PRG009 ^tva fork ^tate (ffolbge of Agriculture JVt Qfornell IniuerattH Slibrary Date Due ! ]ul28 *5r|| 1 'fttK , i.-ilw T4 Jwlari8M)B In' '>fl ■ ^ "^ H^ J 1S69 MAY H f; 1Q7II MMi M 3 l3/U OE^A ^m0^" rs: j|gpp-^ WIIW t 1^ ff'M A ■fi-'V J P fS«4 Library Bureau Cat. No. 1137 Cornell University Library PR 6009.L8E73 The philosophy of cpnS*. and 3 1924 014 520 146 The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014520146 THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONFLICT AND OTHER ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME BY THE SAME AUTHOR •THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE. 8s. 6d. net. THE SOUL OF SPAIN. ys. 6d. net. AFFIRMATIONS. 6s. net. IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS. 6s. net. THE WORLD OF DREAMS. 6s. net. ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME. First Series. 5s. net. THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONFLICT AND OTHER ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME SECOND SERIES HAVELOCK ELLIS BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 1919 ,\\ . i/ ■pRG009 L8 E1^ Printed in Great Britain 4 <.* -N ' '\'\\\\\^ \ CONTENTS PAGS I. Europe - - ■ . . 7 II. Civilisation - - 14 III. On a Certain Kind of War - : 23 IV. "V^ VicTORiBus" ... - 32 V. The Origin of War - . - 43 VI. The Philosophy of Conflict • - - 57 VII. Elie Faure ..... 68 VIII. The Star in the East - - - 80 IX. Luther - - - 89 X. Herbert Spencer - - 100 XI. Eugenics in Relation to the War - - no XH. Birth Control and Eugenics - - 128 XIII. War and the Sex Problem - 142 XIV. The Unmarried Mother - - - 148 XV. The Mind of Woman - - - 157 XVI. "Equal Pay for Equal Work" - - - .i7S XVII. The Politics of Women - . - 186 XVIII. Psycho-analysis in Relation to Sex - 19s VI CONTENTS XIX. The Drink Programme of the Future • XX. Rod6 - XXI. Mr. Conrad's World XXII. The Human Baudelaire XXIII. A Friend of Casanova's XXIV. Cowley - Index - 224 23s 246 257 267 284 296 I EUROPE When we glance at a map of the world, the eye catches its large firm outlines and passes over as negligible that broken comer of a great continental mass which we call Europe. Yet let us look more closely. Then we may realise that what at first had seemed the jagged and half- melted edge of a continent is really a delicately and artfully carved piece of work such as we find nowhere else on the whole design outspread before us. We reaUse that the artist who made the world, elsewhere content, on the whole, ta mould huge masses or great blank spaces, has here used his finest graver and brooded with his most loving smile over the minute configuration of land and water, so as to achieve the maximum of har- monious diversity with the eHmination of all extremes in a temperate region sheltered from the withering blasts of the South and the icy devastation of the North, bathed by the warm and yet stimulating currents of air and ocean. We search in vain for any similar achievement of art among the blank oceans of the world, its vast barren plains, its oppressive moimtain masses. Only at one 8 ESSAVS IN WAR-TIME spot, and then on a much smaller scale, on the eastern edge of the same huge continental mass, can we find in a climate as of Southern Europe something of the same dehcate configuration. There, on the coast of China and in Korea and in Japan, was the home of an elect people of artists and moralists, who alone in all the world rivalled and sometimes excelled the men of Europe in profound vision and exquisite skill, weaving a dream of calm happiness and seeking to catch in its meshes the last evanescent gleams in the beauty of things, pohshing to the highest point a httle mirror and seeking how large a part of the great universe they could reflect in its smallest space. For in this subtle skUl there was something miniaturish, and this admirable perfection was the work of a blend of men to the making of whom all the great human stocks had not gone. ■For if a fine artist fashioned Europe a consummate artist peopled it. Elsewhere in the world, on those vast plains, against those huge mountain chains, in the scattered islands of those oceans, the populations "were everywhere formed of few or coarse racial elements, at the best but incongruously mixed or imperfectly refined. "But on the outskirts of Europe were arrayed the finest tempered comparatively pure races of the world — the dark, long-headed Mediterranean whites to the South, the fair, long-headed Baltic whites to the North, the broad-headed Asiatic Alpine whites to the East — in such a manner that each stream could flow across Europe and mix with the others in well compact harmonious blends at the maximum number of points of contact in this EUROPE 9 complexly featured land. In each little district two, and more often all three, of these races were blended, always wth some slight diversity, to furnish the special tone and colour of the group, its own character in physical beauty and in spiritual production. Only here and there in scattered isolated spots were found small patches of pure race to give touches of bright colour, though not of creative energy, to the total harmony. In this exquisite process the men of every district were brought into blood relationship with the men of every other district. The men of each land were a little different, each nation with its own delicate individuality, yet all hearts were united by tenuous fibres stretching back to the common stocks, and whatever the men of one land said or did there were always responsive fibres to thrill sympathetically in the hearts of all other men. No more ingenious device to secure harmony was divinely possible. Europe resembled a beautiful old tapestry, diversified in tone and colour, yet with the same thread running everywhere through the design, binding it together and giving unity to the whole. It was part of the marvellously happy position of Europe that while so pkced as to attract and to retain the finest streams of human migration, and to mix these slowly in endless variations of harmony, it was yet protected from all the grosser devastations of the outside world. On three sides surrounded, and yet not isolated, by the seas, on the fourth the great Russian plain served as a buffer against rude blows from the east. Thus- the human streams that entered Europe could only filter through slowly; strength or address were needed by those who 10 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME sought a home in the spot thus moulded with infinite precaution; there was always leisure here to generate energy, to elaborate cultures unique in all the world. The divine bull that bore Europa to the Cretan home of Zeus and tossed her on the soil of Europe left her to develop the ^Egean seed within her, in forms that were altogether European. The might of Asia only touched the outermost edge of Europe, to raise a few prehistoric Cyclopean walls which left no memory of themselves save in obscure legend. Elsewhere in the large coarse outUnes of the world's map men might lose themselves in dreams of objective physical might or of infinite impersonal Being to fit the huge world they hved in. But it was never so in Europe. It was Europe that discovered men, individual, self- conscious men. Elsewhere Man had been a group, and always objectified and subordinate to ends larger than himself, eager to lose himself in something vast, in a horde or in a dynasty, in a pyramid or a Nirvana. Man created gods and worshipped them. But on the shores of the Mediterranean the divine was made flesh in the arrogant imagination of these daring Europeans.^ Men 1 " It was here [in Crete] that Mother Rhea fled to bear the King of Heaven that was to be, God made in the image of Man, while Father Kronos and the world he ruled clung to the Stone Child, the aniconic pillar-worship that expressed itself in the Bethels of the Semites and the Pillar Rooms at Knossos " (R. Burrows, The Discoveries in Crete, p. 5). It was hither that this same Zeus in the form of the bull bore Europa, the mother of Minos, the first lawgiver of European culture; and again, some thousand years later, on the coasts of this same Eastern Mediterranean, the homeland of the gods, the angel Gabriel, traditional chief of the cherubim or winged-buU angels, once more cast the divine seed into the child of man. EUROPE II themselves became gods. Men of art and men of science, makers of beauty and discoverers of truth, mystics and inventors, they became divine creators, for their creations were not collective agglomerations or vast abstractions, in which men lost themselves, but those products of ^personaUty in which men find themselves, made of the stuff of the hving world, on the pattern of the Europe that bred them, temperate and measured, of infinite diversity and endless subtlety. These men measured the stars and analysed their substance. In the fever of their own swiftly vibrating energies they discovered new forms of vibrating force in the physical world, to which all men before them had been blind and deaf, and they utiMsed these forces, as gods rather than as worshippers of gods, for the magnification of men, to bring them food, and to carry them swiftly through the earth and the sea and the air, and to cure their diseases or heal their wounds. All men have made to themselves representations of the world as they con- ceived it. But these men, in the penetration of their intelligence and the precision of their skill, so conceived the world that their representation of it could be controlled by their exact observations of it. They discovered that science ie measurement. They measured and analysed not only the stars but their own bodies and souls. They explored the conscious- ness of primitive animals vaguely reaching towards a soul. They traced back the first forms of their own bodies and the construction of their own minds, and sought to con- ceive their growth as a gradual and continuous whole. 12 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME They penetrated beneath the complex surface of thoughts and feelings to grope to the hidden sources of their own obscure impulses. They revealed the mysteries and wide- ranging forces of love in the activities of man. They followed the clue of hunger to its last irradiations in the laws of human association and the formation of societies. They constructed in the Heaven of the Future the end- lessly renewed vision of a Perfect Commonwealth. Meanwhile, on their European comer of the earth, they built places to hve in or to love, not as the maimer of the great outside world had been, colossally massive or sardonicEilly fantastic, but in the image of man's soul, tenderly human, with the traces stiU clinging of their smiles and their tears. Slowly through the centuries they made their peaceful villages on the green banks of quiet streams, fit to soothe the hearts of all who lived in them or passed through them, their httle towns on silent canals haunted by ghosts of a vanished past, their larg • cities which vibrated with the feverish rumours of their inextinguishable thirst for ever more life. They formed in the image of their dreams the great churches which are like jewels, so sacred that the eyes of those who gazed on them grew dim. They painted pictures, and their vision of the loveliness of air and earth and human things recreated the world on a diviner scale. They wrought statues, and all the secrets of the soul seemed entwined in the curves of their carven limbs. Many and many a century has passed since Europa, with white hands cUnging to the bull's horns, tremulous and so daring, was borne across the narrow sea, with the EUROPE 13 seed that was to be cast afar and change the spirit of the world. That great and commonplace world still pursued its slow and serene and laborious course, carrjdng on the everyday tasks of life. Yet the European ferment worked subtly in its veins. The impetus of European energy accelerated its motion. The vision of Europa became for ever entangled in its dreams. For the world realised (with secret thankfulness) that there will never be another Europe. II CIVILISATION The child who has scratched himself with his plaything throws it away in a pet, and there are some people to-day who would treat civilisation in the same way. Children of a larger growth, often the most attractive kind of people, they Mve in an imaginative world of their own into which they have only admitted the facts that please them, and they have made civihsation their plaything. But sud- denly the facts they had excluded from their world have insisted upon obtruding themselves, the child has been scratched by his plaything, the blood is only too plain to see; he tramples in a rage on the doll he had cherished and sulks in the corner. Like the hero of the httle sketch by " Denis Thevenin "^ (the name which is a transparent dis- guise for the sensitive poet and doctor Georges Duhamel) , he hates his century and he hates Europe and he hates the world; he threatens to go up into a high mountain alone where he can see no more of mankind. Yet we must speak with precaution. It is not possible to assume any airs of superiority when we contemplate those who thus treat civihsation as a plaything, for we are all children alike and aU make our ideals our playthings. *• Denis Thdvenin, Civilisation i<)i,}.-jgiy, p. 257. 1918. 14 CIVILIIATION 15 What, after all, is civilisation ? Simply what we like to make of it. Edward Carpenter, in Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, described it some thirty years ago as " a kind of disease which the various races of man have to pass through," though, he added, they usually die of it; he identified it with class hierarchy on a property basis, to be dated back only about a thousand years so far as England is concerned, and he regarded a civihsed state as another term for " policemanised " state. More recently, " Denis Thevenin's " mouthpiece described it as " a choir of harmonious voices singing a hymn, a statue of marble on an arid hill, a man who would say: ' Love one another.' " ' Attractive plaj^things, each of these definitions, however widely unlike: you may choose which you will — either of them may be worth while. Nor can it be said that those serious persons who have solemnly undertaken to instruct us in detail concerning the meaning and history of civilisation have removed us into any less capricious atmosphere. Buckle, who wrote so extensive an intro- duction to its history, was content, quite incidentally, to define it as " the results of the progress of knowledge;" and Guizot, in his famous lectures, throwing aside so narrowly intellectual a conception, boldly stated the broad proposition that civilisation consists of " two principal facts : the development of human society and the development of man himself." There surely should be a playground large enough for anyone. Too large, the writer of the article on " Civilisation " in the Encyclo- peedia Britannica seems to think, and in the course of his methodical exposition he first refrains from defining what i6 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME it is that he is writing about, and then falls back on the humble idea that civihsation is " the desire for a larger and larger modicum of average individual comfort." When we go back to the origin of the word we are not greatly helped, for originally, in sixteenth-century French, to " civilise " simply meant to make a criminal matter a , civil cause, whence it came to mean " make civil " in other than legal senses. Thus the word " civihsation " in its early and French stage really had that suggestion of a " poHcemanised " state which Edward Carpenter finds so distinctive. That probably may have influenced Dr. Johnson when, as Boswell tells us, he proposed to omit " civilisation " from his Dictionary and only to admit " civility." It might have been better; We should indeed have lost a verbal peg which the human imagina- - tion has found so convenient whereon to hang its con- fections, but it would have been clearer that what we are concerned with is the development of the refinements proceeding from the close contact of human beings in large groups, an extended kind of " urbanity," or, as Matthew Arnold defined it, " the humanisation of man in society," which may be regarded as a concise form of Wilhelm von Humboldt's earher definition, "the humani- sation of peoples in their external institutions and customs and in their corresponding inner sentiments." That is a fairly safe definition, while yet remaining extremely vague. It helps us to see our way towards the right relationship of " civilisation " to " culture." " Culture," indeed, as the German scholars who have most diligently explored it are ready to admit, also remains without a, CIVILISATION 17 satisfactory definition, but, in the serious sense, it is no longer to be identified with " cnltshaw," and is tending to be used in a wider and even biological sense. It may cover the whole productive activity, physical and psychic, of a human group, without regard to its quality, just as we speak of bacterial cultures. " Civilisation " would remain the name for the spiritual growth, the " humani- sation," of mankind generally. Yet, obviously, that fails to carry us far. It leaves altogether in doubt the nature, good or bad, of the special quaUty of " humaneness," It furnishes a convenient frame, it formulates the outHne, but the human imagi- nation must still be left to supply the contents. We must each determine for himself what " humaneness " means, accordingly as we regard man as angel or devil or a subtle mixture of both. So that the spirit of man is still able to cherish an infinitely varied assortment of rag- dolls, aU called " CiviHsation," some made to be adored and some to be kicked, and some to be subjected to both treatments in turn. Such considerations are the necessary preliminary to any discussion of civilisation which seeks to avoid the sphere of mere caprice. If we enter a playground, or even a nursery, let us at least realise where we are. But there is a further consideration, perhaps less widely reaUsed, which the recent devastation among our idols — or our dolls — has shown the danger of neglecting. Until about a century ago it was commonly believed that the world was created circa b.c, 4004. That date may have seemed a little arbitrary to some, but there were B i8 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME no established facts which made it other than plausible. CiviHsation was assumed to begin almost immediately after the creation of the world. So that at a time six thousand years ago, when, as we now know, mighty civiUsations had slowly risen and fallen, at a time when men had long been the equals of ourselves in brain development, there was, according to the theory we have only just cast away, no world at all. When we consider the absurd contrast between the actual period of milHons of years during which Nature or God was occupied in making man — to say nothing of the inconceivably longer period occupied in moulding the world — ^with the idea of man's recent origin which that same divine being inspired to man's reason, we feel that we are outside the sphere of sober fact to be contemplated seriously, we are elevated into the region of joke. The fairy-tales told to children concerning their origin are by comparison rational. The point for us to realise is, that while during the past century the curtain concealing our origin — on which we had scrawled B.C. 4004 — has been drawn aside and revealed a practically endless succession of vast and fascinating events, we have scarcely yet even begun to reaMse the imphcations of this long descent. We still retain the feeling that civiMsation began yesterday. Our plaything seems to us but a fragile toy. It is an ancient observation concerning the man who suffered from the delusion that he was an earthen pot and entreated his friends to place him on a high shelf where he would not be broken. It is the delusion many of us stiU cherish about civilisation. We have scarcely yet begun to see that CIVILISATION 19 civilisations are more solid products than we had supposed, and that even their destruction is of little moment. It has happened so often. Man has again and again shattered to bits the civihsation he had made, but he has always remoulded it afresh, differently if not more beautifully, at aU events nearer to his heart's desire. When it was once suggested to James Hinton that the time would come, owing to the exhaustion of the possible number of combinations of sounds, when music would end, he replied that a man would then arise, so moved by a new spirit, that he would exclaim: " There has yet been no music !" That has again and again been the proclamation of Man in regard to civilisation. After long generations had slowly elaborated their rough tools, the Mousterian and his successor the Aurignacian man came to maturity in France, not only with brilliant new mechanical principles, but with a new desire, in which Art was bom, to perpetuate in carving the images of the things he had known in life, and with a supreme discovery, sometimes so tragic in its results for after-ages, that the soul is immortal and the dead body a thing to be cere- moniously buried. Then the Solutrian man arrived, concentrating his attention on the acquirement of manipu- lative skill and carr3dng the fabrication of the implements of work to a point of exquisite skiU and efficiency never again attained imtil vast periods of time had elapsed. For the Magdalenian man who followed him, filled with new ideals and a new delicacy and ingenuity in carrs^ng them out, disdained those utilitarian accomplishments while yet making all sorts of briUiant discoveries in the art of 20 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME living; he was enamoured of art, and in his long winter days in his cavernous palaces, by the light of the smokeless lamps he had devised, he painted the frescoes and carved the ivory that stiU survive to arouse our admiration at their expressive economy of signiiicant line.^ -That civilisation melted away in the perpetual rains of a new climatic period, but then another civilisation appeared, that of the Azihan Age, having a more favourable home in the P5n:enees, where the Azilian men found a sort of Ararat on which to establish themselves amid the waste of waters, when the old Magdalenian civiUsation and all its arts had disappeared together with the reindeer. There they found, in a climate at last resembling our own, the elements of a new civilisation which in course of time developed into that of the great Neolithic Age, the basis of our oAvn civiUsation to-day. Yet, according to our famihar behef .of yesterday, darkness was stiU upon the face of the deep. Another six thousand years or more were to pass, and the foundations of the great city of Knossos, the supreme radiating centre of civihsation, had already been laid for countless ages,^ and the Egyptian d3aiasties were about to begin, when at last, as we were 1 An excellent popular account, up to recent date, of these stages of Palaeolithic culture will be found in Ancient Hunters, by Professor W. J. Sollas, a book which is not only competently scientific and sufficiently full, but attractively written. 3 The fascinating civilisation of Crete, in many ways more akin to our own than that of any past age, has been described in many books. While we await the full account to be given by Sir Arthur Evans, its chief discoverer, I may mention The Discoveries in Crete, by R. Burrows, an attractive book by an accomplished writer, and Crete the Forerunner of Greece, by Mr. and Mrs. Hawes, who themselves took a distinguished part in the discoveries. CIVILISATION 21 taught, the world was created, b.c. 4004. At that time, the Neohthic man, who left his civihsation in the Lake- villages, towns rather, to be reconstructed only a few years ago,^ was already finding it transferred beneath his eyes into the civilisation of the Metal Ages, and the citizens of Knossos were soon to see their city ravished and burnt, a catastrophe more memorable, so far as civilisation is concerned, than any catastrophe of to-day is likely to seem four thousand years hence. Then the Greeks came, and that great Moral Reformation of the sixth century B.C., throughout a new and larger world, from the Nile and the Tiber to the Hoang-ho and the Ganges, which has been called the true inauguration of our latest civilisation.^ All these generations of men, as each wonderful civihsation' of the past seemed to lie shattered before their eyes, arose in a new spirit, with a new youth- ful energy, and each of them proclaimed afresh during half a million years : There has been no civilisation yet ! We have learnt that the history of Man and his civilisa- 1 The civilisation of the Lake-villages, which seemed to Remy de Gourmont " one of the most smiling ages of our Western humanity," was described in detail by Keller, the pioneer in this field, and later by Dr. Robert Munro in The Lake Dwellings of Europe, of which there is a more recent revised French edition by Rodet, Les Stations Lacustres d'Europe, 1908. " By J. Stuart Glennie. He used to point out that the sixth-fifth century (550-450 b.c.) is the line of division between ancient and modern civilisation, as it was the century of Confucius, of Buddha, of Zoroastrianism as a power, of the second Isaiah and the triumph o^ Jahveism, of Fsammetichus and the worship of Isis and Horus, the age of Xhales and Pythagoras and Xenophanes and Sappho and Alcaics; finally, it was the age of the influences which led up to the domination of so-called Aryan culture and the age in which Republics slowly began to replace Monarchies. 22 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME tions stretches back into a still immeasurable past. Yet do not let us leap to the conclusion that Man is old. It is dangerous to leap to conclusions about anything in this world, most of aU when Man and his civihsations are concerned. Who knows whether Man is old ? Some- times he stni seems even too exuberantly youthful. " Man was only bom yesterday," Maeterlinck lately wrote, " and has scarcely yet even begun to disentangle himself from chaos. We fancy that he is moving towards Death, and aU his past shows us that he is more probably advancing towards Life." Another philosopher, stirred to imwonted impatience by a recent lamentable achieve- ment of our bureaucrats, remarked the other day: " If I were God I would put humanity under water for three minutes and begin again with the crocodiles or something substantial." But that is precisely what, on another plane, with an inexhaustible youthful assurance of " world enough and time," Man himself has been per- petually doing with his creations. When indeed we survey the brief history or the long history, as we choose to regard it, of this Divine Child in the creation of its infinitely various and endlessly novel playthings, nothing is left to us but wonder and adoration. We can only apply to the Soul of Man — so unfathomable, so mj^terious, so disconcerting — ^the words of the Hebrew Psalmist to his Jahve: " A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past." Ill ON A CERTAIN KIND OF WAR GusTAv Frenssen, author of the fine novel Holyland, which once won the admiration of Enghsh readers, and himself a native of the homeland of those Anglo-Saxons who achieved the only Germanic invasion of England, has narrated a significant personal incident. " When I was once in a central German town," he said, " I met an Enghsh lady who was born in England of entirely EngUsh parentage. All the time I was in the room with her I was quietly wondering how it was that this Englishwoman, in her face, in her speech, and especially in certain move- ments of her head and hands, resembled one of my father's sisters who lived in the simplest fashion in her village home. When I left the gathering with friends and told them my remarkable observation, I learnt that this lady had said to them how wonderfully I resembled an uncle of hers. If this was no chance, we have here," Frenssen comments, " an intimate racial resemblance propagated through some fifteen hundred years or fully forty genera- tions." We now conceive of human Ufe in Europe as extending back so many hundreds of thousands of years that the date of only forty generations ago, when the Saxons, 23 24 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME those " Germanest of Germans," as Steinhausen, the historian of German Culture, calls them, reached our island to make so deep a mark, seems but as yesterday. Nor is that by any means the only example of the mixture of European races which binds together in one family group the peoples who to-day look upon one an- other as bitter opponents. The thoughtful observer is continually brought up against the absurdity of war under such conditions, though we can never forget that such absurdity is the obverse of tragedy. Yet we have no right to protest. We ourselves mould Fate, and Man is his own star. We are not entitled to pray that the cup we ourselves fashioned shall pass from us until we have drained its dregs. It is thousands of years since with infinite patience and skiU we began in the later Stone Age to devise the mechanism of war and created those means to do iU deeds which have so often made iU deeds done. In the remarkable prologue to his Metamorphoses — it may well be enshrining an ancient tradition — Ovid sets forth how the Bronze Age and still more the later Iron Age involved an ever-increasing violence in human relationships; and archaeological evidence reveals to-day how deadly a weapon the dis- covery of these metals placed in the hands of men whose previous stone implements were indeed highly valuable aids to subsistence, but no great encouragement to the luxury of warfare among a sparse population. However fantastic the confusion of our beUigerency to-day may be, we have no right to complain. Three waves at least erf human population have left ON A CERTAIN KIND OF WAR 25 super-imposed strata in our national geology throughout Europe. They are, as we know, the dark long-heads from the South, the tall long-heads from the North, the round-heads from the East. These three waves have washed their sedimentary deposits all over Europe, so that there is no country in which some elements at least of all three cannot be traced, while in many, and notably our own, all three are clearly and emphatically repre- sented. We know how perplexing a problem may be conditioned by the mere flux and reflux of nationality, so that, for example, the Alsatian has at some periods been a Frenchman, and 'at others a German, always a rather French German or a rather German Frenchman — none the worse, probably the better, on that account. But far more intricate and profound are the results of the flux and reflux of these three great stocks which are so much deeper than nationality. These results cannot but be endlessly distressing to the more thoughtful of our intransigeant patriots in aU the belligerent countries. There is, indeed, no end to the baffling confusions and contradictions which face the honest and pure-hearted patriot in aU lands when he looks narrowly into his most sacred national traditions or contemplates the variegated inherited spots of what must sometimes seem to him his own leopard's, not to say leper's, skin. How often it happens that we come across some large, tall, fleshy, buUet-headed man, eyes level with face, an indescribable something in expression and €ven build marking arrogant contempt for the English crowd around him, and we say to ourselves, " An unmistakable Hun !" Yet he may 26 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME prove to be quite English, and then we recall that some of our notable patriots look very Uke that — ^white EngUsh hearts, as they feel themselves, fated to be bom in such alien casings. But we may avoid personalities and consider only traditions. Let us turn to Germany. It must indeed be distressing for a patriotic German, accustomed to worship the large and robust goddess " Germania," to realise that the divine maiden bears a name which, far from being echt deittsch, has a meaning which no one is quite sure about, except that it seems in any case trivial, and was certainly imposed by those ancestors of the trtiitorous ItaJians who first presented to the world the tribes they vaguely called " Germans." But the French patriot is in no better case. It is difficult even for a thoughtfully patriotic Frenchman to cry, " Viva la France !" when he reflects that the Franks, after all, were merely a horde of barbarous Boches, whose proper home lay beyond the Rhine, though he may seek his revanche in the fact that that sacred German river bears a name which is not German at all, but, as some German scholars themselves admit, perhaps Celtic. Difficulties are by no means over when we cross the Channel to that country which so far our patriots permit us to call by the atrociously Teutonic name of " En^nd." There may indeed be a reason for their remarkable self- restraint in casting out from their eyes such trivial motes as " Berlin Roads " or " German Measles " and refraining to pluck out that gigantic beam of " England." For it is a painful fact that our most uncompromisingly zealous patriots bear patronymics that are only too ostentatiously ON A CERTAIN KIND OF WAR 27 Teutonic, tarred all over by the " Anglo-Saxon " brush. There is much to do here in whitening these Germanic sepulchres. A small beginning has indeed been made with the more recent importers of Teutonic patrony- mics, not so far-seeing as that Mr. Eltzbacher who even before the wai;- began ensconced himself behind the two old English names of Ellis Barker. The King himself, as we know, democratically following the example of some of his humblest subjects, changed his name, and thus conspicuously set over Windsor Castle that re- assuring announcement : " The Proprietor of this Shop is British." These reflections, however melancholy they may be to the ultra-patriot, need not lead us to overlook the central facts of a tremendous situation. It has been said that the European war is the great civil war of the human race. If by that is meant a war fought by peoples who share the same blood and the same traditions, peoples who have been accustomed to hve together in amity under the same or similar social rules, then we may weU accept the statement. It thus differs from those wars of the past which, however they may have sometimes been conditioned by concealed economic pressure, were often merely the struggles of rival d5aiasties for great prizes, a sort of perilous game engineered by high-spirited rulers content to operate with smaU bands of professional troops or mere mercenaries. We always seem to imply, however, that a civil war is a particularly deplorable kind of war. Yet, so long as we retain war at all — ^for it is clearly possible to foresee a better way — civil war is, if 28 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME we consider the matter, the only almost inevitable and really noble kind of war. For it is civil war that is most likely to be fought from ideal motives and for the sake of great principles. We have but to recall our own wars of King and ParHament, or the American War of North and South. Our European war may then be said to be in this also a civil war, that it was inspired at the outset by an exalted idealism, and Germany could inflict on us no such defeat as that we have power to inflict on ourselves by faUing to any lower level. Yet if there is nothing for lamentation or for shame in the motives of this sort of war, there is always an element of failure in the end, and on both sides. That end is, indeed, given in the beginning of every such war, for when the opponents partake of each other's nature, they necessarily share the failiure as well as the success. So far as individuals are concerned it is the failure that is most conspicuously shared. This was seen in our own in- structive Civil War of three centuries ago. It becomes clear when we can draw aside the formal veil of history and penetrate to the private Uves of the people. Thus, to take an East Anglian middle-class family of that day I chance to be interested in, there were two brothers, the elder on the side of King and Church, who, after being many years a FeUow of his College in Cambridge, settled in his comfortable Suffolk rectory, while his brother, leaving College early for the law, became a distinguished judge, and finally a Commissioner of the Privy Seal; yet while the elder brother was persecuted, despoiled, and driven out of his living, to die in idle, respected neglect. ON A CERTAIN KIND OF WAR 29 the younger brother, after leaviiig London to settle on his estate when Cromwell's arbitrary methods had revolted his legal mind, disappears entirely at the Restora- tion, though it is unlikely he shared the fate of his fellow Commissioner, who fled to Vevey and was murdered by Royalists, and even the tablet set up to his memory by his daughter leaves obscure the date and place of his death : they were on opposed sides, yet alike in the failure of their personal ends. They were typical of the men of that war, and the men of to-day share a like community of fate, so that one could write the private record for thousands, even hundreds of thousands, in the trenches or at home, and merely leave blank spaces for the names, EngHsh names or German names. If we turn from the fate of the men who fight to the fate of the ideas they fought for, we see, again, if we pause to think, that our conventional notions need revision. Men die, but the ideas they died for live on. It is true. Yet under what -Strange disguises ! In the struggle around Charles II., Shakespeare's world fought against Milton's world and was dashed to pieces, yet Milton's world never replaced it, and instead a few elements of each were combined to make another, more mediocre than either, yet better suited to the men who made it. So also in the Civil War of America, men fought for the great idea of the abolition of slavery, and at all events succeeded in substituting new slaveries, economic and social — ^not to mention that legal segregation of the coloured population attempted even to-day— which suited them better, and, it may well be, are better. So that humanity is not merely marking 30 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME time. The optimist is entitled to believe that the dance of Man may after aU be like that slow and sacred folk- dance of Furry Day through the main street of Helston, two steps backward and three steps forward, so that in the end the dance is done. It is even so in the pattern of the cosmic sphere of which man is part, and the planets that circle like kittens pursuing their own tails are stUl dancing forward through space, on the path of Progress, to an unknown end. Let us not, therefore, in this most lamentable kind of war, lose sight of the differences between the great ideas which carry men forward and the violences and extrava- gancies which carry men back, for in such a war it is the men who look forward who Hve, while the others, profaning the cause they profess to honour, are vowed to death, and for them is no place in any saner world t6 come. We may once again turn back to the record of our old CivU War as set down in the history that was written — ^by one who had lived through it close to the chief actors — with such a strange, hesitant, incorrect vividness of expression which is so attractive because he seems to invent speech while he speaks. Clarendon was a partisan who was also an artist, but, in the gallery of immortal portraits he set up, the partisans and the extremists on either side are for ever nailed dead to the walls and move us by no personal appeal. Yet there is one figure there that still seems living, indeed a modem of our most modem world, whose capacity of brain was matched by the humanity of his heart, the t5^e of the new model of some of our finest young soldiers to-day, whose high ON A CERTAIN KIND OF WAR 31 spirit in war has been but the reflection of their high spirit in peace. He was no pacifist, he rejected " peace at any price," and it may be in his rejection of it that phrase was first heard. He fought on the side which seemed in the end to come nearest to his ideals, and he died on the battlefield. Yet in " the very agony of the war," amid the " senseless scandal " and " unreasonable calumny " of fools, he was never ashamed of his " impatiency for peace," and " sitting among his friends, often," we are told, " after a deep silence and frequent sighs, would ingeminate the word Peace, Peace." IV VM VICTORIBUS! It once happened that the present writer as a boy was drawn by curiosity to Westminster Abbey in order to hear a famous preacher of that day, Dean Stanley. What the text was, or the special topic of the sermon, has long since faded from memory. But the main point of the discourse remains vividly clear. It is not, after the ancient Roman manner, Vtz victis ! that we are called upon to cry in the struggles of the world, declared the sturdy little mcin with the resonant, defiant voice, but Vce vidoribus ! He was not a pacifist, but — as is so often the case with these small fragile persons perpetually battling with Death — of most mihteint spirit, and in the course of this same discourse he declaimed with chal- lenging emphasis the lines of Clough : " 'Tis better to have fought and lost Than never to have fought at all." It is not to the seeming victor that the finest spoils of battle pass, and victory rather than defeat brings the burden of woe. Vcs vidoribus ! Some forty years have passed since then, but the reminiscence of the idea embodied in that vehement cry has remained in the background of at least one hearer's 32 V.E VICTORIBUS 33 mind ever since, to be tested again and again by the history of our own time or the past. The great wars of history are ambiguous for the most part, but when any meaning emerges, the moral is clear to see: Woe to the victors ! The illustration furnished by Napoleon in Prussia has become a commonplace now. In the campaign that culminated in the complete and magnificent victory at Jena, Napoleon was enabled to trample down insolently the soil of Prussia, and that campaign seemed to the world, as Treitschke admitted it to be, the only disastrous campaign in the history of Prussian warfare. Yet Napoleon and all his victories vanished hke mist, blown away by armies smaller than his own under commanders who have never been ranked with him. By his victories he had defeated himself. All their fruits went to Prussia. Napoleon ploughed the fields of Prussia, but the Prussian it was who reaped the harvest. The power and the organisation of Prussia were enormously furthered, hastened, and extended. The victorious hero who trampled on Germany was as much as any man the creator of Germany. Vcb vidloribus ! The third Napoleon entered into the first Napoleon's heritage. The Germany which victorious France had made trampled on the France that made it, to inflict a wound not healed to this day. Yet the moral is ever the same : Vcb victoribus ! The victors of Sedan, the triumphant besiegers of Paris, went home with Alsace-Lorraine and -their milHards; therewith they bore home also all the woes of victory. They grew prosperous, materialistic, arrogant, luxurious, licentious, after the manner of those victorious Teutonic c 34 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME Goths of old who sought to loll in drunken insolence on curule chairs, and were soon melting away like northern snow on the warm Italian plains. The spiritual creative- ness of the nation was killed; for nearly fifty years no great thinker or creative artist, no personality of world- wide significance, has come out of Germany, scarcely even in music, for Wagner's career began forty years before the war of 1870. The one German figure of universal influence renounced his nationality at the outset of his career, and was the prophet of woe to his native land,^ unwearied in denunciation of that Kultur which seemed to him the total lack of all culture, and the fervent adorer of France. For while Germany was thus attracting the enmity of the world, the position of France in the world remained unimpaired, heightened rather, its strength reinvigorated, its moral authority affirmed, so that those who before had been inclined to question it were no longer heard, and to-day all have borne witness to the greatness of that France which Germany in 1870 so enriched. Nor is the victor's tragedy a spectacle which we in England have only viewed from afar as spectators. There was one moment in recent times when the prestige of England in the world stood lower than perhaps it has ever stood before. It was the moment of victory. The triumph of England over the Boer States 1 It seems not to be usually realised that, when at the age of twenty- four Nietzsche was elected Professor of Classical Philology in the Uni- versity of Basel, he renounced his German nationality in the usual course. That was why he could not take part in the Franco-Prussian War, although he succeeded in obtaining permission to join an ambulance corps (E. Forster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Friedrich Nielssche's, vol. ii., P- 31). V;E VICTORIBUS 35 was nearly everjrwhere regarded as the shame of England, arousing open or ill-concealed hatred and contempt, and, as we know, it was only by a sudden reversal of the policy of victory, so far as that was still possible, that the credit of England in the world was to some extent restored. In a sense it is true that no victory, as the would-be victor understood victory, has ever been achieved in the world, because the victor can never stand still at the moment of victory. It was by a fine inspiration that the victory of the children of Israel over the Amorites was reported as due to the sun standing still upon Gibeon at the command of Joshua " until the nation had avenged themselves of their enemies." That was indeed the only way to do it. For in our everyday world the sun refuses to stand stiU until the nation has avenged itself on its enemies, and the result is that victory swiftly passes into something quite other than the victor had intended.^ History, we are sometimes taught nowadays, has no lessons. That, certainly, is a lesson which our leaders 1 It need scarcely be said that a doctrine of the reverse kind has lately been preached in England by journaUstic leaders of mob-opinion. Thus a brilliant English writer, Mr. Hilaire Belloc, declares that " Defeat, whichever side may suffer it, will produce spiritual fruits of the most vigorous kind," but for the vanquished, he thinks, these " spiritual fruits " are poisonous. The only example Mr. Belloc gives, of a crudely political sort, is the French ParUamentary system, which he regards as a hopeless failure because it was adopted after defeat a century ago, imposed on France, one must assume, by EngUsh pres- sure. Of spiritual profit accruing to the victor, it is easy to iind more genuine examples where a small people successfully resists the attempted oppression by a great people, so gaining a desirable stimulus to confi- dence and energy. This has often been seen. The spiritual advantages of victory for great nations seem, on the other hand, dubious at the best. 36 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME at all events have no need to be taught. " Our aim is victory !" exclaimed the French Premier in an outburst of original inspiration, swiftly echoed by our own Premier. In the days of Bergson, reason is as much out of fashion as history. Else one might point out that not only is mere victory a demonstrably imreasonable and in the long run disastrous end to fight for, but that, as a matter of fact, in aU genuine fights it is not the end actually sought. That is the case even among animals as far as possible removed from human reason. Even in bull- fights or cock-fights, contests from which reason is artificially eliminated, and still more clccirly under natural conditions, it cannot be said that animals fight for an abstract " victory," but rather for desirable con- crete biological ends, even if mere self-preservation, which concern them vastly more, and, in the absence of reason, may best be secured by fighting. " Victory " is merely an abstraction inserted by phraseologists between the aim and the end. They may perhaj)s teU us that the object of inserting it is to bring the rays of the aim to a more effective focus on the end. They refrain from teUing us that it may edso act in an altogether different way by so dissipating the rays that they never become effective at aU. We smiled when we heard, in the old days of Suffragette mihtancy, of the Committee of School- boys which met to consider that movement, and decided that, while they disapproved of its objects, they entirely approved its methods. We no longer smiled when we suspected that our own War Cabinet might be even such another Committee, entirely approving the methods by V^ VICTORIBUS 37 which the nation is fighting, but not able to express approval of those high ends for which we fight. The new cry of the demagogues lent itself well to that attitude, and seemed for the moment likely to prevail. " Our aim is victory !" To such innocent-hearted people as the Bishop of London it was revealed at once that now at last we have " a great leader who believes in God." One might, indeed, ask : Which God ? For some may re- member, though a Christian Bishop may forget, that the Greeks regarded Victory as the daughter of Styx, whose home was in that nether world which we call HeU. If we set out to fight for Freedom and Right, or, if we prefer the favourite American formula, to make the world safe -for Democracy, we know that while we could not avoid military methods, militarism alone — that is to say, victory — ^is powerless to achieve our ends. For unless in the elan vital of our military onrush we have overthrown Reason, we cannot fail to know that militarism — and we must face the fact that a world-war, while it lasts, is militarism in the Prussian sense of the word — so far from being the loving guardian of Freedom and Right, or the infallible panacea for creating a world safe for Democracy, is the deadly enemy of these things. Militarism is thus a weapon which under certain circumstances must nevitably be used, but a weapon only to be used with extreme precaution — such a two-edged sword, in fact, that the Cause, however excellent, which takes it up takes up also the risk of perishing by it. There is here, we see, a delicate situation. The peril of rejecting the 38 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME weapon offered to us is even greater than the peril of taking it up. Therefore we have engaged our Satan in the task of casting out Satan. We are placed, that is to say, in the paradoxical position of being compelled to employ an instrument in the destruction of which all our salvation hes. At the outset we were incUned to look upon the war as made after the image of a drama, and we saw the white-souled hero proceeding trimnphantly through a few brief acts to overwhelm and pierce to the heart the black-souled villain. But this war has not been made after the pattern of a play, unless, indeed, of marionettes. For the real actors who pull the strings, heroes or villains, whichever they may be, never mingle with their puppets. The yoimg prince in the fairy-tale had a whipping-boy whose innocent back was duly castigated for all his lord's offences. Our lords and governors to-day have whole nations as their whipping- boys, by whose stripes they are not bruised but some- times even healed, overwhelmed, indeed, with rewards and honours. The war can scarcely be made to fit into our dramatic prepossessions ; it permits of no denouement which wiU satisfy even the austerely inhmnan demands of a Greek tragic Fate. It is not a play, but much more one of these monstrous and bloody fairy-tales, without rhyme or reason, crooned gloomily in the obscure dawn of the world. So it is that clear-eyed and acute observers, of whom a few are stUl left in the neutral countries, have grown inclined to think that salvation can only come to Europe by a victory that is defeat, and a defeat that is victory for aU those flagellated nations who are whipped V^ VICTORIBUS 39 less for their own sins than for those of their leaders who will never be whipped. Such a conclusion of the whole matter, it cannot be denied, may leave a sense of dissatisfaction on those melodramatic souls in the gallery who cannot be quite happy unless the villain is clearly brought to justice in the last scene, to fall dead on the stage as the curtain comes down. Even among those who are too intelH- gent to take this spectacular view of human affairs, and who reahse that if we forgive not others their tres- passes we must not be so fooUsh as to suppose that they will forget our own trespasses, it is widely held that, while among the masses in every country there are a certain proportion whose instincts as revealed by warfare are still what we, not quite fairly to the lower races, call barbarous or savage, that proportion has been proved larger in some of the belligerent countries than in others, which countries therefore require a lesson in civilisation. Many of us think that this is specially the case as regards Germany. That would not be surprising. Modern Germany is one of the new countries of Europe, and its civilisation is still in a comparatively early period of growth. (Read the Travels through England in 1780 of the S57mpathetic young German pastor, Moritz, and note his surprised enthusiasm over the high general level of culture and of freedom he found as compared with his own Prussia.) Moreover, the history and cir- cumstances of Germany, and especially of Prussia, have been peculiarly unfavourable to the growth of the spirit of civilisation in the wide European sense. But how is 40 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME civilisation taught ? We know the answer that is com- monly given when the lower human races are concerned. The Bible, syphilis, and alcohol, we are usually told, are the methods by which Britain has carried civilisation to the ends of the earth. This method was evidently useless in the present case, since we knew that aU three of these vehicles of civilisation already exist and even abound in Germany. Yet it could scarcely be claimed that the methods on which we were content to rely were really calculated to be more, or even equally, efficacious in driving home the sweet and gracious lessons of civihsation we desire to teach. So Victory was seen to be not only impotent for its own miUtary ends, but impotent also for the ends of Civilisation. We have thus entered on a new phase. The worship of the abstract victory is over. A Dean of Westminster who preached Vcb victoribus is no longer in danger of preaching no more. In a struggle for definite objects, instead of a dangerous abstraction, all those who are fighting on the same side may succeed in joining hands. But we are already beginning to see farther even than that. We begin to see that not only those of the same side may join hands, but those of the opposing side may see the possibility of joining hands with them. For the supreme advantage of the poHtical method of seeking definite ends over the military method of seeking an abstract victory is that it opens the possibility for the belligerents to realise that the ends, so far as they are legitimate ends, which on each side they seek, are the sajne ends. From that moment war becomes an absurdity. V^ VICTORIBUS 41 " O Grave, where is thy victory ?" It is a cry which to many ears has sounded sadly, even with pathetic irony, from the vain cemeteries of endless battlefields. Yet let us, rather, rejoice. For, after all, we have made our world on the extravagant pattern of Nature's world, with whom is no calm without storm, or life without death. It is only through her tempests of passion that Nature attains her serenity of reason. Man is but the microcosm of Nature. It was necessary that the thirst for victory should make the world a wilderness in order that the assuaging voice might be heard in that wilderness: Vce victoHbus ! THE ORIGIN OF WAR " There have always been wars; there always will be wars." That has ever been the creed, expressed or implied, of the militarist, more devoutly held than ever in the face of threats to supersede war. Even the man of science falls into the snare. Thus, Dr. F. A. Woods, in his study 7s War Diminishing ? — carried out with much pride of objectivity — seems to take for granted that war, even though it may possibly be increasing in intensity, existed at the beginnirig, and asserts, indeed, that societies could not be constituted without war. Yet, have there always been wars ? Our assumptions on this point, like so many beliefs that have become mere superstitions, date from a time when knowledge of the past was much less extensive than it is now. Even thirty years ago it was possible for so cautious an investigator as Maine to talk, in his International Law, about the " universal belligerency of primitive mankind," and to assert, quite as a matter of course, that " it is not peace which was natural and primitive and old, but rather war," and he added, with a lofty superiority at which now we may smile, " war more atrocious than we, with our ideas, can easily conceive." All the prominent 42 THE ORIGIN OF WAR 43 authors meekly followed in the same path — Spencer, Bagehot, Topinard, Steinmetz, McDougall and the rest. There were, indeed, some on the other side, but they were not the leaders of the mob, and few marked them. Darwin,-with his doctrine of natural selection, seemed to the majority to be on their side, especially in Germany, though war had really nothing to do with Darwin's natural selection. Man was born out of war, it was believed, and his whole civilisation is based on war. A little reflection might have suggested that a creature so helpless in his native state as man, and with a more prolonged infancy than any "other creature, was hardly likely, if ontogeny reproduces philogeny, to have been the outcome of war. That consideration was put forward by Letoumeau in his large book. La Guerre, in 1895, but Letourneau was not usually an original investigator or a profound thinker, and his opinions on the origin of war were neglected. In the present century, however, the whole question has been placed on a new basis. The archaeologist and the anthropologist have here unconsciously co-operated to the same end, the one by working among primitive peoples of old, and the other among their modern Tepre- sentatives in savage lands to-day. It must be remembered that man's appearance on the earth dates from a vastly earlier period than was supposed even half a century ago. It is now not uncommon to date the time when species that could fairly be called human first began to appear at about a miUion years back, of which the brief period Qf less than three thousand years we call historical is but 44 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME an insignificant fraction. That, it is true, is but plausible conjecture. We cannot even be precise concerning the existence of known men as the founders of culture by their invention of recognisable and indestructible instru- ments of labour. The geological evidence is held to indicate that CheUean man, who first made tools that were both permanent and undoubtedly human, may have lived from thirty to one hundred thousand years ago,^ so that of the continuous history of human culture, as dis- tinguished from the history of man, our historical period is in any case a small part. To say, therefore, as we certainly can, that wars have raged throughout our " historical " period not only tells us almost nothing about the long history of man, it tell'-, us but little about the evolution of human culture. The vast hiatus thus revealed was at one time easily filled up by summary thinkers. Fighting exists among animals, they said; fighting exists among men to-day; therefore there has been fighting all the time. But that is a Uttle too simple. It is true that many animals can fight, being naturally furnished with weapons. Fighting, however, and war are by no means the same thing. Here, indeed, we enter a field where there are differences of definition. Lagorgette, in his large and useful book Le R6le de la Guerre, found twelve years ago that at least one hundred and fifty definitions of war had been put forth, and since then the number has greatly increased. But there cannot be much doubt that, roughly speaking, 1 The higher estimate is that of Osbom (Men of the Old Stone Age) who now (Origin and Evolution of Life) adds another 25,000 years. THE ORIGIN OF WAR 45 we mean by war an organised attack by the whole com- munity on another community of the same species. The combats of animals— even apart from the fact that when with members of their own species they are rarely fatal and often approximate to play — cannot be said even remotely to resemble war> There are two notable exceptions — though even here fighting scarcely attains the exact definition of warfare — among the ants and among the bees, the only creatures that have attained a kind of culture comparable to man's. They may also be said to be the only two groups, outside men, combining density of popula- tion with the ownership of property. These are two significant facts which we must always bear in mind when we are discussing the origin of war. Man of the early Stone Age — that is to say. Palaeo- lithic Man — in his various successive species and through- out his long career of fifty thousand or more years, was always primarily a hunter. His weapons were for use against animals, not against himself. A hunting population is thinly spread over a large area. There was but little accumulated property. There were boundaries between the hunting-grounds of different communities, but these boundaries were sacred, and as no one would think of violating them they could not form a cause of quarrels. Animals were of far more interest to man than man was to himself. |^Palaeolithic art, which is often quite modern in its admirable expressiveness of line, is mainly concerned with animalsjmen appear but rarely, and then usually as hunters, bearing a light, small spear, 1 P. Chalmers Mitchell, Evohitioti and the War, 1915. 