, to remark not the text only but the preface. They have seldom liked the preface. It has appeared to them too dated in the last war, which either they had not known or wished to forget, and even today, when those who have steadfastly refused to acknow- ledge the abiding menace of Germany are eloquent against her, the continuity of the last war with this and, if the Germans fail now, with the next that we make possible by disarmament, is far from being accepted. A sense of that continuity rests upon an understanding, not yet firm and positive among us, that our enemies are enemies in the •spirit, not therefore to be changed by political upheaval within or by defeat from with- out, but only by an inward conversion for which civilisation must wait, safeguarded, perhaps for more than a generation.. A quarter of a century ago, Bridges came near to a prophetic understanding of this continuity in the German wars, nearer in his choice of text than in his preface, which contains passages that obscure it a little. He appears to have been surprised by Germany's conduct, for he says that " humanity has been sud- denly arrested "—" suddenly," as if Bismarck had not lived- " by the apostasy of a great people, who, casting off as a disguise their professions of Honour, now openly avow that the ultimate faith of their hearts is in material force." What he says of " ultimate faith " needs to be examined. It is true that the Germans believe in material force, loving it for its own sake and as a means to an end ; but we do wrong, we misinterpret the nature of their threat, if we suppose that their end is materialistic. If it were, they might be satisfied by material gains alone, and it has been the fundamental error of those who hoped for appeasement to believe this possible. To consider the Germans as no more than greedy barbarians, hungry for what we possess, is to mistake the nature of their fanaticism and to rest our policy again on the old delusion, which has brought policy to ruin, that by a new sharing of the world Germany might be satisfied. The persistent exaltation and passion of Germans collectively, which, if we will, we may call racial hysteria, is proof that this is not true. They are not savages, but descendants of Goethe and Beethoven ; they know what they do. They are not materialists to be bought off with territories or wealth or the revision of treaties, nor are they to be appeased by what we call justice or mercy, for these they despise, giving or receiving ; though we must still exercise mercy and justice as parts of our own integrity. They march in faith—let us not mistake it—a faith that the spirit of man, which we call good, is evil and ought to be destroyed. This is the strength of their ideal, as of the ideal that inspired Milton's Satan. Upon it rests the continuity of their wars.
This Bridges perceived, for later in his preface he says that " our habits and thoughts are searched by the glare of the con- viction that man's life is . . . the awful conflict with evil which philosophers and saints have depicted " ; and his anthology itself is evidence of his perception. In making his choice, he looked " instinctively to the seers and poets of mankind, whose sayings are the oracles and prophecies of loveliness and loving- kindness," and he set out, as representative of those things upon which our enemies were making war, not our nationalism or possessive power, but the whole range of the humanities. Between cover and cover there are few poems that could be spoken of as poems of war, and these few are so placed that none could be blind enough to call them, or the anthologist, intransigeant. Between two of Brooke's sonnets, which men that had not fought and dared not sing have since affected to despise, stands a passage from Shelley's " Prometheus "— " It would avail not to reply: Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known But to the uncommunicating dead."
The stoicism of Descartes finds place with the serenity of Milton's " More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchang'd To hoarce or mute, though fall'n on evil dayes," and with the passionate inturning of Hopkins's " Come you indoors, come home ; your fading fire Mend first and vital candle in close .heart's vault: You there are master ; do your own desire ; What hinders?"
How many, during the years that have passed since it appeared, have cherished this book, independently of its occa- sion, for these enduring and humane splendours, having, as lovers, found their love in it, as young men their youth, as thinkers the sources of their faith, the heart of their aspiration! It is more than a civilised book ; it is a manual of civilisation as we understand and hope to live it, and as our enemies do not. From Plato to A Kempis, from Tolstoy to Rimbaud, there is scarcely a passage in it which, if didactic, they would not repudiate or, if lyrical, contemn. The cleavage between us is indeed of the spirit, not to be bridged by political or economic compromise as material differences may be. In this real sense, what we fight is a religious war.
Previous page
