THE GREATEST BENEFACTOR : V THIS PANTHEON BUSINESS
By LORD EUSTACE PERCY
[The final article in this Aries, by Sir Arnold Wilson, M.P., will appear next week.] THE English candidate at the second Open Examination for the League of Nations Administrative Service, held at Geneva in August, 1946, bit his pen and cursed the examiners. " Who have been the greatest benefactors of the human race ? "—of course, they would set that subject for an essay in the General Knowledge paper this year, when the Mellon-Lenin Foundation had just offered a million dollars to the League for the erection of a Temple of Human Genius. But what a question to put to a sophisticated Balliol scholar, fresh from a First in Modern Greats ! He could imagine what the other candidates were scribbling. There sat an American, obviously hovering between Thomas Edison and John R. Mott. The Latins were running riot, each according to his upbringing, after a whole drove of started hares, from Thomas Aquinas to Voltaire. His English col- leagues would probably serve up a mixture of scientists and poets, avoiding politicians like the plague ; while philosophic totalitarians, mainly from Germany and Russia, would be combing history for theocratic dictators. But he could see the steadier members of the pack, with the smaller nations at their head, settling down to a more sober modernist line, the line of medical research. Their papers would be a descant on Pasteur, Lister, Ross and the rest. That, after all, was the obvious line ; the healing of disease and the planning of sanitation were the only indisputable benefactions.
Odd, how representative the League was—the greatest common denominator of the errors as well as the virtues of national rulers. Human government had been a pretty unsatisfactory business all round, but it had never failed more disastrously than when it had tried its hand at this business of conferring degrees of immortality on selected servants of the community. Who, desiring to spend an hour's meditation in the praise of famous men, would choose for the purpose the hall of statuary in the Capitol at Washington or the Paris Pantheon ? And the failure was not merely the failure of officialism, for privately constructed Valhallas had offered no better accommoda- tion. The author of the Book of Wisdom would surely find himself as uncomfortable with Comte's calendar of saints as in Westminster Abbey. The task was patently hopeless ; there were too many alternative standards. For instance, which was the best test : character, influence or achievement ? Was Henry or John Lawrence the greater benefactor of India ? Or, again, should one go back to the obscure thinker who, without personal ambition, was content with the knowledge that, in Judge Holmes' fine phrase, " his unhelped meditation might one day mount a throne," or should one choose the eventual occupant of that throne ? Who was to take the first place, the originator or the adaptor, the pioneer or the settler : Faraday or Marconi, Leeuwenhoek or Koch, Columbus or Champlain ?
All very well, but the paper must be written. How would it do to discard any idea of tracing ultimate effects and to ask simply what men, in each period of the world's history, had best served the needs of the moment ? Was not that the surest, as well as the easiest, test ? It was usually only the fool who flattered himself that he was in advance of his times ; Horace, for all his talk of memorials more enduring than brass, dedicated his odes to Maecaenas, not to posterity. It was not for this or any other generation to seek to apply the standards of eter- nity ; a disillusioned post-War world might turn up its idealistic nose at Mr. Arkwright of the spinning jenny and Mr. Bell of the telephones, just as the Victorian had turned his comfortable back on Wesley and Rousseau, but they had delivered the goods their neighbours needed. Perhaps Pantheons would not be the unsatisfactory buildings they are if they had been frankly planned as historical museums. The League Temple had better be divided into chronological rooms, beginning with a Hamurabbi room and ending with one dominated by a symbolical group of Rockefeller Foundation doctors-. Only the religious leaders and philosophers might be grouped in a timeless chamber—if, indeed, they were not to be excluded altogether in the interests of peace. That, after all, was the chief difficulty about Pantheons—that men can agree least about the things that matter most. Twenty-five years ago, Miss Addams, in trying to decorate her polyglot social settlement in Chicago with portraits of human -benefactors, could get no farther than Lincoln and Tolstoy ; she was assured that Francis of Assisi would be regarded as too controversial a figure.
Such a museum might at least suggest to the visitor the question which of these historical figures the world would most fervently welcome if he were reborn today. Now that really was a theme on which an essay might be written without futility. The most alarming thought about the League Temple was the selections that would probably be made for its most modern room. To what benefactors had the .world been indebted since the War ? It had needed two things supremely, dispassionate govern- ment and coherent philosophy ; it had been offered, in response to both demands,, nothing but. the politics- of sentimental excitement.. The sentiment might at one moment be pacifist, at another communist or socialist, -at another nationalist ; but in each phase it had assumed the impossibility of any philosophy other than a political philosophy; or of any government other than government by propaganda. Had Germany done more than push these assumptions to their logical conclusion ? Alone of Europeans, Mussolini had been able to go some way in reconciling oratorical politics with Rossi's idea of a 4: govern° forte suite legge "—curious, by the way, that no one had detected Mussolini's kinship with that ill-fated predecessor in the government of modern Italy. But no totalitarian government could be dispassionate ; now as ever, those who believed that righteousness could be by the law were inexorably driven to pervert law into a crusade of violence. It was obvious enough that totali- tarianism, whether of " German Christians " or Christian socialists, was the enemy of freedom ; but it was even more true that it was the enemy both of justice and of faith. It was a revived preaching of that essential dual- ism which the world had needed and had not received: Beside that want, the benefactions of medicine or science were relatively insignificant, for this disease of the soul was beyond the reach of any scientific psychology.
And it was here, of course, that the whole of this Pantheon business broke down ; for, within the definition of " human genius," there was no single historical figure which could be picked out as the incarnation of this con- ception of dualism. It had just been the basic conception of a thousand years of Western civilization. But there could be no doubt in what society that conception still survived most strongly—and, on the whole, most benefi- cently. If only, during the last fifteen years, the British empire had been conscious of its qualifications for leadership ! . . .
The English candidate began to write . . but he did not sass.
Previous page