46 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME and usually naked, not equipped against the assaults of enemies, recalling the Bathurst Islanders as described by Basedow.^ith pointed wooden spears a little thicker than lead ' pencils, aimed with precision, but easy for human beings to dodge^ War at the outset, in Deniker's opinion, was a species of man-hunt, carried out with no weapons but those used in hunting. War, however, requires motives as well as methods, and the primitive man-hunt is not necessarily war, but usually a juridical process, the origin of our law courts; and even when its justice was not accepted, so that a series of vendettas followed, that was still a process going on within the community, and not what may properly be termed war. "* Some of these statements, obviously, cannot be founded on the observation of primitive Palseolithic society. Here we encounter a consideration which formerly caused trouble. We cannot, that is, take for granted that what we find among savages to-day tells us anything about primitive man. Many changes may have taken place during the indefinite thousands of years since man was really primitive, and even where there seem to have been but few changes that very fact may indicate that we are dealing with an exceptional people outside the main current of humanity. To-day, however, we are no longer reduced to mere assumptions 'in this matter. We are learning so much about the configuration and the activities alike of primitive man and of modem savages that we begin to know when and where they may be to some extent correlated. In this way we are able to assert 1 H. Basedow, Journal oj the Anthropological Institute, vol. xliii., 1913. THE ORIGIN OF WAR 47 positively that the culture of the Mousterians survives among the Australians, that of the Aurignacians among the Bushmen, and that of the Magdalenians among the Eskimo. It has been found possible to go farther and to surmise that in each case the modern people is actually descended from the Palaeolithic people which it resembles in culture, though long since driven out of Europe by cHmatic changes. In each case there is really skeleta,l resemblance between the ancient and the modern people, and even the differences confirm the relationship, for the Australian and the Bushman both possess much smaller skulls than the Mousterian and the Aurignacian, having long since fallen into an easy routine of life under con- genial cUmatic conditions; while the Eskimo, forced to maintain and even to develop the ancient culture under the perpetual challenge of a hostile climate, has retained the high skull capacity of the Magdalenian.^ But, however that may be, we now reahse that there are races living to-day whose culture, even in details, resembles that of Palaeolithic Man in Europe fifteen and twenty thousand years ago. During the past ten years, and in part under the inspiration of Professor Westermarck, the problem of the origin of war has been approached afresh by various workers from different sides. Mention may be made of the study made by Mr. G. C. Wheeler of Aus- tralian tribes. Wheeler finds^ that, " in contrast with the loose-ideas generally held, war in the tribe cannot be * See especially Professor SoUas's attractive book, Ancient Hunters. * The Tribe and Intertribal Relations in Australia, 1910. 48 ESSAVS in war-time deemed a normal condition," while, indeed, wars in the full modern sense of the word, " wars for conquest, are not to be found." What appears to us as " war " among the AustraUans is simply either the carefully regulated punishment of an offender, without bloodshed if the offence is not serious, or it is revenge in which a band of the kinsmen of a dead man, and any others who choose to join, set out to take blood vengeance on another tribe. Wheeler makes no reference to Letourneau, but he con- firms his conclusion that primitive " war " is mainly juridical, and always regulated, like a duel. Even in this sense war is exceptional, and war in the sense of a whole tribe taking the field against another tribe has no existence. " Peace, not war, is the normal condition of the Australian tribes." Among the Bushmen, whose social organisation is very low, although their inteUigence is high, there is even less to be said of war, while the Eskimo in their most characteristic groups know no war at all, and Ross found at Bering Straits that it was impossible to explain to them what war is. So much for the modem representatives of Mousterians and Aurignacians and Magdalenians. But it is now possible, also, to attack the problem from the other end. We may turn, that is to say, from the anthropologists to the archaeologists, and ask what evidence they have dug up of warfare in primitive times. The result is the same. We do not find the weapons of warfare or the wounds of warfare. It is not until, at the end of the Palaeolithic period, we come on the splendid Mediterranean man of Cro-Magnon, who is still amongst us, if, indeed, he is not the immediate protot37pe of the THE ORIGIN OF WAR 49 modern fair long-heads of Europe, that we begin to sus- pect a taste for fighting. These people.have been called the Pre-Neolithic race, and many years ago Lapouge declared, in his pioneering book Les Selections Sociales, that there were no wars or murders before Neolithic times; that statement is too absolute, but we- may agree that it is with civilisation that the art of killing developed — that is to say, within the last ten or twelve thousand years, the time which marks the arrival of the NeoUthic people Who have never been dispossessed by any new climatic change or any hostile invasion from outside. Yet our Neolithic ancestors could have made but little progress in warfare. They prepared the ground for war; they planted the seeds. They were not primarily hunters, but agriculturists, and herdsmen, and domesticators of animals, and industrial workers. That is to say that, unlike the men of all the early ages, they were living in compact and populous communities which with a high birth-rate might expand beyond their own proper boundaries, and they were accumulating property which might come to be regarded as booty. Yet those Neolithic days w#e still in the main peaceful. The great Lake- Cities of Central Europe which have yielded the secrets of Neolithic culture during the past half-century were not warlike and they have been said to represent one of the happiest periods in human history. They were indeed preparing the reasons for war, but they had not yet developed the methods of war. That came when they discovered the metals and found the ways of smelting ores. Then were brought into the world war's " two main D 50 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME nerves. Iron and Gold," as Milton called them, and as they have remained during three thousand years. It is significant that the early legends, notably those of Greece, which deal with the origin of metals, tend to be evil and bloody. The Copper Age, the Bronze Age, above all the Iron Age, made it possible to fashion weapons of deadly effect. The history of the development of the sword out-of the hunter's dagger is on the side of method the history of the origin of warfare. When in the long development of human art we come at length on the situla from Bologna of the HaUstatt or early Iron Period with the procession around it of warriors marching in regular order and uniform equipment, each man with helmet on head, great spear on his right arm and shield on his left, we know where we are, we begin to feel at home. But this was the climax of a long period during which the softer bronze prevailed, lending itself to more beautiful effects and to war that was still picturesque. During the great Bronze Mgean Period in which modern civilisa- tion was developed, Hogarth remarks^ that all the body armour that has been found is only of a cereaaonial kind and not for service, that there are few rftpres^itations of armed men, and that it seems doubtful whether any professional military class existed. But a beginning had been made, and it was during the Third Late Minoan Period (looo B.C.) that art began to decay and swords to grow longer. The methods of warfare were slowly being adopted. In Britain, for instance, it seems to have been ID. G. Hogarth, ajt. " iEgean avilisation," Encyclopedia Britannica. THE ORIGIN OF WAR 51 during the Bronze Age — between three and four thousand years ago — that strongholds commonly began to be needed/ Since then the irripressiveness of war has steadily grown until it has become, as Bagehot remarked, " the most showy fact in human history." That acute if summary thinker, in his Physics and Politics, half a century ago pointed out that the fighting powers of man- kind have grown continuously, while civilisation and city life no longer make man unwarlike or unable to compete with barbarians. To-day we can conclude that these propositions have been confirmed beyond possibility of doubt. It was in regard to the earlier stages that Bagehot' s views were necessarily vague and incomplete. A more extensive and accurate statement of the place of war with special reference to its earlier phases was reached just before the Great War by a Finnish scholar, Rudolf Holsti, writing in English, in The Relation of War to the Origin of the State, doubtless the mo^ important summary of facts and conclusions we posesss on this long-debated question. Savages, Holsti ^hows, are on the whole not warlike, although they often try to make out that they are terribly bloodthirsty fellows ; it is only with difficulty that they work themselves up to fighting pitch, and even then all sorts of religious beliefs and magical practices restrain warfare and limit its effects. Even among the fiercest peoples of East Africa the bloodshed is usually small. Speke mentions a war that lasted three years; the total losses were three men on each side. In all parts of the * Rice Holmes, Ancient Britain, p. 95, 52 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME world there are peoples who rarely or never fight ; and if, indeed, the old notion — repeated without any evidence by a long succession of writers down to Rignano to-day — th&.t primitive peoples are in chronic warfstre of the most ferocious character were really correct humanity could not have survived. Primitive man had far more formid- able enemies than his own species to fight against, and it was in protection against these, and not against his fellows, that the beginnings of co-operation and the foundations of the State were laid. War was a result, and not a cause, of social organisation. " I rejoice that the number and duration of wars are diminishing in the world," wrote Leroy-BeauUeu early in the present century, and it is a thought that has appealed to many of us. We have too often overlooked the additional fact which the same writer casually adds: "It is true they are more terrible and involve vaster ruin." We realise now that this addendum is important ; we begin to see that a primitive war lasting three years with a total of six deaths gives place in our present phase of civilisation to a war lasting four years with a total of six million deaths. And such are our excitable human brains that the greater the magnitude of war, the greater its fascination. The adulation of war seems to have reached a cUmax during the nineteenth century, in which century also — note the significant correlation — the ruth- less movement of commercial expansion and the xeckless movement of the rising birth-rate likewise each reached their climacteric period. In the humane eighteenth 1 E. Rignano, Essays in Scientific Synthesis, 1918, chapter vi. THE ORIGIN OF WAR 53 century, before the Industrial Revolution, men were in spirit, however it might be with their practice, against war. Kant, the last thinker of the century, the offspring of Hume and of Rousseau, reflected that spirit. But in the nineteenth century, however their creed might differ at other points, at this point representative men were at one. Fervent Christians like De Maistre, philosophers like Hegel, advanced social reformers like Proudhon, emotional rhetoricians like Ruskin, though they might possibly allow that war in itself may be evil, were equally with Moltke and the militarists lost in enthusiasm for its magnificent results. Even before their time, MandeviUe, that enfant terrible of our conventional pillars of society, had summed up their creed: " The moment Evil ceases Society must be spoiled, if not totally dissolved. ' ' But he had been silenced with a prolonged " Sh !" To-day, however, we are in a better position than the men of any previous age to estimate the results of war, magnificent or otherwise. It so happens, as we have seen, that by the labours of archaeologists and anthropologists we are also in a better position to estimate philosophically , the place of war in civilisation. It probably began late in the history of mankind; it developed slowly out of animal hunting by way of a regulated attempt to secure justice as well as the gratification of revenge ;^t was immensely stimulated by the discovery of the metals,^ and especially iron; above all, it owed its expansion to two great forces, the attractive force of booty and com- mercial gain in front, and the propulsive force of a con- fined population with a high birth-rate behind. 54 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME In the rise of war we foresee its fall, and in its causes we read its decay. We may put aside the fantasies of those who once imagined that the supreme power of love and sympathy would one day swallow up war. The great human lovers, prepared to love even their enemies, are a negligible minority which shows no signs of increase, and even Christianity was able to prevent its followers from enlisting for scarce three centuries. Among ordinary mortals, as is too often forgotten, love is the obverse of an emotion of which hatred is the reverse; we cannot have one without the other; that the emotion is, as the psycho- logist says nowadays, ambivalent, is clear to anyone who analyses the utterances of hatred, from whichever side emanating, during the Great War; they are the outbursts of violated love and sympathy. Abolish love and hate would disappear. Nor is there any more reUance to be placed on reason than on love. That reasonris but a tool in the hands of the passions has since Spinoza been a truism. War is bound up with passions, and can only be so treated. Letourneau, and more recently Nicolai in his admirable Biology of War, have compared it to cannibalism. Like war, cannibalism is not strictly primi- tive; it is not usually found among the carnivorous animals; it has no existence among the lowest savages; it develops slowly with a higher degree of culture; it becomes bound up with religion and with morals, though dn different systems, since some people eat only their friends and others only their enemies ; it is not only a duty and an aspiration, it is also the gratification of an appetite, for all the evidence goes to show that human flesh is of THE ORIGIN OF WAR 55 all meats the most delicious. Yet cannibalism, with all its manifold deep roots in human nature and culture, has disappeared with a rapidity for which, a^ Wester- marck observes, there is hardly a parallel in the history of morals/ And it has disappeared, not through love or through reason — to neither of which, indeed, was it really antagonistic — but through a process of sublimation, under the stress of an impulse, an aesthetic impulse, which among ourselves has left only its final transformation in the most spiritual sacrament of the Christian Church. There are, as Montaigne long ago remembered, much more terrible things in civilised war thin the barbarian roasting and eating his dead relatives,^ and we may surely expect that they, too, will one day arouse even a more profound disgust. We can see the line along which war must eventually disappear even without any active human interference. Its two causes are already decaying. The excessive birth-rate is falUng, and necessarily falls with every rise in culture. Excessive industrialism has likewise passed its climax; there is no more world left to fight for; and with the regularisation of industrial and commercial activities, of the whole material side of life, the economic cause of war falls away, and the energy thus released is free for sublimation into other and possibly more exalted forms of human activity. i Westermarck has dealt with the history of cannibalism in his Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. ii., chapter xlvi. * Montaigne, Essais, Book I., chapter xxx. " I think," he wrote, " there is more barbarism in eating a man alive, tearing him to pieces by torments and hells, than in eating him dead." 56 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME Whether we are to-day approaching the first great step in this process of subhmation is still open to doubt. War is so young in the world, its fascination remains so strong, and Man, though he seems so delicate, has proved so tough, and so remarkably impervious to facts. When, indeed, we contemplate Man in the spirit in which the author of Job contemplated Behemoth, the Hippopotamos , we may well exclaim in wondering awe : " He is the chief of the ways of God : And who can measure the thickness of his skull ?" VI THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONFLICT One of the finest of European thinkers, Jules de Gaultier, began his last book, published shortly before the war, with an investigation of pacifism.^ This essay, so much more timely than the writer knew, was specially concerned with Novicov's pacifism. Gaultier, with his usual calm and penetrative subtlety, easily demolished that too simple-minded enthusiast's conception of an approaching Utopia of mild uniformity, and set forth the essential place of conflict in the world. But he went beyond his text: he affirmed not merely the eternity of conflict, but also of that special form of it called War. Whether the ^stinguished French philosopher stiU complacently accepts the permanence of war in human affairs, or whether he now suspects that his defence of war was a mani- festation of that Bovarism he has himself so luminously defined, there is no public evidence to show. For the present he philosophises no more, but, like many more ordinary people, is absorbed by a new and unaccustomed routine of work. That confusion, however, between conflict and war — for it is as a confusion that it will here be regarded — has 1 Jules de Gaultier, Comment naissent les Dogmes. 57 58 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME played a large part in the minds alike of those who approve and those who condemn war. The militarist is, as a matter of course, at one with the French philoso- pher in identifying- war with all aspiring struggle, and naturally we find that Germany, as the classic land of militarismjn our time, aBounSsTn vigorous' exponents of this view. Jules de Gaultier here finds Moltke as a strange bed-feUow. It was in 1880 that Moltke wrote in his famous letter to Professor Blimtschli in London: " Eternal peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream, and war is a part of God's world-order. In war are developed the noblest virtues of mankind: courage and sacrifice, fidehty and the willingness to sacrifice life itself. Without war the world would be swallowed up in materialism."^ The old man, whose own personal virtues were of an entirely peaceful and rural character, was unconsciously repeating (as his biographer, Jahn, admits) what had been said — and indeed better said, though in much the same words — forty years earher by a more obscure Serman, Ottocar von Platen, but the fact that the saying was a mere chch6 in current use only makes it the more significant. Nor is it necessary to ask whether Germany was ever so " swallowed up in materialism " as after the successful wars through which Moltke guided her, for we are here concerned to unravel a delusion, and not to consider the imbeciHties that delusion may lead to in human practice. The militarist, however, would not have been able to cherish this delusion so long if the pacifist had not made 1 Max jahn, Feldmarschall Moltke, pp. 620, 685. 1900. THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONFLICT 59 the way easy for hitn. Indeed, a great part of the responsibility belongs to the pacifist, who usually claims to be in the iield of philosophic thought, a field which the militarist is quite content to trample down contemp- tuously with a few conventional moral formulas. So that militarist and pacifist play into each other's hands hke two accomplished jugglers, adroitly changing the ball they play with, which at one moment is Conflict and at another War, to the bewilderment of the spectator. Novicov, as a typical pacifist, is admirably adapted for this game. Regarded less as a game than as a logical perversion, one may say that what we are concerned with here is a confusion between the species and the genus, so that we may talk about the genus and mean the species, or ostensibly vilify one species of the genus and really include another species. It is much the same as though an attack on the poisonous qualities of the deadly nightshade were to be met by an enthusiastic defence of the potato; since both plants belong to the same or allied orders, it is easy for the controversialist to typify the whole group either in the poisonous leaves of the one plant or the useful tubers of the other, according to the necessities of his argument. Conflict we may regard as the genus and Warfare as a species — a species which we may, if we like, compare to the nightshade, but must in no case confound with the whole order. This view, indeed, is not that of Pierre Bovet, in his recent book, L'Instinct Combatif. Approaching the question from the pedagogical standpoint, Bovet is one 6o ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME of those who confuse the species with the genus. For him all the forms of conflict, good or bad, are transmuta- tions of warfare, mere varieties of the species. War, he argues, may be complicated into the modem struggle for existence, or deviated into wild competition, or ob- jectivated into an interest in violence and bloodshed, or subjectivated as by the Jesuits or the Salvationists, or platonised into diplomacy and intellectual games, or, finally, in accordance with the part assigned to all the primary instincts by Freud, subhmated into the highest ' forms of social and spiritual activity, in art and morals and religion. Ingenious as this conception is, and even in a strictly Umited sense true, it is hopelessly inadequate when we take a broader view of the phenomena. It is not even satisfactory, as Bovet himself admits, when we consider war itself, for, as he remarks, so far from being the outcome of a primary instinct, " all that we know of modern wars associates them with the cupidity of the few rather than with the combativity of the many." More- over, Bovet's own data on the combative instinct in children show that it is a temporary phase in development, appearing on the average at the age of nine and passing away about the age of twelve. The child is the analogue of the race, and we shall probably best understand war in the past if we regard it as a passing phase of the world's childhood, usefui, it may be, at the time of its manifesta- tion, out of place ahke in the earlier and the later phases of the race's development. But the great principles of conflict in hfe stand on a far wider basis, and are built into the structure of the world. THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONFLICT 6i That is what a pacifist such as Novicov altogether fails to understand. To him Darwinism has no meaning. The collective murder of war is not merely a social method of struggle ill adapted for the present phase of civilisation, it is altogether without foundation in the world, and civilisation consists in " the adaptation of the planet to the need of man." Mankind is thus regarded as an abstraction simplified almost to Euclidian proportions. At the utmost it becomes a flock moved by a single common need. That there must ever be a vast variety of needs, that needs are always changing, that conse- quently there is perpetual struggle in the world, a state of conflict which must be resolved by some method, whether or not of war, Novicov was unable to conceive. To this simple-minded pacifist humanity was a herd, whose business it was to maiatain association throughout life, and human need seemed so simple-that no question of conflict over its gratification could be contemplated. If humanity were indeed so simple a thing as this, if the needs of civihsation were so primitive and elementary, no doubt war could be ehminated without any trouble (the only trouble would be to discover how it ever originated), but' its absence would mean the absence of other things of far greater worth. It is probable that most of us S5anpathise with William James when, after describing a delightful week he had spent at one of the famous Chautauqua gatherings, he speaks of the rehef with which he re-entered the savage and primitive atmosphere of the wicked world, with its everlasting conflict between the powers of light and the powers of darkness. " In 62 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME this unspeakable Chautauqua -there was no potentiality of death in sight an5rwhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly appear." So it comes about that while for the too abstract pedagogue like Bovet the nightshade may be all sub- limated into the potato, for the thorough-going pacifist like Novicov all potatoes are nightshades, and for the thorough-going militarist like Moltke all nightshades are potatoes. In other words, war is regarded as the eternal and supreme type of conflict in the world, and for one side it is all good because it is conflict, and for the other all bad because it is war. On neither side can we see the slightest recognition of that fundamental truth, built into the very foundations of life, of the universe itself, that conflict is a genus with many species, of which war is only one. We are helped to realise this merely specific character of war when we remember that its pecuhar trait is violence. Many various traits may mark the different forms of con- flict, but violence, purposed and organised violence, remains the specific trait of war, according to the dictum of one of the greatest authorities, Clausewitz: "War is an act of violence for the purpose of compelling the adversary to fulfil our will," and he adds that with this object it equips itself with the inventions of the arts and sciences; while, long before Clausewitz, the classical definition of war, set forth by Cicero, was finally formulated by Grotius as a conflict by methods of violence, certatio per vim. Thus to formulate war, to place it correctly' in its classificatory position, is a direct aid to clear thinking. THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONFLICT 63 When we have done so, moreover, we realise that a method of which the essence is violence is ahen to all those arts of living which, since the beginnings of civihsation, we have been painfully striving to develop. Thus war, as a settlement of national conflicts, is for us to-day antiquated, just as the parallel, but earlier because more easily over- come, method of violence in the settlement of personal conflicts is antiquated. That is not to say that war has never had any beneficial influence at an earlier stage of civihsation. Such a position would be untenable. We cannot escape from the fact that the slow process of civihsation first emerges into the stage of history pre- cisely at the point when the Bronze Age was passing into the Iron Age,^ at the point, that is to say, when it became possible to manufacture satisfactorily the deadly weapons demanded by war, the point where, as we are able to discern, war actually became acute and prominent in human affairs to a degree far beyond its previous small beginnings. The Iliad," the traditional record of a war which took place at this timp, is the characteristic pre- lude to European history. Why war should in that phase of man's history have been so associated with progress is a problem which remains unsolved. It cannot be said that it has yet been even seriously ap- proached.^ We may perhaps suppose, to fall back on the old analogy, that at that stage our belladonna plant had not evolved the full potency of its poison, so that the 1 More precisely round about 1200 B.C. 2 I may refer, however, to Holsti's helpful and too little known work, The Relation of War to the Origin of the State, published just before the Great European War. 64 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME witchcraft of its mirage-producing drug action caused comparatively little evil. We are still, however, too near the beginning of history. It is only to-day, indeed, that we have discovered the existence of the magnificent Minoan Age, fjiintly reflected in Homer, which immedi- ately preceded that beginning. We must be outside the phase of war to understand war intelligently, and as yet, it must be remembered, we are still in the Iron Age. It is even argued by some that the Great War has really been just a struggle between rival national combinations to secure the iron ores of Lorraine and the strip of French and Belgian ore-bearing land to the north. Butting aside the partisans of war, it seems difficult to find advocates of violence in any department of life. One exception must be made. For those Syndicalists who accept M. Georges Sorel as their philosopher, violence, ^ar from belonging to the archiepiscopal category of " regrettable necessities," is an essential and beneficial part of the world's order, exactly as for Moltke and the militarists. This disciple of Bergson, who has sometimes proved so disturbing to his feUow-disciples, piquantly combines a reverence for classic ideals and an almost puritanic moral asceticism with the adoration of violence. But he h£is extended the militarist's conception of violence. For Sorel the strike is a phenomenon of war, and nowadays the only promising kind of war, provided that it embodies the proletarian violence of class struggle, " ime chose tres belle et trds heroique," capable of saving the world from barbarism in the same way as, Sorel ccfticeives, war saved the world from barbarism in an- THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONFLICT 65 tiquity.i This apology for violence stands alone, and we need scarcely attempt to weaken its force by inquiring how it is that a civilisation so copiously aspersed with violence should still need more violence to redeem it. Violence occupies an ever smaller part in our vision of the world. Even for pre-human eras we no longer invoke it. The catastrophic theory of geology has passed away, and even the discontinuous element in evolution has failed to fill any important place. Six days have long ceased to suffice for our picture of creation, and even six million years now go but a little way. The occasional emergence of a moment's violence is but a little thing in this vast sea. Yet the conflict of forces and the struggle of opposing wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it together. It is with the notions of effort and resistance that we have formed our picture of the universe and that Darwin made intelligible the manner in which we ourselves came to be. It is on the hke basis that our spiritual world rests. We create in art on the same plan and with the same materials as the world is created — making greater things, Keats said, than the Creator Himself made — and it is precisely in the most fundamental arts, in architecture and in dancing, that we find conflict and resistance most definitely embodied. Every pose of the dancer is the achievement of movement in which the maximum of conflicting muscular action is held in the most fluidly harmonious balance. Every soaring arch of the architect is maintained by an analogous balance of opposing thrusts, * Q. Sorel, RSflecHons sw le Violence, p. 130. E 66 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME without which harmoniously maintained struggle his art, like the creator of the world's art, would coUapse in ruins. For in the creation of the forms of art we see, as in the evolution of the forms of animal life, there is no room for violence; conflict and resistance go hand in hand with harmony and balance; we must go very low down in the arts — ^indeed, to the most degraded of all — ^to find that knock-out blow adored of the miUtarist. It is not otherwise throughout the spiritual sphere in which man's evolution moves. All the great achieve- ments of mankind have slowly been reached and slowly extended by heroic effort and sustained struggle with earher and outworn cioltural achievements which had become less fit for human use. We vaguely divine, and sometimes even definitely trace, the superb struggles that thence arose, from the discovery of fire and the introduc- tion of agriculture and the domestication of animals and the use of metals, onwards to the conquest over the air wl^ich we are but attaining, and the conquest over war which we have not even yet attained. Among more primitive peoples we see such cultiural conflicts even to-day, and Dr. Rivers, who has so thoroughly studied them in Melanesia, concludes that in the contact and interaction of different cultures are furnished " the starting-points of all the great movements in human history which we are accustomed to regard as Progress." Guizot, in his History of European Civilisation, was probably correct in insisting that the hard fortunp of Europe in toil and struggle, as compared with the smooth tranquiUity of some other civilisations, was really Europe's THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONFLICT 67 good fortune. It is in such toils and struggles that the spirit of heroism is developed; war may give it scope — a fruitless scope which means less than nothing for human progress — but the tasks of civilisation have created the stuff of it. It was in peace, not in war, that the heroes of to-day were nurtured. There is, indeed, no task of the muscles or of the brain in our ever-shifting civilisation which may not be the training-ground for heroism and the field of its manifestations.^ The world is cemented with blood and sweat; without pain and fortitude — that is to say, without struggle and conflict — there would have been no world at all. Thus it is that there is no standing-ground anywhere for the pacifist of the (in the strict sense) namby-pamby type, as little as there is for the mihtarist, since both ahke support the delusion that, with the ending of war, struggle and heroism would vanish from earth. 1 This is so even in the least material of the arts. Of a promising young English musical composer, George Butterworth, killed in France after a distinguished military career, it has been said: "The same qualities which distinguished him as a soldier would undoubtedly have brought him deserved renown as a composer. Courage, patience, initiative, wide sympathies, high motives, and the instinct of genius for the essential, were all his." The passing of war, we see — if, indeed, we are to witness that passing — ^need leave us with no regrets. There is nothing that war has ever achieved we could not better achieve without it. If, indeed, it were not so, war would remain inexpugnably entrenched in the world, and its champions need not tremble. " Man is above all an artist," has lately written 6Ue Faure, who has himself been a champion of war. " He only rejects those forms of art that are exhausted. The desire of perpetual peace will not kill this form of art unless the conditions of peace involve a new method of warfare, with the same sudden and collective intoxication, the same shining responsibilities, the same creative risks, the same atmosphere of voluntarily accepted tragedy." VII tUE FAURE It wovild be amusing — ^in the graver sense of that abused word — to study the influence of the war on ovi more vividly ahve and exuberant Hterary personalities. To study, that is, how it has modified, transformed, ex- panded or contracted them when it has not plimged therh into absurdity. It would, for instance, be amusing — always speaking in the respectfully serious sense — to study the influence of the war on Mr. H. G. Wells. But in England we have few Uterary personalities who combine in any high degree volcanic emotion with aesthetic sensibility to the external world. I prefer to cross the Channel, where such temperaments are more often found, and I select filie Faure, not because he is a literary figure of the highest order, for he is exasperatingly unequal, but because, while Uttle known to most of us, he illus- trates so well the effects of the war on a temperament of aboriginal emotionahty combined with aesthetic sen- sitiveness. The primitive instincts are mostly revealed in persons who have had the good fortune to possess a strain of plebeian blood; in their near ancestry some peasant bowed over the eairth. Where that is not the case, what 68 £lie FAURE 69 seemed to us " primitive temperament " will be found to lack, after all, the sane earthliness which could alone make it sound and life-giving, for there must not be too great an interval in generation between the man who cast corn into the earth and the man who breaks for others the bread of life. £lie Faure's father was a peasant's son. " He had the peasant's ruddy hide, knotted hands, feet planted firmly on the earth. But his soul was that of a saint, of a king, of a man, and he went through life with the adorable candour of the mythological heroes." It was a significant ancestry, and in all his work we feel this massive, groping, exuberant force, close to the heart of Nature, firmly anchored in reality, unquenchable in large-hearted faith. In a fine and characteristic passage he has described how, when visiting foreign cities, he is wont to spend his time in museums and picture galleries, only leaving them to go straight to the Zoological Gardens at the hour when the beasts are fed. When he has watched the great jaws crunching bone and tearing flesh, the contracted muscles rolling beneath tawny manes, hides like the bark of trees, foreheads like rocks, and eyes of burning stone direct their flame on to him, he regains his equilibrium, he is brought back to the eternal bases of the. world, and the degeneration of towns, even of picture galleries, no longer seems to matter. There is, further, a special quality in filie Faure's primitive contact with earth and close grip of reality. His ancestral roots are in the south, or, more precisely, one is inclined to believe, in the south-west, of those stocks, often originally Protestant, which, from the days 70 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME of Agrippa d'Aubign6 to the Reclus family, have mani- fested pecuhar vigour in realistic thought and the sapid qualities of fine style. With all the temperamental energy of his impartial sjmipathy, Faure yet seems to show a peculiar appreciation of certain regions of the south-west, daring in war and ardent in saintship, at once enthusiastic and sceptical, subtly intellectual and full of violent contrasts; this is the land not only of soldiers but of moralists, of Pascal and of Brantome, of Fenelon and La Rochefoucauld, and Montaigne is its dominating figure. It is the region, Faure remarks, which brought science to art as in French architecture, and art to science as in French medicine. Here, it is clear, he might himself most congenially find his hereditary source.^ It is not surprising that with his elemental passion for the fundamental facts young Faure turned in the first place to the study of medicine and became a doctor. In his penetrating and S57mpathetic study of Lamarck, the father of biology—the only essay he has written on a scientific figure — Faure illustrates his own doctrines by setting forth his conception of Lamarck. It was Lamarck, he says, who taught the world that biology has a chief value by showing that good and evil pass into each other by insensible gradations in which every organism plays its own necessary part. The nobihty of our lives resides i When this was written I was ignorant that 6lie Faure's birthplace is actually, in fact, close to that of Montaigne, his favourite author, and that he is a nephew of the Reclus brothers with whom I had grouped him, deriving his name from one of them. It may be added that, according to a tradition in iMe Faure's family, there is English blood in their veins, dating from the time when Guyenne was held by England. £lie faure 71 less in our morality than in our intelligence and passion and organisatory force. Morality is but the grammar of life, and we must not make it our first demand of the great artist, whether he works in aesthetic creation or in social action. Lamarck's work was a poem. He had in him everything of the artist, the inexhaustible faculty of suffering, and the sensualism, and he ended, like an artist, alone, old, infirm, poor, a widower, blind, as Beethoven had ended deaf. " So the harmonies which were to remake the world were concentrated at first in the silence of two beings half cut off from it." The great artist, alike in the actual world and the imaginative world, is a saviour who cannot save himself. We divine £lie Faure's own temperament in his sjmapathetic picture of Lamarck's, and we may find further light in his treatment of Michelet. We are, indeed, a little surprised to find an author who, as Faure admits, " obstinately defended the most puerile and vague form of social optimism " thus ranked among the great Constructors. He enters their rank, says Faure, " almost in spite of himself," because he brought to the forces of life " the homage of a sensibility the most in love with the fatal energy of Nature which perhaps ever existed." He felt already, before knowing it, that it is possible to pass harmoniously from that pity of Dostoi- evsky for others, which is a means of conquering a little cruelty towards oneself, to the cruelty of Nietzsche towards himself, which is pity for others who are not capable of such cruelty. In Michelet there was always a struggle, and he always accepted the struggle. There 5'2 tSSAYS IN WAR-TlMTE was always the conflict to balance humanity and art, sensuality and conscience, which may make the martjn-, often the criminal, sometimes the hero. Nothing would induce him to sacrifice a fragment on either side. " It is when moral force thusMweUs beside sensual force that the kingdom of great harmonies is revealed." For two years after the death of his wife Michelet suffered intense grief and remorse for his own neglect to understand the companion of his life. " Yet he would not have consented to jdeld his grief for peace of heart and soul. It is not too much to spend aU one's blood and all one's tears for the higher voluptuousness of opening to men those sources of hope which despair itself has dug deep within us." It is clear that a doctor who approached the problems of medicine in this spirit, combining the search beneath the surface for the structure of Hfe with the poet's insight into its mystery, was not likely to rest content with the humdrum routine of medical practice. Faure has not abandoned medicine, and it is as a doctor that he has gained his intimate knowledge of war. But evidently he realised early that even in science, even in hfe, it was art that attracted him; it is to the study of art in the wide sense that he has consecrated his best energies. Even at this point, however, when he was reaching at last to the manifestation of his individual nature, he was still not false to the traditions of his stock, and he has himself remarked that, notwithstanding the supremacy of the North in art, from the South have come the move- ments of initiation, and from the South the bony struc- fiLIE FAURE 73 ture which underhes the North's sensuous perception of atmosphere and flesh. It is by his Histoire de I' Art, of which the fourth and concluding volume on modem art is announced to appear, that Ehe Faure is probably best known. His vigorous and pungent analytic vigour combines with his wide-rang- ing sensitive sympathy to give him a remarkable grip of the most various aesthetic phenomena and artistic creators. Tedious detailed description is alien to Faure's method. It is the spirit of the work that he seizes with masculine grasp, the heart of its creator that he pe/ietrates with intuitive insight. That is illustrated by his book on Velasquez, the supreme challenge to the critic, still more — since the calm lucidity and reticence of Velasquez are remote from Faure — by his monograph on Carri^re, perhaps the best of many good books about that fascinat- ing artist, by his admirable essay on Cezanne, and by the unsurpassable chapter on that group of French Gothic cathedrals which manifest the revolutionary energy of the thirteenth-century communes. This critic is himself a creator, of like nature with the masters in art he can so vividly interpret. Literature has become the medium of his energies as an artist, and the first of his more personal books, Les Constnicteurs — the series of critical yet sympathetic studies of Lamarck, Michelet, Dostoievsky, Nietzsche, and Cezanne, in which he at length definitely though indirectly set forth his own philosophy of life — appeared by a strange chance in 1914 on the eve of that great upheaval in which we still live. To Faure the world is a perpetual revolution of which 74 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME the artist is the leader, not only, be it understood, in the sphere we conventionally term art, but also in action, ior Jesus and Napoleon were supreme artists, and both alike acceptable, in the sphere of practice. Jesus as a Isnical artist is perhaps even less famiUar than Napoleon as " a master of Isnicism in action," and it may be necessary to remark that Faure is far from seeking to belittle Jesus or to display hostility to Christianity. Jesus " brought a new splendour into the world," he declares. " We acknowledge that Christianity in removing us from Ufe has put into us not merely anguish, but such reserves of love that it has multiplied our power to fecundate Ufe on that day when we meet life anew." Elsewhere he writes: " Apart from Rubens (builder of an impartial universe with no aim but to live in the intoxication of its own energy), nearly all those who have given us the sensation of mounting with the very flood of the world — Michael- Angelo, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Rembrandt, Mohere, Diderot himself — ^f aced no other aim in the world than Christian morals." It is the world as art, we see, and therefore as fundamental harmony, that £lie Faure is ever5rwhere conscious of. " Only the lyrical artists introduce ideas into the universe." Thus regarded, the world may be an everlasting catastrophe, but must be an everlasting 15^10. At every moment it is throbbing with new life, arid the Ufe of to-day for ever denies the Ufe of yesterday. Life transcends good as well as evil, and moraUty is the crutch which supports the soul of man when too weak to walk in a new faith. " The artist never accuses. He is the man of affirmation and of tUE FAURE 75 conquest. If he has — and he alone — the feeling for immorahty, he also alone knows that the introduction into the world of some new splendour is the only work of virtue, and that one adds nothing to hfe by seeking to protect it by an appeal to the pohceman or the judge or that street-walker, public opinion." Here, again, we see why Faure placed Lamarck at the head of the " Con- structors," as he calls those great artists of hfe who " reveal that a work of organisation is going on in a destroyed society," and in their work " take our flesh to build the walls of the temple and cement them with our blood." It was Lamarck, in Faure' s view, who substi- tuted for the mathematical vision of the world, immobi- hsed in a moral God, the biological vision of a world incessantly transformed into a God who may be repre- sented to the inteUigence as a source of aesthetic equili- brium, for ever in course of being broken and again built up. Thus he opened the way to the great artists, the Constructors of the modem world, armed with the mighty courage to know that what they destroy will be built up and what they build will be overthrown. It is in "this spirit of revolution which is God " that aU life becomes lyrical. When any good thing falls to the groimd we wander at random, we cry out in our distress; we will not understand that the dissolution of the ancient organism has liberated the precious elements which in a new crystalhsation will recreate heroic Hfe. Every child bom, he remarks elsewhere, is a barbarian who in the moment that he leaps to the hght tears apart the flesh that bore him. The child at birth is the sjonbol of 75 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME humanity, joyously making its way to life through a pathway of blood. For Faure, as for HeracUtus, hfe is the upward leaping of a fountain, for ever concentrated in the hving moment. We are of the same flesh as they who built p3a-amids or cathedrals. Why this rage to preserve them ? If we indeed beheve in life, we need not fear to trample underfoot the ashes of those who struggled before us. " My tenderness and my hate are merely the necessary elements of a reUgious enthusiasm for all that is hfe." The most beautiful ideas are those that are not yet made. Only they who never hesitate to destroy are worthy to grasp the conqueror's laurel. £lie Faure would certainly agree with Bakunin that the passion for destruction is a creative passion. It is because it embodies the harmonious conflict of his religion of life that Faure, like Nietzsche, again and again turns to the dancer's art, with its task of moulding music and sculpture to the passion of a moment that annihilates the past. "There is more rehgion," he declares, "in the passionate gesture — ^whatever it may be — of the dancer, who unites the rhythms of space and time in sculpture and music, than in aU the prohibitions of the ascetic and all the anathemas of the law." This was the view of the world which £lie Faure was setting forth in 1914, with impassioned conviction, never more vigorously than in the volume of essays entitled La Conquete, published in 1917 (after being hideously hacked by the Censor), but nearly all written before the war. We see the situation in which Faure was now placed. An ironic Fate suddenly thrust him into a world £LIE FAURE 77 which to all outward semblance was the monstrous image of the very world he had idealised. Faure was too clear-sighted not to see, too honest not to confess, the torment of doubt that arose within his breast. " This book is a tragedy," he wrote on the first page of La Conquete. "It is made up of contradictions, and the first breaks out on its threshold between the title and the motto, a war-cry and a groan." For Faure is no longer content with that vision of humanity as a child that with joyous triumph enters the world through destruction and blood. He had perhaps noted in his Montaigne — his constant companion, he tells us, in trenches and cellars — the reference to the infant which " enters the world knowing nothing without being taught save to cry," and he selects his motto firom Pascal: " Je ne puis approuver que ceux qui cherchent en g^missant." He feels that he is passing from the old intellectual equilibrium to the new, but between the two his heart is torn, and his speech, as he admits, partakes of his heart's distraction. This is plain to see in a later work, La Sainte Face, ostensibly a record of his experiences at the front, and, as a narrative, full of obscurities lighted up by vivid patches of varied colour. But the narrative is merely a thread on which to hang a miscellaneous series of reflections; often pene- trative and profound, illustrating the conflict of his own mental readjustment, and written, one feels, under the impulse of a restless literary fever, in any cellar of the battlefield (he characteristically pauses to describe finely some of these old cellars so harmoniously beautiful, he says, because built not to be seen), within sound, within 78 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME reach, of the shells. " Forgive me," he writes. ".You know my sleepless nights, haunted by images of agony, my ardent meditations on death. You know what I have seen. Corpses and corpses^ in thousands, sprinkled over fields and woods, bordering the road, fiUiflg°'the wet ditches, forming the only inhabitants of flaming villages with smoke that twisted its poor bloodied arms beneath the rain to the sky. You know that after having seen such things I ask how the father and mother of a child dare look each other in the face." We watch his painful struggle to transform, not to suppress, his old conception of Hfe; not to suppress, for even if warfare, to which he once assigned so large a place, must depart from the world, killed by its own monstrous weight, it must give place to some other and nobler form of warfare, since war is only terrible because hfe is terrible, made up of passion and bloodshed, and war is marked merely by its exterior brutality. There are many tender and shrinking souls to whom the horror of the world to-day, when they have once seen it or once possessed the imagination to realise it, seems too great to be borne. They feel that aU they had once thought civihsation is a failure, and they long to go out to seek some paradise of the desert where they may fast and pray. No doubt there will really be many to seek and to find, in one form or another, some such new Thebaid. But the whole world has never gone out into the desert. For there are others, of whom filie Faure is the protagonist, who cannot thus throw carelessly aside the mature convictions of a hfetime. They, too, have fiLIE FAURE 79 seen, they also have the imagination to realise. They are thrown into confusion, they are agonised by doubt. But they cannot suppress their deep-seated faith in the ever-Uving flame of life, and their joy in the world, their joy even in the pain of the world when it is the pain of life. It is because the forces of this conflict are so faithfully mirrored in his violent and sensitive temperament that Elie Faure has a significance for us which we cannot to-day afford to pass by. VIII THE STAR IN THE EAST " We have seen a star in the East." We shsill never know how many thousand years ago it was when that saying first arose among men as a conscious belief in human Progress. We only know that it is stni uttered in tones as fresh and youthful as ever. Only yesterday, indeed, we saw a star in the East, though on nearer view we called it " Bolshevism," and deciding that it was probably only a falling star, sinking straight to the Pit, we put our gold and frankincense and m5mrh back into our hearts. It has happened to us so often before since the Son of Man was bom. That is why those treasures of Man's homage to Progress remain through the ages so little diminished. There is always a flaw, visible on nearer view. That has been so even in the most exquisite story the world has known to symbohse the coming of a " Prince of Peace " to earth. " Peace on earth, good-will toward men," the simple-minded enthusiasts of our Authorised Version thought it to mean; and three centuries later, on nearer view, their Revisers broke to us with gentle vagueness the sober truth that it really meant something much more like " Peace to men of good-will." And that is a very different thing. How different we realise when we read 4.. So THE STAR IN THE EAST 8i in our newspapers the sayings and doings of our great leaders, and try to reckon on the fingers of one hand the number among them of " men of good-will." If Chris- tianity sometimes seems to have brought so little to men, it has perhaps, after all, brought as much as the angels promised. One has noted in recent days a widespread disappoint- ment with the world, not altogether dissipated by the oyous band which raises again the final chorus of Shelley's Hellas. For even that exultant hymn, one may remark, is pierced by doubt and fear. The reasonableness of such a feeling one need not stay to argue. The world is as it has always been; the perfection of the world, such as it is, remains the same. Human experience, likewise, remains in every age perfectly equal to its task. One is not called upon to defend the world in the forum of human caprice. The attempt "to " justify the ways of God to men " has always aroused a smile in the wise. The ways of man are perhaps in more need of justification. It is a necessary task to adapt the Universe to Man, but it is sometimes also necessary to adapt Man to the Universe. When this adaptation is incomplete we are in the presence of a disease which calls for diagnosis. The problem we have to deal with has been dramatically illustrated by the Russian Revolution. For generations, in and even out of Russia, milhons of men have regarded a revolution in Russia as a chief ideal of human progress in Europe. It has been a light before the eyes of the most temperate political and social idealists; the more passion- ately eager to aid its realisation have gladly gone to their F 82 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME death. Yet as soon as that Revolution is achieved, with the usual friction and bloodshed, our spiritual attitude is automatically transformed. The Governments of Europe, forgetting all their animosities, tumble over each other in their haste to overthrow an ideal realised in the accustomed manner which yet the wisest ideahst never foresees. (There is the tragic figure of Kropotkin.) We are not, again, here concerned to consider the reasonable- ness of that attitude — the substitution of an injustice by a reversed injustice may well admit of conflicting judg- ments — but only to note the existence of the automatic mechanism by which every spiritual effort is at once compensated. The devout poet prayed that we might not seek " . . .to wind ourselves too high For sinful man beneath the sky." But the prayer was perhaps unnecessary. There is a gravitation in human nature which corrects that. We have experienced it in recent years among ourselves. We arose in noble wrath to slay the spirit of greed and arrogance and hate in the hearts of our enemies, and in the measure in which we succeeded we concurrently planted the seeds of the same passions in our own hearts.^ 1 Some six months after the beginning of the war an American professor wrote from London to the New York Times : " I have been much impressed with the almost complete absence of expressions of hatred against the enemy. Even the indiscriminate slaughter of women and children at Scarborough and Hartlepool has not provoked a spirit of vindictiveness in this well-balanced and self-restrained race- The EngUsh do not unpack their hearts with words." How sadly dif- ferent a report that professor would have had to send home a few years later I THE STAR IN THE EAST 83 We learnt the law of the conservation of force in the moral world. For in the moral world, as in every other world, we cannot create more force than exists. Remy de Gourmont was wont to insist on what he called the law of intellectual constancy in civilisation,^ He based it on the memorable biological researches of Quinton, which have indicated that evolution — ^which as Spencer left it, Gourmont declared, arose in the void and pointed to some unknown Messianic end — ^is an adjust- ment, in part effected by the formation of new, better adapted species and in part by the action of intelligence, to maintain against the increasing hostility of a cosmos ever departing from the state in which hfe originated, those fixed and determined conditions of thermic, chemical, and osmotic constancy required by life. Every species possesses a constant and Hmited measure of force, but no more, wherewith to attain this vital and necessary end. Within the Hmits of the human species it seemed to Gourmont — and various distinguished thinkers and investigators have associated themselves with this con- clusion — that there must be the same constancy in intellectual force, from prehistoric times until now.* The achievements of to-day impress us more than the achievements, so far as we know them, of primitive man. We overlook the fact that the difference is accidental, the accident of position and the result of accumulated traditions. It makes a difference whether we are able to leap from the summit of a Himalaya or only from the * See, e.g., Remy de Gourmont, Promenades Philosophiques, Second Series, 1908. Jules de Gaultier has discussed this doctrine apprecia- tively and at length in his Comment naissent les Dogmes, 1912. 84 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME plain; it makes a difference whether the sponge is full of water or dry. But the essential fact remains that the energy of the leap is the same from the mountain as it was of old from the plain, and that the capacity of the sponge has neither been increased nor diminished. There is evolution, but the natural evolution of animated beings is simply, said Gourmont, a succession of changes, rendered necessary by changes in the environment, to assure an original constancy which is the pivot of the whole machine. If we apply this principle to human intelhgence through the ages, we cannot fail to apply it also to morals, where, indeed, it is far less hkely to be questioned. " There will never be any more perfection than there is now," declared Walt Whitman. And at the dawn of the modem scientific era, Leibnitz asserted that " in any one hour there is the same motor action in the world as in any other hour," It is so in the physical world, as the man of science has shown ; it is so with the moral world, as human experience has never ceased to make clear. " Evolution is a fact, Progress is a feehng." We are here in the presence of two phenomena, one objective and one subjective. On the one hand is the fact of evolution maintained by constant inevitable effort, from which, indeed, the individual may faU out, yet still maintained by the power of hfe that moves in the whole. On the other is the conception of Progress which the individual sets forth as the aim of his own activity, being thereby used to maintain the order of the world, which he imagines to be identical with his individual notion of Progress. But it is not thus identical, and so it comes THE STAR IN THE EAST 85 about that the very conception by which he helps to main- tain the world in its course is an illusion. It is thus that at the most exhilarating moment of his triumphal March of Progress, when the goal his imagination has created seems now at length within reach, he is pulled up, and with a sudden sense of despair he seems to himself to have pur- sued a mirage. That is an experience which has of late come to many. It seemed to them a few years ago that the march of Progress was accelerated. They were overcome by the intoxication of their own movement. The great idea came to them that this war, unlike all wars that had gone before, was the War of Right against Might, a War to end War, a War to make the world safe for Democracy. In the course of time they found that they were not fighting against Might, but on the side of Might, while for Right they looked around in vain; they found that the war was scarcely over before their leaders began to talk of the securities and safeguards necessary in view of the next war; they reaHsed that the Democracies for which the world had been made safe were not theirs even if they may have been those of the men they had fought against. It is not the first time that the star in the East has been pursued a httle too swiftly, or, as the Greeks put^it, the ravishing Syrinx, when at last Pan's hand touched her, turned to mere reeds, better fitted for art than for life. Yet, let us always remember, we have no right to com- plain because we have failed to understand how the world is made. Men are not so good as we supposed, it seems to the simple-hearted idealists who witness the 86 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME worst crimes committed by those who bear the most sacred banners. But it may be that men are better, and it is certain that they are different. It is part of the splendour of hfe that it never has been, and never can be, fitted into any ideal. It is part of our illusion to think that hfe is too small while in reahty it is too large. Illu- sion and ReaUty are both part of Life, each supporting the other, and we cannot live sanely and completely unless we are loyal to both, not only, on the one hand, rendering unto God the things that be God's, but in the world of reahty strenuously rendering unto Caesar the things that be Caesar's, dethronement and degradation when that seems meet. We may perhaps look a little more deeply yet into the matter. The average man will probably accept quite innocently the assumption, just made, that Caesar's sphere is that of reality and God's that of illusion. And if he succeeds in being loyal to both he may make that assumption work. But many of us who seek to see clearly and wholely how the world is made find our profit in reversing that assumption. We also are loyal to both, but our reality is their illusion and our illusion is their reality. Until modern times this was the standpoint of all those who sought to see clearly and wholly how the world is made. It was the attitude of the most religious and the most philosophic man who ever sat on an imperial throne. Marcus Aureltus, fortified from within, fulfilled his duties in the world, however austerely, with admirable devotion; he adored the beauty of the universe, but he never imagined that the march of Progress or the goal of THE STAR IN THE EAST 87 Perfection coixld be anjTwhere else than within. The standpoint of Jesus in this matter, so far as we may reasonably divine it, was the same as that of Marcus. He, too, without any exuberantly robust joy in hving, considered the lihes, if only to point a moral, he came eating and drinking, he approved of paying taxes, he was on the side of justice and of pity in the world. But he never imagined any New Jerusalem made with hands, and his Kingdom of Heaven was in the heart. We may fairly regard an attitude in which the first of Christians is one with the last great pagan as a reasonably normal attitude. It has, at all events, these two supreme advantages: it makes what we caU cynicism impossible; it makes that disillusion we see around us to-day equally impossible. It is long since for the multitude the values became confused. In the Christian world, indeed, we have come to regard Judas Iscariot as the pioneer of that confusion by supposing that he sought to force his Master's hand, without quite realising that we thereby make the arch- traitor the patron of all our attempts to set up the King- dom of Heaven on earth. Just fifteen centuries ago, after Rome had been sacked by the Goths, and Civihsation seemed in downfall, the greatest and most influential teacher the Church ever claimed was writing his immortal treatise De Civitate Dei, stiU a living and instructive book to read to-day. St. Augustine's standpoint was not opposed to that of Marcus and of Jesus. He was not seeking to rebuild a Christianised Rome, he was seeking to replace it by a Heavenly City. But he worked out his 88 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME conception with so passionate a sense for reality, the outcome of his perfervid temperament and his subtle intellect, that his book became the corner-stone of all vain attempts to build a heavenly city on earth. It was the favourite reading of the Emperor Charlemagne, the least Christian of men in Christendom, and it has been the perpetual stimulus to that confusion of values between the inner world and the outer world, which is the fruitful source of inevitable disillusion even to this day. That is why the affirmation of even the simplest of eternal truths is never out of date, if we would avoid the risks of falling into a shallow cynicism or an enervating self-deception. While we seek to construct a reasonably sweet City of Man, with due regard to the quaHty of such material as society yields, we cannot afford to forget the af&rmation of that great lyrical artist, as a modem man terms him, who proclaimed: " The Kingdom of God is within you." IX LUTHER Four centuries have passed since on All Saints' Eve, the 31st of October, 1517, the Reverend Father Martin Luther set up on the gate of the great church at Wittenberg those " Propositions " by which was initiated the most revolutionary act ever performied by any German. This incident, it is true, was but a part of an epoch-making series of deeds, and less important on the spiritual side than the moment, about a year later, when at last his rebellious indignation against the avenging " justice " of God was finally settled by what Luther always believed to be the direct visitation of the Holy Spirit. That visitation came (there is no place closed to Divine revela- tion) to the privy in the tower of Wittenberg monastery, with the illumination " The just shall Hve by faith," and the gate of Paradise was opened super cloacam. It was the central event in Luther's inner life, but for the initiation of the mighty course of his external career the world has doubtless been right to select the publication of these Propositions, even though they were merely evoked by the extravagancies of a Dominican indulgence - monger who is disowned by his own Church, and even though Luther himself was at times tempted to explain 89 go ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME them away. That the centenary is being celebrated by ^ Young Germany as joyously as it was in 1817 after the war of Liberation, under the inspiration of Father Jahn, " the new Luther," is improbable. But the occasion is still profitable for our own meditation. Luther has always been regarded as the central German. In the light of what we know to-day he may perhaps appear more typical than ever before. The study of this point is aided for many by the recent completion in an English version of the best and most impartial hfe of Luther yet pubhshed, a hfe written, strange as it may seem to some, by a scholarly Jesuit, Father Grisar; that is to say, by a member of the famous company which led the Counter- Reformation.^ Luther, as befits a central and representative German, was born in the centre of Germany, a High Saxon of Thuringia. Thus he belonged south of the frontier line which cuts off the Low Germans of the north, with whom, on any reasonable anthropological theory, the English are closely related. He was not only separated from the Anglo-Saxons, but was racially apart from the other two great representative Germans: Bismarck to the east, standing for the special Prussian blend, and Goethe to the west, a Frank of the Rhine, and therefore predestined to cosmopolitanism. It is usual to emphasise the plebeian origin and boorish temperament of " the most eloquent and insolent peasant 1 Luther, by Hartmann Grisar, S.J. Translated by E. M. Lamond. Six vols. (London: Kegan Paul, 1913-1917.) In justice to Father Grisar, it may be mentioned that the present essay is not largely founded on this biography, but mainly on Luther's own Table Talk. LUTHER 91 Germany has produced," as Nietzsche terms Luther. He was a miner's son, and certainly there was nothing in his disposition which behes his birth. Yet too much may be made of it. Luther's great contemporary, Erasmus, who was born on the outskirts of Low Germany, though of higher was not really of much higher social origin; the illegitimate son of a priest, the grandson of a physician, he mixed at the outset in much the same kind of social circles. Yet two men could flot be of more radically unlike temperament. It may be said that the sensitive refinement of Erasmus was the outcome of a fragile constitution, for we know how a strain of morbid delicacy, even in the lowest social classes, may separate its possessor by an abyss from healthier brothers and sisters. But Luther was highly neurotic, a much more pathological person than Erasmus.^ We have to recognise that Luther's characteristics really were ingrained in his stock and fairly in harmony with the whole atmosphere of his environment. He was an adept in the culture of his land and day, eagerly devoted to literature, a poet, a good 1 Luther's pathology has been studied by KUchenmeister and later by Ebstein. In youth he seems to have been healthy, and always remained robust. But he evidently had the uric acid diathesis in a pronounced form, and this led on to rheumatism, sciatica, govit, and stone, -with frequent nephritic colic. He often refers to the trouble he suffered from constipation, which led to haemorrhoids, and the result- ing losses of blood were an eagerly sought relief to his system. There was a tendency to melancholy, with attacks of giddiness, faintness, buzzing in the ears, hallucinations of sight and of hearing, as well as periods of prostration alternating Avith excitement, which sometimes made his friends fancy he must be afflicted with epilepsy or possessed by the Devil. All this is highly significant. We may bear it in mind, for instance, when we recall the circumstances under which Luther received his great revelation in the monastery tower. 92 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME musician, accomplished in the mechanical uses of his hands, the intimate friend of Cranach, a skilful dialec- tician. If it seems evident that if he was withal, as it seems to us to-day, gross and plebeian, that was not a mere accident of birth, but of the essence of his repre- sentative character. " My notion is that the Germans are simple, true, affectionate folk," said Walt Whitman once to Edward Carpenter, — and the observation is notable as coming from such a man, — " but there is a kind of rough- ness, one may almost say brutishness, about them." One sees this on a colossal scale in Luther, who would probably have laughed contemptuously at the ingenious explanation of Treitschke that roughness in a German is an affectation, like pohteness in the people of other lands. It is in accordance with this disposition that the flaming energy in the man was accompanied by the pro- duction of much smoke. Flame and smoke were impor- tant weapons in the spiritual warfare of this representa- tive German. He was, above all, as he himself recognised, a rhetorician, not strong in logic. There is never any consistency in his opinions, even on the most vital subjects, as anyone who has ever sought to ascertain his precise standpoint on some important question (as, for instance, marriage) cannot fail to discover. He was quite unable to pursue an argument on measured and rational lines He proved but a blustering child in controversy with the calm and lucid Erasmus. Luther realised his defeat, but he found consolation in the field of invective, wherein he was easily a master, eind henceforth " my dear Erasmus " became that scorpion, that bug, a mere hollow nut that LUTHER 93 fouls the mouth — yea, " the vilest miscreant that ever disgraced the earth." " Whenever I pray, I pray for a curse upon Erasmus." It is not surprising that Erasmus, who felt no need to retaliate in kind, again and again in his references to Luther uses the word " delirium." The turbulent flow of Luther's arrogant invective, obscure and vague as it may often be, yet with the vital warmth of the blood in it, is indeed delirious in its astonishing wealth and energy. The most incompatible elements are brought together in this stream, humility and egoism, exalted abstractions and a superb naturalism in the use of gross or familiar imagery, scarcely before reached by the coarsest of mediaeval preachers, and dotfbtless the despair of all great preachers since. One cannot help being painfully affected, indeed, however remote one's sym- pathies from Rome, by the dogmatic contempt, the unmeasured vituperation, which from the height of his personal infallibihty as the special mouthpiece of God Luther flung on the whole Church. It was magnificent in its daring and its horror, alike for friend and foe, but it had in it neither justice nor mercy, not even ordinary humanity. Luther had lived for years in a monastery, some of his best and wisest friends were monks, he had exercised authority in the Church, and even when he began to rebel the Pope had dealt with him considerately. But Luther had Uttle but evil to say of monks or friars except St. Bernard, and he was not altogether pleased even with St. Bernard; indeed, the whole Western Church " had had no excellent teacher but St. Augustine, and the Eastern Church but Athanasius — and he was nothing 94 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME particular"; while Luther's letter to Leo X. (1520), in its reckless abuse under an air of condescending patronage, is the very perfection of insolence, the production, it seems, of a Teutonic Aretino. Strange as it may seem, on this and the Mke occasions Luther was altogether unaware of the spectacle he presented, and reaUy imagined he was making an appeal to which a favourable response was possible. That this was so we may judge by a letter he wrote to Erasmus four years later. Eras- mus was an old friend, now aged and infirm; he was influentisd; it was Luther's part to be conciliatory — evidently he wished to be so. Yet the letter in which he makes the attempt is Sull of overbearing insults, of a spitefulness such as was once termed feminine, and it could cause nothing but resentment and alienation in the recipient. Yet behind aU this, and at times in the front of it, there is something homely, human, genial, almost lovable. If we ask how it should be so, we find the answer in the fact that this flow of passionate hatred and contempt is as little the outcome of disposition as of reason; it is a method, even a conscious method, of generating energy. " I never work better," he said, " than when I am in- spired by anger; when I am angry, I can write well, pray well, preach well. My whole temperament is quickened and my understanding sharpened; the vexations of the world and the temptations of the Devil depart from me." His wrath, he said again, " refreshed his blood," and it was in the most extravagant outbursts of hatred that he felt most conscious of " the presence of God." Thus the LUTHER 95 great German's " H3anns of Hate," far from being the index of evil disposition, were simply a device comparable to that of the beast which instinctively lashes himself with his own tail in order to attain the degree of infuria- tion demanded by circumstances. It is a method which the German temperament, too phlegmatic to be easily moved to energetic action, especially requires, but, we must remember, the method is in more or less degree universal. We may see it during a great war in every belhgerent country, not excluding one's own, whichever that may be. It is the distinction of Luther that, while he pushed the method to the extreme, he was entirely open wiAi it. He was even prepared to admit what he called the " honest and pious He," even " a good stiff lie " (" ein gudte stargke Lugen"), provided it is for a good end. It was a point of view later recognised in Bismarck's statecraft. Luther was a true German in his close combination, alike in speech and act, of the abstract with the realistic, of the emotional with the material. To some people the German seems a creature of dreams and sentiment, of music and metaphysics. To others the German seems a creature of reckless materialism and crude fleshliness. Luther beautifully illustrates the fact that he is both. Here is all the sentiment, the simpHcity, the enthusiasm for theological abstractions, and it is exhaled from a soil which for earthly coarseness can scarcely be matched in the history of genius. Let us note Luther's attitude in a test question, the feeKng towards women. Probably no sixteenth-century German would come out well here, but 96 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME surely none could equal this monkish reformer of the Christian world. For many years, he tells us, he never knew there was any sin but incontinence. Later he regarded a wife, whom he usually coupled with eating and drinking, as having her main function in relation to masculine incontinence. " God has made that plaister for that sore." Marry a wife, " useful for the kitchen and the bedchamber," he bade his followers; " care not for rosy cheeks and white legs — you will find such in pictures." For the rest, let a woman utiUse her broad God-given hips in " sitting at home." She is a fraU vessel, the silliest of God's creatures. The doctor then turned round and said: " Let us talk of something else." One is constantly impressed by the expressive power of Luther's imagery, his plastic energy in moulding speech to emotional ends, the force with which even his casual sayings, pungent or poignant, cut to the core of experience. " When I am assailgd by tribulation, I rush out among my pigs rather than remain alone," he said on one occasion at table. " The human heart is like a millstone in a miU; put wheat imder it, and it grinds the wheat to flour; put no wheat, and it still grinds on; but then 'tis itself it wears away." Such utterances of vital human truth, embodied in vivid or homely metaphors, occur again and again in the Table Talk} Luther's rhetoric, indeed, however tmrbulent, however turbid, is no mere voice. It springs hot from a human 1 " The concentrated spirit of the sixteenth century," this book is well termed by Dr. Preserved Smith {Luther's Table Talk, Columbia University Press, p. 87). It was highly popular in Germany, and had some influence on Goethe's Faust. LUTHER 97 heart, itself as turbulent and as turbid. Luther's words and Luther's deeds are of a piece, alike human, violent, extravagant, the expression of a blindly impulsive force, the assertion of the most daring defiance] the world had yet seen. Luther felt himself the child of God placed in a world under the direct rule of the Devil; what the exact relation of these two Cosmic Powers was he could never explain, but he felt himself the battlefield of their contest, and in the agony of this athletic struggle he has become one of the great spectacular figures of history. This Germanic temperament, we see, is made up of an incon- gruous mixture of gold and clay. But its great indi- vidualities moulded in the furnace of passion are devour- ing forces of Nature, and its ordinary common humanity, when hooped round in the lump by the iron bands of statecraft, becomes of an astonishing resistance. The mighty effort of Luther changed the world. But that he had changed it into a better world was not so clear. It was not even clear, it is not clear to-day, what really the change was that he effected. The chief authorities are here hopelessly at variance. For Guizot he was the leader of a movement which abohshed absolute power in the spiritual order, just as the English Revolution abohshed absolute power in the temporal order. For some he is simply the superb expression, in voice and deed, of the obscure seething movements beneath the surface of his time. For some he is the protagonist of modern Democracy, or even of " Kultur." For some he is a gigantic belated figure thrust out from the Devil-haunted darkness of the Middle Ages and without any relation to G 98 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME his own world or ours. Even Hamack, the temperate theological representative of modem Germany, admits that Luther's Reformation delayed the pohtical imity of Germany, brought on the Thirty Years' War, obscured the value of the Mediaeval and even the Early Church, and permanently fostered all the evils of rehgious schism. It is doubtful whether Father Grisar, who has devoted so memy years to the elucidation of his hfe and work, has formed any conclusion as to what precisely Luther stands for. Luther himself, in the end, seems to have been equally in the dark. As the close of his career drew nigh he was plunged into ever deeper hours of gloom. In such moments of spiritual darkness he might obscurely have felt that he had become an involuntary, and more tragic, Samson Agonistes. The whole world seemed to him to grow swiftly and steadily worse; its end, he asserted, could not be far off. He lost his self-confident arrogance. He reaUsed that he was imable to control the forces he had unchained.^ He saw himseK strugghng against great streams of tendency he had never set out to combat. The new stirrings, of a social economic hfe he was unable to comprehend aroused his horror and hatred. On the one hand he would hang all rich farmers, such as nowadays would be termed " profiteers," but, on the other hand, he was pitUess towards the struggling peasantry, and heartily approved of serfdom. Shortly before his death a German princess, in fatuous compliment, wished him 1 Janssen, in his instructive History of the German People (vol. xvi., p. i), remarks that at the close of the Middle Ages reUgion and morality were at a low ebb in Germany, and that Luther's influence aggravated this condition of things. LUTHER 99 forty more years of life. " I would rather," he replied, " throw away my hopes of Paradise." He was mercifully spared that infliction. If he had lived forty years longer it would have been his fate to reaKse that the man who above all others had prepared the way for the purification and reinvigoration of the " Anti-Christ of Rome and his greasy crew," was that same Father Martin Luther who seemed to have dealt the Church so deadly a blow on All Saints' Eve, 1517. X HERBERT SPENCER The figiire of Herbert Spencer, as his friends and acquain- tances knew him and as he comes before us in his Aido- biography, recalls the typical Englishman in the full flower of that originality and eccentricity the world has always professed to see in him. In Herbert Spencer's personahty and character, indeed, the t5?pe becomes almost a caricature; it seems difficult to beHeve that so pure and unmitigated an example of the essential Enghsh- man, in all his bare angularity, could really have existed in the middle of the Victorian period. But he was of very sturdy and independent stock, bom in the heart of England, the AngHan Midlands; his father, a man of stem and obstinate temper, gravitated, not by tradition but by temperament, to the Quakers; his mother, herself a gentle and ordinary woman, possessed the singularly persistent hereditary strain of the Huguenots, so further accentuating her son's firm and rebelUous nature, and perhaps also conferring on him that natural instinct for clarity and beauty of style which has often marked our Enghsh writers of similar strain.^ Yet Spencer remained * Those who scofi at Spencer's literary style have in view the later volumes of his System, dictated in failing vitality and ill-health, and encumbered by the arid and ponderous terminology of his theory. 100 HERBERT SPENCER loi absolutely and insularly English; his few journeys abroad were usually unfortunate and even injurious to his health; he never learnt, or wished to learn, German; he was scarcely more influenced by any other country; he rejected and disliked Comte as much as Kant. He was not even attracted to English thought or English literature, being English by instinct and not by tradition. He was more ostentatious than Hobbes in his indifference to books or even to formal study, although attracted to Nature; that is to say, to Nature as mechanism. His mind was, indeed, as that of ordinary Englishmen has always been noted to be, indolent, with no wide-ranging power or active inter- est. He was only interested in what fitted in with his own self-conceived ideas; any kind of discipline imposed from without was impossible to him. Therefore he was unreceptive. Whenever the conversation failed to in- terest him, whenever people argued against his theories, or brought forward theories of their own, he simply adjusted the special ear-pads he had devised for these occasions; the ordinary Englishmen can attain the same end without the use of ear-pads. Spencer was a self- taught amateur; he never had any methodical training even in science. He was egotistic, self-absorbed, self- confident; at the same time he was fearless and simple- minded, always absolutely sincere, even in social inter- course, where absolute sincerity must so often mean tactlessness. While so unconventional along the lines His native and often delightful qualities as a stylist are better seen in The Study of Sociology and many of the Essays. Of First Principles, also, it may be said that the substance is admirably transmuted into the form. 102 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME of his own temperament, he was yet, outside his idio- syncrasies, a complete middle-class Englishman of the straitest sect, at home in Pall Mall clubs and Bayswater boarding-houses, puritanical, personally austere, — always seeking comfort, it is true, though always uncomfortable, — very prudish, reverent towards Mrs. Grundy, and constitutionally averse to any open-minded discussion of sexual problems. At all these points he was the naked, typical Englishman, carried, indeed, to' so ultimate a point that we may say, to parody a famous phrase, that if Herbert Spencer had never existed it would have been necessary to invent him. Yet there is more to be said. This fantastic Englishman, in the shape of a meditative recluse of valetudinarian habits, was much more than an illustration on another plane of that EngUsh eccentricity which, in an earlier age and in the world of fashion, may amuse us so mightily in the figure of Philip Thicknesse. Spencer lived his own lif^ and he shut oft theworld with indifference or contempt. But in the result he wasnot impoverished by that isolation. His roots went deep down in the soil of his English race; from that rich source he drew direct the nourishment of a mighty brain. So that without immediate contact' with little aid from tradition and with even a sturdy horror of such aid, by the superb force of his natural instinct he easily took his rightful place as a supreme representative of the EngUsh genius. He "invented, and elaborated in many large volumes, a new philosophy which, by a large proportion of the ablest minds of his time all over the world, was accepted as a completely HERBERT SPENCER 103 satisfjdng explanation of the universe; he realised the problem and led the controversies of Evolution even before Darwin wrote the Origin of Species, devising for natural selection that term, " Survival of the Fittest," which has become the most famous term ever devised in the realm of science; he wrote a textbook of Psycho- logy, which it is possible to regard as the most important of his own centiury and the best worth reading in ours, without any training in that science and little knowledge of what others had done; he estabUshed on new and firmer ground the foundations of the science of Sociology; he became the chief leader of his time in social morals, the most acute and searching critic of the State, the foremost champion of the rights of the individual and of all the ideals of freedom. Great as was Spencer's recognised place in the England he represented so perfectly, his influence and authority in the rest of the world was at his death far greater, from France to Russia, from America to Japan. The world seemed to hear with veneration the clear trumpet tones of this authentic voice of England. In Herbert Spencer England became for the first time, if not the last, in a true and a spiritual sense Imperial. Everywhere there were prophets who emulated his voice, legislators who sought to transform his maxims into social action, philosophers who embodied his doctrines, while solitary youths in the Australian bush or the African veldt pored over hiat First Principles to find therein the inspiration of their lives. When he died it was as though a great monarch had passed away. It seemed natural that, 104 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME as in Italy, legislative Chambers should suspend their sittings. Yet in his own England it appeared to many that it was a discrowned king who had departed. A new generation had arisen, and youth is always impatient with the ideals and beMefs of its fathers. That is not because they are bad, or even because they are good; it is merely because youth craves for ideals and beliefs that are young and fresh hke itself. Spencer's had begun to look faded; the very depth and extension of his influence made his essential doctrines seem commonplace, while his non-essential doctrines had often been discredited by later investigation. Moreover, there really was a new social movement in the world which ran directly counter to Spencer's most fimdamental doctrines. Spencer had sought to carry, even to an extreme, the expansion of the individual's sphere and the limitations of the State's. The men who were now coming to the front sought to carry to an opposite extreme the expjuision of the State's sphere and the limitation of the individual's. Ideologists were in vogue who, having their inspiration from the Germany Spencer had ignored, sought to set up the wor- ship of a State fetish on which he would have poured contempt, while the passion for legislating on all the details of social life became almost a mania. Moreover, the hues of social progress and universal civihsation, as Spencer had divined them, were being apparently de- stroyed; all progress and civilisation, as he understoocJit, lay in the continuous advance of a personal freedom involving the supersession of miUtarism with its con- HERBERT SPENCER , M . 105 comitant all-supremacy of the State. He had not, 'ndeed, foreseen that social aberration by which indus- trialism itself might be militarised. But it seemed to him that the engines of progressive civilisation were being reversed; he felt that he was in the presence of a generation blind and deaf, and he apprehended the approaching cataclysm. It is at this point that Mr. Hugh Elliot comes before us with his vigorous book on Herbert Spencer.^ He haS passed more thoroughly than most of us through all the phases of feeling which Herbert Spencer evokes. He read the whole of Spencer's works when qn active service in South Africa during the Boer War, often with little other baggage than a toothbrush and a volume of The Principles of Psychology. The Study of Sociology, for instance, that most frenchant indictment of war and militarism, he read, far from any town, in momentary expectation of attack and with a revolver at hand. He became a dogmatic Spencerian. But in the years that followed, as a keenly interested observer of social and pohtical movements, he realised that those movements scarcely seemed to be advancing on the lines Spencer had laid down, while, as a trained student of biology, he had to recognise that, in the sphere of science also, Spencer's facts were often wrong and his theories unsound. The disciple grew apathetic. During the Great War, however, and in the light of that war, he read Spencer again and evidently from a higher plane of vision, with a new dis- * Herbert Spencer, " Makers ol the Nineteenth Century " Series. (Constable and Co., 1917.) io6 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME crimination and a more penetrating insight. He is able to throw aside all that was temporary and unessential in Spencer's doctrines, the hmitations of his own time and his own outlook. A Spencerian, Mr. Elliot now recognises, is one who rejects, all authority, even Spencer's, just as Spencer himself rejected all authority. And when that spirit has been attained, and when all deductions have been made, he finds that Herbert Spencer takes his place not only as a great figure in the world's history, but as an EngUshman with a special message to Englishmen to-day. There can be little doubt that, as an unexpected out- come of the Great War, in the finest spirits in England to-day — ^the men who are shaping not indeed the present but the future — there burns more than ever before the secret passion of freedom and the ancient EngMsh fjiith in the individual as against the State. It would certainly be a mistake to assume that the EngUshman rejects the State. If we wish to see the English view of the State clearly set forth, in contrast to those exotic theories of the worshipful supremacy of the State which have since been imported, we need only to turn to the work of one of the most central of Enghshmen, the man to whom we owe the chief record of the glories of England, the Odyssey of our race. There we find the author's namesake and cousin, Richard Hakluyt of the Middle Temple, writing in 1582 to a friend in Turkey to obtain information as to the best working and dyeing of wools there practised, " for that of many things that tend to the common benefit of the State, some more and some less, I find that no one thing, after one other, is greater than Clothing." In that HERBERT SPENCER 107 statement we have the Enghsh attitude towards the State set forth in words that are of symboHcal even more than of hteral truth. The Enghshman regards the State as he regards his trousers, as useful, indeed, even indis- pensable, scarcely to be worshipped. For the Enghsh- man, more than ajiy man, is used to making States, cutting them to suit the individual's freedom; he knows too much of States to fall into the barbarian's mistake of supposing that they are sent from Heaven. But this attitude has been the outcome of a political instinct, by no means of a reasoned theory. Now in Herbert Spencer the ancient English instinct became — ^who knows through what logical germ of his remote French ancestry ? — self- conscious and reasoned. The spirit of England, which had chiefly found only practical or imaginative utterance, became intellectually articulate. As will happen to the logically minded, Spencer feU into an extreme which was scarcely Enghsh, though as long as he retained mental vitahty he corrected earher extravagancies. In his emphasis on the essential things he failed to see that not only was there nothing to lose but much to be gained, even for the individual's freedom, by sociahsing the material things of which all have common and equal need. The superfluous intensity of logic to which he stretched his antagonism to the State, thus contributed to his own neglect. We overlooked his central vision of the dangers that attend the hypertrophied State with its inevitably miHtaristic tendencies, and his warnings were unheeded. Now Europe has reached the abyss that Spencer foresaw. So it comes about that the Great War has set the final io8 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME seal on the fame of Herbert Spencer, and henceforth he takes his rightful place in the great EngUsh tradition. What was false, imperfect, extravagant ceases to trouble us, and has fallen away. The essential remains. His authority may be gone, but only because it has been merged in the authority of England. To-day when we are forced to become citizens of the world it is a happy fact that the man who above all others has carried the influence of Enghsh thought all over the world, was the most essentially Enghsh of men; the more Enghsh the more universal. The civiUsing mission of England lies in the reahsation of that message which was the outcome of Spencer's deep and clear vision. Yet it is not to be supposed, let us never forget, that there is any real antagonism between SociaUsm and Individuahsm. There is only a seeming antagonism due to the limited intelligence of the human mind and the consequent necessity for a division of labour by which one group of persons swings the pendulum one way while the other group swings it back. To the uninitiated onlooker it might weU seem a futile proceeding. Yet it is the whole rhythm of life. An IndividuaUst tribe of Arabs, or a Socialist State of Jesuits in Paraguay, may present a brilliant and happy appearance. But they remain quite without force of vital progression or per- manence and exert no influence on the world at large.' The social heart cannot be always expanding or always contracting, any more than the physiological heart can be in a state of perpetual diastole or perpetual systole. The heart remains a pendulum just as oiur poHtical ideals HERBERT SPENCER 109 » remain a pendulum. What we seem to witness to-day is a renewed pulse of the pendulum in a direction which at the moment is supremely desirable; and it so happens that for movement in that particular direction Englishmen have always Keen counted by tradition and temperament as the natural leaders. XI EUGENICS IN RELATION TO THE WAR The Great War has drawn the attention of all the countries concerned in it to the question of their racial future. When the finest young manhood of the finest nations has been destroyed to a greater degree than ever before, when the best stocks are thus impoverished and even the survivors are to a large extent poisoned at the sources of life, it cannot be said that there are no serious grounds for this concern. It is easy to understand, also, that in those countries which still cling to the notion that wars will always go on, and that every war must in the future as in the past lead to a new war to reverse the decisions of the previous war, the matter is of very urgent impor- tance. For if in another twenty or forty years a new war on a yet larger scale and by yet more deadly methods must be started by the losing side to restore the balance, both sides must be laying the foundations of their future armies. This view has been especially that of Genuciny, or rather Prussia, a land where in former times war was said to be the national industry, and where the ideals of mihtarism have prevailed as in no other land. Indeed, we already hear wild stories of the methods of Govern- mental breeding — a. sort of conscription of healthy women EUGENICS IN RELATION TO THE WAR iii for the purpose of raising, with the aid of the most virile men, a crop of vigorous German soldiers for the war needs of the next generation — as officially contemplated, if not, indeed, already in operation. It is often stated that after the Thirty Years' War, nearly three centuries ago, bigamy was permitted, and even encouraged, in Germany to restore the balance of the population;^ and in Nuremburg in 1650 it was certainly ordained that " in future it is permitted to every man to marry two women," but to what extent, or for how long, this practice was carried on is not clear. It seems to me quite likely that the ordinance was • merely intended to regularise a few such unions already formed, for (as we learn from Janssen's History of the German People) a century earHer there was a con- siderable amount of such sexual irregularity hi Nuremburg, if we may judge by a series of decrees against the practice. It is easy to exaggerate concerning either the past or the present. What may be stated with certainty is that, as a result of the war, the Berhn Society for Race Hygiene in 1917 presented a memorandum to the Reichstag in favour of making medical examination compulsory before mar- riage, with the issue of certificates of fitness for marriage, but there were no signs of the adoption of the proposal. 1 This statement is usually made vaguely without quotation of authorities. The Nuremburg decree, which is the only basis for it I have come across, is quoted by F. von Hellwald, Die menschliche Ehe, 1889, p. 559. We do not hear of it elsewhere, we do not hear of it in practice, and we do not hear of it being revoked. It seems to me that we can attach little consequence to it. A century and more earUer the Reformation had indirectly led to much irregularity in marriage, but this was dealt with -severely, and we hear of men being belieaded for bigamy. 112 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME Even before the war, however, there was in the Central Empires one isolated but conspicuous advocate of more revolutionary methods, especially of polygamy as a means of raising the virile level of the race. This is Professor Christian von Ehrenfels, who for the ten years before the war was unwearied in preaching a new sexual morality which aimed at raising the racial level by instituting what he called "procreation marriages"; that is to say, private contracts between a man and a woman solely for the production of a child, all due provision being made for its alimentation and education, the child remaining with the mother though the father retained the rights of a guardian. The woman would be bound exclusively to the man for the period of the contract, but the man would be free to enter simultaneously into more than one such contract. Not all men, however, would be regarded as eligible to form part of this phalanx for the promotion of virile selection, and for the men who were excluded prostitution would be the recognised resource. It must be added that Ehrenfels was not animated by any motives of narrow German patriotism, but regarded his doctrine as holding good for all the highly civihsed European peoples, and as directed against what he considers the alarming menace of the " Yellow Peril."^ Ehrenfels admitted that his practical proposals were certain at first to meet with strong opposition " in a society deeply corrupted in its instincts of reproduction," and it cannot be said that he had a single notable follower, 1 C. von Ehrenfels, Sexualethik, 1908, and numerous articles in Sexual-Probleme about the same period. EUGENICS IN RELATION TO THE WAR 113 even in Germany, before the war. It may well be that the war has created a more favourable atmosphere for the spread of his doctrines. No open governmental or official support is likely to be given to any such radical scheme, for on the moral questions of sex our bureau- cratic classes are as orthodox and conservative as the bulk of the people. But until militarism is definitely destroyed we must certainly be prepared to find that the need of good " cannon fodder," and plenty of it, will remain present to the military mind, and that all con- veniently practicable methods of satisfying it will be methodically and relentlessly pursued. That is an essential part of mihtarism. It is asked what ought to be done to counter this mihtaristic breeding activity, threatened or real. Before, however, we discuss the rational eugenic policy of the future, there are one or two prehminary but fundamental considerations which have to be clearly faced. In the first place, it must be remembered that the Great War was entered on at the onset, on one side at all events, with the aim, above all, of making future wars unnecessary and even impossible. It is true that the mihtarists, especially in Germany (in opposition to the opinion of some of their own greatest thinkers), regarded this aim as Utopian-^^in the words of Moltke: " a dream and not even a beautiful dream." But in most civiHsed countries that is merely the opinion of a small minority, for while there are many who consider that the aboHtion of war is a dream, there are few outside Germany who refuse to recognise it as even a beautiful dream. H 114 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME All nations, even the militaristic Romans of old, have loved peace, though they have not known how to ensure it. In modem times we have begun to see how it can be ensured. To many of us nowadays it seems just as possible to establish peace between groups of individuals as we have found it possible between the individuals themselves, and to institute an international pohce to keep the peace between nations seems to us no more beyond human abihty, however more difi&cult, than to institute a national poMce to keep the peace between individual citizens. Until it is demonstrated, therefore, that this conviction is unfounded, we cannot imitate in practice those leaders of mihtarism who still accept an entirely opposed conviction, and look forward in due course to another war. If, however, it is argued that we must at all events be prepared, and in view of another possible world-war speed up the increase of our population to the utmost, it is necessary to face another fact. The mihtary idea, that a high birth-rate means mihtary efficiency, is altogether fallacious. This has been clearly illustrated during the Great War. The European countries with the highest birth-rates are, in descending order, Russia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Himgary, Italy, Austria, Spain, Finland, Germany. Now it is obvious that this hst includes aU the countries (ejtcept Belgium, which was supposed to be guaranteed by treaty against aggression) which have met with overwhelming disaster in the war. Moreover, it includes iio belligerent country which has not met with serious disaster, and some countries on the Hst have only EUGENICS IN RELATION TO THE WAR 115 been saved from still more serious disaster by the prompt efforts of countries with lower birth-rates than their own. Further, we may observe that the largest and most populous country, that with by far the highest birth-rate, was precisely the country in which complete mihtary collapse first took place. So that, so far from being a help in w£ir, a high birth-rate may rather be said to be a hindrance. We shall doubtless be told that the high birth-rate must be united with efficiency. But that is precisely the point ! A nation with a high birth-j^ate is not in a state of efficiency. That high birth-ratMs the mark of immaturity, defective civilisation, and general inefiiciency. Exactly in the degree in which the birth- rate declines — we are not concerned here to determine which is cause and which effect — efficiency is found to be increasing. ' There is a further point for consideration. Even if we admit that the mihtaristic aim must be maintained in the world, even if we agres that it is desirable to thrust up the birth-rate, if we can, it must still be said that all methods of a direct and vigorous kind are not calculated to achieve the desired end. It is highly probable that the marriage customs which now prevail have prevailed precisely because they were those best adapted to the pro- duction of a large efficient progeny, so that any arbitrary interference with these customs, while it might affect the quality of the progeny — bettering it or worsening it — would only be likely to diminish the quantity, on which the militarist mainly relies. Polygamic institutions, for instance, were once far more prevalent than they are now. Ii6 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME If, however, polygamy led to a high birth-rate, we might have expected that the races practising it would have overspread the earth. On the contrary, they have largely either died out or abandoned polygamy, and it would appear that they are decidedly less productive of offspring than monogamic peoples. The negro in Africa is not supposed to be behindhand in procreative activity. But Winwood Reade noted of the polygamic tribes of Equatorial Africa that there seemed to be among them fewer children than wives, whUe it was not until the Jews abandoned their early patriarchal polygamy that they began to cover the earth. It is the social classes most left alone, even in poverty and filth, which breed fastest. Governmental interference with breeding would not, it is almost certain, increase the rate of reproduction, but would far more probably decrease it. It has so far been assumed that it is possible to introduce artificial methods of human breeding by oflftcial decree. But that assumption can by no means be made. Before he ^;an even attempt to set his schemes in action on a large scale — and except on a large scale they would be impotent — the militarist breeder of men must cope with a preliminary problem which wiU become of ever greater magnitude, and that is the social environment. The conditions are constantly growing less favourable for official interference. The right conditions for the miU- tarist breeding of men — for " virile selection," as he terms it — have again and again been clearly and vigorously set forth by Ehrenfels. They involve the double standard of morality^for men and women; women, Ehrenfels EUGENICS IN RELATION TO THE WAR 117 believes, are called upon to abandon their instincts in favour of monogamy just as (in his opinion) men had previously been cedled upon to abandon their instincts in favour of polygamy. It also involves not merely the toleration, but the approval, of prostitution. It is not surprising that the feminists in Germany, and the leaders of social and sexual reform generally, have violently opposed the doctrines of Ehrenfels. The conditions he desires for " virile selection," which are reaUy those of militarist breeding of men, have, indeed, existed in the far past. For, as Herbert Spencer pointed out,^ the domestic despotism which polygamy involves (unless placed on a new economic basis) harmonises with the pohtical despotism of militarism. If we go back to the Carolingian period of French history, we find it recorded that among the men-at-arms of Conan II., Duke of Brittany, each warrior might have ten or more wives and thus beget some fifty children. But that was a thousand years ago. Even among the Germans, though in the days of Tacitus a fighting chief might have more than one wife, bigamy has not been officially authorised later than the seventeenth century. To-day the conditions are different even in Germany, which once furnished the best possible son for this kind of breeding; of old, indeed, the ideals of the fighting male everywhere ruled in unquestioned supremacy and women meekly accepted the part which men had assigned to them. But in the years before the war a certain section of German women, in associa- tion with the more progressively intellectual men, came *■ Principles of Sociology, third edition, vol. i., p. 679, Ii8 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME forward as the radical and vigorous representatives of the modem woman's movement. That is why the views of Ehrenfels have met with such decisive and often even contemptuous treatment at the hands of hberal German thinkers. In practice they would produce too much friction to be of use to the miUtarist. It was necessary at the outset to clear the groimd by these preliminary considerations. In doing so we have perhaps achieved more than was attempted. In reaUsing the ways the problem can never be solved, we are learning the only ways in which it can be solved. " If you wish for peace, prepare for war." It has been with a pathetic faith in that ancient Roman maxim that the nations have been acting in recent years, even Ger- many, for we do not rightly understand the policy of the " mailed fist," if we fail to see that it is a device for attaining the ends of fighting while dispensing with fighting. No time-honoured maxim has ever been so tragically disproved as this has by the Great War. It has shown that not only does the method of preparing for war fail to ensure peace, but that it can scarcely be said, even when war breaks out, to confer much more than a merely initial advantage on those who practise it. So conspicuously is this the case that the well-advised militarist might now plausibly reverse that ancient maxim, and declare: " If you wish for war, prepare for peace." There would be a one-sided element of truth in that saying. All the fundamental human quaUties, the qualities with which alone war or any other arduous activity must be EUGENICS IN RELATION TO THE WAR 119 carried on, can only be developed in peace and in the activities of peace. Intelligence, initiative, resourceful- ness, endurance, caution, courage, the discipline that comes of self-reliance and mutual reliance — all these qualities, essential to success in war, can only be developed slowly by free activity in the manifold business of ordinary life. They cannot be learnt in barracks. To wait to learn them on the battlefield is far too costly and perilous. The men who are successful in this war have for the most part learnt how to be successful as lawyers and engineers and commercial travellers — indeed, in all classes and all vocations. A militarist training fails to impart all these qualities in the same degree, 'and imparts some of them in no degree. Germany, which has been the modern type of the miUtarist nation, has developed some of these ' quahties, but with its insistence on strenuous intellectual instruction and its pressure of external mechanical organisation it has atrophied others that are equally essential. It has created an army, it has been said, of " splendid automatons," but in doing so it really handi- capped the fighting efficiency of the individual, and immensely increased the proportion of total casualties. Its method is a scientific transformation of the ancient horde movements of the East. What is true for the efficiency of the individual is equally true for the efficiency of the race. The conditions are the same. Just as we cannot make a thoroughly good individual even for war, except we have in view the ends of peace, so also it is with the race. It is in peace, and through peace, and for peace, that we must culti- 120 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME vate the race, even if we desire a race that is apt for war. It may now appear clear that the problems in Eugenics which we have to face as a result of the war are not new problems. They are the same old problems, only they have acquired a new urgency. Formerly they pre- sented aims which were indeed highly desirable, but not so patently urgent that the careless masses might not pass them by with smiling indifference. Now the influences of war have so swollen the old evils that only blindness or stupidity can fail to reaMse that a readjust- ment of our ideals and our practices has become absolutely necessary. There are at least three main questions — all a matter of concern before the war to those who cared for the welfare of society and the race — which the war has rendered far more acute: (i) The relation of the fit members of the community to the unfit; (2) the influence of the venereal diseases; (3) the position of women in relation to sexual problems. The problem of the relation of the fit members of society to the unfit was beginning to be seen in its true proportions before the war, and is becoming still more serious now. As it stood four years ago, we saw, in every civilised country, on the one hand, the educated and well-to-do classes, exercising foresight in marriage, care- fully hmiting the number of their children, devoting their best care to the children they produced and for the most part bringing them to maturity. On the other hand, we saw in the not-weU-to-do class, reckless and improvident parents, ignorant of any knowledge of how EUGENICS IN RELATION TO THE WAR 121 to control conception, constantly producing undesired children which they were not able to provide for and often were not healthy enough to produce at all, with the result that a large proportion of these children died, or were defective, and became a permanent burden on the community; that is to say, on those who had themselves exercised prudence and self-control in the production of children. We do not beHeve that the well-to-do necessarily consist of people of fit racial stocks, or that the not-weU-to-do necessarily consist of unfit racial stocks. But we know without doubt that the first class contains a large proportion of capable people producing capable children, and that when they cease to be capable they speedUy fall out of that class; we know also that the other class contains a large proportion of incapable persons, producing incapable children, in whom the inefficiency, shiftlessness, and recklessness of the parents tends to become feeble-mindedness, with all its numerous anti- social manifestations, in the children. The problem before us, roughly speaking, was to encourage the people of the first class, who already for the most part limit their families, to have as many children as was desirable, with due regard to their own health and well-being and their prospects of raising them satisfactorily, and to bring, together with improved economic conditions, care, education, and, if necessary, pressure, to bear on the people of the other class to enable them to limit their famihes, when that seemed desirable, and so to decrease the number of the unfit, and in some degree to destroy at the source the stream of feeble-mindedness which is 122 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME so disastrous in its effects alike on society and the race. So the matter stood before the war. But now the situa- tion has become immensely exaggerated. The unfit remain much as they were, and nothing has happened to render them less ^productive; every country seeks to preserve its unfit members from the dangers and depriva- tions of the battle-hne. But the fit — the sound, the vigorous, the alert, the high-spirited — are precisely those whom it naturally and rightly seeks to put into that hne, to be in large proportion killed, maimed, or nervously impaired, while an innumerable number of the best racial stocks in every belUgerent country have been cut off altogether in the male Hne. Thus we are called upon more urgently than ever before to carry out the racial pohcy, which is also the best social policy, of encouraging what remain of our fit stocks and discouraging from procreation the unfit stocks. The perils of venereal diseases were also beginning to be realised before the war, and at last faced courageously. It was indeed time, for even war is less destructive to humanity. In some countries, as in England, rational and practical measures of dealing with, and so far as possible preventing, the venereal diseases were slowly maturing at the beginning of the war, as the result of investigation and reports already made. But these diseases are not only more destructive than war, they are also immensely increased by war, and that not only among soldiers, but the civilian population. It was as the result of war — the French campaigns in Italy — that syphilis first became known and overspread Europe at EUGENICS IN RELATION TO THE WAR 123 the end of the fifteenth century. Similar results have been seen to-day in the chief belligerent countries, and, as an authority has said, in respect of increasing the pre- valence of the venereal diseases " the present war seems likely to leave all previous wars far behind." We have to recognise that the results of sjrphilis and gonorrhoea on the individual and the race, indirectly produced by the war to-day, are almost if not quite as serious as the direct results of the war. If, therefore, any shred of mischievous prudery or false modesty yet clings on us, to prevent us from honestly facing and freely discussing this evil, let us finally cast it away. Even when that preliminary feat is accomplished we are only at the beginning of the task. It is fairly easy — and considerable progress has herein already been made — to facilitate the treatment of venereal diseases, and even to spread abroad an increased amount of popular instruction concerning the results of these diseases and the risks of incurring them. But there are deeper problems involved which it is not so easy as some good people think to grapple with. There have been various appeals of late from lands afar which have sent their sons to the war, imploring the people of Europe to guard their boys' purity. But purity, to be of any use^ must be robustly implanted within at home from the outset; it cannot be safeguarded from outside. Even if it could, a man who is able to fight cannot be treated as a child and ought not to be so treated, for the only sture guides of life are knowledge and self-control and the sense of responsibility. Even the possession in a moderate degree of these great foimdations of morality is by no 124 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME means all that is required, especially under the conditions of war, which have ever aroused the impulse of licence to a greater extent than peace. Purity and the sexual impulse, as we are now learning to recognise, are far from being antagonistic; we cannot rely indefinitely on any ideal of abstinence. At this point the problem we here encounter merges into the next great problem: the position of women in relation to the sexual and racial difficulties raised by the war. Here, indeed, we reach the most fundamental and the most far-spread problem of all. It is, therefore, a for- tunate circumstance that its present urgency coincides with a tendency, among the more politically advanced communities, to confer upon women equal rights of citizenship with men. The fatal defect of such schemes as that of Ehrenfels is that they are impracticable because they disregard the interests and the instincts of women, who constitute precisely the sex most concerned. The grave problems before us may demand a radictd modifica- tion aHke of our moral ideals and our social conduct. It is, therefore, essential that women should be able to deal with them as citizens on the same footing as men, with much the same sort of civic and legal rights, and also, it must be added, so far as possible, the same economic independence, for without that no sexual reform can ever lead to wholesome social results. The obvious and immediate fact about the war, so far as the sexual position of women is concerned, is the diminution of possible husbands together with the elimination of many of the men most desirable as husbands. A great hardship is EUGENICS IN RELATION TO THE WAR 125 thus inflicted on the girls who are to-day growing up to be women. At the same time, as is well recognised, such a disproportion of the sexes always leads to increased illegitimacy. This is a problem we are already faced with, and while it needs much discussion before any results can be safely reached, there can be no doubt that many are already reahsing that radical transformations in prevailing ideas and customs may be necessary. There is significance in the fact that the investigation carried out in the United States among varied groups of sub- scribers to Physical Culture has lately shown that a notable proportion, among both sexes and in many vocations, are in favour of legalising polygamy, while a much larger proportion accept the legal and social approval (perhaps with governmental financial aid) of unmarried mothers. Reference may also be made to Kammerer's recent full and enlightened study of The Unmarried Mother, probably the best book on the subject yet pubUshed, with its attempt to remove the popular misconceptions surrounding the unmarried mother, and its advocacy of a revision of opinions on this subject and on questions of sex in general. It is not, however, merely the personal sexual relation- ships of a single generation of women which are affected by the war. The future of the race is affected. This is already beginning to be realised as regards at least one special point : the effect of the shortage of men in leading women to marry the feeble-minded. It has been found in England, and probably elsewhere, that- many a girl is now wilhng to aecept the attentions and even the marriage 126 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME offers of a feeble-minded man whom she would not have looked at before the war, and astonishing marriages of such a kind are now said to take place. Thus the sexual hardships imposed upon the young women of to-day serve to exasperate the evils caused directly by war on the future of the race by increasing the proportion of feeble- minded among the population. " Every fit man wanted ' ' was the demand placarded on the streets in the early days of the war. They went, often never to letura, and the unfit were left to recruit the next generation. It is becoming clear to aU that this freedom of the mentally and physically defective to become the fathers of the future race must seriously impair the efficiency of the race, for already the birth-rate of the feeble-minded appears to be increasing, and there can no longer be any doubt that strenuous methods must be adopted to inhibit the fertility of degenerate famihes. Yet such merely negative activity is not enough. The sexual instincts of women are one with the interests of the race. Our best efforts will be needed to give that flexibility to the marriage relationship, and that transformation to social morality, which the best interests of women and of the future race unite to demand.* Thus when we survey the large and complex field opened before us by the problems of the Great War in their bearing on Eugenics, we see that there are at least three main paths for our activities. Never ibefore has * In this connection reference may be made to the stimulating and suggestive ideas, however at times highly disputable, of James Hinton. For an exposition and critical discussion of these, see James Hinton ■ A Sketch, by Mrs. Havelock Ellis, 1918. EUGENICS IN RELATION TO THE WAR 127 it been so urgent a demand on us to do all in our power to prevent the breeding of the unfit and to Umit the breeding of the less fit members of society, so that even the most hardened opponent of birth control can scarcely remain longer deaf to the appeal of humanity and the future race. Never before has it been so urgent to combat, by treatment, by prevention, by instruction, by the largest and noblest education in sex, the actual and threatened spread of the venereal diseases. Never before has it been so urgent to enlarge and requicken our sexual morahty and social customs in such a way that women may be enabled to allow free play to their best impulses and ideals in the purification and fortification of the race of the future. To many of us it sometimes seems that we witness to-day the overthrow of the old world. If it be so, let us not forget that on us is placed the high privilege, even though at the same time it is the grave responsibihty, of building up a new and better world on a firmer foundation. XII BIRTH CONTROL AND EUGENICS Birth control is nowadays discussed from many points of view. There is, for instance, that standpoint of economic doctrine which furnished the old Malthusian basis for the limitation of offspring; the production of himian life, it was held, tends to outstrip the production of the food needed to sustain Hfe, so that unless procreation is restrained, Nature steps in to attain the same end more disastrously by wars, pestilences, and famines. That argument is stUl a fruitful source of debate, the most careful investigators seeming to acknowledge in this contention an element of truth, although not accepting Malthus's law in the strict form in which it was first proclaimed. Then there is the evolutionary or zoological point of view. Along this hne of argument it has been shown how the whole course of natural progress has consisted in the imposition of checks on the immense reproductive impetus acquired at the beginning of life. Throughout the com^e of evolution there has been a progressive diminution in the quantity of offspring — comparatively few of which in the lowher forms of life succeed in surviving — and this 128 BIRTH CONTROL AND EUGENICS 129 diminution in quantity is accompanied by an increase in quality which ensures far greater chances of survival. Birth control is a continuation of the same evolutionary process, become conscious, voluntary, and deliberate; it is, therefore, altogether natural. Then there is the humanitarian standpoint of social reform; here we find the democratic argument which appeals to the champions of Labour, and is the most widely popular of all in this matter. Anyone, indeed, who is acquainted with the lives and homes of the workers, even in the richest and most progressive countries, knows the misery produced by an excess of chiJdren, who are unwanted and cannot be properly provided for. We find undue strain on the fathers, the exhaustion and ill-health of the mothers, and the worst possible conditions for the care of the children, many of whom ought never to have been bom, while a large proportion die soon after birth.^ Hence in all directions radiating centres of wretchedness exert a depressing influence on the whole social level of a community. This is the standpoint of those noble- hearted pioneers who are determined at all costs to free society from a shameful stain. Very different is the attitude of those who take the purely medical standpoint in relation to birth control. They do not commit themselves to any wide generalisa- 1 As regards England, I may specially refer to the pictures presented by the letters of i6o working women brought together by the Women's Co-operative Guild, in a little volume entitled Maierniiy. These letters, which are pubUshed without reference to birth control, are by no means written by working women of the lowest class, but they present many pathetic situations due to over-large families, and constant laments of the awful results of the writers' ignorance in sex matters. I 130 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME tions, but merely assert that in certain diseased conditions, when pregnancy would involve serious risks — as in some forms of heart disease or when a woman is liable to puerperal insanity — ^it is imperative to use contraceptives. This standpoint has been recognised by enlightened physicians for over half a century. Finally — and distinct from the evolutionary, economic, social, Eind medical outlooks — there is the eugenic stand- point. It is not a new standpoint. But to-day, when so many of the chief branches of the white stock are being sapped in their racial vitality by influences of previously unknown virulence — for even the great pestilences of old at all events spared the strongest — this aspect of the problem assumes the gravest significance of all. That we possess in birth control an invaluable instru- ment, not merely for immediate social betterment, but for the elevation of the race, is tacitly admitted to-day by nearly all thoughtful eugenists, though they often refrain - from emphasising the fact. The reason they thus refrain is that they recognise that the prevention of conception, by itself, however beneficial it may be in improving social conditions, has no necessary improving effect on the race, and may even act in the reverse direction. This is evident. A merely random restriction of the fertility of a stock, without reference to the racial qualities of the stock, cannot possibly improve the stock's quaUty. In actual practice, moreover, as carried on at present, neo-Malthu- sian methods may even be dysgenic rather than eugenic, for they tend to be adopted by the superior stocks while the inferior stocks, ignorant and reckless, are left to BIRTH CONTROL AND EUGENICS 131 propagate freely. This unfortunate result is encouraged by the notorious failure — still so conspicuous amongst us — to spread the knowledge of contraceptives among the classes which from the eugenic standpoint most urgently need them. It is obvious that the present state of things in this matter could not indefinitely cont nue, for it means that while the classes that impose social burdens continue to pile up those burdens at the same irate, the classes that bear social' burdens are relatively diminishing in number and are therefore forced to bear an ever greater burden. In proportion as we realise this vital fact we shall work ever more zealously to spread the knowledge of contraceptive measures among those classes whose fatal fertiHty it is necessary to arrest. Putting aside this temporary and transitional aspect of the question, it is important to remember that while the mere hmitation of offspring is not in itself a method by which the eugenic selection of the race can be secured, birth control yet remains the only instrument by means .ol which that eugenic selection can be rendered practicable. When Malthus, more than a century ago, put forward his new and revolutionary doctrine concerning the need to Mmit the production of offspring for economic reasons, he knew of no better method for carrying out the recom- mendation than abstention from sexual intercourse. In any case it is probable that at that period continence was the only method of limiting, the size of a family which a respectable Anglican clergyman could admit. But it was not a practical method. The number of married people who from any naotive, and especially from any 132 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME eugenic motive in which their own personal welfjire was not concerned, could exercise the unselfish self-control necessary to carry out such a method must be very small, while people capable of obeying such lofty motives and possessed of the will-power needed to do so effectually are, from the eugenic standpoint, the very last people whom we should desire to limit their families unduly. The method of birth control by the use of contraceptive measures is the one and only method which places in the hands of the whole population possessed of ordinary care and prudence the complete power to regulate, Hmit, or, if necessary, altogether prevent, the production of off- spring, while yet enabMng the functions of married hfe to be exercised, without any vain struggles to attain an ascetic ideal or any wasteful impoverishment of physical or spiritual well-being. Here, clearly, we have the key to the eugenic position. The pioneers of Eugenics, while reahsing the gravity of the problem they were setting forth, usually left it in the air, out of reach of any driving force. Even Galton, the first and greatest of these pioneers, who was always so reason- able and so temperate in his statements of the objects and aims of eugenics, never emphasised, or even clearly set forth, the nature of the method by which alone eugenics could become practical. Galton nearly always spoke' as though procreation and marriage were the same thing, so that persons unfit to propagate the race were therefore imfit to marry, and must be excluded altogether from all the personal benefits, physical and spiritual, of the marriage sacrament. That was clearly an impracticable BIRTH CONTROL AND EUGENICS 133 demand, scarcely to be allowed by social opinion, and placing an intolerable burden on many of the best people. The inevitable result was that eugenics was constantly misunderstood, ridiculed, regarded as a fad, while even many of its would-be followers ventured to take up impossible and absurd positions, thereby still further discrediting the eugenic doctrine. Only a few years, however, after Galton first began to put forward the new ideas concerning the better breeding of the race, in 1885, Miss J. H. Clapperton, a friend of George Eliot's, in her Scientific Meliorism clearly indicated that the voluntary restraint of procreation by neo- Malthusian methods, apart from economic and prudential motives, is a necessary condition for " national regenera- tion." It may well be that this was the first definite public intimation that in birth control we have the key that xmlocks the eugenic door and lays open to human practice a region which is otherwise only accessible to the theorist, if not the faddist. Since then that realisa- tion has quickly spread among all who think seriously in this department of life. At the present day it is only the ignorant and the superstitious, including doubtless many would-be legislators, who really imagine that pro- creation is one with marriage, and that there is no way of affecting procreation except through the prohibition of marriage. All those to-day who are deeply concerned in the great problem of eugenic progress assume, as a matter of course, that the only practical instrument by which eugenics can work is birth control. Only by the regulation, limitation, and, if necessary, prevention of 134 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME conception, in the light of our gradually increasing know- ledge of heredity, can we hope to raise satisfactorily the general level of the race. The two fundamental eugenic aims — ^more urgent to-day than they have ever been before — are to impede the pro- duction of bad stocks and to favour the production of good stocks. The prevention of bad stocks may be put first, not only because it is the most promising hne of progress, but because in itself it indirectly, and even directly, favours the development of the good stocks. Leaving aside those unequal social and economic condi- tions which, we may hope, will in the future become more and more levelled towards equality, from the eugenic standpoint the commimity may be roughly divided into two groups, the capable and the incapable. They over- lap and gradually merge into each other. But in the well-marked shape they are two great and opposed groups. The influences of to-day, and even perhaps of the greater part of the last century, — including the best and most altruistic impulses, — ^have impeded the development of the capable group and favoured the development of the incapable group. Our social progress has largely con- sisted in the fulfilment, not only in philanthropy but in law and administration, of the doctrine that the capable shall bear the burdens of the incapable. It thus comes about that the vigorous, hardworking, and prudent people assume ever-growing financial and other burdens which Hmit their powers to do justice to their own children, while rendering it more possible for the lazy, the improvident, and the diseased to live in ease they have BIRTH CONTROL AND, EUGENICS 135 not earned, to procreate their own kind, and to escape the natural results of their own laziness, improvidence, and disease. This process has long been going on, and the more rapidly in the most civihsed and progressive countries, which thus set themselves to work to retard their own progress and to diminish their civilisation. But the Great War threatens, in all the belligerent countries, and even by its reactions in the neutral countries, to render a chronic process acute. The capable group finds itself greatly reduced in numbers while at the same time its burdens are enormously increased; the incapable group is expanding, not only because it finds itself more than ever unfit to deal with its harsher environment, but because many of those who belonged to the great inter- mediate zone, and even many who once were capable, are being forced to sink to this lower social stage. Now no one seriously proposes that the capable, how- ever intolerably heavy their burdens may become, should throw off those burdens and leave the incapable to their fate. That would be to renounce all those humanising ideals and efforts which have been in active operation for over a century and more slowly and silently for a vastly longer period. UntU recent years, indeed, there seemed no choice. And it still' remains true that we must continue to succour the unfortunate who are actually with us. But now a great hope for the race has begun to glimmer before our eyes. We begin, that is, to discern that by the judicious use of the instrument of birth control, in the light of an ever-growing knowledge of the eugenic aspects of heredity, it is possible — and that not 136 ESSAY5 IN WAR-TIME in some dim miUennimn, but in the immediate future that will soon be with us — to cut off the supply of the imfortvmate and to diminish steadily the output of in- capables. Like the wizard's lazy apprentice who f oohshly released the stream he could not control, we have struggled vainly to stem the tide of unfit babies, and now at last we have learnt the magic formula to apply at the source. In view of these considerations, what, it may be asked, are the lines of action we ought to foUow ? Without waiting for any great national or collective movements there seem to be at least three directions in which we may work, even individually, towards rendering eugenic ideals effective in social and racial life. I. — By increasing and promoting the knowledge of the laws of heredity. Knowledge must come before action, and our knowledge of the tendencies of heredity in its bearing on eugenics — whether pursued alotig biometrical lines or Mendelian lines or simply by careful observation apart from theory — is still far from adequate. It is rapidly growing and becoming more orderly, but in order to be a guide to conduct its basis must be extended to cover an enormous number of cases; it must become still more detailed and still more precise. While the expert biological investigator may be expected to take the chief part in this extension of knowledge, it is by no means confined to him. Every physician meets with cases of family heredity which it would be desirable to explore so far as may be possible, and it is his duty to put them on record. Without going outside one's own family, indeed, provided one can trace backweirds for a few generatibns, BIRTH CONTROL AND EUGENICS 137 it is possible to draw a picture, even if only for one's private edification, for example or for warning; while those of us who can follow our ancestors backwards for several centuries may find in our hands a study full alike of fascination and instruction. II. — By popularising a knowledge of the methods of birth control. A knowledge of the methods of limiting offspring by the use of contraceptives, which in the eighteenth century seems still to have been confined to the rakes of the fashionable world and only used for immoral purposes, began about a century ago to be associated with moral and prudential motives. Since then it has steadily tended to spread in all civiHsed countries throughout the world. Naturally, it began among the most educated and enlightened classes, among tho*se most sensitive to the moral considerations involved by the responsibilities of parenthood, and most capable of forethought and self- restraint in fulfilling ^ these responsibilities. Thus the movement was at first confined to the better social classes. But it has been constantly spreading downwards, a notable extension being specially observed after the pubHcity of the trial of Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant in 1876 for spreading pamphlets containing information on the use of contraceptives. The literary propaganda stimu- lated by that trial has continued and grown ever since. It has reached the higher levels of the working-class, sufficiently intelligent, enterprising, and inquisitive to secure information which concerns them so much, even where obstacles are placed in the way of its dissemination by prudery or obscurantism. The propaganda, however 138 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME much it continues to spread laterally, has now probably reached almost as far downwards as it can reach by Uterary methods, for it is approaching those social strata which, immersed in labour, if not in drudgery, and without literary inquisitiveness or enterprise, however much they may desire knowledge, offer a barrier to the natural diffusion of knowledge. Thus it comes about that, in the present stage of transition, the class which contains the largest proportion of capable elements of eugenic value is that which is most willing and best able to hmit its output of offspring, while the class which contains the largest proportion of incapable elements is stiU deprived of the knowledge enabling it to regulate the production of children, even when it possesses the wiU, This state of transition, as has often been pointed out, is deplorable. Its deplorable results, if long continued, have indeed been emphasised and reiterated with much wringing of hands. And how few of those who have assumed this rhetorical attitude have hfted a finger to remove the difl&culty ! Yet in this practical matter we have no use for Cassandras who can do nothing but howl. The only thing that wiU help is to bring the needed knowledge personally to these lower social strata which are impervious to Uterary propaganda. For we cannot go back. We are in the middle of the stream. Salvation hes in pushing forward. The attitude of those prudish or ignorant obscurantists who exclaim with dignified superiority, " But I disapprove of such methods in toto !" has now become ridiculous. They are no longer of our time. They belong to the past, and the BIRTH CONTROL AND EUGENICS 139 Great Wax has sealed their fate. We of to-day are aware that we are concerned with a great and firmly established movement of world-wide extension, a movement which continues in the highest civilisation of every land, a process which began in the lowest zoological series and has its sanction in Nature. The exact line of action must vary in accordance with the circumstances in a particular country. In a coimtry like Holland, where birth control clinics are not only established but officially encouraged, the road lies easily open for the most enlightened eugenic teaching. In a country like England, where the chief barrier is official inertia supported by that prudish and ignorant obscuran- tism to which attention has already been called, the paths of action are manifold both for the physician and the enhghtened public, by dissipating ignorance, by giving private instruction, by inculcating higher racial ideals, and by stimulating local authorities to a sense of their responsibility. There cannot be the slightest doubt that it is a primary duty of Poor Law Relieving Officers (especially when, as is now becoming the case, these officers are women and of higher type than was formerly usual) to give instruction in birth control, when necessary, as a matter of the most urgent importance. This is obviously needed not only in the interests of the poor themselves, but in the interests of the community, even apart altogether from the race. In the United States the problem is at present rather more difficult. Here a barrier has been erected by the law. The result has been that heroic pioneers like Mrs. Margaret Sanger, in a 140 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME generous passion of humanitarian ardour, have flung defiance at the laws. The method of reforming bad laws by breaking them is not that which commends itself to an inst nctively law-abiding community, even when the law-breaker is inspired by the noblest motives. But the fact that it should be necessary to break a law in order to carry out so exalted a task as that of working for humanity and for the elevation of the race is itself an outrage on something even higher than law. In educating the community and in remoulding the law in accordance with that education there is evidently still room for much work in America. III. — By acting in accordance with our knowledge. It is not enough to acquire a knowledge of the laws of heredity. It is not enough to spread a knowledge of the methods of birth control. Each of these separately, however desir- able, win scarcely effect much for the practical eugenic elevation of mankind. It is only when they are combined, in the Ught of a high sense of personal responsibility, to become a guiding motive of action that the task is achieved. For this high sense of responsibihty, directed towards individual action, hes at the root of the whole matter. Only so far as that is attained by an ever larger proportion of the community is eugenic progress either possible or desirable. In that attainment all is attained. This means that we need not trouble over-much con- cerning hasty eugenic legislation and the legal regulation of marriage. No doubt such legislation and regulation will from time to time be attempted, with whatever success, in new and crude communities. They have BIRTH CONTROL AND EUGENICS 141 brought on eugenists the charge of being faddists and cranks. They may be disregarded. The lines of eugenic progress are clear. There will be time to invoke com- pulsion and the law when sound knowledge has become universal and when we are quite sure that those who refuse to act in accordance with sound knowledge refuse dehberately or because they are congenitally incapable of doing anything else. These constitute the irreducible nucleus of the incapable group. They are at once a real anti-social danger and a focus of racial poisons. But they are a comparatively small and entirely manageable number of persons. It is on this nucleus that we not only may, but must, apply such degree of pressure as may be necessary, aUke in the interests of the community of to-day and the race of to-morrow. This pressure may in the mildest degree consist of such elementary social inducements as they may be amenable to, proceeding to steriHsation when these inducements fail, and in the ultimate and extreme degree to complete segregation. It is along such lines as these, and not by any fatuous and futile methods of imposing compulsion on the community at large, that we may reasonably expect eugenic progress. We can, each of us individually, work towards this goal. The radiating effects of definite enlightenment and of personal influence will steadily make clearer the precise boundaries of the nucleus we have to destroy. The present crisis in the history of the race is a challenge to our best endeavours XIII WAR AND THE SEX PROBLEM The condition of our streets in war-time, with their exhibition of the attraction of the soldier, has caused much scandal. It is an attraction, indeed, like that of magnetism, in which the elements on each side take part, in reality a quite natural process, and arising from an emotioned source which lies deeper than either vice or virtue. " To every man a damsel or two," we are told in the Bible, was the old rule in war, and, one way or another, so it has continued ever since. But it is long since war has been so near to us as it has been of late, and in front of this aspect of war, as of many others, the civihan raises his voice in loud protest, as at something new in the world. Yet it is almost as old as the world, and certainly older than history. Homer, who records the legendary story of a real war, describes it as being waged on account of a runaway wife, while women and disputes over women are woven into the whole story; even the gods in the sky who watch over the fighting are moved by the same passions. When we come to the unadulterated history of the Greeks we find the facts clearer, and long before the Christian era troops of women accompanied the Greek armies, 14a WAR AND THE SEX PROBLEM 143 while at the great seaport of Corinth the women who had succeeded the sacred priestesses of Venus were much sought by soldiers far from home, whom, we are told, they duly and thoroughly exploited. We still have our Corinths for soldiers from across the seas and far from home. If we leave the Greeks, we are told that Darius was accompanied in his conquering course across the world by three hundred and fifty concubines, and doubt- less his troops followed, as opportunity offered, the ex- ample of their great leader. The Romans introduced no change, and, indeed, strengthened the existing conditions by forbidding their soldiers to marry when on service. Even Christianity made no difference; it even demon- strated the fundamental nature of these relationships between man and woman by its complete powerlessness to change them, either by the fury of its moral denuncia- tions or the ferocity of its laws. This was seen even in the most Christian of all Christian wars, the Crusades to deliver Jerusalem from the Infidels; Louis IX. was a saint as well as a King, and he enacted the most drastic and pitiless decrees for suppressing prostitutes in France; yet a few years later he found that they were swarming outside his own tent on the sacred soil of Palestine. That the same state of things has continued on into our own time, in spite of the decrees of saints, kings, and generals, which have at the most disguised or changed its outward manifestations, it is scarcely necessary to show. It is clear why this should be so. We have, in the first place, the craving for feminine companionship felt by men far from home, a craving which, as it becomes more 144 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME acute, becomes more indifferent as to the method of its gratification. It was this demand, according to the traditional story, which first led Solon to institute at Athens those estabhshments of pubHc women which, whether regulated, unregulated, or nominally suppressed, have survived for at least two thousand five hundred years. There is, however, more in it than this. There is the special stimulation of battle and bloodshed. It used to be said that war unchained the wild beast in men. It would not be patriotic in any of the recently belligerent countries to say so to-day. But it is at least possible to remember that, even away from the excitement of war, the sight of blood has for many, if not most people, an emotional touch of terror or fascination. Aftet the fatigue and over-excitement of battle, as is noted by miUtary surgeons, any slight stimulation, even a very small dose of alcohol, may produce (more especially in those who are at all predisposed by unsound heredity) a condition almost approaching insanity. This emotional disturbance easily passes over into the sphere of sex, and so we have those scenes of orgy and Ucence which have always been noted as apt to occur after a victory. Then, on the othp hand, we have to bear in mind how this influence of war on men reacts on women, to produce a mingled emotional state of terror and fascination. The woman's instinct of timid shrinking from the soldier is only the reverse side of an instinct of fascinated attraction. Even in Germany, where the trappings of militarism are so familiar, this fascination is strong, especially in country districts during the autumn manoeuvres. This has often WAR AND THE SEX PROBLEM 145 caused diatnay to the Lutheran pastors, who thus see the strenuous moral and rehgious education to which they subject the girls of Germany so easily undone, and they have investigated the subject with the usual German thoroughness. " The fault is chiefly with the, girls," the pastors sadly complain, " for as soon as they see a soldier they become half mad." Here, as in the case of the soldiers themselves, we are in the presence of the stimulation of war and the symbols of war, deeper than either virtue or vice. Under the usual social conditions of the soldier's hfe it largely falls into shapes that are immoral rather than moral, so that as the first great authority on prostitution, Parent-Duchatelet, stated more than a century ago, " In the social order it is a law as constant as those of Nature that wherever soldiers are brought together prostitutes are found." When prosti- tutes are scarce good girls take their place, with results that vary according to stabihty of character and general social conditions. We see that we are here in the presence of deeply rooted natural facts. We cannot uproot them, and if we really desire to do so we must uproot war itself. Any palliatives we meanwhile apply may throw a veil over the surface, but cannot alter the nature of things. The favourite panacea seems, since it is not easy to treat soldiers as children, to concentrate attention on the women and treat them as children. But it is just a httle too late. We have put a large part of the world's work into the hands of women; they enjoy a freedom and responsibihty they have never possessed before; they are to be citizens K 146 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME and to exercise the vote; they have seen themselves, indeed, restored ahnost to the palmy days of savagery when men were occupied with fighting, himting, and loafing, and all the rest was woman's work. We caimot now turn round and say to them: " But if we think you're going to be naughty, we'll put you back in the nursery." It won't work. There is only one line of moral advance that is sound and sure, however slow it must inevitably be. It has often been pointed out. We need education, from eaily years in aU those matters of sex w^iich all need to know, and such education must not be mere instruction, but a slow training of emotions and ideas in face of the real facts of life. We need sound economic conditions and wholesome surroundings, so that none need be forced on downward paths. We need to cultivate the sense of responsibility, and the power of self-control in women as well as in men. Along these lines we may hope to make it easier for both sexes alike to attain the power of self- protection amid the inevitable risks of Mfe in war or in peace. For those who think that self-protection is a low and selfish aim, there is a higher ideal to aim at. And that is that every woman should learn to become the guardian of all men, and every masn the guardian of all women. The war is helping to give a new vitahty as weU as a new urgency to these demands. Even the present move- ment for encouraging easy and early marriage cannot fail to lead to results not always foreseen by those who are pushing it forward. How radical may be some of the WAR AND THE SEX PROBLEM 147 moral reforms caused by the war we have a little indica- tion in a recent inquiry in the United States. In moral matters America is a rather conservative and puritanic land, and even the American facility of divorce is the sign of an effort to make marriage a real and exclusive union. Now an inquiry has been carried on among a large number of people of aU kinds — men and women, clergymen, lawyers, teachers, doctors, business men, working men,etc., which has in some respects surprised those who started the inquiry.^ Thus, while the majority preferred religious marriage, more than a third of the remainder (nearly half being ministers of reUgion) approved of marriage by mutual agreement without legal ties. A considerable proportion in every group (except the ministers), nineteen per cent, of the men and nine per cent, of the women, are prepared to tolerate polygamy, while a ver^ large pro- portion, more than fifty per cent, in some groups, both of men and women, endorse legal and social approval of unmarried mothers, with Government aid These opinions are an attempt to grapple with the problems which the war is presenting to us. Nowhere will these problems be so acute as in our own country, where the disproportion of the sexes is already so great. It is clear that we have our work cut out in that approaching task of social reconstruction of which we hear so much. 1 See series of articles in New York Physical Culture, beginning Novem^jer, 1917. XIV THE UNMARRIED MOTHER In that work of moral reconstruction on which we are always engaged, however little we may be aware of it, the remoulding of the social attitude towards the un- married mother begins to be conspicuously visible. For this, needless to say, the war is largely though not ex- clusively responsible, both directly and indirectly. It is easily possible to exaggerate the increased sexual irregu- larity which accompanies wars. But there is no doubt that, in more than one way, war cannot fail to lead directly to raise the proportion of unmarried mothers. Indirectly also, especially after a war of such magnitude, the effect is even greater in consequence of the resultant inequaUty of the sexes. Prinzing has foimd, in European countries generally, that the chief determinant of ille- gitimacy Ues in the ratio of the number of unmarried males capable of paternity to the number of mmiEirried women capable of bearing children in a commxmity. All other factors, it appears^ such as improved social con- ditions, legislation, emd the increased use of contraceptives, are merely incidental, and do not largely affect the essential relationship.^ If this rule is sound, and it 1 F. Prinzing, Zeitschrift fiir Sozialwissenschaft, vol. v., 1902. 148 THE UNMARRIED MOTHER 149 scarcely seems to have been seriously disputed, if the larger the circle of nubile women surrounding a virile man, the larger the number of illegitimate children, it is evident that, since the war, in all the belligerent countries we are approximating an age and sex distribution of the popula- tion which will inevitably increase the number of un- married mothers. While, however, the war has tended to accelerate the development of the social consciousness in this direction, the movement was in progress long before the war, and was becoming registered in social and legal reforms, according to the stage of progress reached in different coimtries. In Germany, where most study has been given to the question, most social progress was made. Some years ago, the city of Leipzig initiated the method whereby illegitimate children automatically become the wards of officially appointed guardians, a method likely to spread widely. In Germany, also, subsequent marriage, o» even the appUcation of the father, suffices to legiti- matise a child. In Hungary the illegitimate child has a right to claim maintenance from the State until twelve years of age. It is in Norway, however, that we now find the most radical measures taken for the support of the illegitimate child, which has a right to its father's name, belonging to his family as much as to the mother's, and is entitled to be supported by both parents in accor- dance with the financial status of that parent whose economic condition is superior; moreover, the illegitimate child inherits equally with the legitimate children. The Norwegian law, it may be added, while dealing so gener- 150 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME ously with the illegitimate child, tries to avoid any undue generosity towards the illegitimate mother; she must receive no support from the child's father beyond her confinement ejipenses, and is herself compelled to con- tribute towards the child's support, while the State and not the mother is the mediator between the child and its father; yet in practice it can scarcely fail that the credit given to the illegitimate child must also reflect favourably on its mother's social position. In the " Anglo-Saxon " countries there has been no such pronounced moral and social reconstructive progress registrable by changes in law. There have been out- bursts of popular indignation when the unmarried mother is treated with unusual harshness, and there has been a recognised tendency to regard infanticide by an un- married mother as something less than murder in view of the fact that in such a case the mother is the instrument of the social opinion of her environment. Moreover, our War Government has in some degree quietly readjusted the unmarried mother's economic position, when she is dependent on a soldier, by refusing to distinguish her from the married mother. But there has been no revision of the English law in the matter of legitimating the unmarried mother's child for nearly half a century; it has never even been assimilated to the more advanced law Of Scotland, and substantially stands as it stood in Norman t mes when the feudal English barons made their famous declaration refusing to change the laws of England, in opposition to the Canon Law of the Church, which was on this point reasonable and humane. THE UNMARRIED MOTHER 151 This comparative stagnation has been accompanied, and doubtless encouraged, by a lack of careful study, in striking contrast with the thorough and persistent investi- gation which has gone on in Germany, Especially has there been a remarkable absence of detailed histories revealing the special characteristics of the unmarried mother. This deficiency has now been made good by the admirable volume written by Mr. Percy Kammerer for the series of Criminal Science Monographs issued by the American Institute of Law and Criminology, and recom- mended by a Preface from Dr. WiUiam Healy of Chicago, now the foremost American criminologist, and notable for his skill in adopting some of the methods of psycho- analysis to the scientific investigation of misconduct and the reformative treatment of delinquents.^ The book thus comes from America, but the conditions described are not remote from those existing in England; indeed, among the cases described there are nearly as many women of British as of American birth, more if we include the French Canadians, and the proportion of illegitimate births in the United States, though widely different from that found in some European countries, is roughly the same as in England. The book consists in part of a condensed summary of the present state of knowledge concerning the unmarried mother and her child, with a statement of the legal position in various countries, but mainly of a statistical study of five hundred original cases, with the reproduction 1 Percy Kammerer, The Unmarried Mother, Boston. (Little, Brown, and Co., 1918.) 152 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME of a large number of these detailed histories arranged to illustrate a dozen or more different types or classes of unmarried mother. Thus constituted, the whole work is certainly the most valuable study of unmarried mothers yet written in English; in some respects, indeed, there is no other book even to compare with it. The author is well aware that his cases, and indeed any other series of available histories, must necessarily fail to present a completely representative picture of the im- married mother. It is probable that we are all privately acquainted with cases of unmarried women who disappear from their famiUes for a while to reappear under a new name, with a child, as widows, or of a child bom too soon, who after the subsequent marriage of the parents is, with a little manipulation, deftly inserted into the legitimate family, whUe a still larger number of immarried mothers are able to dispose of their children elsewhere, and so have no occasion to figure in their own circle as mothers of any kind. A considerable proportion of unmarried mothers is thus eliminated from study, and they are the socially superior, as well as the most capable and inteUigent women. The result is that the pictmre presented of the unmarried mother is psychologically somewhat inferior to that demanded by the real facts, but socially this is of httle consequence. Kammerer finds that the causes which lead an un- married girl to become a mother are complex, and no one factor is ever all-determining. But he seeks in every individual case, so far as possible, to disentangle the various factors. With the factor of heredity that is THE UNMARRIED IIOTHER 153 difficult, for while ^ye must certainly attach high imf)or- tance to heredity (without allowing that the tendency to produce an illegitimate child can in itself be regarded as inheritable), the ancestral traits are usually difficult to determine, and it has not been possible to regard heredity as a major factor in a single case. Bad environment is dealt with in much greater detail, and includes absence from home, bad home conditions, vicious neighbourhoods, uncongenial surroundings, lack of recreation, and con- taminating industrial conditions. Signfficance under the last head is attached to long hours and monotony: " laxity of moral fibre follows physical debility." It is. noted that ninety-nine per cent, of the waitresses among the recorded cases complained of bad health brought on by standing so long in their occupation. Considerable importance is attached 'to recreational disadvantages; the working girl of to-day is often employed in such arduous tasks that her energy can only find recuperation in exciting recreations apt to be accompanied by the risk of sexual over-stimulation. Kammerer regards both wholesome recreations and some mental interests as " supremely important " for the sublimation of the sex instinct. Educational disadvantages are also found to be a factor in many cases, and especially the fact that " a large number of girls are actually woefully ignorant of the nature and expression of the most dominant instinct in life." Sexually, the unmarried mothers may be regarded as fairly normal, and exhibiting the normal amount of variation (it is rather by lack of self-control that they differ from the normal) ; in most cases they are 134 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME not passive, but are equally responsible with the father for their condition; the ages of the fathers, moreover, indicate normal sexual attraction; stories of assault (which show an astonishing similarity in invention) nearly always break down on investigation. Of aU the causative factors, bad home conditions seem the most important; to these the author devotes his longest chapter, and insists on the need of the education of parents, as well as a greater degree of State interference with the home, when required. The importance alike of home conditions and industrial conditions, as they exist to-day, in producing the un- married mother sufficiently indicates the complexity of this social problem, and shows that we can by no means expect its speedy disappearance. It is indeed usually in progressive and well-educated countries that the illegitimacy rate is highest; little or no relationship is found between illegitimacy and low wages, while, as we know, though the fact is not too loudly proclaimed, it is among poor, backward, and illiterate communities (as in Ireland and Brittany) that what with dubious etymo- logical soundness we call " virtue " most flourishes. There are some compensations. Many notable and even great figures in history and culture were illegitimate children, down to quite recent times, though nowadays they do not proclaim themselves as " sons of God," nor proudly add the title of " the Bastard " to their names, but are carefully camouflaged, as we are wont to term it, against the attacks of the dreaded enemy. Society. Even when she fails to produce a distinguished child, it is THE UNMARRIED MOTHER 153 a little unreasonable and illogical, as Dr. Healy here remarks, to class among the anti-social agents of destruc- tion the woman whose work is constructive, and presents to us, as th& fruits of her " misbehaviour," Nature's highest product. Social reformers have sometimes tried to distinguish between the unmarried mother and her child, and (as in the new Norwegian laws) have made up for increased indulgence towards the one by increased austerity towards the other. But the mother and child belong together, and the histories here presented show that their association is frequently beneficial to both. As Kammerer points out in his wise and liberal-minded chapter of " Conclusions," the evils from high mortality, infanticide, public hypocrisy, and dishonesty of attitude towards sex questions, caused by striking at the un- married mother, are disproportionate to any benefit gained for society. Without condonation for sexual laxness, we must recognise that we are simply in the presence of " an unfortunate social and biological maladjustment." State aid, when required, need never be refused to the unmarried mother; she will not go through the agonies iiivolved by her position merely for the sake of obtaining it. Throughout this admirable investigation, the author is inspired by the high aim of guiding enlightened public opinion to a new attitude towards^:he unmarried mother.^ In removing common misconceptions, and in showing ^ There is still room for enlightenment, moral as well as iptellectual. Almost as I write I receive an appeal for subscriptions from a Benevolent Fund (duly " Registered under the War Charities Act ") for the assist- ance of ill-paid women munition workers, and find that the managers smugly assure the charitable public that " no maternity case of an unmarried woman has been assisted from this Fund." 156 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME how largely the unmarried mother is the creature of society, he believes that he is helping to induce that social state of mind in which the whole question of sex will be lifted from the filth of the street to its proper spiritual setting. " No single cultural advance," he concludes, " could be of greater importance to society." XV THE MIND OF WOMAN The question of the mental characteristics of women, while it still retains psychological interest and practical impor- tance, has been much narrowed down in recent times. Of old there were always champions of the intellectual excellence of women (usually masculine champions), but they appeared to be maintaining a brilliant paradox. Most people, whether men or women, seem to have felt that women had little use for mind: it was their husbands' business to furnish 4;hat; their part was to seek knowledge, as th&y were taught to seek God, through men. The sphere of women was generally held to be Clothes, Cookery, Children. It had not apparently become clear that there is no sphere more important and none in which the exercise of intellect is more supremely desirable. Popular theories received a rude blow from that great eighteenth- century movement of thought, culminating in the French Revolution, which taught that all human beings are bom equal and that differences are merely due to environmental conditions, to social inequahties. Useful as this move- ment in practice was, the notion itself, though it still has its belated survivors among ourselves, was crude and simple-minded as a complete account of the matter. The IS7 158 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME more searching biological method of the nineteenth century arose, and led to a reaction which at first fostered new superstitions on a pseudo-scientific basis, for it was widely asserted that women, even by the anatomical conformation of their brains, are intellectuedly inferior. Now that view also only possesses historical interest. It is almost undisputed that a species, like our own, which has reached so high a degree of success could only have progressed through the possession of a marked superiority in both sexes. The question has thus lost something of the interest which it may have possessed when it was a kind of game of sex rivalry; to-day, when we see a sex animus of this kind introduced into the question, we know at once that the discussion has been placed on an antiquated and unprofitable foundation. Yet the problem of the varying mental characteristics of men and women still possesses a very real interest, for we know that sexual differences are consistent with sexual equahty, and we know, more- over, that psychic sexual differences are inevitable so long as there are physical sexual diflEerences, for since body and mind are linked at every point, like minds in imUke bodies are imthinkable. One of the most interesting and most discussed aspects of this question is the sexual distribution of genius. It is by no means a matter of primary practical importance, for genius is always a rare and incalculable element in human hfe. But it is so often dragged to the front in the consideration of the question before us that it is necessary that we should know how to deal with it, as against those THE MIND OF WOMAN 159 who have too summarily settled its significance in the light of their own prejudices, whether on one side or the other. Genius, as roughly distinguished from talent — ^which simply means the abihty to do better what others do well — ^is the far rarer abiUty to do something which others have hitherto been unable to do. Such abihty involves a radically abnormal temperament, for it means seeing the world from a different angle from other people and feeUng it with a different sensibility. Such a person is neces- sarily sohtary, a rebel at heart, and highly charged with an energy which manifests itself in play, or in work which has the characteristics and the zest of play. This energy is derived from a rjeservoir which, it is sometimes held, normally yields the energy of sex or the energy of war, and is in genius diverted into a new channel. Among people with much sexual energy or much fighting energy — as was notably the case among the Greeks — ^we should thus expect to find genius more than usually abundant. Now if, striving to put aside anything we may have heard regarding the sexual distribution of genius, we ask ourselves which sex in the human species is the more apt to be abnormal, solitary, rebelhous, playful, with the greater reserves of sexual energy and fighting energy behind it, most people, it is probable, would find them- selves in agreement. As a matter of fact, genius, as generally recognisable, is incomparably more often met with in men than in women. There is no doubt on this point. Among British persons of genius, placing the question on an objective basis, I found that only 5-3 per i6o ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME cent, were women, while, in history generally. Professor CatteU finds it is 3-2 per cent. Dr. Cora Castle in a more special and comprehensive study of eminent women foimd, a little to her dismay, that from the dawn of history to the present day only 868 women have " accompHshed an5d:hing that history has recorded as worth while." Moreover, the eminence thus attained has by no means always been due to ability, but often to quite other qualities and even to the accident of position. By Dr. Castle's objective method. Queen Mary of Scots comes out as the most eminent woman of history, and while she was doubtless a woman who would have attracted attention in whatever social circle she had been bom, she was not a woinan of genius and very dubiously even a woman of talent. There is no doubt about the fact, but when the question is thus placed upon a foundation much broader than that of genius in the narrow sense of the term, it is easy to see that, up to a certain point, the fact has no significance. Women have not so often been eminent as men, for the very good reason that they have not so often had occasion to be eminent. Even as queens, though they have shone on the throne, women have had less occasion for eminence than men, because they have not alwajrs been ehgible as monarchs. In the learned professions, where talent so easily leads to success and fame, women have been more decisively shut out from eminence, for, save very occasion- ally, these have been absolutely closed to women until yesterday, and are to some extent closed still. That is a completely adequate reason why in the list of eminent THE MIND OF WOMAN i6r women great lawyers, great preachers, great politicians, ,who so abound among eminent men, have no existence. For the display of talent, even for the exhibition of notoriety, opportunity is necessary, and such opportunity has not been accorded in the same measure to women as to men, in some countries and at some periods, indeed, has not been accorded at all. But it is another matter when, as in the past so often happened, " lack of opportunity " was invoked to explain the deficiency of women of genius in the narrow and special sense. A little consideration would soon have shown the emptiness of that unintelligent parrot cry. Even the very fact that opportunity is so essential for the attainment of success in the ordinary social and competi- tive fields of accepted ability might have suggested a doubt whether opportunity is of much value in the develop- ment of genius, which is necessarily novel and soUtary, a revolt against the abiUties of the ordinary social and competitive fields, and perhaps a lifelong object of hatred, contempt, or, at the best, indifference, to the community in which the unhappy genius-possessed victim Hves. The world has never offered opportunities to genius in men, and it might even be said that for the sake of a little charm or a touch of piquancy it is readier to condone genius in women than in the other sex. As a matter of fact, however, women of genius have had just the same diffi- culties to overcome as men of genius, and they have over- come them exactly as men have overcome them, single- handed and in the end triumphant. This has been so even on the stage, where one might imagine that a woman's i62 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME path is easy. It is true that some great actresses, and also some great actors, have been bom to the stage, being themselves the children of actors. But many actresses — a far larger proportion than have enjoyed the advantages of respectable middle-class birth — ^have sprung out of the gutter, slowly and painfuUy to attain success and favour. One of the greatest of actresses, Mademoiselle Clairon, has left an autobiography which supplies a highly instructive picture of the thorny path of genius in women. A seven-months child, weak and small, harshly brought up by a superstitious and violent mother, in ignorance of all the refinements of life, and knowing nothing up to the age of eleven but how to read a Prayer- Book, she yet rebelled against the career of work-girl for which she was intended. It so happened that she was often shut up, alone and without occupation, in a room from which, by standing on a chair, she was able to look across the street into the room opposite, which, by a strange chance, was occupied by a popular young soubrette actress, and here she could see the actress taking her dancing lessons. That vision decided Clairon's career, but she was still only at the beginning of a long series of difficulties which, with infinite patience and skill, she finally overcame. How little all that~"we understand by opportunity — social equality, edutational faciUties, open professional careers — counts for in the development of genius in woman is shown by the remarkable fact brought out by Dr. Castle that in the most recent historical period eminence has been attained by a proportionately smaller number of THE MIND OF WOMAN 163 women than was the case in the eighteenth century. This is so as regards England, France, and Germany, as well as America. Italy is, in a small degree, an exception; but, on the other hand, Italy in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries was more prolific in eminent woinen than in either the eighteenth or the nineteenth. Even within the ordinary range of ability it would appear that opportunity, as tested by that college training which is usually held to mean so much for men, plays but a very small part. A few years ago, Amanda Northrop investi- gated the 977 successful women of Arrierica on the basis of Who's Who in America, and found that only 15-5 per cent, of them had received a college training. Moreover, the college played a decreasing part, and the percentage of successful American women who had been college-bred was less for those born between i860 and 1870 than for any preceding period. The fact is that all that we conventionally term "oppor- tunity " is wasted on genius, worse than wasted, for in the midst of such opportunity genius runs the risk of being stifled. Genius is more likely to be at home in the gutter or in the desert, and it is out of such soils that the most exquisite genius has sometimes grown. During the Middle Ages, women in the cloister enjoyed just the same opportunities as men for the development of genius, but the one woman of literary genius who arose in the cloister during all those ages, Hroswitha, wrote plays which are in violent and startling contrast to the cloistered life. If genius is less often manifested in women than in men, the cause is not to be found in environment, but within; it is i64 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME an intimate secret of structure and mechanism. We find genius more often in men, just as we find transposed viscera or twelve- toed feet more often in men, just as we also find that even the papillary ridges of the fingers show greater polymorphism and asymmetry in men than in women. For the cultivation of such anomaHes aU the opportunities of the world are offered in vain. When we turn from genius to what we commonly regard as its opposite — that is to say, to idiocy, although it would really appear that genius and idiocy are more closely related than we usually imagine — we seem to see a similar preponderance of the male. There is no question that in all institutions for the feeble-minded idiocy, in most of its varying forms and degrees, is more prevalent in males. It is true that Miss Leta HoUingworth, on the ground of her experience at the New York Clearing-House for Defectives, argues that there is a fallacy in the results presented by institutions. There is not the same amount of social pressure on girls as on boys, she holds, so that the feeblest-minded girls are not so readily driven out of the world by the stress of mental competition. The un- doubted fact that girls are more precocious than boys is also a protection to them from this point of view; a female of the mental age of six (as measured by the Binet scale). Miss HoUingworth states, survives in society about as well as a male of the mental age of ten or eleven. Even apart from this, it is much easier for the weak-minded woman to obtain employment than for the weak- minded man; in her own feminine environment her weak- mindedness is much less likely to attract attention than THE MIND OF WOMAN 165 that of the weak-minded man in his environment. There may be something in this argument. It falls into line with the conclusion of Cyrus Mead in Indiana that feeble- minded girls more nearly approximate to normal girls than feeble»minded boys to normal boys. And that conclusion again, is but a special example of the wider law of which every student in the great field of sexua differentiation is for ever finding confirmation, that the organic characteristics of man vary more widely, more extravagantly, than those of woman, who tends, as it were, to keep closer to her centre of gravity. Even if we are disposed, with Miss Hollingworth, to regard the greater tendency of the male to idiocy as a mere fallacy, due to women being normally nearer to the threshold of idiocy than man, but able by their precocity and cleverness to disguise the fact, we should still have to recognise that we are in the presence of an exception to a general tendency. For most of the congenital abnormahties to which we may most properly compare idiocy are recognised as more prevalent among males than among females. There is, in other words, a greater variational tendency of the male. A " variation," as it has always been understood by biologists, who were necessarily the first to be concerned with this phenomenon, is a congenital anomaly due to some early deviation of growth not traceably of the nature of disease, , Colour- blindness is a typical variation, and as is so often the case with variations, it is much more frequent in males than in females. So it is also with left-handedness and albinism and congenital deaf-mutism, as well as with most of the i66 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME various physical abnormalities. This tendency was well recognised by Darwin as by most biologists. Some years ago, however, investigators who were not biologists entered this field and confused the issues by appl5dng statistical methods which in themselves were undoubtedly sound and accurate, to data which had no connection with the innate variational tendency, so that, notwith- standing aU the vaunted virtues of the methods, the results attained could only be unsound and inaccurate. Those methods were specially apphed to differences in size, even in the size of adults — for here was a seductive field for the mathematical statistician — and conclusions were drawn as to the comparative " variability " of the sexes on this basis. It should have been obvious that nothing could thus be learnt concerning the comparative incidence of innate variations in males or females. At the best the inquiry would have to be restricted to the time of birth, and even then was Hable to be affected by fallacies. This is now, no doubt, generally recognised, and most biologists to-day seem prepared to reaffirm the old doctrine of Darwin, that variations are more apt to appear in males than in females. This question of the comparative frequency in men and women of the two extremes of intellect and idiocy is of considerable interest, and so much weight has sometimes been placed upon it that it has been necessary to discuss it with some care. But its practical importance, it must be repeated, is small. The concerns of life are carried on within the ordinary range of intelligence, and sexual differences here, if there are any, must produce much more THE MIND OF WOMAN 167 effect than even the most striking differences at either of the two extreme ends. Such ordinary differences in intelligence can be studied either in the school among the young, or among adults in the various vocations which men and women follow together. Precise investigation, however, encounters many difficulties. There is, for instance, the very fundamental difficulty as regard^ adults that while men and women are employed together in many occupations, it is by no means easy to find them doing exactly the same work together under exactly the same conditions. Nearly always some fairly obvious consideration, such as the undesirability of giving night- work to women, or the impossibility for them of work involving a heavy strain on the muscles, causes a sexual division of labour, and this is fatal to any precise investi- gation into sexual differences. I encountered this diffi- culty many years ago when I endeavoured to ascertain the experience of the English Post Office, which employs so large a number of both men and women clerks. Al- though the work of the post-office clerk, male and female, may seem to the public so uniform, yet it was practically impossible to find men and women doing exactly the same work together under exactly the same conditions. It was thus impossible to secure any precise and unimpeachable data reveahng sexual differences in intelligence and ability. Nothing was forthcoming but opinions of officials, founded on experience, it is true, but necessarily "TTf a merely general character, and these opinions on the whole fairly bjdanced each other. That seems to be the result nearly always found in the long run in the occupa- i68 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME tions in which both men and women axe employed. Real conflict of opinion only occurs when there is a question of introducing women into an occupation previously exer- cised by men. Conservative prejudice in such a case induces the beUef that women are not fitted for this occupation, and after experiment there may be a reaction to the contrary behef that they are better fitted for it than men. This happened lately in England with regard to fruit-picking. The farmers held that women would not be able to do this work so well as men; but the shortage of men owing to the war made the employment of women necessary, and then the farmers enthusiastically declared that the women excelled the men. It will probably be found in the end that the aptitudes of the sexes for this, as for other occupations, are, taken all round, about equal. Such differences as practical experi- ence reveals generally are not in inteUigence, but are merely the results in skill and aptitude of fundamental sexual distinctions, which are obvious and weU recognised. Such are the much greater average muscular develop- ment and power of men, the Habihty of women under ordinary industrial and civihsed conditions to suffer disturbance from their periodic functions, the compara- tive lack of occupational interest in women due to the fact that they usually look forward to marriage as their eventual career, and the inevitable reaction on conduct in hfe of the different nature of the primary sexual activities, the aggressive energy of the male and the maternal protectiveness of the female, qualities which become transformed in the ordinary course of hfe into THE MIND OF WOMAN 169 initiative activity in men and social and philanthropic activity in women. Such differences seem rarely to have any measurable practical influence on intelligence, except in so far as they produce fatigue, and even in aptitude and skill, it has been found, at some time or some place, that women have been able to exercise efficiently every occupation, even the most strenuous, exercised by men. The only vocation of men which women have never exercised, save very rarely and on the smallest scale, is the soldier's. We may perhaps conclude that fighting is not, in the complete sense, a human vocation. It is at the same time quite true that attempts have been made, on a more or less scientiiic basis, to ascertain psychic sexual differences in adults. Perhaps the most notable attempt in recent years is that set forth by Professor Hejmians, of the Dutch University of Groningen, in his very interesting book. Die Psychologie der Frauen. Professor Heymans is a trained scientific psychologist; he is unusually free from bias, and he belongs to a country where women have long enjoyed a considerable degree of equahty with men. He employed the Enquete method, and sent out detailed questionnaires to Dutch physicians concerning the families they were acquainted with. It is a disputed method, but on this occasion some of its disadvantages were avoided. The physicians were women as well as men, and their answers concerning individuals of each sex, given in percentages, may be compared and any sexual bias, if present, easily be revealed. Heymans concludes that the chief fundamental distinction between men and women is the greater emotionahty (or as I have 170 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME termed it, affectability) of women. The figures given by the women observers showed this even more clearly than those of the men. Consequently all the mental, moral, and other characters, desirable or undesirable, which are correlated with emotionality, are especially found in women, and will continue so to be found so long as emotionality is more marked in women than in men. This need not necessarily be for ever. Heymans regards it, indeed, as fundamental, and puts aside with contempt the notion of those who imagine that education or even racial experience can have created the characteristics of the sexes; it is much more likely, he declares, iollowing Steinmetz, that sexual differences influenced culture than that culture created sexual differences. But fundamental differences can probably be modified by sexual selection; men mould the women of the future, and women mould the men of the future, by the ideals which affect their choice in marriage. Women are what they are because men have so far chosen them so, and men have likewise been created by women's choice. In so far as the sexual difference in emotionaUty is more fundamental than this, He5rmans makes no attempt at explaining it. It may not, however, be altogether beyond explanation. Although the congenital variational tendency may be more marked in men, the very different quaHty of variabiUty is more marked in women. Souvent femme varie is a physiological verity. Such variability is inevitable in an organism so 'argely concerned with reproduction, and may well constitute the physical side of emotionality. So that even the most admired qualities of feminine intelligence. THE MIND OF WOMAN 171 in so far as they are correlated with emotionality, may have a deep physiological root. On the whole, we are not brought by either experience or science to any precise or detailed knowledge of these minute and subtle mental differences between men and women which yet, we cannot fail to believe, inevitably exist. We turn more hopefully to the school and the college, where boys and girls are fouiid working in the same way under the same conditions, and have been subjected during recent years to a vast amount of experi- mentation, especially in America and in Germany, Even here, however, we meet with fallacies at the outset. One such fallacy of fundamental importance is the greater precocity, physical and mental, of girls. This is marked even from infancy, and it seems now to be proved that girls walk and talk earher than boys. The female — ^it is perhaps a general tendency in nature — tends to attain complete development earlier than the male. The mediaeval canonists of the cloister recognised this difference, which they estimated at two years, and explained by the maxim, " III weeds grow apace." To-day, one imagines that nature, aware of the special stress which will be placed upon woman by reason of her preponderant part in reproduction, anxiously hastens her development in preparation for that stress. The result is that the girl tends to be a more capable and intelhgent person than the boy of the same age. This is a fact which seems to be unknown to those legislators- whose mania it is to make laws for the " protection " of young women. It is also overlooked by those who consider that the comparison 172 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME of data derived from the examination of school children is finally decisive for sexual differences. The inteUectnal tasks of school life are not those of adult life in the world, and even if they were we could by no means be sure that sexual differences would remsiin the same as in early life. Men, it would seem, often continue to progress after women have ceased progressing, and thus illustrate the old fable of the hare and the tortoise; ia one small field, that of drill work in arithmetic, this seems to have been clearly shown, and the majority of investigators report a better rate of improvement in boys even though girls may at the outset have been faster. Such investigations have led to the generalisation that while girls are more industrioTis than boys, the natmral limits to which girls can raise themselves by industry are sooner reached than by boys. It is generally agreed by investigators that boys are superior to girls in judgment and reasoning, in mathe- matics, and in analytical processes generally, for there is, as Heymans and others have concluded, a deep feminine disUke of analysis, probably connected with the emotion- aUty of women. In most other respects schoolgirls seem to be either equal to schoolboys or superior. The general result is that dviring school life girls stand better than boys of the same age in most measures of general intelli- gence. The girls are decidedly better in the majority of tests of memory, which counts for so much in most branches of school work, and it is also generally held that they are more impartially industrious. It must at the same time be pointed out that these qualities are by no THE MIND OF WOMAN 173 means necessarily the highest qualifications for success on a wider stage of life. Memory, as Josiah Morse has found, is the chief aptitude in which coloured children excel, while they are inferior to white children, as girls are inferior to boys, in judgment and reasoning. Special aptitude, again, so important for future life, is not correlated, as Ivanoff found at Geneva, notably in regard to drawing, with general inteUigence or impartial industry. Here, as ever, we find that advantages are balanced by disadvantages. The student in this field may best prepare himself for the inevitable conclusion by devoutly reading Emerson's essay on Compensation. It is something even to be able to feel confidence in this conclusion which still remains so vague. Sexual differ- ences in mind are deeply rooted, even though subtle and elusive, and in their distribution a balancing equivalence prevails. We are still only at the beginning of the inquiry, as all careful investigators insist. That is why so many of the statements reached seem to be contradictory. Frau Rosa Mayreder, in her thoughtful Survey of the Woman Problem, has brought forward some of these contradictions with gentle ridicule. It must be remem- bered, however, that a sex which presented no contra- diction in its characteristics could scarcely present any- thing of vital worth ; even a nation of any worth presents vital contradictions. Moreover, seeming contradictions, when really well based, can often be reconciled in a higher unity, even when they are not due mainly to the varying influence of different temperaments or different environ- ments. Some insist on the petty immoraUties of women. 174 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME as shown, for instance, in a predilection for smuggluig, and others on their over-conscientiousness, as shown by the frequent breakdown in health of workgirls when promoted to the post of manageress or forewoman. It is easy to accept such seemingly opposed conclusions without disputing the truth of either. So with the greater S5mip,athy of women, and at the same time their greater cruelty; these are but two diverse aspects of the same emotfonality. Similarly, the narrow conclusions of the specialist are often misleading, even when just. Dr. Mathilde von Kemmitz, a Munich gynaecologist, has lately come to the conclusion that the majority of the intellectual women of to-day are " asthenically infantile," adding that this cannot be assumed to be either a cause or a result of their intellectual activity, and that we can draw no conclusions from it regarding either the women of to-morrow or women in general. This is no doubt an admirably cautious reserve. But if she had possessed a wider outlook. Dr. Mathilde von Kemmitz might have reached a more illuminating conclusion. There is an element of the child in the man of genius; it is not there- fore surprising that we should find it also in women of the same temperament ; when, moreover, we reflect that it is precisely in the infant that brain and nervous mass are relatively largest, it would be surprising if high intellect were not associated with a tendency to the presence of the infantile type. The facts of the speciaUst, however carefuUy wrought, taken separately, teU us nothing. Yet they are the precious fragments of mosaic by which alone we can form any large and harmonious picture of the universe. XVI "EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK" We have heard much of this formula lately and are likely to hear more of it in the near future. Like other formulas, however, which have the air of fundamental and unassail- able axioms — from " All men are equal " onwards — it proves on examination difficult to interpret. This is especially the case when it is applied in the sphere of women's work. When we seek to regard this as a purely economic question difficulties arise, and when we attempt to struggle with these difficulties we discover that it is not a purely economic question we are dealing with, but also a social question, a psychological question, a physio- logical and even biological question. Its basis is broad laid in the whole of life, and unless we reaUse that we cannot hope to grasp it effectively. At the same time, while we have to recognise that it is broader than we are apt to suppose, we have also to recognise that it is narrower than it seems to many. The obligation to realise that a Subject is large and complex implies the corresponding obligation to exclude from it all extraneous elements which merely confuse the issue. There is especially one such confusing and obscuring element, introduced with a matter-of-fact air, and so 175 176 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME persistently accepted, that it must be clearly put aside at the outset. That element is the notion that payment for work must be related to the number of the worker's " dependants." On that notion, elevated into a principle, has been established the rule, still prevailing in a great many fields of work, that men have more dependants than women, and that therefore men workers must receive a higher rate of payment than women workers. This " principle " is really a subterfuge — an excuse for obtain- ing a large class of workers at less than a market price which happens indeed to have been established for men, but certainly without any regard to the question of men's dependants — but it is still so well estabhshed that it must be dealt with seriously, although the assumptions it involves and the absurdities it leads to ought to be evident to all. Even if we are so simple-minded as to accept the fiction,that children are dependants on their fathers and not on their mothers, it must not be taken for granted that even unmarried women have no dependants; it is probable that they have just as many dependants, that they work quite as often for parents and sisters, as un- married men. The unreaUty of this doctrine of the male worker's dependants is not only shown by the fact that the immarried man is not put on the level of pay of the immarried woman, but on that of the married man. It is shown still more crudely in the fact that when the woman has actually been married and has a family directly dependant on her there is seldom, indeed, any question of putting her in the same position of advantage in regard to pay as in the like case falls as a matter of course to the "EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK" 177 man. The County Council school teacher may be married if a man, but must not be married if a woman, so as to enable the Council to pay the woman teacher a much lower salary than the njan. It is an ingenious device, which results in excluding from the teaching profession exactly the women who are best able to understand children. But when, as has happened during the war, circumstances have made it desiraule to employ a married woman as teacher, with children dependant upon her, there has been no question of paying her the salary which would as a irtatter of course be paid to the man teacher, whether or not he has any dependants. It may be remarked, also, that if we are here really concerned with a " principle," it is only just that it should be invoked in favour of the employer as well as of the worker. If the worker with dependants is entitled to be placed in a more favourable position than the worker without dependants, then the employer with dependants is entitled to the same privileges, and the worker can ask for higher wages from an unmarried employer than from the married employer with dependants. Moreover, it becomes clear that if the " principle " is sound it must logically be appUed not only to wages but to prices generally. It is evident that on this basis a man with a large family requires a higher price for his produce than an unmarried man. A greengrocer, for instance, must regulate the price of his cabbages, not merely by the market prices and the other subsidiary conditions he is accustomed to invoke, but may boldly undertake to regulate them by the size of his family. When a child died he would at all events M 178 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME have the consolation of being able to announce: " Great reduction in cabbages !" There is, indeed, no end to the absurdities into which we are led when this so-called " principle " is once admitted, and it is strange that it should still be necessary to discuss it seriously. The fundamental fact that faces us when we apply to women the formula of ' ' equal pay for equal work ' ' is this : we are no longer deahng with quite the same kind of work- producing machines. Woman is a different machine from man, with all sorts of special characters which are not yet understood, though they have been in existence for untold thousands of years, and with one fairly definite difference, in that woman is a smaller machine, therefore demanding less fuel (three-fourths to five-sixths, according to different scientific estimates and different conditions), and therefore with a normally smaller output. This clearly recognisable difference, it may be as well to add, is not an accident, due to temporary or modifiable conditions. It is clearly discernible in the palaeoHthic Krapina Man of the Mousterian Age tens of thousands of years ago, under climatic, bioloigical, and social conditions altogether unlike those existing to-day. According to a leading authority. Professor Keith, the sexual differences in the Krapina Man g,re " as great if not greater than are seen in modern races," the woman being much less massive, robust, and brutal than the man. Turning to the people more nearly related to us of the Reihengraber of Central Europe, at a very much later though still pre- historic period, we, find, among a short tribe, that the women were on the average four inches shorter than the "EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK" 179 men, while among a remarkably tall tribe, much larger than ourselves, the women were twelve inches shorter than the men. The difference which such figures indicate is fundamental. The skeleton is the structure in which the muscles are rooted, and it is the strength of that structure conditioning the strength of the muscles which largely determines the work-producing power of the human machine. Roughly, the force of a woman's hand, as measured by the dynamo- meter, is two-thirds that of a man's. Similarly, the aver- age woman golf-player, it is said, lifts the ball about two- thirds of the distance of the average man. These esti- mates are unusually favourable to women. As a rule the power of the muscles in woman is less than two-thirds that in man, often little more than half, even less. In power of leg muscles, which have been more equally developed in the sexes, women show better than in the arm muscles; but the inferiority, even as regards the thigh muscles (which are women's strongest point after the muscles of the tongue, according to Waldeyer), is still marked, and as regards the muscles of the trunk the inferiority is most marked of all.^ To-day, it has been stated, a postman can carry a load of thirty-five pounds, a postwoman cannot comfortably carry more than twenty pounds, a little over half; and the chairman of the South Metropolitan Gas Company informed the shareholders (in 1916) that the amount of work turned out by a woman is about two-thirds that of a man. Similarly in Germany, 1 Havelock ElJis, Man and Woman, ch. vii. Dr. Clelia Mosher has lately found some other muscles relatively stranger in women. i8o ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME where 100,000 women are employed on the railways, the efl&ciency of women for purely manual labour is found to be between 50 and 75 per cent, that of men. The relative muscular force of men and women was elaborately investigated in America some twenty years ago by Kellogg. He found that while the average woman is inferior to the average man in height and still more inferior in weight, the greatest inferiority of all is in strength, so that while the height of the average woman is to that of the average man -92, the ratio of her total strength is only -53. This result of KeUogg's, it must be added, is too low for the average working woman, and more concerns women not of the working- class. If, however, we seek out the indications to be discovered some centuries ago among the working agricultural population when we may reasonably suppose that women's muscular powers were developed to the utmost, the same rule seems to apply. Thorold Rogers and Cunningham have incidentally supplied data on this point. The former, while remarking that the wages of an agricul- tural woman worker in the nineteenth century were probably worth little more than a third what they were four centuries earlier, still finds the same proportion hold good; the wages for a woman fixed by the magistrates for reaping and hay-making in the seventeenth century generally wavered around two-thirds of the wages fixed for a man, which is close to the results of scientific in- vestigation as to the relative strength of the sexes to-day, and when allowance was given for meat and drink it was " EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK '* i8i precisely in the same proportion.^ The. same sexual ratio — about half as much again for the man — prevailed also in Germany some thirty years ago. When we turn to employments in which psychic apti- tudes are required as well as physical strength, the question necessarily becomes more complex and liable to vary according to the demands of the particular employment. Roughly, the same relationship, however, seems still to hold good; thus it has lately been reported that the actuarial value of the female clerk is from half to two- thirds that of the male clerk, or, as experience elsewhere finds, three women equal two men. But it is difficult to find employments in which exactly equal work is imposed on men and women. In the post office, for instance, it never happens ; here long experience and much experiment have shown that absolute sexual equality of work is ^ Various figures bearing on this sexual difference will also be found in the Select Documents of English Economic History, edited by Bland, Brown, and Tawney. Thus about looo, a bond servant was entitled for board to iz pounds of corn, a woman to 8. In Richard II.'s time, while the wages of a labourer averaged 9 or 10 shillings a year, a woman's was fixed at 6 shillings. ' In Henry VI. 's time a worker in husbandry received 15 shillings, a woman 10, though the extra allow- ance for clothing was larger for the woman; at the same time a man reaper received 3 pence a day with meat and drink, and without 6 pence, a woman reaper 2jd. with, and 4jd. without, meat and drink. In 1604 the wages for men haymakers with meat and drink was 4 pence, without, 8 pence; for women haymakers, 3 pence and 6 pence; for reapers the corresponding wageswere 5 pence and 10 pence, for women 4 pence and 9 pence. In 1738 men mowers received 12 pence with drink, 14 pence without, women haymakers 5 pence and 6 pence. We see that (except the eighteenth-century women mowers, whose wages were very low) the women throughout received rather over two-thirds the wages of the men. It is a larger proportion than many women receive to-day. i82 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME impracticable. Equality of work and of pay is only attained in the higher vocations, where women are free to arrange the conditions of their own work. George Eliot was a woman of fragile constitution and deUcate health, only able to work under special conditions, but she could command higher pay for her work than any man received. Teaching is a major occupation of women of largely intellectual nature, which seems to secure fair sexual equality of work though not usually sexual equahty of pay, even when no allowance is made in the school arrangements for the more frequent absences of women from indisposition or other reasons. This is one of the general causes of the inferior value of woman's work. It appears that the insurance societies of England, Germany, France, Austria, and Switzerland all report that women are ill oftener than men. On tramways and omnibuses, it is found, whether from illness or other causes, women not only stay in employment a shorter time, but are more often absent than men, so that a larger female staff is necessary, and the work of women less valuable. With this a number of other associated sexual differences are observed in munition factories by Greenwood, Vernon, and other qualified investigators. Women have less staying power than men, and of 1,000 girls entering a munition factory, 132 would be unable to outstay the second month, this becoming more marked after the age of twenty-three; they faint much oftener than men; they cannot speed up without an increasing proportion of accidents, while men can. By abnormal stimulation, as we know, it has proved possible for indi- "EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK" 183 vidual women workers, or groups of workers, to approach, if not to excel, the output of men; and it is the young (below twenty-three), precisely those who will most be injured, whose reserves of energy enable them best to endure this excessive strain. We think we can afford to be reckless with human machinery because it seems 'to cost nothing. Yet if we demand from the small machine the normal output of the large machine someone will have to pay for the damage. Regarding the extent of this damage many gynaecologists have strong opinions.^ We are not here, it must be observed, concerned with the delimitation of the sphere of women's work. On the contrary, it is here assumed that there is no sphere of work which women are not entitled to enter, and few which it would not be to the social good for them to enter. It is still a legitimate question, and of the highest social 1 Under the conditions of primitive life, in the old home industries, and in ordinary domestic life, women have accomplished an enormous amount of labour. But it has been wholesome because they have ncft been confined to one monotonous posture, but have been allowed free movement. It is continuous sitting, and still more continuous stand- ing, which are injurious to women. In an excellent summary of the question of " Women in Industry " {Popular Science Monthly, October, 1913), D. R. Malcolm Keir, pointing out the characteristics of woman's structure, writes: " Any work which requires long standing for a woman is injurious. Women performing such work are especially liable to congestion of all the organs enclosed by the hip-bones, because standing and the habit of resting on one leg only cause a narrowing of the hips. This is especially apt to occur because the greater proportion of women are too young to have become securely and permanently established physiologically before going to work. After leaving the work for matrimony the deformities caused by the work become apparent. The uterus is very apt to be crowded out of place or to be congested. Menstruation is made irregular and difficult. Miscarriages occur oftener among factory wives than in the general population. It is more fre- quently necessary to use instruments in childbirth among such women." i84 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME importance, to inquire how far it is desirable for women to work under industrial conditions made by men and for men; on this question there is much to say. But here we are merely concerned to determine the normal sexual ratio of work and therefore of pay under existing con- ditions. We see not only that Mr. and Mrs. Sidney "Wehh were justified in concluding that " inferiority of earnings is almost always coexistent with inferiority of work," but that the sexual difference in amount of wages, pro- vided no foreign considerations are introduced, tends to correspond to the difference in amount of energy the two organisms can put forth, or, roughly, about half as much again for the man as compared to the woman. What is the compensation to women for this superi- ority of men ? Manouvrier, the most pronounced feminist among anthropologists, is accustomed to assert that woman's fundamental muscular inferiority is " the true counterpart of a superiority: the exclusive aptitude to produce children." He adds that he has noticed that this argument seldom arouses enthusiasm in women. The reason is obvious. The idealistic masculine mind (especially when reinforced in its idealism by self-interest) is apt to assume that such superiorities are their own exceeding great reward. The practical feminine mind wants to know how much they are worth. This, we now begin to see, is not an unreasonable inquiry. Maternity, when efficiently exercised, possibly is a fimction of im- portance to the community. If so it deserves its financial reward from the community. It is here that the other- wise economic inferiority of woman is equalised- It is "EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK'-' 185 obvious that such reward can only be bestowed on the family that is a genuine benefit to the community or it is meaningless. The individual citizen cannot have it both ways. If society holds itself responsible to the mother for the child produced, the mother has a corresponding responsibility to society for control in child production and for the quality of the child produced. But that, once more, is not a question we are now concerned with. XVII THE POLITICS OF WOMEN The political emancipation of women has evoked from many simple-minded persons the anxious question: " What are the politics of women ?" These questioners, only concerned to know how women wiU mark their ballot papers, reject the balanced statements of the scientific investigator who cannot admit pohtics into psychology. One seems to suspect even a certain alarmed uncertainty respecting the politics of woman in the legislative decision — no doubt quite reasonable on general grounds' — to restrict the number of women voters at the outset by raising the age of the woman voter, notwithstanding the fact that, both mentally and physi- cally, women are more precocious than men, and should, therefore, if any sexual difference is made, obtain the vote at an earlier age than men. The supposition seems to have arisen : Suppose that all the women voted one way while all the men voted another, and the whole masculine sex was thus out-voted ? Suppose that the question of war or peace were presented to the electorate, and all the women voted for war and all the men for peace, so that the whole of the fighting sex might threaten to join the ranks of conscientious objectors. The supposition i86 THE POLITICS OF WOMEN 187 was evidently too horrible, and it was decided to ensure that the women voters should be in a safe minority. Yet any anxiety on this account is altogether uncalled for. There will be time enough to inquire what are the politics of women when we have answered a preliminary inquiry : What are the politics of men ? At the same time we need not ridicule an interest in the question of the political tendencies of women. If, as we may well believe, the feminine organism, physical and psychic, is fundamentally different from the masculine organism, that difference cannot fail to affect even the vote. Moreover, it must be remembered that politics is a masculine, not a feminine development, so that political tendencies and political cleavage must necessarily proceed otherwise among women than among men. There is one definite feminine characteristic which we may often observe in the impersonal judgments of women on public affairs : the inevitable absence of those emotions of tender chivalry which dazzle the eyes of men where women are concerned. If one chances to overhear a ferocious wish for the extermination of Germans, the women being expressly included, one may be quite sure that this (to a man) ruthless logic proceeds from a woman. In the fine book, Caspar d, which Rene Benjamin wTote concerning the early episodes of the war, we are told of the susceptible French sentry who yielded to the pathetic appeal of a young woman to enter the lines, touched by the charm of her fluttering bosom. Later the sentry was shocked to learn that the fluttering bosom had been constituted by two carrier pigeons. A few years ago, a i88 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME young woman in New York, condemned to imprisonment for a quasi-political offence, resolved to introduce the hunger-strike into America. Friends and sympathisers outside were indignant at the outrage being perpetrated on womanhood; they even discussed the possibility of a rescue by violence, and at the expiry of the sentence they gathered to meet the victim, who emerged, to their consternation, in plump and excellent condition. What precisely had happened she never revealed to them, but, until quite recently, nothing further was heard of hunger-striking. Now the superintendent of that prison was a well-known woman. One wonders whether, supposing that the Governor of HoUoway Gaol had been a woman, anyone would ever have heard of the hunger- strike. The rise of women to positions of authority, which political emancipation cannot fail to encourage, will bring in a good time for women. It may also bring in a bad time for women. Yet against the absence in women of those disturbing chivalrous emotions which have so hampered men, and not in one direction only, in meting out justice to women, there is an influence of the reverse kind to be noted : the maternal impulse of women. Here we have an emotional force, with an aptitude for irradiation, which finds no adequate analogy in the paternal impulse, for the simple and sufficient reason that the organic basis of maternity is immensely larger than that of paternity. To more than one of the larger-hearted and larger-brained women among the advocates of the emancipation of women it has seemed in recent years that the special value of the THE POLITICS OF WOMEN i8g feminine vote is the scope thereby given to the maternal element in politics.^ To ascertain exactly what this means, we may turn to the record of the legislative efforts of women in Finland, where they not only vote but sit in Parliament. I find that during a year seventeen Bills, partly or wholly prepared by women legislators, were brought into the Finnish Parliament. These seem to me divisible into three classes: (i) The improvement of human (irrespective of- sex) and animal conditions; (2) the improvement of the conditions, or the increase of the opportunities, of women workers; (3) the improve- ment of morals. It is a little difficult to decide under which of the three heads some measures should be entered, since the improvement of general conditions of living in some of the cases would specially benefit women, while, similarly, the improvement of the conditions of work for either sex will often have an indirect bearing on morals. In the first or generally humanitarian group, I count eight of the measures brought forward by the Finnish feminine legislators, and in the second group, for the improvement of the conditions of women, likewise eight, one remaining for the third, or moralistic, group. Some would doubtless have fexpected to find the third group larger. It may be doubted, however, putting aside the question as to whether Tolstoy was justified in his lifelong belief as to the moral inferiority of women, whether women are more attracted to the moral questions generally than men; when they feel concern in a moral 1 " The Maternal in Politics " is, I may add, the title of an essay by the late Mrs. Havelock Ellis in a forthcoming volume, The New Horizon. igo ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME question, it is generally a moral question by which they consider that their own interests are afiected, and such concern is obviously no indication of any devotion to morality in the abstract. But the important point to observe about these legislative proposals of the Finnish women is that, even where they are not specifically con- cerned with children, as in some cases they are, they may all without exception be said to represent, in the wider sense, the maternal element in politics.^ These two opposing tendencies — on the one hand destructive of emotion, and on the other constructive of emotion — which we may fairly regard as marking the public and official activities of women in a higher degree than of men, may both perhaps be brought into connection with what has been regarded as one of the fundamental psychic characteristics of women. I refer to what I have been accustomed to term the "affectability" of women. This by no means indicates merely a greater tendency to emotional sentimentality in women. I recall being present, some thirty-five years ago, at a public meeting to promote some philanthropic cause — what it was I no longer remember, and it is no matter; the one point that ^ Since this was written the women candidates for Farliament in the English election of 191 8 — the first in which they have been allowed to come forward — have confirmed the impression made by the Finnish women. There were, for instance, six women candidates contesting London constituencies, and prominent in the addresses of most of them were such questions as education, child welfare, health of children. State endowment of motherhood, cheap milk and bread. All these questions belong to the maternal in poUtics, although only in its narrower sense, and not in its wider national and international aspects. One of the six women candidates, indeed, was chiefly concerned to carry on a furious anti-alien propaganda. THE POLITICS OF WOMEN 191 struck me was that, while the men who spoke mostly sounded a more or less sentimental and emotional note, the one woman who spoke (a woman with a career of high distinction) was cold, hard, precise, practical. " It is all a matter of £ s. d." was the refrain of her remarks. She was not an example of feminine emotional sentimen- tality, yet she still illustrated feminine affectability; for it is highly probable that the men who allowed weight to sentiment were also quite alive to the importance of money, whereas to assert the exclusive power of money is to allow myself to be driven into an extreme of aggressive practicality which may become itself unpractical. Pre- cision has been attempted in the presentation of this aspect of the feminine mind by a distinguished Dutch psychologist. Professor Heymans of Groningen, who records the results of a careful inquiry into the political opinions of women in his instructive book Die Psychologie der Frauen. Holland, with its high level of intelligent mediocrity, was probably a favourable land for such an inquiry, and the investigation, which was part of a much wider inquiry and therefore impartial, showed that while among twelve hundred persons the number of women with any political tendency at all was much smaller than of men (one to three), extreme views were more prevalent among the women : there was a decidedly larger proportion of Conservative women than of men, there was an equally decided larger proportion of Radical women than of men, as also in the smaller group of socialists and anarchists; on the other hand, the propor- tion of Moderates was much larger among the men. 192 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME Heymans finds these results quite in order; women, through dislike of analysis, are attached to the old and conventional, but when by education or chance they overcome this prejudice, their impulsivity drives them to the opposite extreme, while the tameness of an inter- mediate standpoint fails to supply their emotional needs. However correct this explanation may chance to be as regards the political women in a land where women are not enfranchised, there is one point, overlooked by Heymans, which prevents us from regarding it as a final conclusion. He fails to see the significance of the fact that a far larger proportion of his women than of the men had no views at all on pohtics. These, it is fairly evident, are those who with the advent of enfranchisement, as they are slowly drawn into the poUtical sphere by the influence of fathers or husbands or canvassers, will fill up the serried ranks of indifference and banality, forming a party of Nonchalance more than equal to the masculine party of Moderation. So that while the early stage of feminine interest in pohtics tends to bring contributions alike to the extreme Right and the extreme Left which neutralise each other, the later stage, by strengthening the unpronounced intermediate Centre, neutrahses the whole sex. We are not, however, reduced to mere speculation or even to reUance on the statistical records of women's opinions. The poHtical enfranchisement of women is no longer of yesterday, and has been attained in many parts of the world. That its results tend in the direction indicated seems to be now becoming recognised. What- THE POLITICS OF WOMEN 193 ever terrors its advent may seem to threaten, it happens, with this as with other political reforms, once the change effected, the dreaded terrors only arouse a smile. In Aus- tralia women have been politically enfranchised for fifteen years. Itmaybeof some interest.in this connection, to turn to an Australian book. Time 0' Day, published not long since, which is regarded in AustraUa as " a national docu- ment of some importance," and so impregnated by the Australian spirit as to be scarcely intelUgible to the non- Australian mind. Yet it is desirable to make a serious attempt to understand it. The young Australian author. Miss Egerton Jones, represents her heroine as an Aus- tralian girl who is setting down the essential facts of Australian life to-day for the benefit of her future great- grandchildren. She is brought before us as a Senator's daughter and naturally records her experience as a voter. " To-day is voting day. Such a beastly nuisance ! I hate voting, and I don't know many women who don't. It seems queer those English suffragettes should be so crazy on it; aU women just about vote as their husbands or fathers tell them; female suffrage only amounts to giving the man of the house a few extra votes. It was so funny to-day, too; when I got into the polling booth I couldn't remember which men I had to vote for. Dad had carefully primed me up. but when I looked at the names I was bothered if I could remember which were Liberal and which were Labour. I thought awhile, pencil in hand, but I only got more confused, so finally I lifted the curtain and called out to dad, who was marshalling us all there like a harem. ' I say, dad, I've N 194 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME forgotten who to vote for; do tell me again.' You should have heard those polling clerks laugh, and dad was as mad as hops with me. As if I could help it ! I don't care who gets in his old Senate." It seems fairly in- telligible. It recalls the famous declaration of Miss Christabel Pankhurst, that " Votes for women means a new Heaven and a new Earth." We see that it may at all events mean, as a small instalment of that millennium, an increase in the gaiety of polhng clerks. It is an outcome of the pohtical ema:ncipation of women which should not surprise us. PoUtics has from the outset been so exclusively moulded by men, in accordance with masculine instincts, that it may well need a con- siderable amount of remoulding to the heart's desire before it appeals with equal force to feminine instincts. Yet those of us who have long regarded the enfranchise- ment of women as an essential part of our pohtical creed may still remain justified, for however trifling its direct results may be its indirect benefits are of immense range. To-day more than ever, indeed, this emancipation seems an act of social justice and a step in democratic progress. To-day more than ever, moreover, the social questions in which women's help is needed are becoming a practical part of pohtics. Even if there were less to say for it, the political enfranchisement of women hberates from bondage to mere agitation a mass of energy which may now be apphed to the solution of the actual problems of life. XVIII PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IN RELATION TO SEX In 1895 an unostentatious book quietly appeared in Leipzig and Vienna entitled Studies of Hysteria {Studien uber Hysterie), written jointly by two authors. Dr. Josef Breuer and Dr. Sigmund Freud. There was no pubHc ready to receive the book, it attracted little attention, and had a small sale. In England and America it re- mained almost unknown, so that it is now a satisfaction to the present writer to recall that almost the first full exposition in English of the views set forth in this book appeared in the first volume of his own Studies in the Psychology of Sex in 1898. Yet these studies of hysteria, as an attentive reader could scarcely fail to realise, turned over a new page in medical psychology, and the ne'w page was of fascinating interest. A case of hysteria was no longer to be regarded as on the psychic side almost beneath a physician's serious attention, nor was it to be settled merely by an accurate description of the physical symptoms, after the manner of Charcot's school, to which school in the first place Freud himself had belonged. It was a mystery to be patiently investigated, a mystery to which the key often lay far back and forgotten in the patient's history; and when skilfully used, with knowledge 195 196 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME and insight, the patient's medical history acquired not only psychological significance, but something of the interest of a novel. Freud himself clearly recognised this, and stated, even in this first book, that it was by a repre- sentation of psychic processes. " such as we are accus- tomed to receive from the poet," that he had gained his insight into the nature of hysteria. Priority in the inception of the ideas contained in this book, and the treatment based on them, belongs, as Professor Freud has since acknowledged, to the elder writer. Dr. Breuer. After acting as the missionary for the conversion of his more famous colleague, Breuer disappears from the psycho-analj^tic scene. He was indeed an unconscious if not unwilling missionary in this field. He pointed out the road, but could not accompany the disciple far along it. He signed with Freud the statement in the Preface that " sexuahty plays a leading part in the causation of hysteria," and elsewhere makes the emphatic statement on his own account that " the great majority of serious neuroses in women arise from the marriage bed." But it would appear, from what Freud has more recently said, that on this fundamental question of sex Breuer never fully shared the revelation; as Freud has himself put it, Breuer guided him to an insight which he himself never gained. The process, so far as the change of attitude towards sex is concerned, may dehberately be termed " con- version," and it is that term {Bekehrung) which Freud himself apphes to it; for we may best understand it as of the nature of a reUgious conversion, a changed attitude PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IN RELATION TO SEX 197 towards the world and the revelation of a mission in life.^ We have to remeniber that Freud was the pupil of Charcot, and under Charcot's inspiration was preparing to devote himself to the physical aspects of nervous disease and to physical treatment, especially electro- therapeutics. Charcot was indifferent to the psychic side of his cases, and, following the French medical tradition and well seconded by his disciples, he regarded the recognition of a sex element in the causation of disease as degrading. That attitude was the outcome of the whole of Charcot's temperament and habit in approaching disease, as was clear at once to anyone who saw him — as I still vividly recall him — in his dealings with patients at the Salp6tri6re. One realised that he felt a complete mastery of the case, and that he regarded it as a purely physical problem; for the patient himself, and for any communication that the patient might be able to make, he felt evidently an almost contemptuous disdain. There could be no attitude more directly opposed to that which Freud ultimately reached.. But it was in that atmosphere Freud was trained to approach nervous disorders. We can well believe that when at length faced by the mysterious Sphinx of sex he had flouted and met with the stern demand why he had persecuted her, Freud passed through a deep spiritual upheaval, a complete revolution comparable to that experienced by a stiU greater Jewish apostle of truth in days of old on the road to Damascus. If we are tempted to think, as most of us certainly are tempted to think. igS ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME ♦ that the convert has sometimes been dazzled by his new vision and drawn by his convictions to excess, we may learn to view these results with a more sympathetic tolerance if we understand how, certainly on the basis of a favourable soil, they were originally brought about. It can scarcely be said that there seems to us much excess to-day in this early volume of Studies of Hysteria, although, Freud tells us, its unconventional views suf&ced to create around him a vacant space even in the circle of his friends. Much as the Freudian doctrines and formu- las have been transformed since, not only was the sexual element in the causation of hysteria here clearly recog- nised at the outset, but the chief lines of its psychic mechanism were set forth. The doctrine of the " sup- pression " of unpleasant, and usually sexual, experiences into the unconscious was there, and, Freud has lately declared, " the doctrine of suppression is now the founda- tion pier on which the structure of psycho-analysis rests." There was also the doctrine of " conversion," by which an emotional experience may be changed into a physical, and usually pathological, phenomenon having no con- scious or apparent resemblance to its emotional cause, which this process, more or less, relieves and removes, so that, as Freud expressed it, " the hysterical symptoms are built up at the cost of the remembered emotions "; at the origin the physical pain or disabihty had been as- sociated, in time, with the emotional experience, but the link had never been recognised in consciousness. We see, again, in this book the conception of " symbolism," which was afterwards to play so important and so much PSYCHQ-ANALYSIS IN RELATION TO SEX 199 discussed a part in Freud's teaching. In this first book, however, the symbolism of objects was, as Freud has since acknowledged, overlooked though present, and the symbolism revealed was a symbolism of situations, a sexual situation being represented by an analogous situation on a different and more avowable plane ; it was, therefore, more a physiological than a psychic symboUsm. In this first book, once more, we have the tendency for the sexual exciting cause of the disorder to be traceable farther and farther back towards early life, although there was, as yet, no definite assertion of " infantile sexuality,' ' which was not put forward until 1905 . Finally the Freudian method of treatment was in principle here established as a method of drawing out and bringing to the surface of consciousness a repressed and corroding element, a method by Breuer termed " cathartic," though Freud himself later termed it " analytic," probably be- cause he felt unable to accept Breuer' s conception of " a foreign body in consciousness." No extreme position at any point can, indeed, be said to be taken in this first book, and it is probable that many to-day who view psycho-analysis with horror might peruse the volume with a degree of assent they would not have felt when it was pubhshed, for even the opponents of Freud have now absorbed some of the ideas he has flung into modern currents of thought. For my own part, it seemed a fascinating book even when it was first published, and I read it with sympathy and real enlightenment^ if perhaps some reserves of judg- ment. The attitude of Charcot towards sex in relation 200 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME to hysteria was by no means universally shared in England. Various physicians had stated their belief that the sexual emotions, by no means necessarily or usually in their coarser aspects, played an important part in the causation of hysteria. I had myself, a year earlier (in Man and Woman), ventured to express the opinion that the part played by the sexual emotions in hysteria was under- estimated. So that I was fully prepared for the general attitude of the authors of the Studien uher Hysterie, and, indeed, read the book with rare intellectual delight, apart from any agreement with its thesis, simply because that thesis was presented with a sympathetic intuition and a power of skilful analysis which had never before, even by Janet, been expended on the delicate and elusive mechan- isms of the disordered emotions. I still think that there is no simpler or more persuasive introduction to Freud's work than his first book. From that time began an exchange of publications and occasionally of letters. Freud found in my Studies helpful suggestions in the development of his own doc- " trines, suggestions which I had not myself been inclined to carry to an extreme or dogmatic form. In this way he was encouraged by the " Histories " of normal persons in the third volume of my Studies, as well as by an instruc- tive article published by Sanford Bell in the American Journal of Psychology, to follow up the task he had already begun of pushing back the sexual origins of neuroses to an ever earlier age, and especially to extend this early origin so as to cover not only neurotic but ordinary in- dividuals, an extension of pivotal importance, for it led PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IN RELATION TO SEX 201 to the Freudian doctrine becoming, instead of a mere clue to psycho-pathology, an alleged principle of universal psychological validity. He thus finally reached that conception of constitutional " infantile sexuality " which he regards as so fundamental, and his opponents as so horrible. He also adopted some of my terminology, such as " auto-erotism " and " Narcissism." The first of these two terms, however, I may remark, the Freudians have often perverted and confused. This was not entirely due to Freud himself, who when in 1905 he first adopted the term found its chief significance in the fairly legitimate sense of a sexual impulse which was not directed towards other persons and found its satisfaction in the individual's own person. But, subsequently, Freudians have often used the term to indicate a sexual impulse which not only found its satisfaction within the individual's own person, but was actually directed towards his own person. Now that is what I had termed Narcissism, and regarded as a subdivision of the great group of auto-erotic phenoiiiena. The essential characteristic of an auto-erotic manifesta- tion, as I had devised the term, was that the erotic impulse arose spontaneously and from within, and was not evoked from without in response to the developed normal appeal of an attractive external influence. I formed the word on the model of such words as " automobile," which means moving by itself, and not, as the Freudians would have it, towards itself. I regard erotic dreams in sleep and erotic reverie in waking life as the typical form of auto-erotism, and the term seemed to me a convenient way of grouping together a large number of phenomena for which no 202 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME common name had previously existed. That is why I consider that the Freudian tendency to limit the term to a single group of manifestations is illegitimate and confusing; it stultiiies a useful name for which there is no other convenient equivalent. So far as I know, indeed, no Freudian has attempted to justify this per- version of the term. The point is worth mentioning because it indicates a frequent Freudian tendency to looseness in definition. This is to be noted, but not altogether to be blamed. Definitions are not so essential in the biological sciences as in the mathematical sciences. Moreover, the Freudians are at the beginning of their science, if science it may be termed, while precisely accurate definitions come at the end of an investigation and not at the beginning. This looseness of definition has been a part of the vital growth, the perpetual shifting new development, which has so strikingly marked Freud's work Freud's conceptions have, indeed, grown marvellously. The Studien uher Hysteric have long been left behind. He is perpetually remoulding his ideas, as his experience widens and his insight becomes more penetrating, intro- ducing new ideas, extending them into new fields. From hysteria psycho-analysis was applied to other groups of psycho-neurotic disorders, first to morbid obsessions and impulsions, then to all sorts of psychic disorders, including various forms of insanity, though in the latter it has scarcely worked out as well, and in the severe forms of mental disease, as Freud himself has pointed out, it is helpless. The appUcation of the Freudian ideas to the PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IN RELATION TO SEX 203 normal child was, as has been said, a pivot on which the whole doctrine has turned. It involved, first of all, a new elaborate analysis of all that is meant by " sexuality." The infant, the young child, is, of course, not sexual in the limited and localised sense which we have in mind when we think of sexuality in the adult. In the young child, as viewed by Freud, sexuality is generalised and may take on many forms, forms which in later life, if we found them associated with a specific underlying sexual impulse, we should call perverse. Therefore Freud regards the child as " polymorph-perverse," and, as is indeed well recognised (and as my own investigations had repeatedly shown), the sexual perversions of later life may largely be regarded as a persistence of, or a return to, the impulses of child life. The extreme and pronounced way in which Freud set forth his doctrine of infantile sexuality aroused much opposition and resentment among many people who failed to realise that sex in early life is a very different thing from sex in adult life. Later, Freud deprived this objection of its force by a dexterous turn of the artist's hand, which became necessary at the point he had reached; he enlarged the whole conception of sexuality, and " libido " for him became the manifesta- tion of many pleasurable desires which had not previously been regarded as sexual.^ The extension of the Freudian i Cyril Burt points out {Eugenics Review, January, 1918, p. 334) that in this extension of " libido " Freud is in harmony with recent psycho- logy, which tends to regard the innate tendencies inherited from animal ancestors as specific differentiations of a single life-impulse rather than as separate and independent faculties. Thus McDougall, enlarging his earUer more rigid conception, considers instinctive activity (Psycho- logy and the Study of Behaviour, 'p'p.ii'z, 148) as but one " slender stream 204 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME domain to cover the normal child necessarily led on to the inclusion of the normal adult and all his activities. Freud was greatly helped and encouraged here by the application of psycho-analysis to dreams. We may aU, he holds, apply psycho-analysis to ourselves, and demon- strate the validity of its principles, bystud5dng our dreams. He attaches supreme importance to this field of investi- gation: " dream interpretation is the foundation-stone of psycho-analysis." His largest and most elaborately detailed book is on dreams. Die Traumdeutung. It was certainly a legitimate and hopeful field of investigation, though there are some of us, some even who have given special study to the analysis of dreams, who doubt whether the great and rich field of dream-hfe can be so entirely squeezed into the limits of the Freudian formulas as Freud has asserted, and who cannot possibly accept the wild statement that before psycho-analysis dreams were regarded as " a purely bodily phenomenon," outside psychology. Only one further extension of the Freudian conception was possible, and that Freud eventually took. Having included individual psychology in his domain, he proceeded to incorporate also therein collective psy- chology, so that finally psycho-analysis could be applied of the great purpose which animates all living beings, whose end we can only dimly conceive and vaguely describe as the perpetuation and increase of Ufe." Burt would describe " libido " as " general conative energy," deriving from the instincts generally, not merely those of sex. Such a position resembles that of Jung, who, as is well known, goes beyond Freud in the matter and uses " libido " in the older classical sense (as, for instance, Cicero sometimes uses it) as passion or desire in general, whence it becomes analogous to Bergson's " flan vital " in biology and Schopenhauer's " Will " in metaphysics, as Jung himself admits. PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IN RELATION TO SEX 205 to all the highest social manifestations of human develop- ment. A few years ago Freud himself published a schematic outline of the various sciences to which psycho-analysis had been applied or become applicable :^ (j) It helps to explain much in the science of language; (a) it modifies the hypotheses of philosophy and stimulates philosophic activities in new directions ; (3) it affects biology, not only by, for the first time, doing justice to the place of the sexual function in humanity, but by acting as a mediator between biology and psychology; (4) psycho-analysis brings new contributions to our conception of evolution, showing that the old axiom, that the development of the individual repeats the** development of the race, applies also in the psychic sphere, and indicating that infantile psychic formations persist in the adult; {5) it also con- tributes to the history of civilisation, not only by helping to explain myths and legends, but by illuminating the origin of great human institutions as attempts to relieve human needs which cannot be directly gratified; (6) in the fine arts it plays a similar part, explaining alike the hidden motives of the artist and of his audience in seeking to resolve a conflict which might otherwise work out disastrously; (7) it likewise concerns sociology, for the forces which cause repression and suppression of the individual are mainly engendered by docility to social demands; (8) psycho-analysis js, further, of the greatest importance for the sciences of education by revealing the true nature of childhood and enabling the educator to 1 Scieniia, vol. xiv., 1913, p. 169. 206 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME avoid the danger of too violently repressing instincts which may seem to the adult vicious and abnormal, but which are only rendered dangerous by the adult's futile attempts to crush them, instead of allowiilg them in due course to be sublimated, for " our highest virtues have arisen as reactive subhmations from the foundation of our worst predispositions." What is Freud's vocation ? One is tempted by this enumeration of the fields in which he claims to be working to ask a question to which the answer may not be quite obvious. He started as a medical psycho-pathologist, but medicine covers now only a small part of his field. We cannot even describe him as a man of science, for he attaches himself to no particular science — even as a psychologist he is too large to be fitted into any school — and his activities are individuaHsed, intuitive, and conceptual to a degree which removes them from the impersonal and objectively verifiable basis of science. He enters the philosophic domain, and might by some be termed a metaphysician; but here, again, apart from the fact that, as he himself has frequently observed, he has always dehberately avoided the study of philosophic literature, he by no means lives, as the philosopher is bound to live, in the world of ideas, but is primarily absorbed in the active manipulation of human nature. His activities are, above all, plastic and creative, and we cannot understand him unless we regard him as,' above all, an artist.^ He is indeed an artist who arose in science, 1 He would himself disclaim this title. " Nicht Poet sondern Naturforscher," he says of himself in the preface to Die Traumdeutung, notwithstanding what he had said in his first book of the similaiity of PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IN RELATION TO SEX 207 and to a large extent remains within that sphere, with disconcerting results alike to himself and his followers when he, or they, attempt to treat his work as a body of objectively demonstrable scientific propositions. It has thus happened that nearly all the chief and ablest of his early supporters — Bleuler, Adler, Jung, and Stekel — have successively left him. For in art we are concerned with matters of taste and sympathetic insight, which one person may feel and another not, or even the same person may feel to-day and cease to feel to-morrow. Freud himself has stated that he cannot psycho-analyse a patient unless he experiences sympathy towards that patient; it is the artist's attitude. What is pecuhar about Freud's art is the novelty of the medium in which its plastic force is exercised. It is not a physical medium, it is not even a purely intellectual medium, such as is dealt with by the philosopher who also is in his way an artist. Freud's art is the poetry of psychic processes which lie in the deepest and most mysterious recesses of the soul. He began with themes which, novel as they were, at the same time were not difficult to follow. But as his art developed he proceeded to weave ever subtler and more daring harmonies, as his technique became firm often choosing the very simplest theme for development into an elaborate structure. A beautiful instance of this is his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, in which he builds up the whole of Leonardo's character from one slight childish his attitude to the poet's. But it is possible for the investigator of Nature to be an artist, and in the activities of Leonardo who can say whether there was more of art or of science ? 208 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME reminiscence which that great man chances to have recorded. Freud's daring virtuosity is perhaps shown even more remarkably in his essay on Jensen's novel, Gradiva, in which he elaborately psycho-analyses an imaginary story; the results are altogether disclaimed by the novelist, but they perfectly illustrate the psycho- analyst's conceptions. Truth or fiction, to the artist it is all one, even when the artist is a psycho-analyst, for he is only concerned with truth to his art. Freud's method is so complex, so novel, so startlingly opposed at many points to accepted belief (and therefore so apt to arouse both bitter hostility and ardent enthu- siasm), that it is not possible to expound it fuUy and fairly in a small space. A brief outline of some of his main positions may perhaps be helpful. As Freud views the psychic field, the largest and even the most important part of it lies in an unconscious region. A meiin part of the art of the psycho-pathologist, and indeed of the psychologist generally in Freud's sense, consists in tracing the passage of infantile impulses into the unconscious, in discovering the processes of conversion which take place in this obscure region, and in bringing them again to the conscious surface of life, in which transformation not only is the abnormal rendered normal, but those sublimations take place in which human culture consists. Normally the process is a part of human evolu- tion; abnormally, in neurotic persons, the process mis- carries, and the help of art is necessary to render the process natural. This art is the whole of psycho-analysis. Freud traces back the processes with which he deals PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IN RELATION TO SEX 209 to roots in early childhood, to an infantile disposition with certain resultant psychic mechanisms, and that is largely why they are lost from ordinary view in the un- conscious. The later psychic developments are highly important, but they are always obscurely connected with more fundamental, however concealed, roots in childhood or infancy, even though ultimately they are shaped by human imagination into the great figures and conflicts of Myth and Religion and Art. This infantile source of later psychic processes is, in Freud's view, sexual, though, as already indicated, a dexterous sleight of the artist's hand has later enlarged the conception of sexual pleasure by combining it with all pleasure, thus taking away the ground from the anti- Freudians' feet. On infantile " sexuality," and on its significance for all later life, he lays great stress. The infant's sexual Ufe he rega,rds as highly complex. It primarily consists in simple tactile pleasures, in thumb- sucking, in friction of the various body openings, or of other sensitive spots. It develops into a special interest in the activity of the excretory functions. Extending to other persons, it tends to attach itself in the boy's case to his mother, in the girl's case to the father, as well as between brothers and sisters, and it also tends to ignore the adult distinction of sex. " You will not be wrong," Freud says, " in attributing to every child a fragment of homosexual aptitude." These special at- tractions may easily become special aversions. Funda- mentally, however, they are wishes. A sexual wish is in Freud's view, fundamental. 210 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME In the course of the development^ however, the infantile wish, as a result of important conflicts, disappears into unconsciousness, and is replaced in consciousness by some other manifestation. This is inevitable, for, as the sub- ject grows older, the moralised emotions of shame and disgust, acting as censors, drive the infantile sexual wish out of the conscious field. Fragments, indeed, of this infantile state of desire may in some cases persist in the form of fixed perversions. Perversions are related to neuroses as positive to negative. In the neturoses the same original impulses Eire at work, but they are working from the unconscious side, all the intensity of the sup- pressed emotion becoming transferred to the physical symptom. Disease is thus, in Freud's words, a flight from unsatisfying reaUty into something which, though biologically injurious, is not without advantage for the patient, for it is a kind of cloister into which, with his transformed infantUe longings, the patient retires when deceived by the world or no longer able to fight against the world. We imagine that we can destroy our childish and primitive impulses by some miraculous process and change them into nothing. It is not so, says Freud. Nothing is destroyed. We can at the most shift our desires into the unconscious, convert them into morbid shapes, or subhmate them, and then not entirely, into exalted ideal impulses. Spirit is as indestructible as matter; that is Freud's great discovery. Freud's work is the revelation in the spiritual world of that transforma- tion and conservation of energy which half a century earlier had been demonstrated in the physical world. PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IN RELATION TO SEX 211 , That is an abbreviated description of a state of things which, as Freud now views it, is of universal extension, and represents a fundamental human process of supreme importance. It is only in the rare cases in which it is intensified through occurring in abnormal persons that it becomes morbid and demands the physician's attention. The method by which the physician of Freud's school investigates this state of things, by bringing it to the light of consciousness and, in so doing, relieving it, is the famous method of psycho-analysis. At first, when working with Breuer^ Freud used hyp- notism as the vehicle of his method. He has, however, long since abandoned that method as capricious and mys- tical, while in many cases the patients could not be hypnotised at all. He prefers to investigate the patient in the normal state by what he terms the analytic method. For a doctor to find out what he is ignorant of by address- ing questions to an equally ignorant patient seems un-, promising. But Freud remembered that he had seen Bernheim show at Nancy that, when a patient appears ignorant of what happened to him in a previous hypnotic state, his ignorance is not reaUy absolute, but may with skill be overcome. He found it was the same with the early emotional experiences which lay at the roots of these patients' neuroses. Freud encourages the patient to say everything, however irrelevant or indecorous or silly, which comes into his head, while he, as it were, stands by and watches these bubbles from the psychic depth, on the lookout for those which furnish a clue to the nature of the process beneath. J ung developed a valuable branch 212 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME of this psycho-analysis with his method of free association, which consists in reading out a string of words to the patient, teUing him to say at once what each word suggests, and noting down the results, in the faith, often verified, that in this way the patient will unconsciously give away secrets that are unknown even to himself, not merely by the nature of the words tliat he responds with, but by his hesitation in responding at all to certain words. This method Freud regards as the psycho-analytic equivalent of the chemist's quahtative analysis. As the patient's real history is thus brought to the surface and revealed, slowly and laboriously — and Freud admits that the process is extremely slow and laborious — the patient is enabled to become conscious of the morbid process, and in so doing is greatly assisted in casting it off. In that way the psycho-analytic method is, as Breuer termed it, cathartic, and, as Freud points out, it is the very reverse of the hypnotic method, for while h3^notism seeks to put something into the patient, psycho-analysis seeks to take something out, and is, as Freud has himself said, analogous to the sculptor's art. This conception of psycho-analysis was a brilliant idea for which Freud deserves all credit. It has not, however, been pointed out, so far as I am aware, that Freud had a forerunner in the idea, though not in its clinical and therapeutical applications. In 1857, Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, more noted as a Swedenborgian mystic and poet than as a physician, pubhshed a volume of mystic doggerel verse written by what he considered PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IN RELATION TO SEX 213 " a new method," the method of " Irripression." " A theme is chosen or written down," he stated; " as soon as this is done the first impression upon the mind which succeeds the act of writing the title is the beginning of the evolution of that theme, no matter how strange or alien the word or phrase may seem." " The first mental movemerrt, the first word that comes," is " the response to the mind's desire for the unfolding of the subject." It is continued by the same method, and Garth Wilkinson adds: " I have always found it lead by an infallible in* stinct into the subject." The method was, as Garth Wilkinson viev/ed it, a kind of exalted laissez-faire, a command to the deepest unconscious instincts to express themselves. Reason and will, he pointed out, are left aside; you trust to "an influx," and the faculties of the mind are " directed to ends they know not of." Garth Wilkinson, it must be clearly understood, although he was a physician, used this method for religious and literary, and never for scientific or medical ends ; but it is easy to see that essentially it is the method of psycho-analysis applied to oneself, and it is further evidence how much Freud's method is an artist's method. When we survey the Freudian conception of psycho- analysis, it is manifest that the core of it is its doctrine of sex impulse as appearing in infancy, passing through various phases and processes, mostly involving conflict, and ultimately developing — except when by miscarriage it takes on morbid shapes — into the loftiest cultural shapes that humanity can create. It is not only the core of Freudism, it is also the chief point of attack for the 214 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME opponents of Freud. It must be said that Freud has never compromised on the matter, and to-day he vigor- ously reproaches Adler and Jung, once his chief lieu- tenants, for seeking to minimise or explain away the sexual core of psycho-analysis. It may, indeed, be said that Freud has even gone beyond his own thesis in his emphasis of sex. He is quite aware that he uses the term " sexuality " in, as he says, " a much wider sense than is usual," and no one has so well shown how different the sexual world of childhood is from that of the adult as Freudhimself inhis study of the sexual theoriesof children ; these theories commonly devised by children to explain the mysteries hidden from them are not only different from the adult's facts, they usually leave out entirely all that the adult means by sexuahty. So that when the ignorant adult approaches the sexual feelings of childhood he is apt to make the crudest and most lamentable mis- takes. Yet Freud himself has encouraged this error, and exposed his position to quite unnecessary attacks by speaking of childish sexual psychology in terms of adult physical facts. This is notably the case as regards Freud's introduction of the term " incest-complex " and by his acceptance as typical in this respect of the altogether adult story of (Edipus and Jocasta. Although a very Uttle consideration should have sufficed to show that these adult conceptions are on a different plane from the emotions and ideas of children, and though Freud had himself shown how totally unHke the adult's are the ideal and undefined sexual visions of the child, the leader's confused mistake has been followed by a sheep-like flock PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IN RELATION TO SEX 215 of Freudians, who have thereby copiously aided the unnecessary indignation of their opponents. For the truth is that, with a different conception of " infantile sexuality" on each side, the Freudian and the anti- Freudian have each alike been fighting, in St. Paul's words, " as one that beateth the air." We must at the same time remember that the Freudiaii emphasis on infantile sexuaHty, however careful and guarded the terminology adopted, would still have shocked and repelled the average conventional man and woman. In the matter of sex we are all a little mediaeval. Hunger and Love, said Schiller, are the two great pillars which support the world. It shocks us not at all when the importance of the pillar of Hunger is emphasised, and even exaggerated, as it may be by the political economist. But it is another matter when we find the pillar of Love emphasised and even exaggerated. It is only the child of genius, trained to deal with facts and to follow Nature wheresoever she seems to lead, who is innocent of this prejudice and bewildered by the outcries he unwittingly evokes. A distinguished thinker, James Hinton, who, like Freud, began as a physician and gradually extended his speculations over the central facts of life, was such a child of genius, worshipping and following Nature. " How utterly," he wrote, " all feeUng of impurity, or reason for special feeling at all, is gone from the sexual passion in my mind ! It stands before me absolutely as the taking of food. I cannot even recall why the feel- ings of special impurity chng about it. It has taken its place in my mind absolutely afresh, and as one with al^ 2i6 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME that is most simple and natural and pure and good."^ It was in this spirit that Freud formulated his theory of " libido," with its infantile manifestations and marvellous transformations, serenely pursuing his way, while the conventional world was shocked and even his own chief supporters often fell away, Adler depriving " libido " of its love constituent and Jung even transferring it into a vague metaphysical abstraction. There is, however, no need to fall back on this, the fundamental justification or condemnation, as we choose to see it, of genius. We may preserve our usual worldly attitude and yet be able to discern that when the mis- apprehensions arising from bad terminology and extreme statement are put aside, the essentials of the Freudian vision of life may still be found acceptable. We have ' refused to face them, but we have obscurely recognised them, and they have even been plainly expressed, especi- ally by poets and noveHsts. Let us take as an example one of the insights of Freud which has most aroused antagonism: the emotional relationship between mother and son, to which there is a corresponding relationship between father and daughter. This is notably a case in which feelings which are entirely plain to see have yet not been seen merely because people were unwilling to see them. Mothers had been suckhng their children for untold millions of years before, a century ago, Cabanis pointed out the nature of the delicious pleasure often, or, it is probable, normally, experienced in suckling; and it is not surprising that another century should have elapsed 1 Mrs. Havelock Ellis, James Hinton : A Sketch, 1918, p. 107. PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IN RELATION TO SEX 217 before Freud pointed out that this pleasure is mutual, although in the infant it can only be termed " sexual " if we are careful to understand that sexual pleasure at this early period is an altogether different thing from what it becomes later. It normally remains a different thing even for a considerable period, and towards the mother it is permanently a different thing, for the son always feels as a child to his mother; yet on this basis, which we may regard as physically non-sexual and emotionally sexual, the relations of mother and son may be, Freud would be inclined to say quite normally, comparable to that of lovers. It has been commonly noted by novelists. Thus, Thackeray in Pendennis (chapter xxiv.) says' of the anxiety of mothers in watching their sons' love affairs : " I have no doubt there is a sexual jealousy on the mother's part and a secret pang." Let us turn to a novel called Comme tout le Mande, written a few years ago by Madame Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, one of the best women novelists of France to-day. As the title indicates, it is a common- place story, the ordinary story of an ordinary middle-class girl, wife, and mother, who experiences the ordinary joys of hfe and the ordinary deceptions. Yet the story is told with such art and such insight that, commonplace as it is, and even because it is commonplace, we are made to feel that it is a completely veracious record. Isabelle, the young Norman lady who is the heroine, has two sons, and the elder, Leon, adores her; his earliest childish letters to her express this adoration : when he goes to school at the age of seven he kisses the little cakes his mother brings him because" they have been in her hands. But in a few 218 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME years' time he becomes self-conscious and conceals his feelings; he loves to be in his mother's presence, but he is shy, reserved, and awkward, and is apt to get on his mother's nerves, all the more so as she, on her part, adores her younger son, through private emotional asso- ciations preferring him to the elder boy, who in secret writes verses, and addresses a poem to Joan of Arc, whom he sees in vision " beautiful as my mother." While still a schoolboy he dies, and only then it is that his mother realises the adoration expended upon her, and, too late, passionately responds to it.^ We may again turn to a recent English writer, "Anna Wickham," a mother of sons, who writes verse of a notably powerful, sincere, and poignant order. In a volume of hers we find the lines : " My little son is my fond lover. Sometimes I think that I'll be scarcely human If I can brook his chosen woman I"* These emotions are experienced, they are even expressed (perhaps especially by women, as the sex of the writers I have quoted indicates), but we have put them aside, have carefully avoided considering their significance, at the most have explained them, or ridiculed them, away. So that when at last the child of genius appears upon the scene, and sees, and realises what he sees, and proclaims it aloud — as the child in the fairy-tale cried out: " The Emperor has no clothes on !" — the world is shocked, ^ The recently published letters of Baudelaire to his 'mother contain the repeated statement that in childhood he " passionately loved " her, and even to the end of his life she remained the one woman in the world he really loved. 2 Anna Wickham, The Man with a Hammer, p. 44. PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IN RELATION TO SEX 219 though it has only been told what in reality it already ■ knew. , We must not, however, conclude that Freud has herein performed an altogether unnecessary task. True, the " incest-complex " is a terminological absurdity, since the sexual theories of childhood are absolutely unlike those of the adult, and the adult's attitude has no more meaning for the child than, it would usually seem, the child's attitude has for the adult. Yet the sexual emotions remain on the psychic side the same, however unlike the ideas and the objects aimed at.^ Freud, with his artist's instincts, sensitive to Nature — for both the artist and the scientist are ejqjlorers and revealers of Nature — has not only been more acutely aware of the existence of these infantile emotions than any before him, but he has more accurately investigated them, and he has moreover devised or created a dynamic mechanism into which they beautifully fit, to emerge at last, by a process of sublima- tion, in the highest manifestations of the human spirit. The domain in which Freud works is largely that which he terms the " Unconscious," the mighty treasure-house in which all the apparently forgotten experiences of our lives are stored. It is a mysterious and gloomy region, 1 Those who were wont to oast abuse at Freud for his approximation of parental love and sexual love were probably unaware that he therein represented a tendency in modern psychology. Half a century ago Herbert Spencer, in his Principles oj Psychology, enumerated nine main elements in sex love, not one of them parental love. McDougall, in a suggestive chapter on the sex instinct, added to the eighth edition (1914) of his Social Psychology, now writes: " Sex love is a complex sentiment, and in its constitution the protective impulse and tender emotion of the parental instinct are normally combined with the emo- tional conative disposition of the sex instinct." 220 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME admirably adapted for the operation of Freud's artistic genius. Bat we may do well to remember that it is a vast region and contains many things. With his complete- sincerity, simplicity, and natural gift of divination, Freud has been happily inspired, into whatever excesses of exaggeration we may believe he has sometimes fallen. But less finely gifted men may not fare so well in the Unconscious. They must select among the facts they find, and in their selection ordinary psycho-analysts who have not the sensitive flair of genius to guide them will be guided by the rigid and systematic theory which has them in its clutches. This has been pointed out by Poul Bjerre of Stockholm, not an opponent of psycho-analysts, but himself a distinguished psycho-analyst, writing in Freud's own organ.^ He is especially referring to those who expect to find the " incest-complex " everywhere, and who accordingly find it. " Life cannot be pressed into a single theory," he adds, " however impressed it may be by the highest genius, and however comprehensive." If these wise words linger in our minds we shall view Freud and his opponents ahke with toleration and often with S5mipathy. It is not possible here to discuss those notable psycho- analysts who were once Freud's chief disciples and coad- jutors, and are now his rivals or opponents. It is the less necessary since, if we are mainly looking at psycho- analysis from the angle of sex, it cannot be said that they have added much to what Freud has brought forward, though they may sometimes have taken much away. 1 Jahrbuch fur Psychoanalytische Forschungen, vol. v., 1913, p. 692. PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IN RELATION TO SEX 221 They have all done good work. Professor Bleuler was a distinguished psychiatrist before he joined Freud, of admirable solidity, judgment, and insight. Stekel is a capable, energetic, and industrious worker. C. G. Jung, belonging to Zurich, where the first large movement of Freudian appreciation began, was an early adherent. He not only devised the associative method of exploring concealed psychic states, but introduced the term " com- plex," a much used and, as Freud thinks, much abused, if not unnecessary, term, though, it must be added, Freud employs it himself. Of late years Jung has written copiously, and especially a very lengthy essay on the " Transformation and Symbols of Libido." In this luxuriant-j ungle of philosophy and philology J ung wanders with random and untrained steps, throwing out brilliant suggestions here and there, hazarding the declaration that " the soul is all libido," and that " sexuality itseH is only a symbol," conveying the general impression of a strayed metaphysician vainly seeking for the Absolute. He remains a psycho-analyst, but from Freud, who has never fallen into such extravagances, he has wandered far. Freud himself, in a contribution to the history of the pSycho-analytic movement, written with aU his transparent sincerity and instinctive charm, sums up an account of his former disciple' ^ relation to the movement by sajdng that Jung has furnished the psycho-analytic instrument with a new handle and then proceeded to put in a new blade. Alfred Adler is entitled to more respectful consideration, and herein I am also expressing Freud's opinion. Here is nothing of Jung's obscurity and con- 222 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME fusion; indeed, Adler may be said to err in the opposite direction by becoming too precise, narrow, and coherent. His chief conception is that of the " impulse of aggression" and the " masculine protest," on which he places extreme emphasis. This is the impulse by which we seek to fortify our weakest side, even that based on bodily defect, so that it develops into the dominant aspect of our character. We may often see this illustrated by those undeveloped persons who by dint of physical culture ultimately come to regard themselves, and indeed may actually become, superior to the average in physical development. This conception has proved fruitful, and Adler has succeeded in forming a school of co-workers. All these investigators are not to be despised. But Freud remains the man who first devised the instrument of psycho-analysis as it is now known, and who revealed the world in which it operates. It must not therewith be concluded that any of the conceptions Freud has so artfully woven will of necessity endure permanently. He changes them so often himself that it would be foolish to suppose that his successors will not continue the same process. In this respect we may compare him with Lombroso, another Jew of genius, who also began as a psycho-pathologist, and also gradually extended his conceptions over a wide sphere of abnormal and normal life. His theories have been proved to be often defective, even his facts will not always bear examination; he himself admitted that of the structure he had raised per- haps not one stone would remain upon another. Yet he enlarged the human horizon, he discovered new fields for PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IN RELATION TO SEX 223 fruitful research and new methods for investigating them. That was something bigger than either a sound theory or a precise collection of facts, for we do not demand of a Columbus that he shall be a reliable surveyor of the new world he discovers. Freud, similarly and to a greater extent, has enlarged our horizon. He has shown the existence of a vast psychic field of which before we had but scanty intimations. The human soul will never again be to human eyes what it was before Freud explored it. He has revealed the possibility of new depths, new subtleties, new complexities, new psychic mechanisms. That is the great and outstanding fact XIX THE DRINK PROGRAMME OF THE FUTURE The solution of the drink problem has long been overdue. The situation has been equally unsatisfactory to those who wish to abolish drink and to those who would afford a reasonable freedom for its enjoyment under good con- ditions. Two opposed groups of forces have held this i problem in a strained and unnatural condition of rigidity: on the one hand the forces which oppose drink altogether — seeking to replace beer by ginger-beer and whisky by lemonade and wine by concoctions of grape-juice — and on the other the forces which maintain the sale of alco- hoHc drinks in an atmosphere of false glitter conceahng discomfort or filth.^ The Great War, which has done much to Uberate * I am not here concerned with the question of the advantages and disadvantages of the use of alcoholic drinks. It is sufficient for the present purpose to bear in mind that, whatever these may be, we are willing to pay for alcoholic drinks as much as for meat, and more than twice as much as for bread, nearly as much, in fact, as the total revenue of the State before the Great War. The existing state of scientific knowledge regarding the action of alcohol on the human organism, as set forth by a committee of recognised authorities appointed by the Central Control Board, will be found in their clear and weighty Report, Alcohol : Its Action on the Human Organism (igi8), which should be in all hands, 224 DRINK PROGRAMME OF THE FUTURE 225 restrained forces and at the same time to enlarge our notions of social and economic possibilities, has exerted this same influence in the sphere of the drink problem. We have been prepared to face not only greatly increased State, control, but even State purchase of the liquor^ trade. Evidently, we are approaching a new phase of the question. We are being freed from the dominance of extremists, and we are no longer alarmed by vast financial operations. We have seen what it is possible to spend on the work of death and destruction; we begin to think it reasonable that in future the more important tasks of life and construction should be financed on the same scale. What are we going to do with the " liquor trade " when we own it ? Thkt is a question in which we are all concerned, and in which we are all entitled to have a voice. And if the violent antagonisms of minorities on this question are to be effectively neutralised, the voice of the majority should be heard. It is only within recent times that there has been in England any doubt about the voice of the majority on this question. Four centuries ago beer was the universal drink for men, women, and children, all day long, even at break- fast, for, as a seventeenth-century song tells us, "... ale, bonny ale, with spice and a toast. In the morning's a dainty thing." It is true that this ale was mostly, though Jby no means always, of low alcoholic strength, yet it is stiU a cause of astonishment to read in ancient domestic accounts of the enormous quantities of ale which were assigned for the p 226 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME consumption of the members of a family, young and old of both sexes. Even Harrison, who describes himself as a " poor parson " of £40 a year , tells how in Elizabethan England his wife brewed 200 gallons of beer every month for his small household, equal, it would seem, to several quarts a day per head. We do not find, however, that any evil results were attributed to this habit, and we certainly know that the people who practised it created the most glorious epoch in our history. Even the Puritans, sternly as they repressed all the manifestations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, saw no evil in drink; they never rejected its use, and the austere Prjmne fortified himself, we are told, in his courageous attacks on the foes of godliness by mighty draughts of ale. The natural acceptance of drink was made manifest in the beauty and splendour of the ancient pubhc-houses which furnished refreshment to the wayfarer. Next after our old EngUsh churches, our old Enghsh inns, in town and country, constitute the largest legacy of beautiful and interesting buildings which our ancestors have left us, shamefully as we have allowed so many of them to be deformed or neglected, degraded into sordid beer-shops. While, however, the fight around drink had no place in our ancient traditions, it is not the recent outcome of a superior moral attitude. On the contrary, it is as old as civihsation. Thousands of years ago, among the ancient Egyptians who initiated the civilisation of Europe, not only was drunkenness common, but there was also an anti-drink social attitude. This may be detected in a picture which represents a party of elegant ladies drinking DRINK PROGRAMME OF THE FUTURE 227 wine while other women near by are clearly showing their disapproval. In England it was only in the eighteenth century that we begin to perceive a certain concern with the question of drink. The upper-class man was indeed free to be " as drunk as a lord " on wine, and no one had a word to say against anyone of any class drinking beer; but spirits were coming into common use, and the results were found to be often evil. Hogarth is instructive at this point with his pictures of the haggard misery of Gin Lane as contrasted with the jovial happiness of Beer Street. Another influence soon came in to promote drunkenness, and that was the great industrial revolution which stimulated the growth of the population and crowded the workers in towns, without either amusement or education. The result was first discomfort and then drink. A reaction in favour of total abstinence was inevitable. For nearly a century past drunkenness and the other evils of drinking have been slowly but steadily declining. In 1836 Lord Melbourne wrote : " The King begs that everyone will dine with him after the Council and drink two bottles of wine a man " ; and I have been told by an old County Court judge that in his early days at the Bar the Bar mess would sit down to dinner at six and rise at twelve.having in the interval drunk three bottlesof wine each. It is true that the more drink declines, the louder become the protests against drink. That is the kind of thing we always witness. When an evil is so widespread as to be familiar nobody remarks its presence. When it begins to attract loud and angry indignation we may be 228 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME sure it is dying out. So when 30 per cent, of the workers were completely and hopelessly drunk every Saturday, and a large proportion of these unable to return to work on Monday, the fact was accepted without protest.* To-day Mr. Arthur Mee writes to the papers to say that he has seen one Anzac lad (not even an Englishman, be it noted) from a prohibition camp thoroughly drunk; that the young Anzac was an object-lesson in prohibition Mr. Mee neglects to mention. It is not prohibition, or any steps towards it, it is not restrictive drink legislation, it is not even the efforts of temperance reformers — ^helpful as these have been — which have produced the change. It is a larger and more complex matter, the growth of civilisation and the progressive developments of demo- cracy. When Chadwick, eighty years ago, wrote that famous Report on the Labouring Population of Great Britain, which we cannot too often reread, he clearly realised that the true causes of drunkenness were the rapid increase of the population, urban overcrowding, the wretchedness of the home, lack of amusement, and absence of education. That all these root evils have been removed, that even any of them have been completely and satisfactorily removed, it would be futile to assert. But to anyone who bears in mind the picture presented by Chadwick, the change must seem almost inconceivably vast. * Taiae, half a century ago, in his Notes sur I'Angleterre — a book that may still be consulted with profit — ^remarks (p. 289) that in Chelsea, within a few days, he twice observed workmen lying dead drunk on the footpath, and was told by a friend that it was a common sight. In the present century one may live in Chelseaior years and not have seen this sight once. DRINK PROGRAMME OF THE FUTURE 229 No doubt in an old country like our own, with a great past of national character slowly creating progressive social conditions, a certain amount of optimism is justified. In some other countries, without the training of a similarly long past, we may witness attempts at a-short cut to the millennium, attempts which in the field of drink merely take the form of Prohibition. Since the War, and even before the War, the device of Prohibition has been popular in various parts of the world. It has conquered the United States, it was established at a stroke in Russia. The spread of the Prohibition movement in America bears witness to the fact that civilisation in America, with its ill-combined jumble of races, is still new and crude, not very long emerged from a pioneering past in which drink and bloodshed formed an ugly and lawless combination. On that foundation naturally arose the American "saloon," the almost. exclusively masculine drinking shop, so unlike English customs, and so entirely opposed to the customs of the most civilised nations of Continental Europe. It is, indeed, scarcely even in accord with American ideas, which encourage the belief in the equality o.f the sexes. Therefore a reaction took place to an opposite extreme even less in accordance with fundamental American ideas. For Prohibition, which enables not only a majority, but often even a minority, to enforce a uniform abstinence from drink on the whole community, is opposed to any democratic conception of society, while, by com- pelling the individual citizen who insists on his whisky to adopt the undignified course of going to the druggist to ask for " embalming fluid," it equally offends that 230 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME . individualism which is the most ancient of American political creeds. We can scarcely find in the new Ameri- can practice a model for imitation. Still less can we find it in Russia. Here we see in an exaggerated form all the favouring conditions of drunkenness which existed in England a century ago. The impression prodiiced in former days, on a visit to Russia, by the aspect on hohdays of what seemed to be a general drunkenness, good- naturedly accepted by all, is unforgettable, and Russian novehsts, like the minute and realistic TchekofE, confirm thatimpression of the ingraineddrunkenness of the Russian in his orgies, if not in his daily habits, which we receive even from his ancient and beautiful epic folk-songs. But in Russia Prohibition was summarily imposed from above on an unresisting population which had never been consulted. The result was, no doubt, in many respects beneficial, even although victims of drink replaced the fiery vodka by methylated spirits, and the mortality from alcohol in Russia actually increased after Prohibition was introduced. In any case we in England can hardly expect to find inspirations of reform in the ukases of an extinct Tsarism. The method of control which finds most favour in England is not that of Prohibition, but Restriction. It cannot, however, be said that any brilliant results were promised by this method; it has, indeed, often produced exactly the contrary results of those intended. This has long been illustrated in Scandinavia, as an enHghtened . and competent observer of social conditions in Europe, Miss Edith Sellars, has often made clear. Lately she has drink: programme of the future 231 shown afresh how the law for restricting the minimum sale of spirits in the rural districts of Sweden to fifty-five gallons, so far from diminishing drunkenness, has actually increased it, even though it is optional fpr a district to adopt the law; while in the urban districts, where it is not adopted but (under the Gothenburg system) small quantities of spirits may be obtained, there is less drunken- ness. The country people club together to buy the large amount which can alone be procured, and having so much drink to dispose of are tempted to abuse their oppor- tunities.^ Evidently, in the interests of temperance, it is far better to encourage people to obtain small quan- tities than to compel them to obtain large quantities. Experience proves what common sense alone might have shown. Yet there is much to be said for experiment, provided we are really willing to learn and be guided by its results. State ownership and control must prove advantageous if it enables valuable experiments to be made in limited areas. In this way we might, for instance, test the advantages of the proposal, frequently made, that the drinkers of alcoholic beverages in a refreshment-house should be partitioned off from the drinkers of non-alco- holic beverages, the beer-drinking husband being seated on one side of the partition and the tea-drinking wife and 1 Edith Sellars, " Quarts versus Noggins," Fortnightly Review, January, 191 7, and by the same writer, " Sober by Act of ParUament," Nineteenth, Century, June, 1913. It is pointed out that Finland, once regarded as the most drunken country in Europe, subsequently became, in spite of some bad laws, remarkably sober, through the reforming efiorts of the people themselves and the growth of social movements for' education and recreation. 232 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME children on the other side, though whether they are to be allowed to communicate through the partition we are not told. Experiment would show the advantages of this plan, or, more probably, condemn it for ever. State control would be even more useful by rendering it possible to utiHse on a large scale the practical experi- ments already made. A well-proved experiment is furnished, for instance, by the People's Refreshment House Association (origin of the constantly extending " Trust Houses "), which during the past thirty years has been exerting its reforming influence. *rhis Associa- tion would have performed a useful service if only by restoring the aspect of so many beautiful old English inns. A filthy, decayed hovel of a beer-shop in some remote picturesque village wiU be tEiken over by the Association, thoroughly purified, its ancient features reverently brought to light, new features boldly introduced as modem sanita- tion and comfort may demand, the whole tastefully decorated and furnished, and it becomes a pleasant club for the villagers, and an attractive house for anyone to visit or stay in. But it is not merely the aspect of our old inns which is thus restored ; their old spirit is also brought back. They become genuine houses of refreshment and rest again, food is as easily obtained as drink, and the drink may be with equal faciUty eilcoholic or non-alcohoUc. There is no pressure to choose the alcohoHc drinks, nor any flaunting advertisements of them on the walls; the manager receives no extra profit on their sale, but at the same time they are of the best quality, for, the house not being " tied," the Association is free to buy where it will. DRINK PROGRAMME OF THE FUTURE 233 In these inns there is no sort of restraint beyond that imposed by the whole atmosphere of the house and the quiet influence of a capable manager and his wife. It is in such esiperiments as these that we may find a model for our guidance in the State control of the liquor traffic. Of one thing, in any case, we may be certain. Arbitrary restrictions and prohibitions are not in accordance with our English spirit. We have enough self-discipline and self-control to accept them, under protest, in times of national crisis. But as permanent institutions they are opposed to our national English genius. Restrictions and prohibitions produce on us, as on our Scandinavian kinsmen, the exactly opposite effect to that intended. We are not so spiritless that we meekly consent to be treated like children. There is justification for that attitude. For there are no short cuts to the millennium. It is only by the sldw process of civilising our lives and humanising our manners that we can abolish the evils of drink. It may be a tedious and imperfect process. But there is no other. It is not only at home, in the history of our own past, that we may learn wisdom, but also abroad. A few years ago the Bishop of Birmingham (after of Oxford) visited Barcelona and came back filled with an enthusiasm for the caf& of that city which scandalised some of his friends. But one who has often made the same observation may be permitted to say that the Bishop was justified. There are, indeed, caf^s of all kinds in Barcelona, but in many visits to that interesting city I have had repeated occasion to admire the pleasant and sometimes spacious resorts 234 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME they furnish to the workers. It is enough to refer to one such caf^ neax the heart of the old town, the people's quarter. Here you may find the worker and his family — ^husband, wife, children, and, maybe, grandmother as well — settled down round a Uttle table, for a long evening of rest, refreshment, and enjojmient, while on a narrow stage an excellent variety entertainment — song, dance, and dramatic sketch — goes on at intervals. There are no restrictions, but neither is there any rowdiness nor horseplay. The possible drinks, alcoholic and non- alcohoUc, are numerous, and on the whole the alcoholic do not predominate, while one glass, with a copious supply of water, usually lasts throughout the evening. The total cost to the family works out at about threepence and even less per head. The Catalans — often called the Scotch of the South — are not, it must be remembered, a decayed and spiritless people. They have displayed their energy in commerce and in thought for a thousand years; their city is to-day the combined Manchester and Liverpool of Spain; it is also the home of Anarchism and the scene of perpetual strikes. But in this long evolution the workers of Barcelona have slowly achievedharmonious social order, and the drunkenness of ancient Spsiin has long been left behind by methods more certain than Restriction and Prohibition. Here we may well find one of the models for our drink programme of the future. There is only one question that we have to settle: Are we yet civilised enough ? XX RODO A FEW months ago Jos6 Enrique Rod6 died in Palermo on his way from South America to France.^ This statement probably conveys no meaning, and it may even be that it is here made for the first time in England. We live, still with a certain degree of safety, in a remote island wrapped round by northern mists which deaden all the rumours of the world, and its finer voices only penetrate to us, if at aU, from afar, slowly and with difficulty. South America we associate with various miscellaneous things, perhaps mostly unpleasant. We seldom think of it — even if we happen to have been there*— as a land of poets and artists and critics. So it can scarcely be sur- prising that few among us know so much as the name of South America's best writer, who was also the best writer anywhere in the Castilian speech, and one of the most distinguished spirits of our time. Our ignorance may seem the more ungracious if we learn that Rod6's most remarkable essay — his whole work may be said to be comprehended in some half-dozen long essays — is called Ariel? This sensitive and exalted * This was written in the autumn of 191 7. S Jos6 Enrique Rod6: Cinoo Ensayos. Madrid, 1915. 236 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME thinker, familiar with the finest culture of Europe, found the symbol of his aspirations for the world in the Enghsh poet's Tempest. Ariel is the long monologue (extending to a hundred pages) of a teacher who once more gathers his old disciples arotmd him in his study, dominated by a bronze statue of the Shakespearian spirit of the air at the moment when Prospero gives him his freedom. " Ariel symbolises the rule of reason and of feeling, generous enthusiasm, high and disinterested motives for action, the spirituahty of culture, the vivacity and grace of intel- ligence, the ideal goal to which human selection tends, eUminating with the patient chisel of life the tenacious vestiges of Caliban, s3mibol of sensuality and torpor." Prospero — for so his disciples have named him — discourses on the art of hving. For Rodo believed with Shaftesbury that " virtue is a kind of art, a divine art," and the moral law " an aesthetics of conduct." To hve in the finest sense is to exercise a free creative activity which passes beyond interested and material ends, to cultivate the leisure of the interior hfe, and from that centre to organise the beauty and harmony of society. To enforce this point of view, Rodo analyses at length, beneath the mask of Prospero, the spirit of the civilisa- tion of the United States. He refrains from insinuating — such a suggestion would be alien to his gracious and sympathetic attitude — that this spirit is S5anbolised by Cahban. He admires, though he is unable to love or altogether to approve, the spirit of North America, and his penetrating analysis never even remotely verges on harshness or scorn. He distinctly believes, however, RODO 237 that the utiUtarian conception of human destiny and equaUty in mediocrity as the social rule constitute in theif intimate combination the spirit of Americanism. If it can be said that UtiHtarianism is the Word of the English spirit, then the United States is the Word made flesh. Rodo by no means implies that the same spirit may not be found also in South America. On the contrary, he declares that there is in the South an increasing Nordo- mania, but he regards it as opposed to the genius of Latin America, a mere artificial " snobisme " in the political sphere. It is necessary, even for the sake of America as a whole, that Latin America should jealously guard the original character of its collective personality, for nearly all luminous and fruitful epochs of history have been, as in Greece with the poles of Athens and Sparta, the result of two distinct correlated forces; the preserva- tion of the original duaUty of America, while maintaining a genial and emulatory difference, at the same time favours concord and solidarity. " In the beginning was action." In those words which Goethe set at the outset of Faust, Rod6 remarks, the historian might begin the history of the North American Republic. Its genius is that of force in movement. Will is the chisel which has carved this people out of hard stone and given it a character of originality and daring. It possesses an insatiable aspiration to cultivate all human activities, to model the torso of an athlete for the heart of a freeman. The indiscriminating efforts of its virile energy, even in the material sphere, are saved from vulgarity by a certain epic grandeur. 238 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME Yet, asks Rodo, can this powerful nation be said to be realising, even tending to realise, the legitimate demands, moral, intellectual, and spiritual, of our civilisation ? Is this feverish restlessness, centupUng the movement and intensity of hfe, expended on objects that are truly worth while ? Can we find in this land even an approxi- mate image of the perfect city ? North American hfe seems, indeed, to Rodo, to proceed in that vicious circle which Pascal described as the course of the pursuit of well-being which has no end outside itself. Its titanic energy of material aggrandisement produces a singular impression of insufficiency and vacuity. This people has not known how to replace the inspiring ideaUsm of the past by a high and disinterested conception of the future, and so lives only in the immediate reality of the present. The genial positivism of England, it seemed to Rodo, has here been deprived of that idealism which was a deep source of sensibility beneath the rough utiUtarian surface of the English spirit, ready to gush forth in a limpid stream when the art of a Moses struck the rock. English aristocratic institutions, however politically unjust and out of date, set up a bulwark to vulgar mercantilism which the Americem Repubhc removed, but left unreplaced. So it is that we find in the United States a radical inaptitude for selection, a general disorder of the ideal faculties, a total failure to reahse the supreme spiritual importance of leisure. They have attained the satisfaction of their vanity of material magnificence, but they have not acquired the tone of fine taste. They pronounce with solemn and emphatic R0D6 239 accent the. word " art," but they have not been able to conceive that divine activity, for their febrile sensationism ej^cludes its noble serenity. Neither the idealism of beauty nor the idealism of truth arouses their passion, and their war against ignorance results in a general semi- culture combined with languor of high culture. Nature has not granted them the genius for propaganda by beauty or for apostolic vocation by the attraction of love. Bar- tholdi's statue of Liberty over New York awakens no such emotion of reUgious veneration as the ancient traveller felt when he saw emerge from the diaphanous nights of Attika the gleam of Athene's golden spear on the height of the AcropoUs. Just as in ,the main this analysis may be, it will occur to some readers that Rodo has perhaps attributed too fixed a character to North American civilisation, and has hardly taken into adequate account those germs of recent expansion which may well bring the future development of the United States nearer to his ideals. It must be admitted, indeed, that if he had lived a few months longer Rodo might have seen confirmation in the swift thorough- ness, even exceeding that of England, with which the United States on entering the war sought to suppress that toleration for freedom of thought and speech which he counted so precious, shouting with characteristic energy the battle-cry of all the belligerents, " Hush ! don't think,- only feel and act !", with a pathetic faith that the affectation of external uniformity .means inward cohesion — a method of " self-inflicted camouflage," as Professor Dewey has termed it in a discussion of the 240 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME " Conscription of Thought " which Rodo might have inspired. Still, Rodo himself recognised that, even as already manifested, the work of the United States is not entirely lost for what he would call " the interests of the soul." It has been said that the mercantihsm of the Italian Repubhcs paid the expenses of the Rencdssance, that the spices and ivory of Lorenzo de' Medici renewed the Symposia of Plato. There is in civUisation a trans- formation of force, by which the material becomes the spiritual, and provided that process is carried through, it seemed to Rodo, the North American Repubhc will escape the fate of Nineveh and Sidon and Carthage. Ariel is for Rodo the ultimate outcome of that process, the instinct of perfectibiUty, the ascension of the organised forms of Nature into the flaming sphere of spirit. It will be seen that, alike in his criticism of hfe and his criteria of progress, Rodo remains essentially democratic. He is altogether out of sympathy with the anti-democratic conception of life often associated with Nietzsche's doctrine of the Super-man. He waived pohtely aside the af&rmation of Bourget that the triumph of democracy would mean the defeat of civiUsation, and greatly as he admired the genius of Renan, he refused to believe that a concern for ideal interests is opposed to the democratic spirit; such belief, indeed, would be the condemnation of Latin America as much as of Anglo-Saxon America. Rodo accepts democracy, but on that basis he insists on the need for selection. Even in Nature, he remarks, among flowers and insects and birds and onwards, we see natural selection favouring superiority and ensuring the RODO 241 triumph of beauty. It is not the destruction but the education of democracy which is needed in order to further this process of natural selection. Rodo held that it is the duty of the State to render possible the uniform revelation of human superiorities, wherever they exist. " Democratic equality is the most ef&cacious instrument of spiritual selection." Democracy alone can conciliate equality at the outset with an inequality at the end which gives full scope for the best and most apt to work towards the good of the whole. So considered, democracy becomes a struggle, not to reduce all to the lowest common level, but to raise all towards the highest degree of possible culture. Democracy in this sense retains within itself an imprescriptible element of aristocracy, which lies in establishing the superiority of the best with the consent of all; but on this basis it becomes essential that the qualities regarded as superior are really the best, and not merely qualities immobilised in a special class or caste and protected by special privileges. The only aris- tocracy possible on a democratic basis is one of morality and culture. Superiority in the hierarchical order must be superiority in the capacity to love. That truth, Rodo declares, will remain rooted in human belief "so long as it is possible to arrange two pieces of wood in the form of a cross." In Ariel Rodo never directly brings South America on to the scene. He would gladly, one divines, claim for his own continent the privilege of representing Ariel. But he reaHsed that much remained to do before that became possible. His love for his own country is embodied 9 242 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME in three of his finest and latest essays, concerned with the three noblest figures of South America in different fields. In the first of these he deals with the greatest figure of South America in the sphere of actions, Bolivar, " the South American Napoleon." In the second he discusses attractively the hfeand environment of Juan Montalvo,the greatest prose-writer of South America, with whose name Rodo's is now associated. In the third he shows all his delicate critical discrimination in estimating the work of Ruben Dario, who was, as Rod6 points out, not so much the greatest poet of South America as of contemporary Spain, an imaginative figure of world-wide interest. In these essays Rodo is revealed as the unf aiUngly calm and lucid critic, discriminating and sympathetic, possessed of a style which, with its pecuHar personal impress of combined gravity and grace, rendered him, in the opinions of good Spanish judges, the greatest contemporary master of the Castihan tongue. That Rodo realised how far the finer spirits of South America yet are from completely moulding their own land to their ideals we may gather from various episodes of his work. He was not able to regard South America, any more than North America, as to-day a congenial soil for art. If he disliked the intolerant spirit of utilitarian materialism in the North, he equally opposed the intoler- ance of Jacobinism in the South. . This is brought out in an admirable series of letters, entitled " LiberaHsmo y Jacobinismo," suggested by the action of the Charity Commissioners in removing all images of the Crucified Christ from the walls of hospitals, suppressing them, not R0D(5 243 as objects of worship (for that had already been done), but even as symbols. Rodo criticises this action,- not from the point of view of Christianity which is not his, but from that of a sympathetic and tolerant Liberalism, to which he opposes the spirit of Jacobinism. By Jacobinism he means, in fair agreement with Taine, a mental attitude of absolute dogmatism, necessarily implying intolerance, on the basis of rationalistic free- thought. Flaubert's Homais is its immortal embodiment. Rodo admirably analyses this attitude, and shows how, with all its clear logical thoroughness, it is out of touch with the complexities of life and lacks the sense for human realities. Rod6 sees that true free-thought, far from being a mere rigid formula, is the result of an interior education which few can acquire. The attainment of toleration, of spiritual toleration, he regards as the great task of the past century — an affirmative and active toleration, " the great school of largeness in thought, of delicacy in sensibility, of perfectibility in character." He foresaw, even before the War, that there are troublous times ahead for freedom, but he saw, also, that even if but one soul should stand firm, there will be the palladium of human liberty. Rodo was of the tribe of Quinet and Renan, of Fouillee and especially Guyau. Like those fine spirits, he desired to be the messenger of sweetness and of light, of the spirit of Jesus combined with the spirit of Athens, and the intolerance of rationalism seemed to him as deadly a poison to civilisation as that of Christianity. In his steady devotion to this combined ideal Rodo may be said 244 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME to be European, and more distinctively French. But in his adaptation of that ideal to the needs of his own land, and his firm establishment of it on a democratic basis, he is the representative of South America. It was his final hope that out of the agony of this war there would emerge new ideals of life, new aspirations of art, in which Latin America, stirred by the worldwide shock, would definitely affirm its own conscious personaUty. Rodo was a Uruguayan, of old and wealthy family, bom forty-five years ago in Montevideo, where he spent nearly the whole of his life. On leaving the University of his native city, where in later years he himself lectured on Literature, his activities found some scope in journal- ism, and he was interested in pohtics, being at one time a Deputy in the Uruguayan Chamber. The mood of his earhest writings is one of doubt, anxiety, scepticism; he seems to be in expectation of some external revelation or revolution. But his own personal vision became gradually estabhshed. His revelation was not from without, but from within. He attained a rare serenity and lucidity; and he remained always indifferent to applause. Indeed, amid the declamatory and impulsive extravagance which often marks the South American, it seemed to some that his attitude was the outcome of a temperament almost too calm and reasonable, and they recalled that neither in youth or later had he ever been known to be in love. But Rodo's spirit was as large- hearted and sympathetic as it was penetrative and keen. When he died, in Sicily, suddenly and alone, on his way at last to visit the land of France which he regarded as rod6 245 his intellectual home, he was exercising, it is said, a tranquil kind of spiritual royalty over the whole South American Continent. Henceforth his slender and very tall figure will no longer be seen striding rapidly through the streets of his native city, as his friend and fellow- countryman Barbagelata has described it, one arm swinging like an oar, and lifted aquiline face that recalled a condor of the Andes. XXI MR. CONRAD'S WORLD The tie that binds a reader to an author is sometimes twined up with the secret feeling that no other reader can be so well fitted to appreciate that author. One's own temperament or one's own circumstances, it seems, have produced a rare, if not unique, sensibility to this author's art. The present writer is specially tempted to fall into this delusion over the works of Joseph Conrad, now appearing in reissues which indicate to how wide an audience they reaUy appeal. When I consider that Mr. Conrad's readers have chiefly known the sea from the esplanade of a summer holiday resort ; that even if by a rare chance they have gone round the world, it has almost certainly been by steam, a method of progression which, as Mr. Conrad has so well pointed out, can reveal Uttle or nothing of ships, or of the life of sailors, or even of the genius of the sea, I reaUse that these people inevitably lack that concealed reservoir of emotional experience in his reader on which the artist must draw for his most profoundly intimate appeals. So that reader regards himself as elect who on both sides of his family is of the sea, the son and the grandson of sailors, whose forefathers have once and again sailed from port never to be heard 246 MR. CONRAD'S WORLD 247 of again, and when they were not sailors found consolation as shipbuilders, or spent their lives in the warehouses of those mysteriously attractive Docks of the Thames where all the wines of Europe are arrayed in long avenues of casks, and all the spices of the East stored in legendary profusion. And if he can also recall that as a child, and many a time later, he wandered round that Circular Quay at Sydney which seems to lie at the heart of Mr. Conrad's world; that he has again and again sailed, but never steamed, round the Cape and the Horn, once at least on the ship's articles, and even as a child of six, with a fellow- navigator of much the same age, explored in a dinghy the rocks round the Chincha Islands for starfish, he feels that in Mr. Conrad's art he has reached a long-sought shrine which all men now behold, but few can enter. A veil of mist may intervene between that remote life and the totally different life of the present, but to enter Conrad's novels is as when Pythagoras entered the temple at Argos and recognised on its walls, with what mysterious stirring of the soul, the shield that had been his own in a previous existence. It is a shrine which was erected late in the history of art, so late that in a few years more it could not have been erected at all, for the life it commemorated would have been forgotten. The Englishman, regarded compre- hensively and afar, is an essential sailor. However lacking the inhabitants of these islands may be in any fine artist's insight into the sea and the ship and sailors, they are all the descendants of sailors. Each successive people that from prehistoric days onwards invaded and 248 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME conquered England canae as sailors, facing all the dangers of an unknown coast and its hostile population. The sea has been in our blood throughout. Our most beloved heroes, from Drake to Nelson, have been sailors. But the English are not essential artists. The EngUsh sailors who wrote the records gathered together in Hakluyt's Voyages, that Odyssey of the English people, produced some inspiring and occasionally picturesque narratives of epic achievement, but not one of them ever developed into an artist. In later days Trelawney, in his Adventures of a Younger Son, appears as a kind of forerunner of Mr. Conrad, and even the distinction that his admirable book is not a narrative of fiction based on fact, but a narrative of fact partly based, we are incHned to suspect, on fiction, heightens the resemblance; but Trelawney was a Cornishman, not a typical representative EngUsh- man. The English poets from Shakespeare to Swinburne have not greatly mended matters. Shakespeare near the close of his life, after reading the history of Magellan's voyage to the Pacific, the greatest achievement in the history of navigation, and seizing with delight on the name he found there of the Patagonian god Setebos, produced in the Tempest a good make-believe sketch of the sailor's life; but it was only make-believe; and the sea which Swinburne turned into rhythmic rhapsody was, at best, the swimmer's sea. There was, indeed, outside England, Herman Melville, a fine prose poet who was happily romantic on sea as on land, although, at sea especially, he too often fell into fantastic extravagance. Even after Melville, Whitman, who had himself once MR. CONRAD'S WORLD 249 cherished the idea of going to sea in order to understand ships, could declare, shortly before his death: " A ship in full sail is the grandest sight in the world, and it has never yet been put into a poem. The naan who does it will achieve a wonderful work." One is inclined to sum up the total results of English literature here in the state- ment put forward in an attempt at verse by Mr. Mase- field's impotent Dauber : " It's not been done, the sea, not yet been done, From the inside, by one who really knows, I'd give up all if I could be the one. I see it all, I cannot put it down." After a thousand years and more the man arrived who can " put it down." He arrived, we see, late, even at the latest possible moment, when the word " sailor " was already becoming merely metaphorical, and when the ship, which had slowly developed from the hollowed log to a miracle of exquisite beauty, was giving place to a totally different machine, worked on other principles and even constructed of other materials. Moreover, when he arrived he was not, after all, English, penetrating and sympathetic as was the insight with which he placed himself at the heart of the English sailor, even the mo^t typical and peculiarly English sailor. He was not only not an English sailor, he was not of a race of sailors, belonging to an agricultural land which no longer so much as possesses a seaboard and rarely sends its sons to sea. Mr. Conrad thus comes before us as a fascinating " varia- tion " which suddenly reverts to tjTpe. After twenty years on the sea, from some motive which he cannot 250 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME himself explain — "acompletelymasked and unaccountable phenomenon," he calls it — he begins to write, he abandons the sea, he follows the lure of literature which had haunted his father. But the born artist who thus reached his art after so many years, at the end of this immense circuit of half a million mUes, has garnered up in his art a wealth of beauty for ever unattainable without such apprentice- ship. Mr. Conrad has been made a great artist by the sea and the environment of the English sailor's life. But his temperament has not ceased to be the Pole's, imagina- tive, high-strung, excitable. It is, indeed, in the electric flashing of this clash between original temperament and the environment of the English sailor's hfe that Mr. Conrad has become the great artist he is. The English sailor is unable to arrive at art by the very harmony between this lack of inborn disposition and the sedative routine, the monotonous order, of the sailor's life. The variegated panorama of the world makes as little im- pression on him as the vision of endless cities on the ever- moving commercial traveller. The marvels of half the earth are stored up in the subconscious brain of the man who has spent his life at sea, but on his conscious brain they arouse little curiosity and leave but little memory. They have flashed before his eye with a faint amusement, the unrolling of a cinematographic film in which he had no personal concern. If he experiences any touch of vivid interest outside his profession, it is not on the margin of strange lands, but when he is at his post at sea, and is perhaps moved to set down in the log-book the MR. CONRAD'S WORLD 251 unique experience of seeing a swarm of butterflies settle on the rigging in Mid-Atlantic. For the most part, it must be realised, the expected and the unexpected are as one to the sailor. He must be equally prepared for both (" a Jack of all trades "), and the rarest emergency is met calmly, with scarce a comment, only the swift com- mand and the swift response, "Ay, ay, sir !" It is a fine and symbolic touch in Typhoon when Captain MacWhirr gives his instructions to the steward about the matches : " A box and just there, see ? Not so very full . . . where I can put my hand on it, steward. Might want a light in a hurry. Can't tell on board ship what you might want in a hurry." That is a large part of the sailor's art, to have everything at hand, quickly ready for use in emergency, even the things he may not need once on the voyage, even the things he may not need once in his whole career, like the weU-kept revolver over the Captain's berth, within easy reach of his hand, but never used save once, perhaps, to intimidate an insubordinate seaman, while the boatswain cheerfully exhorted: " Just wing him, sir !" In my own childhood's memories there were even two guns mounted on the maindeck, one to star- board and one to port, as though ships' husbands in those remote days dimly foresaw hostile submarines. Mr. Conrad has soaked himself in this alien element, so that it has become a second nature to him; its traditions have become his traditions; he has submitted himself wholeheartedly to its simple moral rule and its instinct of fidelity as the core of life. Yet beneath the exquisitely sensitive receptivity which has made this possible he has 252 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME preserved that foundation of aboriginal individuality without which, indeed, no man can become a fine artist. Thus, throughout, he has been able at once both to live that life and to see it from the outside, as an artist, attaining a conception of the world, so he puts it ^and in a form which recalls the philosophy of Jules de Gaultier, with which he may well be unacquainted), as " purely spectacular," as " a universe whose amazing spectacle is a moral end in itself." " I have come to suspect," he says in his Reminiscences, " that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely spectacular: a spectacle for awe, love, admiration, or hate, if you like, but in this view — and in this view alone — never for despair." As he looks back at the vivid spectacle, scenes and figures crowd back to him in profusion, always delicately and truly seen, yet in sudden and vivid flashes, as by lightning. This quality of vision, with the extraordinary and precise memory accompanying it, is of the essence of Mr. Conrad's genius. It enables him to present men and things, purged of their accidentals, beneath an intense light which reveals their clearest outline and their inmost reality, with a truth that is one with imagination, and results in beauty — for, as he himself says, he has " never sought in the written word anything else but a form of the Beautiful." This quality is associated, deeply and intimately, with a gift — seeming so- easy as to be instinc- tive — for felicitous metaphor and simile. In this felicity of image-making Mr. Conrad is true to the PoUsh genius ; Mickiewicz in Pan Tadeusz, the national poem of MR. CONRAD'S WORLD 253 Poland, shows precisely the same fresh and vivid power. The young moon, low in the western evening sky, we are told passingly in Lord Jim, was " like a slender shaving thrown up from a bar of gold." No prose novelist, indeed, has more filled his work with admirable metaphor. There is a poet latent within this artist.. The imagery, in its marvellous felicity, is not the fantastic and dis- torting caricature in which Dickens was so expert on land and Herman Melville at sea. It is the revelation of the thing, precisely and clearly seen. The imagery of all other writers of the sea seems extravagant or clumsy beside this. We see this same quality of vision in the peculiar method of Mr. Conrad's narrative construction. He begins at the middle. It is as though the story were presented to him as one whole in a sudden flash of light- ning which cleaves it to the core at the outset. From that centre we have gradually to be brought to the surface from which normally we should have begun. Hence the need for this, in a double sense, oblique narration. The sensation of excitement is produced, not by stating the mystery and then slowly evolving its solution, but by presenting the solution first and then building up the mystery. It is not a method we are called upon to find fault with; it is too deeply based in the author's mode of perception. Even in the fragmentary chapters of his Reminiscences he begins in the middle of his life, and works back towards the beginning. It has become an instinctive habit of his mind. This oblique method of narration — oblique not only through the frequent intervention of Mr. Conrad's alter 254 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME « ego, Captain Marlow, but by the line of itstiirection — may well be a method that comes easily to a sailor, for the sailor, in the perpetual adjustment of his aim to the wind's aim, is familiar with the method of progression by slant- ing awry towards the goal he desires to reach. In the novel, as Mr. Conrad has shown, it lends itself to a shim- meringly brilliant effect of prolonged sensation. Now the sea fails to lend itself easily to sensationalism Its beautiful or awful experiences arise and dissolve on a level of placid routine. Moreover, women, with the large possibilities of sensationalism they introduce, are normally absent from the sea, or chiefly present, as in the most characteristic of Mr. Conrad's sea stories, as a spectacular element. "Girl! What ?" exclaims Captain Marlow in Heart of Darkness; "Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it — completely. They — the women, I mean — are out of it — should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse." Thus, Mr. Conrad's special quality of vision, his method of narrative, and, perhaps still more profoundly, some obscure a:ncestral quahty of tem- perament, combine to make him, beside the artist of the sea, a novelist of sensation, of exciting quests, of spiritual adventures, even of lurid situations. In this aspect he has no necessary connection with the sea, and, indeed, tends to drift away from the sea altogether, as we see notably in Under Western Eyes. As he has himself said, a break occurred in his development at the point where he seemed to have said all that was in him on the sea, " a sudden change in the nature of the inspiration," and MR. CONRAD'S WORLD 255 after finishing the Typhoon volume " it sefemed somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about." A considerable proportion of Mr. Conrad's books belongs to the class initiated after this crisis. It is in this field that he has become a professional man of letters and so acquired a large measure of his reputation. The success is all the more legitimate since, however much Mr. Conrad may be applying lessons learnt on the sea, we recognise that here he enters a peculiar field of psychological sensationalism which the widespread Slav genius has made its own. That consideration, indeed, indicates that there is here a limit set to success. In this kingdom Dostoevsky rules, and what can the man do that cometh after the King ? However brilliant in vision and accomplished in skill he may elsewhere be, it still remains true that the sea is Mr. Conrad's world. Here he is himself a king of un- disputed sway. His own vision, his own experience, his own insight, here control a medium of expression which they possess unique power to mould to the ends of art. A very few simple ideas rule in this sailor's world of his ship, as Mr. Conrad has himself remarked, notably the idea of Fidelity. That is the sailor's deep and silent creed, but it is enough for his duty and enough for Mr. Conrad's art. Herein is the tragedy of Lord Jim, which, as he would himself probably agree, is the greatest of his books. On the other side is the figure, not in externals typical, of Captain Mac Whirr. His is a figure, indeed, in which we see Fidelity reduced to its lowest and simplest terms, so that he seems rather a fool even to his own mate. 256 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME yet a figure of an overwhelming magnificence which places Typhoon among the summits of literature. These novels, stories, sketches, of the sea, may not bulk large, not even to-day, in their author's own work. But in the end it is not bulk that counts. The little episode of the derehct in The Mirror of the Sea would alone suffice to- stamp for ever Mr. Conrad's quality, even if nothing else of his work survived. Fidehty is not only the basis of the sailor's life, as Mr. Conrad sees it, but also the basis of the artist's hfe as Mr. Conrad lives it, for, as he has himself said, he first learnt his artist's creed on the decks of ships. " Fiction," he remarks, " is but Truth dragged out of a well and clothed in the painted robe of imaged phrases." In his own case, at all events, nothing is so sure as the exact fidelity to truth of these " imaged phrases." This delicate and, as it seems, almost uncon- sciously easy precision renders the actual facts. So it is that this great master of ships and the sea and the seaman possesses the unique powers of evoking from the remote past the images of these things in the mind of the man who has ever lived the life he describes, the sights, the sounds, the odours, the very aspect of the men who move among them. So it is, also, that he possesses the power of creating these things afresh in the mind of the man who has never known them. That is why we can scarcely be too thankful that a miraculous chance has enabled an artist with so sensitive an eye and so firm a hand to record at the last moment the vision of a beautiful and wonderful world which already belongs to the past and will soon fall from Hving memory. XXII THE HUMAN BAUDELAIRE There clings to the personality of Baudelaire, even to- day, a reputation that -remains rather inhuman. The humanity of his work has, indeed, been slowly, very slowly, affirmed. It is but a small body of work, and even within its narrow limits unequal, often falling into rhetoric or banality; it has had to make its way to us amid all sorts of impediments : prosecution at the outset, its own novelty, the scandal of all respectably conven- tional readers, the embarrassed and imperfect compre- hension of admirers from Gautier onwards. Only within recent years has it become clear to all that here a new revelation of the mysteries of human emotion was ex- pressed, with a firm hand that possessed the sense of form, with a voice whose music could thrill the nerves and awaken the hidden impulses of the heart. Even in the midst of the agonies of war, we are told, in a little cabinet de lecture of the Latin Quarter with three copies of the Fleurs du Mai, they are never- on the shelves, and the reada: must put down his name weeks in advance. Yet if the poet has taken his place not only in the ranks of great writers, but among the classics of the heart, the man still" remains homeless. For the most partj we search in 257 ■ R 258 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME vain among the documents that are left — his fragmentary notes and letters, his recorded sayings and doings, the recollections of his friends — for a human person to love. We find a rather neurotic individual, shghtly unsound in heredity, who was predestined to live an extravagant, abnormal, in the worldly sense unsuccessful life. On that basis we have the record of perpetual reaction between extremes, of eccentricities that were, merely childish, of a puerile delight in devices pour epater le bourgeois which the man of genius usually leaves to others. We seem to be in the presence of a mysterious and scarcely attractive figure, wearing a fantastic mask to which he himself likes to attract attention. " N'est-ce pas que je ressemble a un eveque damne ?" It is just fifty years since Baudelaire died. Therewith his books pass out of copyright, and the circle of his readers is indefinitely enlarged. It was a fitting moment for the publicaticHi of the long series of intimate letters. Chiefly to his mother, and covering the years between the age of twelve and his death, thirty-four years later, which has been appearing in the Revue de Paris^^ They are the revelation of a personality which it had been left to sensitive readers to divine beneath that mask of " Wan- dering Jew" or "Guillotine" or "Eveque damne" which Baudelaire loved to present to the world, and his dubious friends to point at. Here that personality is revealed clearly for all to see, even in pathetic nakiedness, simple, human, pitiful. It is, indeed, a pathetic, even a tragic figure, guided ^ Now (igiS) published in a volume with some additions. THE HUMAN BAUDELAIRE 259 through an atmosphere of unrelieved gloom by an in- evitable Fate, whose life-course we follow in these letters. , In the first letter of the series, a schoolboy of twelve, he writes to his brother of his laziness, "a little mixed with amour-propre " (he could not write until receiving an answer to his former letter), a sprain of his foot, and his shame at having taken no prize. There we. have, in effect, the four themes that were destined to be woven in and out of the whole drama: laziness, which was really a defect of physical energy combined with fidelity to a high ideal; pride which he could not shake off in the most intimate and even the most humiliating relationships', a feeble constitution; a perpetual inability to command worldly success. Throughout Baudelaire faces the facts of himself, without either disguise or emphasis, without either self-praise or self-paUiation. At the most, he says^ and that more than once: " I have suffered so much, I have been so punished, I think I may be forgiven much." His letters are written in a completely simple and un- literary manner; there is no style, nor always grammar. He is no longer the mischievous child hiding behind a mask, but still a child, indisciplined and awkward and helpless, with dreams in his head and tears in his eyes, afraid of everything. He cannot go to see his mother on one occasion because his clothes are so shabby and he is afraid of the servants, so asks her to meet him in the Salon Carre at the Louvre, " the place in Paris where one can talk best." He knows, indeed, who he is and what he stands for in the world, though with no touch of vanity. " I think that posterity concerns me," he remarks 260 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME parenthetically. And still his irritable pride comes in; after telling his mother that until she had sent him money he had been two days without food, and obliged to take some brandy offered to him, much as he hated spirits, he adds : " May such confessions never be known to living soul or to posterity." The chief figures of this drama, after the protagonist, are three : Maitre Ancelle, the lawyer who was constituted his guardian, after he had dissipated the greater part of the little fortune inherited from his father; his mistress, Jeanne Duval, the V^nus Noire (she had a strain of negro blood) ; and his mother, to whom most of the letters are addressed, the being who always remained the nearest to him in all the world. There are other subsidiary figures, notably his stepfather. General Aupick, successively French Ambassador in Constantinople, London, and Madrid, an honourable and good-hearted man who was prepared to be friendly and even helpful until he recognised that the young man's irritable pride made this impossible ; and there is Poulet-Malassis, the admirable publisher and friend, whom we dimly see in the background. The guardian, the mistress, and the mother remain the three persons who had the deepest influence on Baudelaire's intimate personal life. Ancelle had the least, and there was no reason why he should have had any. He was only there because the poet had shown himself clearly unable to manage his own money affairs, and he seems to have been an excellent man, whose conduct was irreproachable. But Baudelaire, though aware of this, could never forgive him for being there at all. The fact that he must be THE HUMAN BAUDELAIRE 261 treated as a child in money matters is a perpetual corrod- ing poison to one of Baudelaire's temperament, all the more so when there is no doubt about its' necessity, and it recurs again and again in his letters to his mother, whom he begs repeatedly and with insistence to deal with him^ directly and not through Ancelle. He was never able to overcome the humiliation of this guardian. Ancelle filled the chief place in the antechamber to Baudelaire's intimate life. Within, a more important figure, Jeanne, was associated with nearly the whole of his active years, from the age of twenty-one onwards. In one of his letters Baudelaire mentioned that he could not get on with his brother on account of the latter's ' ' attitude of cynicism towards women . ' ' How little there was of the cynic in Baudelaire could not be better illus- trated than by the long story of his devotion to Jeanne, for there could not well be a woman better fitted to stimu- late the germs of cynicism than Jeanne. When what beauty she possessed faded, and she became a prematurely aged invalid, no charm was left; she was stupid, false, and spiteful; she took all the money he could gather together for her, and trickily tried to get more; she treated him with insolent contempt, and seemed to delight in humiliating him; she went to his publisher to try to sell books and drawings he had given her; she made him ridiculous by declaring that the money he had sent to pay for her in a nursing-home had never been handed oyer; she showed neither regard nor admiration for him; she felt no interest in his work, and would not trouble to acquire any. Baudelaire soon ceased to have any 262 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME delusions about Jeanne; at first, as he admitted, he was guilty of outbursts of violence, but before long, while recognising good qualities we can no longer discern, he realised her character, with the same courageous insight with which he realised his own. And this, as he writes to his mother, was the woman on whom he had, like a gamester, placed all his chances; " this woman was my only distraction, my only pleasure, my only comrade." So she continued to be, such as she was, many years after. Undoubtedly he was upheld by the deep-rooted pride which he himself recognised as the chief element in his character. Nothing would induce him to abandon Jeanne to misery. For twenty years he worked for her, cared for her, nursed her, scarcely as a lover — though on one occasion, when she threatened to leave him, he was ill for days — but rather with the unrewarded devotion of a Sister of Mercy Of Baudelaire's mother, Madame Aupick, no picture is presented to us. He analyses Jeanne's character, he analyses his own, but never his mother's. Yet we obtain many glimpses which enable us to form a fairly clear idea. She had been, we gather, a beautiful woman of distin- guished appearance; she was also of neurotic tendency, subject to migraine and other nervous disturbances, so that her son shows a constant solicitude about her health. In this matter of temperament, as he himself remarks, he takes after her. But on the mental side there seems a total absence of likeness between the Ambassador's wife and the Bohemian poet who spent his life wandering from one third-rate hotel to another in the Latin Quarter. THE HUMAN BAUDELAIRE 263 She was conventional, she was devout, her literary tastes were of the most ordinary kind. She was indulgent; her son is able to write simply and frankly to her about Jeanne, and no doubt she felt some blind sort of maternal pride in his reputation. He is constantly sending her his articles or specially bound volumes of his works; but, though she is evidently interested in the Poe translations, to her son's genius she seems almost as insensitive as Jeanne. The devotion which subsisted to the end on both sides, notwithstanding the perpetual wounds which each was inevitably receiving from the other, is all the more wonderful and pitiful. The son's letters are through- out the letters of a child, who sometimes implores his mother ("avec des mains jointes," as he says) and some- times attempts to domineer over her. He comes to her with all his troubles, quite humbly, throwing aside, if not without an effort, all his amour-propre. It is seldom that we miss a reference to his " eternal money worries." He is always wanting to borrow money, large sums or small sums — even, at desperate moments, a few francs. But we never feel that he is herein unworthily trying to exploit his mother; his attitude is too simple and childlike, his tone too poignantly heart-felt. He writes to her, as he says, " not only as my mother, but as the one being who loves me." He is often hopeful; all his literary affairs are going well, and he has just had an article accepted by an editor; but — needless to quote further, for anyone who has ever been acquainted with a young author is familiar with such situations. In a month, a fortnight perhaps, he will be rich, but, with only thirty 264 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME francs in his pocket, how about the interval ? Again and again he declares that " before New Year's Day I shall have settled some of my debts and published my verses " ; but on one occasion, turning on himself with sarcasm, he adds : " I shall soon know that phrase by heart." For these anxieties — " unhappy, humiliated, sad as I am, overwhelmed every day by a crowd of wants " — ^were not favourable to productive activity, especially to one of Baudelaire's make, " a creature made of idleness and violence," whose cerebral activity so far outruns his nervous vitality. He realises this himself — no one was ever more clear-sighted — and writes to his mother that " the absolute idleness of my apparent life, contrasted with the perpetual activity of my ideas, throws me into . rages." He feels that he has wasted twenty years of his life in dreaming. " Habit plays such a large part in virtue," he writes, and goes on to speak with humble respect of Balzac, who " always worked." And again, a few years later, he writes: " How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events of suffering less '' On his mother's side we seem to discern, with whatever lack of sympathy and constant reproaches, a patient and adorable affection which no disappointments could per- manently crush. The Ambassador's wife seems from time to time to make futile efforts to bring the child of genius into the ordinary paths of respectability. She realised that an excess of generosity was useless, but though her funds were not unlimited, the advances she THE HUMAN BAUDELAIRE 265 made evidently amounted altogether to a large sum. Baudelaire soothed his pride over these transactions by a sanguine faith in the future and a quiet confidence in the ultimate recognition of his genius. He was never to see the realisation of that faith and that confidence. In March, 1866, he took Poulet-Malassis and F61icien Rops to see his favourite church at Namur, St. Loup, built in the finest baroque style of the Jesuits, with red marble pillars, solemnly fantastic in the dark and heavy atmosphere, the Fleurs du Mai transmuted into stone, a spot to which, for Baudelaire's sake, one went on pilgrim- age in days before the War. Here he fell stricken by paralysis. By his mother's wish they conveyed him to the Paris he had abandoned three years earlier for the still less congenial Brussels. His memory grew faint and uncertain; the great master of language could command few words beyond " Nom, ere nom !" But he still loved to hear Wagner's music; he still delighted in the sight of tulips and dahlias ; he still liked to appear neat and elegant . A few months after the first stroke he died in the arms of his mother, who cherished the belief that he recognised her to the end. The rich genius of France has not been rich in poets. To the French critic, indeed, it has seemed that France has sometimes been a "nest of singing birds." But from the tangled forest of English literature where "that wild music burthens every bough" we are not much impressed by the French critic's nest. It even seeftis to us that those special qualities of the French genius which have produced magnificent results in so many fields — the daring logic, 266 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME the cool penetrative analysis, even the instinct for art — are with difficulty compatible with what we understand as poetry, for in France the rhetorician, with eternal recurrence, takes the poet's place, and no man marks the difference. The clarity and order and sociaUty of the French Latin genius weave a close harmonious network against which the poet, with his disorganising lyric passion, can only beat himself to death. In the island where, as it has been said, " every EngUshman is himself an island," the poet is as independent as the rest, but as free in his spare moments to earn his Uving, more or less creditably, ascustom-houseofficer,clergyman, apothecary, or what not. In France, on the other hand, whose great poets may easily be counted off on the fingers of one hand, from Villon to Verlaine, the poet has been a tragic victim, an outcast even to those who recognised his genius. Ronsard, in the small group of great poets, is the exception, and when we wander from Tours down the left bank of the Loire to that little priory farmstead, delightful even in its decay, which was Ronsard' s home, we realise the secret of his serenity and tender joy, and how it was that he is, after all, the least of the great poets of France. For we understand nowhere better than in France that Nature made the heart in the form of a lyre and stretched across it cords of tendinous flesh. How significantly true it is in Baudelaire's case has'now been made for ever clear by the revelation of these letters. XXIII A FRIEND OF CASANOVA'S It has been well said that Casanova's Memoires present us with a gallery of gracious figures of eighteenth-century women only second to that which Goethe has left in his novels. Nowhere else, indeed, apart from autobio- graphical documents, can we find a whole series of finely individualised and intimately real portraits so attrac- tively presenting the special traits of a century we can never grow tired of studying, the century which Guizot considered to have done more than any other in the service of mankind. For the most part, we. can no longer disentangle the large part of truth we divine in the poetry of Goethe's lovely pictures; but with the increasingly serious investigation of Casanova the identity of the figures brought before us in the Memoires is ever becoming clearer. It is thus that during recent years — thanks to two accomplished Casanovists, Gugitz in Germany and Rava in Italy^ — ^it has been possible to identify with certainty and to study in detail one of the most original and attractive of Casanova's women^ 1 G. Gugitz, " Eine Geliebte Casanova's," Zeitschrift fur Bucher- freunde, No. '56, 1910-1911; A.Ravi, Letteredi Donne a Giacomo Casanova, igi2. Rav4 adds but little to the careful and elaborate investigation of Gugitz. 367 268 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME Mademoiselle X. C. V. She is worth reahsing, less for Casanova's sake than for her own, as a woman of rare intellectual distinction as well as charm- — ^indeed, one of the most typical figures of her century. She appeals to us the more since of all the feminine figures in Casanova's gallery she is the only Englishwoman. On the 31st of August, 1791, the Gazzetta Urbana Veneta announced the death at Padua a week earher of Giustina de Wynne Rosenberg, widow of Count Orsini (Ursini) Rosenberg, formerly Ambassador of the Empress Maria Theresa to the Venetian Republic. The obituary article was enthusiastic, but it was precise, accurate, and discriminative — not the phraseology of conventional eulogy, but the appreciation of a cultured friend, whose estimate, as we are to-day able to judge, was sound. Her natural gifts of imagination and intelligence, her high culture, her ardour for knowledge, her exquisite tact, her literary skill, her rare accomplishment as a delightful letter-writer, made her celebrated all over Europe, the Gazzetta tells us, while her lovable character, her fine penetration of spirit, her peculiar sweetness of manner, her natural modesty — qualities, we are told, seldom combined in one person — rendered her attractive to people of every social class. Justina's father, Richard Wynne, was of ancient Welsh family, his branch of it being settled in Hertfordshire, and he was probably related to the titled family of that name, though the occasional references to him as a baronet are almost certainly inaccurate. That he- was a man of position as well as of wealth seems indicated by the fact A FRIEND OF CASANOVA'S 269 that the Earl of Holderness, who had once been the Enghsh Resident in Venice, acted as guardian^ of his children. Wynne had left England, overcome by grief at the death of his first wife, and settled in Venice. Here, however, in course of time, he met and fell in love with a young girl of superb beauty, whose father's name was Gazini. "He was said to be Greek and of noble family, but both these statements, and especially the second, are dubious. In 1736 Justina was born of this love union. Shortly after- wards legal marriage followed and steps were taken to legitimate Justina, who thus assumed her proper place as the eldest of the family, for two more girls and then two boys rapidly followed, constituting, as several observers testify, a brilUant and attractive group. While, however, Justina's father seems to have held the free-thinking views which are commonly regarded as marking his century, her mother was a devout, even bigoted. Catholic. In later years Justina vividly described the unhappiness she thus suffered. She was a bright and intelligent child with an eager thirst for knowledge. "At thirteen years old," she wrote, " my only passion Wcis the improvement of my mind," and she devoured her father's books by stealth. One of these books was Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent. It must be important, she .felt, because it was so large. Once, in her hurry to conceal it, Justina stumbled, fell, and injured herself; the book was discovered, and her mother's confessor explained that it was a book condemned by the Church. There was much alarm, and Justina was per- suaded that she was in danger of damnation. Scarcely 270 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME had she at length received absolution when, still terrified, she saw another book of her father's open at a picture of Purgatory. That book, she felt sure, must be orthodox, and she carried it away to read. But it was the Contes of La Fontaine ! She read it, naturally, with much enjoyment. New emotions were stirred, and, moreover, for the first time her thoughts were put on the path of emancipation from religious dogma. No harm was done, but Justina is careful to add that she would not recom- mend the book for such educational purposes. Warned by her mother's example, Justina learnt to be tolerant, and she acquired a religious faith of her own which relied on internal prompting rather than on external authority. " I have always been pleased with the genius of Socrates," she wrote in later life, " I have myself an excellent demon which in difficulties points out to me the way I ought to take." Her follies, she owns, have been over the average allowed to mortals, but she never did a fooUsh thing but that Intelligence has immediately enlightened her as to what she was committing. " This foresight has cost me very dear, for it has prevented my ever abandoning myself to a single sensation and envelop- ing myself entirely in it," This is an observation which throws considerable light on Justina's Ufe and character, for if in the Jiigh-spirited daring of youth she sometimes plunged into what she admitted to be "follies," she swiftly regained het balance. When Justina was fourteen her father died, and to secure the inheritance it became necessary for the family to visit England. They took the route through Germany, A FRIEND OF CASANOVA'S 271 which Justina found tiresome; she was only conscious pf being ever5rwhere ill-fed and badly lodged, while her pious mother offered her no objects to gratify her eager youthful curiosity but churches overloaded with ornament, until they reached Holland, where, in the absence of Catholic churches, she was allowed to visit the gardens. But in England the parks, the immense bustle of the City, the tea-tables, the women's pretty hats, the general air of opulence, all made a great impression on the young girl. To her grief, however, before she had time for more than to learn to write the English language well and manage adroitly an English fork, her mother, fearful of heretical influences on her children, hurried the family away to Paris on the homeward journey. Justina was always proud to be English, but she was, nevertheless, dazzled by Paris, its brilliant equipages, the elegance of the men, the gay attire of the rouged women, the Tuileries, and, above all, the theatres, for she was taken to see a tragedy in which Qairon played the heroine. Then the Wynnes returned to Italy. Some five years passed quietly in Venice. When she was seventeen Casanova chanced to visit his native city, made her acquaintance, took part with her in theatricals, and momentarily lost to her his susceptible heart, where- upon^ the Signora Wynne prudently excluded him from her house, while her daughter consoled him with a charming letter. Justina had developed in beauty and intelligence, and was much sought by admirers, young and old, often of high position. She fell passionately in iove with one of them, a young patrician, Andrea 272 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME Memmo — a staunch friend of Casanova's, as it happened, and also the innocent cause of Casanova's famous im- prisonment — ^who ultimately attained to the post of Procurator of the Republic. There were obstacles to the marriage on the part of both famihes, and the ardour of her love began to diminish (so, at least, she wrote in later years) just when the obstacles were melting away. Yet it was about that same time that young Memmo, evidently only too much under Casanova's influence (it was the fear of Casanova's demorahsing influence on hey son that led Memmo's mother to complain to the Holy Office), succeeded in obtaining the last proofs of her love. The Wynnes were just then going to England again, and that is how we come to have a Uttle side-gUmpse of them in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters. She writes to her daughter. Lady Bute, in her airy, super- cilious way, on the 3rd of October, 1758, to tell her that " three fine ladies (I should say four including the Signora Madre) set out for London a few days ago," and warns the Countess that they may possibly use Lady Mary's name to call upon her. She proceeds to give a sketch of the family from observation and gossip, remarking that the EngHsh Resident is among " their numerous passionate admirers," and that " they keep a constant assembly, but had no female visitors of any distinction. The story," she adds, " deserves the pen of my dear Smollett." She has nothing to say, however, against the reputation of the family. Lady Mary might have been more severe had she known that at the very moment she wrote Andrea Memmo was following Justina in A FRIEND OF CASANOVA'S 273 disguise as far as Milan, and there, unknown to her mother, had an interview with her, probably the inter- view which was destined to prove fateful. It may be added that Justina and Memmo, though they never met again as lovers, remained friends throughout life. - Justina was now twenty-one years of age, and had become brilliant alike in body and mind. She was romantic and adventurous, she tells us, " the common case of young women who instruct themselves," and she adds, " Never, perhaps, was anybody more coquettish with so much sensibility and frankness," Elsewhere, again, she speaks of herself as at that time a coquette. But Casanova, whose judgment in such a matter may be trusted, asserts positively " she was not a coquette," and that is the conclusion which best accords with the impression we gain of her life and character. There was war in those days. England, as the ally of Firederick thS Great, was fighting against France. The Wynnes were consequently detained some tinie in Paris before, the war still in progress, they were able to come to London. With our present notions of war it seems astonishing that an English family should choose to return to England, and should succeed in returning, through an enemy country. But spy manias and internment camps had not yet been invented. In Paris the war made no difierence, apparently, to the enjoyment of this English girl. " Seduction gUded little by little into my heart." She rouged and coquetted, she tells us, developed with the dancing-master's aid the grace of her large and well-proportioned form, acquired an easy elegance of 274 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME behaviour, and at the same time a skill in letter-writing which we hear of on every hand — " a dangerous gift," she herself calls it. "I was really charming. I may be permitted to say so now, because I have survived my beauty, and one may compose one's own epitaph." She was surrounded by an atmosphere of admiration, and her mother, dazzled by her brilliant daughter's success, forgave all her daring little liberties, when she discovered them, for, her daughter remarks, it was not difficult to deceive her. But though she tells us of the hberties she took and of the " folHes " she committed, she never tells us what they were. It is at this point that Casanova intervenes to enlighten us. In November, 1758, when the Wynnes reached Paris, Casanova had also lately arrived from Holland. The famous adventurer was just then on the crest of a wave of his turbulent life. His supreme achievement in escaping from the Venetian prison was on all hps, and seemed still further to increase his favour among women, while his recent services to the French Government in their lottery scheme had gained him the respect of influential men. Money was flowing in ; he had taken an elegant house; he kept horses and carriages; he was displaying in a more than usually happy mood his careless air of magnificent insolence. At the Com^die Itahenne one night he saw the Wynne family in a neighbouring box. Justina called the attention of her mother, who graciously beckoned to him with her fan, and Casanova was once more on terms of intimacy with the family, though he was clear-sighted enough to know that he owed this, not A FRIEND OF CASANOVA'S 275 to the Signora's favour — ^he admits she never liked him, and he describes her, not unjustly, it happens, as a superstitious and shallow-minded bigot — ^but merely to his social good-fortune at the moment. Henceforth he was invited to dinner at the hotel the Wynnes had taken in the Rue St. Andre des Arts; he associated with them at the Opera; he was even allowed to see Justina when she was resting in bed, which she now had her private reasons for doing often. She evidently admired him and liked him; she treated him with all the trustful confidence of her frank and adventurous spirit, so arousing high hopes in the now impassioned admirer's mind. One day, however, manifesting the full extent of her confidence in him, she revealed the subject on which her thoughts were fixed; she told him that she was expecting to become a mother, adding that she had so far confided this secret to nobody, not even to her lover, and she begged him to save her from suicide (she had already obtained poison) by enabling her to procure an abortion. That proposal shocked even Casanova, but he faithfully promised to help. Justina was grateful. There were subsequent meetings, often during masked balls at the Opera, to discuss the situation and consider remedies, and after one of these Justina expressed a wish to see Casanova's house. It seemed to the deUghted adventurer (who was not yet acquainted with the ways of English girls) that the consummation of his hopes was approaching; he hastened to convey her to La Petite Pologne, where an omelette and a bottle of champagne were consumed, and kisses followed. But thereupon Justina resolutely 276 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME departed, deaf to all entreaties, leaving the mortified Casanova with an unaccustomed wound to his amour- propre. That wound was to some extent healed a little later, though scarcely by the most straightforward measures. But all the subsequent proceedings are duly narrated in the Memoires: the licentiously farcical episode of the appUcation of the Paracelsian aroph (mainly com- posed of Enghsh saffron, though Casanova deemed it unnecessary to follow the prescription exactly), to which Justina in her anxiety for dehverance submitted with innocent trust; the subsequent intervention of Casanova's aristocratic friend Madame du Rumain, who enabled him to place Justina secretly in a convent for her confinement; the serious troubles that consequently fell upon Casanova; Justina's happy dehverance and return to her family in all the sanctity of virtue, with a certificate from the abbess to show that she had retired to the convent to escape a too importunate suitor — it is all set down at length in Casanova's most entertjiining as well as most psychologi- cally instructive manner.^ There is not a word of it, needless to say, in the Countess of Rosenberg's reminiscences. After describing generally, and with an undertone of disapproval, her life of gaiety and adventure in Paris, she tells how eagerly she crossed to the England she had so long looked forward to visiting * There are several errors in Casanova's narrative, and I was at first _ baffled by his repeated and confusing statement that the visit of the Wynnes to Paris took t>Iace after, and not before, their journey to England. Such errors by no means entitle us to regard the whole narrative as a fiction. They rather seem to confirm it. We must remember that Casanova was writing after an interval of thirty years or more. A FRIEND OF CASANOVA'S 277 again; for, her anxieties over, and the baby's future arranged by the kind abbess's care, Justina's natural buoyancy speedily came into play. Casanova remarks, indeed, probably with truth, that from the date of the arofh episode her calm and confidence began to reappear. But disappointment now befell her. It is evident that England was highly distasteful to her mother; it was a land of heretics, and the task she had to carry through, of accepting a formal reconciliation to Anglicanism — made necessary by the fact that she had induced her husband on his death-bed to become a Catholic — could scarcely have been congenial. Disputes arose with Lord Holderness, and she found comfort and support in her Irish confessor. She persuaded herself that her children were in spiritual danger, and made up her mind to leave England. In order to justify this decision she declared that the climate was injurious to the family's health* In order to support this belief Justina was confiined to her room, and even her bed, her face was stained with saffron-water made by the confessor, and she was only allowed to see doctors and apothecaries. (So it was that saffron again played a fateful part in Justina's life.) The scheme was successful, and Justina was forced to leave England when she had scarcely begun to know her relatives and friends and all the attractions of London. " Bitter tears flowed from my eyes on quitting my beloved country, from which I was unmercifully banished at a time when everything pressed for a stay — above all, the eager desire I had to remain an Englishwoman," a desire, she adds, never extirpated from her heart, and she 278 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME always retained her English surname. She ends the narrative of " My First Travels " with a condemnation of travelling not only for " its miscarriage in my own case," but as not likely in any case to serve the purposes of education. This sudden severe note in the Countess's story of a brilhant young girl with a natural and innocent desire for social gaiety must have been inexpHcable to her readers. But we, who have Casanova's Memoires before us, know now what was in her mind. Justina had learnt her lesson. If she had, as she con- fesses, committed more than her share of follies, hence- forth her reputation was blameless. Two years after her return from London to Venice she was married to Count Rosenberg, a man advanced in years, but of the highest Austrian aristocracy. That, indeed, was not altogether a fortunate circumstance. The Count thought it desirable in the first place to keep the marriage secret, for the Austrian Court punctiliously demanded from a man of the Count's rank good evidence of his wfe's nobility on both sides. Testimonials were obtained from Lord Sandwich and others in England, quite satisfactory, though not so precise as one would like, concerning Justina's father, but the Count found it less easy to prove the nobiHty of her mother. The resulting difficulties caused much anxiety and possibly hastened the Count's death, which occurred three years after the date of the marriage. Justina was n6t yet thirty, and a quarter of a century of life remained to her, but there are no more adventures to record. Occasionally she travelled, once at least to England, to stay with her A FRIEND OF CASANOVA'S 279 brother Richard, who had acquired repute as an author,^ No record of these journeys remains. We hear of her chiefly as the brilliant and charming centre of a dis- tinguished social group, and such she remained to the end. A portrait of her in later years shows a woman of imposing features and development, with a classic profile, a large full eye, and a rather haughty air — certainly a woman of character and ability who must once have been beautiful. She had always been a delightful letter-writer. As years went by literary ambitions arose. " There is a libertinism of the understanding," she wrote, " as well as of the heart, and it is allowable for a woman to give herself up to the former," which causes no social disorder, when the age of beauty is past and a considerable space of life yet remains — a void, she says, which " appeared to me much more frightful than eternity itself, which no terms of comparison have rendered intelligible to me." Certainly she now gave to her lap-dog the time she once gave to a mob of admirers. But books had always been her helpers to support what is commonly called " the age of repentance. Happily," she hastens to add, " I had nothing of that sort to incommode me, having never supposed it a duty to force one's inclinations when they * Chiefly as the author of An Universal Grammar, published in 1775, primarily for the benefit of his little daughter. He was the Rev. Richard Wynne, M.A., Rector of St. Alphege, London, and author of several other books. If, however, he was really Justina's brother he could not be the author of a translation of Rousseau's Dijon Prize Essay, published in 1752, as by Richard Wynne, M.A., and ascribed to him in the British Museum Catalogue, for at that time Justina's brother would only be about twelve years old, 28o ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME neither hurt ourselves nor disturb the order of society. I always held it a maxim that the world might in some manner be formed to our wishes. My liberty of thinking, of speaking, of acting, has procured me the reputation of originality, under the shelter of which I have passed all my life in singular independence: I made my caprices respected in my youth ; in my mature years I have insisted upon a kind of esteem, and I do not despair of procuring for the sayings of my old age the honourable distinction of maxims and prophecies." These remarks are set down ad addressed to her niece, who comments: " This is Uving, my dear aunt." The Countess first appeared before the world as an author in 1782; the occasion is worth noting because it brought her once more, and for the last time, into touch with Casanova. He mentions that he had seen her a few years before, a widow, and held in high esteem, but we know nothing of the interview. Now he wrote her a recently discovered letter of congratulation on her first appearance as a successful author, at the same time sending her a book of his own, but he discreetly made no personal references. She replied in the same tone, ex- pressing her esteem for his person and talents, but also without mention of their old friendship. Therewith he passes out of her Hfe. Only a fragmentary note remains, found at Dux among Casanova's papers, dated ten years later and headed Souvenir, recording how as they went down the staircase at the Castle after dinner a nephew of the Coimtess told him that " Madame de Rosenberg is dead," A FRIEND OF CASANOVA'S 281 Of, Justina Wynne's books two stand out as notable. One of these was a novel of peasant life in Serbia, Les Morlaques, which was translated into German and attracted the attention of Goethe. She here introduce(^ Serbian folk-lore and poems ; the book was probably the first of an interesting series which continues to the present day. Justina seems to have been attracted to the lives of the people, and was able to depict them with animation and skill. The most finished literary fragment in her other notable book is a love-story of Venetian gondolier Ufe, bright with local colour, " Dio and Bettina." This book, pubUshed in New Bond Street in 1785 (there was a simtdtaneous French veirsion which I have not seen), is described as " written in retirement on the banks of the Brenta," and entitled Moral and Sentimental Essays. These essays, which in this sketch it has already been necessary to quote several times, are for the most part bright, epistolary, almost conversational, in manner, but they cannot be called shallow, even though they reveal a certain intentional negligence which she admits. " ' Let your cap be set a little awry, Madam; let it not look as if it had cost you too much pains at your toilet !' I have all my lifetime retained this lesson, which I learnt from one of my first maids. I discovered by it that there are certain negligences which are not unfavourable, and I have adapted her way of thinking beyond the article of dress." That well-bred ease which Casanova noted of her in youth has passed into her pen. She touches Ufe at many points, serious or trivial, playfully, wittily, always simply and without affectation, and sets down the 283 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME wisdom which a charming and clever woman has garnered in much experience of the world. She was a typical woman of the eighteenth century, but her wisdom was independent of her time, for life is essentially always the same. As ever, she is on the side of tolerance. " Believe me, my dear girl," she said to her niece, who was bored by society — she often represents herself as conversing with her niece — " there are few opinions which may not claim our indulgence." If one finds a person insufferable, let us remember that one is probably oneself equally insufferable to him. " The great difference between a man of wit and a fool is that the fool cannot converse with the man of wit, whUst the man of wit can converseadmirably with the fool." She always sought to put herself in the place of others, she remarks, even of criminals: " I tremble to confess it, but I know few errors into which I might not possibly have fallen as well as the unfortunate wretches over whose heads I have seen suspended the sword of justice." Indulgence, she says, not dissimulation, should furnish the social mask needed for intercourse with the world. It is characteristic of Justina Wynne's frank and independent temper that she would wish to inculcate " a lesson of universal candour." " I have laughed a good deal in my youth; my behaviour carried in it the frank- ness of confidence, and I have had no reason to repent it." Let girls assert the right to laugh with all their hearts, she adds; for the time when we learn to smile comes soon enough. These Essays, which tell us how one woman of the eighteenth century learnt to smile, are more instructive A FRIEND OF CASANOVA'S 283 and more amusing than many bepraised books of to-day, though it is doubtful whether the dust that covers them is ever stirr.ed. Justina Wynne's name' has long been forgotten, and might have been forgotten for ever. But it chances that she once crossed the life of a magnificent scoundrel and heightened the comedy of his fascinating adventures. By the irony of Fate it is by a youthful folly she had imagined for ever forgotten that this wise and witty woman survives; and the gracious figure of Justina Wynne only seems worth recalling to-day because she was once a friend of Casanova's. XXIV COWLEY It is doubtful whether, even in more peaceful days than oursj many would have paused to celebrate the third centenary of the birth of Abraham Cowley. It need not, therefore, be a matter of much concern that we still cannot fix the precise^ day or even month when that celebration should take place. For the same uncertainty that hangs over Cowley's birth hangs also over his fame. The three greatest Enghsh poets are Spenser, Shake- speare, and Cowley; so, according to a tradition recorded by Dr. Johnson, Milton had declared, and though we have no contemporary note of that judgment, we know that Milton admired Cowley more than any other poet of his own time. Dryden, characteristically acknowledging his own debt to Cowley, said, " His authority is almost sacred to me," while Pope, also characteristically, asked, "Who now reads Cowley?" having, as Dean Beeching has remarked, " some interest in dissuading his own readers from doing so." Addison, who again had learnt so much from Cowley, could only compare his genius to the lambent radiance of the Milky Way. Half a century later the world had changed. Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, was critical. He put Cowley first 284 COWLEY 285 in his series, but regarded him as one of the so-called "metaphysical" poets (among whom he placed Ben Jonson and other great figures), " almost the last of that race and undoubtedly the best," with " such an assemblage of diversified excellencfcs as no other poet has hitherto afforded." But on the whole he depreciated the " meta- physical " tribe. Their world had indeed been sub- merged, and they had sUpped from their moorings, to become the daring adventurers of a new world where they were themselves forgotten. Johnson was the last critic who dealt seriously with Cowley. His own world had in its turn been submerged ; a new generation had arisen for whom " the world's great age begins anew." Disdainful of the eighteenth century, now and then condescending to the seventeenth, they refused to take Cowley seriously. But at times they accepted him playfully. So he acquired a new reputation of a different sort. It was best expressed by Lamb, who placed the name of Cowley among " the sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the mention." This relegation of Cowley to the aromatic by-paths was as uncritical as the earlier ^attempt to place him on a pinnacle as " the Prince of Poets." Yet, after he has been lying in Westminster Abbey for two and a half centuries, we are still content to leave it at that. Here — one may note in passing — we come again on to that ancient fact that we English are not a nation of critics. To attain that excellency we are too creative. One has even seen put forward in England the fantastic notion that criticism ought to be creative, as though a 286 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME creative criticism were not a contradiction in terms. Much of our best so-called " criticism," Pater's work, for instance, reaUy is creative. But let us turn to nations which have produced masters of criticism. It would be a poor compliment to call the Promenades Litteraires or La Critica creative. Still, we may accept our English critics as we find them, sometimes dull pedants for whom literature is a museum of dead fossils to morahse over, sometimes, and, more characteristically, Uvely amateurs of the higher confectionery, with a reUsh for choice morsels. The typical EngUsh critic, indeed, was Jack Horner, never so satisfied with his own goodness as when " he put in his thumb and pulled out a plum." That literature is something more and other than cake, that it is alive, with warm blood in the veins and a bony structure beneath, the English critic — there are always briUiant exceptions — ^finds it hard to conceive. We may well be content, for we would not choose, even if we could, to be a nation of critics rather than a nation of poets. Now, Cowley was ahve, more alive, indeed, with more movement in him, than any other writer of his time. It was necessary, for he lived in an age of transition. That may seem a futile statement to make, for no one ever lived in any other kind of age. But Cowley lived in an age — ^it may be that we live in the like — ^when the tran- sition was rapid, so rapid that scarcely anyone could keep up with it. The old order, in society and in literature, already more than mature, had been destroyed by war and revolution; there was a new order to build up. It is COWLEY 287 the distinction of Cowley that he, more than any man, was the active agent through whom that transition was in Uterature effected. It is significant that the symbohc figure of Moses looking towards a Promised Land so often furnished him with fine metaphors. He started with Ben Jonson and Donne, he ended with Dryden, and Swift was bom in the year of his death. He traversed the whole space between the English Renaissance and the EngUsh so-caUed Augustan Age, seeming an equal to the men of one world and a king to the men of the other. The circumstances of his temperament and his life ideally fitted Cowley for the task that was laid upon him. This, no doubt, he himself never reaHsed, and maybe it has never been pointed out. To superficial view Cowley's career was a succession of failures and makeshifts and disappointments. He was born near Paternoster Row in the autumn of i6i8, when Shakespeare had been dead two years. Bacon, Jonson, and Donne were of mature age, Hobbes was thirty, and Milton a child of ten. The son of a stationer (which usually meant a 'publisher) and the youngest of seven children, he was born after the death of his father, probably an elderly man. He bore the marks often asspciated with such parentage, a fragile constitu- tion (he seems ta have been easily ill and died d,t forty- seven) and an impressionable, precocious mind. In precocity, indeed, he is one of the chief examples which literature yields. When just able to read, he found Spenser's Poems among his mother's otherwise more pious books, and thenceforward his vocation in life was fixed. At thirteen he published a volume of verses so 288 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME accomplished that in later life he was still able to acknow- ledge them without apology, and he early became a Latinist of high quality, better able than Milton to mould Latin to modern uses. From Westminster School he had gone to Trinity College, Cambridge, and then it was that the Civil War broke up his schemes of life and began to remould him for the real task ahead. He left Cambridge for the less Puritanic atmosphere of Oxford, not because he was an extreme party man — ^we cannot imagine him as a fanatic in any cause — ^but because a scholarly poet and artist found a more congenial environment among the Royalists. Cowley soon acquired " the entire friend- ship " of Lord Falkland in the circle of distinguished men gathered around that rare spirit, of whom Cowley ever spoke with warm admiration, regarding him long before his end as " too good for war," which Cowley would leave to " Those men alone (and those are useful too) Whose Valour is the only Art they know." His own attraction, from fir^t to last, was towards retire- ment and solitude, and it was fortunate for the fertiUsa- tion of his art that circumstances cast him widely about the world. He entered the King's service and became a trusted envoy. When the King's cause declined he crossed to France, and as the Queen's secretary he under- took the confidential but arduous task of ciphering and deciphering her correspondence with the King; from time to time, also, he went on various secret and more or less dangerous missions to Jersey, Scotland, Flanders, and Holland. He spent twelve years in France, and this COWLEY 289 ong contact of his active and sensitive brain with French jociety and French letters was a significant influence on lis literary development. Then he returned to London. It seems a bold step. We are vaguely told that he came ' to watch over the King's interests, though we do not hear that he achieved much in that direction, and naturally tie was watched and his conduct had to be guaranteed by a surety. It is clear that he now acquiesced in the sstablished Croinwellian Government. When the Re- storation came his friends carefully explained away his acquiescence; but a man of Cowley's temper, however his tastes may have driven him to the King's side, could have no sympathy with the reactionary attitude of the Cavaliers surrounding the Stuarts. In this detachment, after abandoning an idea of settUng in America, he resolved to become a doctor, studied anatomy in London and botany in Kent, and took his degree at Oxford, by the new outlooks thus directly and indirectly gained greatly extending the range of his interests and his art. He became one of the early Fellows of the Royal Society, and published a scheme, with many excellent features, for a " College of Experimental Philosophy " which is still beyond the Society's reach. At the Restoration Cowley realised at length his lifelong dream of a little country house with a large garden (" I confess I love littleness almost in all things "), and finally settled at Chertsey, " concealed in his beloved Obscurity and that Solitude which from Childhood he had always most passionately desired." Here a few years later he died. He deft in the minds of those who knew him the memory T 290 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME not only of a great poet, but of a singularly loyable man, among the first of a type then so rare as to need careful description. He possessed a " perfect natural goodness," so that " what others received from the Directioa of Laws he ha^ by native inclination," although (through long experience of a Cromwellian regime which was not yet called "-Dora ") he was " a passionate Lover of Liberty and Freedom from Restraint both in Acts and Words." He was always simple and natural, which was astonishing to his biographer, the worthy Bishop Sprat, who remembered how long his friend had lived in France, and he never talked of himself, so that a stranger would not know him to be a great poet. But, notwithstanding his love of solitude, he had a genius for friendship, and among his nearest friends were men we now count the best of that time, from Crashaw to Evelyn. With an art moulded by this special temperament and these circumstances of his life, Cowley set forth on his pioneering voyage, even such a voyage, this time on the sea of art, as he described in the Ode addressed to his friend Hobbes: "Thou great Columbus of the golden lands of new philosophies. ' ' He was not heavily freighted, like his predecessor Donne, with passion and imagination, and (as undiscerning critics have failed to see) for his task there could have been no worse equipment. " His strength always appears in his agility," remarks Johnson, who here unwittingly placed his heavy finger on a signifi- cant quality in Cowley, his bounding and flexible mind, his " airy frohcs," his incomparable " dance of words." If he had possessed the strugghng weightiness of Donne, COWLEY 291 Cowley would have been no more of a pioneer^han Donne, that last and nearest outstanding bastion oi: the Eliza- bethan fortress, " a looming bastion fringed with fire." Sensitive intelligence was needed for Cowley's task, more even than good taste; for his critics have pointed out with a smile that Cowley's taste was far from impeccable, without being able to sefe that fine taste involves a regard for convention and tradition which must necessarily sterilise a pioneer. For his own special tasks Cowley was none the less specially equipped, and he was content to know in the words of one of his finest Odes that " life did never to one man allow Time to discover worlds and conquer too." His task was in the first place technical. Here Cowley was indefatigable in inventiveness. He remoulded the heroic couplet, he attempted the occasional introduction of Alexandrines, he made advance towards vers libres, he was always trying new metrical effects; his pindarics and his anacreontics, his elegies and his odes, which some- times seem so shallow or so cold and sometimes so viva- cious or so delightful, are always the work of an artist who is feeling his way into the paths of the future, and making mistakes which are as instructive as his Successes. It was not only new forms that were wanted, but new stuff to put into them. Here Cowley was following Donne, with less daring but an immensely wider range. His varied experiences of life, all the new knowledge then coming into the world, his own marvellously receptive mind, furnished him with a vast and variegated imagery 292 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME which he drew upon almost at random. He was, for instance, familiar with war. So it seems to him obvious to compare his heart to a grenade likely to " tear and blow up all within ' ' should it come in contact with his mistress's stubborn heart. Generations of critics have wearied us in futile condemnation of these " conceits." But there is only one thing that matters : Cowley was engaged in the hard but necessary task of testing and proving the new material for art, and his work made in the end for the enlargement and enrichment of literature. There was not only new material to be considered, there was the more important question of new subjects. For Cowley the world was full of new subjects. He could write a " Hymn to Light " and an ode " Sitting and Drinking in the Chair made out of the Relics of Sir Francis Drake's Ship," both equally novel; he has an " Ode upon Dr. Harvey " in which he boldly introduces not only the mechanism of the heart, but also of the liver, and a better " Ode to Mr. Hobbes." Still finer is the lofty reflective eloquence of the " Ode to the Royal Society," where Cowley was making straight the path for Coleridge and for Wordsworth. Throughout Cowley's verse we are aware of a singularly alert and self-conscious intelligence. It is less the spirit of poetry than of prose. Therein Cowley was a necessary pioneer. It was an age of prose that was needed. The Renaissance world had been an age of poetry, of poetry not only in verse, but in science, in religion, in philosophy, even in life. It was an abnormal state of affairs, and the reaction was excessive, it banished the spirit of poetry COWLEY 293 for a time even from poetry itself. Yet the movement was one of progress even more than of reaction, and Cowley was its natural leader. His services in the sphere of verse were recognised by all contemporary critics, from the embittered and sardonic Milton down, and appreciated by the multitudes who bought up ten editions of his works in twenty years. His task was so completely done that we almost fail to see what he effected. With better reason than Tennyson, who was no such pioneer, he might have complained that now that most can raise the flower, for all have got the seed, " the people call it but a weed." It is an ungrateful task, as Cowley himself pointed out, to use " the plain magic of true Reason's light " to chase away the ghosts of the old giants, " Nor sufEer living men to be misled By the vain shadows of the dead." In that sphere of prose towards which Cowley's mind naturally tended it is easier to recognise him as not only a pioneer, but a master. We could not to-day write prose in the passionately torrential way of Milton or the barbarically jewelled way of Donne, and we might hesitate to do so even if we could. But we should be well content to write prose with the lucid simplicity, the delicate music, of Cowley. Something of his tone of courteous f amiUarity with the reader he doubtless learnt from his favourite " Monsieur de Montaigne," who alsa began his essays in the same easy, direct way. But in English that was altogether new, and Cowley is distinctly English, the leader in the great succession of English. 294 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME essaj^sts. It is only by an accident that he is not also among our best letter-writers. He combined all the qualities that make a good letter-writer; his friends bear witness to the gaiety and tenderness of his letters, and one or two fragments that survive confirm their evidence; but the tiresome Sprat thought them too personal and f amihar for pubUcation (I suspect that the Bishop himself was too plaj^fuUy dealt with in those letters), and no one since has troubled to find out what became of them. The loss to Uterature must be considerable. Cowley's place may now be clear. The passion and imagination of the EngUsh Renaissance, in the decline of which he was bom, deepened as he grew to manhood. The gorgeous and cloudy splendours of Donne and Cra- shaw were the last gleams of a dying day. They could lead to nothing but night. There was Milton, indeed, a wonderful afterglow of the Renaissance in the EngUsh sky, a matured Marlowe turned Puritan, surviving in an ahen world where the Renaissance and Puritanism were both alike^unknown. Milton is a magnificent cul-de-sac ; it has often happened to the greatest masters of art. " To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." But Milton could not point the way. His heart was still in Italy, and it was the ferment of France that was now leavening England. It needed a man of altogether different mould, a man with a new vision, one who had known the old day, but was content to let its d3dng glory go, eager to pass on to the new day; it needed a man of prose mind even to quicken poetry. So it came to pass that among " the poets mihtant below," as he called them. COWLEY 295 it was Cowley's part to bear the sacred Ark through the wilderness that separated the world of the Renaissance from the modern world. To-day, when we are possibly passing through even such another wilderness between two worlds, we may feel a fresh interest in Cowley. INDEX ASDISON, 284 Adler, A., 197, 213. 216, 221 Alcohol, 225 et seq. Alsace, 266 America, Prohibition in, 229 Rod& on civilisation of, 236 Latin, 237, 241 Ancelle, Mattre, 260 Anglo-Saxons, 23 Arnold, Matthew, x6 Athens and New York, 239 Augustine, St., 87, 93 Aupick, General, 260 Aupick, Madame, 262 Australian aborigines, war among, 46, 48 Auto-erotism, 201 _ t. 43. 51 Barcelona, 234 Basedow, 46 Bathurst Islanders, 45 Baudelaire, 218, 237 et seq. Bell, Sanford, 200 Belloc, H., 35 Bergson, 204 Bemheim, in Birth control and eugenics, 128 et seq. Birth-rate, and military efficiency, 114 and polygamy, ii6 Bismarck, go Bjerre, Poul, 220 Bleuler, 207, 221 Bolivar, 242 Bourget, 240 Bovet, P., 59 Brachycephals, European, 8 Breuer, in, 112 Bronze Age, 50 Buckle, 15 Burrows, R., 10, 20 Burt, Ojrril, 203 Bushmen, 47, 48 Butterworth, G., 6 Cannibalism and war, 54 Carpenter, Edward, 15, 16 Canifire, 73 Oasanova, 267 et seq. Oastle, Dr. Cora, 160, 162 Catalans, 234 CatteU, Prof., 160 Cezanne, 73 Chadwick, 228 Chautauqua, 61 Child in relation to sexaality, 201 ei seq. China, 8 Christianity, and war, 54, 81 Rod6 on, 243 Cicero, 204 Civilisation, the definition of, 16 North American, 237 Clairon, Mile., 162 Clapperton, Miss, 133 Clausewitz, 62 Conan II., X17 Conflict in relation to war, 57 et seq. Conrad, Joseph, 246 et seq. Cowley, Abraham, 284 et seq. Crete, 10, 20, 50, 64 Croce, B., 286 Cro-Magnon Man, 48 Culture, definition of, 16 Dancing and life, 76 Dario, Ruben, 242 296 INDEX 297 Darwin, C, 43, 166 Defeat and victory, 35 Delarue-Mardrus, Mme., 217 Democracy, Rodo on, 241 Dewey, Prof., 239 Dolichocephals, European, 8 Donne, 290, 293 Dryden, 284 Duhamel, Georges, 14, 15 Duval, Jeanne, 261 Ehrenfels, Prof. C. von, 112, 116, 124 Elliot, Hugh, 105 Ellis, Mrs. Havelock, 126, 189, 215 English, the, 23, 25, 26, 34, 82, 150. 233. *38 Erasmus, 91, 92 ^ Eskimo and Magdalenians, 47, 48 Eugenics, in relation to the war, no and birth control, 128 et seq. Europe, the making of, 7 ei seq. races of, 8, 25 Evans, Sir Arthur, ao Evolution, 84 and birth control, 128 Falkland, Lord, 30, 288 Faure, Elie, 67, 68 ^ seq. Finland^ alcoholism in, 231 French, the, 26, 33, 265 Frenssen, G., 23 Freud, S., 201, 204, 206, 212, 219 Gabriel, the angel, 10 Galton, Sir F., 132 Gaultier, Jules de, 57, 83 Gautier, T., 257 Gazini, 269 Genius in women, 158 et seq. Germans, the, 23, 26, 33, 39, 58, 92, 117, 119, 144, 149 Glennie, J. Stuart, 21 Goethe, 90, 96, 237, 267, 281 Gore, Bishop, 233 Gourmont, Remy de, 21, 83, 286 Greeks, the, 21 Greenwood, 182 Grisar, Father, 90 Grotius. 62 Gugiti, 267 Guizot, 15, 267 Guyau, 243 Hakluyt, Richard, 106 Harrison, W., 226 Hawes, Mr. and Mrs., 20 Healy, Dr. W., 151 Hegel, 53 Hellwald, in Heredity, the study of, 136 Heymans, Prof., 169, 191 Hinton, James, 19, 126, 215 "Hobbes, T., 290 Hogarth, D. G., 50 Holderness, Earl of, 269 Holland, birth control in, 139 women in, 191 HoUingworth, Miss Leta^ 164, 165 Holmes, Rice, 51, 63 Homer, 63 Hroswitha, 163 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 16 Idiocy in women, 164 Illegitimacy, 148 et seq. Incest complex, Freud's, 214, 2i5, 219, 221 Individualism and Socialism, 108 Individuality discovered in Europe, 10 Infantile sexuality, 201 et seq. Iron Age, the, 24, 49, 63 Ivanoff, 173 jahn. Max, 58 James, William, 61 Janssen, 98, in Japan, 8 Jesus, 10, 74, 80 Johnson, Dr., 16, 285 Jung, C. G., 204, 207, 211, 214, 216, 221 Kammerer, Percy, 151 Kant, 53 Keble, 82 Keir, Malcolm, 183 Keith, Prof. A., 178 Kellogg, 180 298 ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME Kemmitz, Dr. Mathilde von, 174 Knossos, 10, 20 Korea, 8 Labour and birth control, 129 La Fontaine, 270 Lagorgette, 44 Lake-village civilisation, 21, 49 Lamarck, 70, 75 Leibnitz, 84 Leroy-Beaulieu, 52 Letourneau, 43, 48, 54 Lombroso, 203, 216, 221 Louis IX., 143 Luther, 89 et seq. Maeterlinck, 22 Maine, 42 Maistre, J. de., 53 Malthus, 128, 131 Man, 10 and civilisation, 19 as a disconcerting mystery, 22 Mandeville, B. de., 53 Manouvrier, 184 Marriage, 147 Masefield, 249 Mayreder, Rosa, 173 McDougall, Prof. W., 43, 203, 219 Mee, A., 228 Melbourne, Lord, 227 Melville, Herman, 248, 253 Memmo, Andrea, 272 Memory, sex difEerences in, 172 Michelet, 17 Mickievricz, 253 Militarism, 37, 58, 64 and birth-rate, 114, 272 Milton, 284, 293 Mitchell, P. Ohalmers, 45 Moltke, 53, 58 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 272 Montaigne, 55, 70, 77, 293 Montalvo, 242 Moritz, 39 Morse, Josiah, 173 Mosher, Dr. CleUa, 179 Mother, the unmarried, 148 et seq. Munro, Robert, 21 Napoleon, 33, 74 Narcissism, 201 Neolithic man, 21, 49 Neo-Malthusianism, 133 New York and Athens, 239 Nicolai, G. F., 45, 54 Nietzsche, 34 Northrop, Amanda, 163 Norway, the illegitimate child in, 149 Novicov, 59, 61 Ovid, 24 Pacifism, 58 Palasolithic man, 19, 44 et seq., 178 Parent-Duch&telet, 145 Pascal, 238 Patriotism, 2j Platen, O. van, 58 Polygamy, alleged, in Germany, III and birth-rate, 116 and position of women, 125, 126, 147 Pope, 284 Poulet-Malassis, 260 Precocity of girls, 171 Priuzing, 148 Procreation marriages, 112 Progress, the conception of, 84 Prohibition, 229 et seq. Prostitution, 144 Proudhon, 53 Prynne, 226 Quinton, 83 Rav^, 267 Reclus, 6lie, 70 Reformation, the, 97 Renan, 240 Rhine, origin of the name of the, 26 Rignano, E., 52 Rivers, W. H. R., 66 Rodo, 235 et seq. Ronsard, 266 INDEX 299 Rosenberg, Count, 278 Rubens, 74 Rumain, Mme. de, 276 Ruskin, 53 Russia, 9, 8i, 230 Sanger, Mis. Margaret, 139 Savages, war among, 51 Schopenhauer, 204 Sea, Conrad on the, 246 et seq. Sellars, Miss Edith, 230 Sex problem and war, 142 Sexuality, the psychological prob- lem of, 201 et seq. Shaftesbury, the third Lord, 236 Shakespeare and the sea, 248 Shelley, 81 Smith, Dr. Preserved, 96 Socialism and Individualism, 108 Sollas, W. J., 20, 47 Sorel, G., 64 Spencer, Herbert, 43, 100 et seq., 117, 219 Spinoza, 54 Sprat, Bishop, 290, 294 Stanley, Dean, 32 State, the, 104, 106 Steinhausen, 24 Steinmetz, 43 Stekel, 207 Sweden, the drink question in, 231 Symbolism, 64 Taine, 228 Tawney, 181 Tennyson, 293 Thackeray, 217 Tools, origin of, 44 Trelawney, 248 Trust Houses, 232 Unconscious, ' Freud's theory of the, 219 United States, Rodo on the, 237 Variational tendency of the male, 165, 170 Velasquez, 73 Venereal disease and war, 122 Vernon, 182 Victory and defeat, 35 Vinci, Leonardo da, 207 Violence as the special trait of war, 62, 64 Virile selection, 131 women and, 175 et seq. Wagner, 34 Waldeyer, 179 War, origin of, 24, 42 et seq. among savages, 47, 51 the Great, 27, 85 the Civil, 28 and cannibalism, 54 and Christianity, 54 and conflict, 57 et seq. definition of, 62 in relation to eugenics, no et seq. sex problems and, 142 et sec. Webb, Sidney, 184 Westermarck, 47, 55 Wheeler, G. C, 47 Whitman, Walt, 84, 92 Wickham, Anna, 218 Wilkinson, Garth, 213 Women, and citizenship, 124 mind of, 157 et seq. and wages, 175 et seq. in Conrad's novels, 254 Wynne, Junior, Richard, 279 Wynne, Richard, 268 Wynne Rosenberg, Justina, et seq. 268 BILLING AND SONS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND