PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM, BY JANE HARRISON, LL.D., D.Litt. PRICE TWOPENCE \ DEIGHTON. BELL & CO., LIMITED, CAMBRIDGE. \ ■ \ Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014 https://archive.org/details/peacewithpatriotOOharr PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM " Well, I never was more surprised in my life ! I hear all these dons are enlisting. It simply amazes me. I thought they cared nothing about it, and that they despised the war, and now they have all turned soldiers. And I hear it's the same at Oxford !" Thus spake, early in September, a military friend. Rage, sheer red-hot rage, choked me and held me speechless for a moment. My academic friends, it would seem, were, in the eyes of the professional soldier, Gallios all — these men, whose passion it was to know the truth and teach it, who scorned the cheap delight of sport, and lived laborious days striving after the difficult right. Now, when the lust of conquest was mad- dening half Europe, when every human value hung in the balance, and all that made life worth the living was threatened, these men, to me the pick of their country's man- hood, would stand aside, not, forsooth, because they were drunk with port-wine and dissolute, but because, over-intelleC' tualized, cold and critical, they would " despise the war !" When speech came back I could only splutter something- elementary to the effect that I supposed even a don might do his duty. The war has brought this release — that it is pos- sible now to utter the word duty unabashed. Not even the youngest eyebrow is uplifted to mark the anachronism. But duty remains a question-begging label. I was in no fit state for fruitful anlaysis. Yet as I went home rage died down, and it is rage, just as it dies down, that " gives, most furi- ously, to think." If I began with anger against my friend, I have ended with gratitude. Long life and many sins against the light had taught me thus much. Whenever at an accusation blind rage burns up within us, the reason is that some arrow has pierced the joints of our harness. Behind our shining armour of righteous indignation lurks a convicted and only half-repentant sinner. If a charge be wholly false it carries no sting — we simply 4 PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. reflect on the stupidity or passion of the accuser, and he drops out of mind. If the charge rankles, we may be almost sure some sharp and bitter grain of truth lurks within it, and the wound is best probed. That the contempt — for contempt, of course, it was, masking as respect — of the soldier for the don was mistaken, I felt sure; but, since the insult rankled, it must be in some sense true — the don did somehow despise the soldier. Let the soldier look to his own sins. Mine it was — my sympathies being wholly academic — to see when and how the don had blundered. At the present moment, when issues vaster and more imminent overshadow all our thinking, the mere question of why the Army sniffs at the University, and the University sniffs back at the Army, is too little actual, seriously to engage anyone's attention. The don has turned soldier, and proudly, if a little shamefacedly, parades the uniform which, ten years ago, would have been to him anathema. Still, even in this sudden fraternity rumour says that, as between Regular and Territorial, brotherly love does not wholly continue. Be this as it may, a trivial and merely professional rivalry or even animosity would not at a time so critical be worth analy- sis, save that this very rivalry is significant of bigger issues — of those momentous issues of War and Peace on which our whole being is now exclusively focussed. It is because, with every fibre of body and mind, I stand for Peace that I want to try and understand this ancient animosity. If I seem to start from matters parochial, I can promise to end with ques- tions international. Before saying anything about War and Peace it is per- haps demanded of each and every writer to state his own posi- tion. Coming out from a beautiful and, to me, most illumin- ating address on the subject, I heard a voice behind me sav : " Well, I'm blessed if I know whether he thought we ought to be at war or not ! They ought to say." " They," being, presumably, those persons who thought themselves'qualified to teach and preach. The injunction to stand and deliver is always vexatious to the Academic mind, trained to weigh and balance and see a hundred sides at once. But the listener's instinct was I think, sound. My view, then, is this : How far peace with patriotism. s our past policy is responsible in part for bringing about the war I am not competent to decide. But at the last moment we had, I believe, no alternative but to tight. To be perfectly frank, 1 ought perhaps to own that this view is not quite of my own making. In the depths of my fanatical heart I dream of a day when our army will go out, not to war, but, if need be, to martyrdom, and when that army will consist of every man and woman in England. 1 doubt if a Hun could be found to " durchhauen " that silent, defenceless band. Bui I have been too often wrong to have, as regards practical affairs, any rooted confidence in my own judgment. So I have, rather reluctantly, adopted the position of my specialist friends. By specialists in moral judgment I mean such men and women as have not only thought more honestly and strenuously, but also lived with a resolute self-control beyond what I can myself ever hope to achieve. They have earned the right to a valued judgment. My own opinion about the present actual war I hold, then, to be quite valueless. What I offer for consideration is quite another thing — my conviction of one cause, I should like to say the main cause, of all war. This cause is, I believe, a thing that we could, if we cared enough, put an end to ; it is also a thing that we — all of us, soldiers and dons alike — most carefully foster. 1 shall best arrive at it by consider- ing for a moment the motives that have sent my academic friends to the front, or to not less arduous though less glorious labours at the rear. To guard in advance against possible misunderstanding, let me say at once that I am not setting out to prove that, as the soldier stands for war, the don stands for peace. Soldiers may stand for peace and dons for war. What 1 am in search of is a certain inward war in our mem- bers which makes perpetually for international conflagration. Why, then, we must ask, did my friends "join"? W as it fear? " Roll up before it is too late." " Hearth and home are in danger, wife and child." I think not. Fear counts for something now, since the disastrous raid on un- armed Scarborough and the holy stones of S. Hilda, but not in August, not very seriously now to us islanders. Was it patriotism? " Your country calls you." " Eng- 6 PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. land expects " " For God and the King." This ques- tion I must partially waive, since the main gist of this paper is really to show the meaning and function of patriotism, its wrongness and its Tightness. When we are truly patriotic war will, I believe, end, but, for the present, to the question : " Was it patriotism?" The answer must be " No. " It was something much bigger, something that was not for England or to be imposed by England, but something for the whole of humanity — some right for which every civilized human being was bound steadfastly to stand. In 1870 Mr. Gladstone said, in his inspired way : " The greatest triumph of our time will be the attainment of the idea of public right as the governing of European politics." To- day our own Prime Minister (*) translates this public right into concrete terms. " It means," he tells us, "first and foremost, the clearing of the ground by the definite repudiation of militarism as the governing factor in the relation of States, and of the future moulding of the European world. It means next that room be found and kept for the independent existence and the free development of the smaller nation- alities, each with a corporate consciousness of its own. It means, finally, or it ought to mean, perhaps by a slow and gradual process, the substitution for force, for the clash of compelling ambition, for grouping and alliances and a precarious equipoise, the substitution of a real European partnership, based on the recognition of equal right, and established and enforced by a common will." "It ought to mean," says Mr. Asquith, cautiously. It does it shall mean, answers every thinking civilized man, be he don or professional soldier. War against Force, against Militarism. " War against War," (t) is a call which a man may well answer, in a spirit of clear thinking and solemn self-sacrifice. Just as in the (nunc tics Paysans the Belgians made themselves soldiers to avoid the dominance of a military class, that spirit, I am sure, is here and now. But into the response of the don as contrasted with that of the soldier enters another factor, curious and in- *In his valuable The War and the Way Out, Mr. Lowes Dickinson has in most opportune fashion called attention afresh to this solemn pronouncement of our Prime Minister. With his criticism of what he calls the Governmental theory as a cause of war, I do not see wholly eye to eye, as will later appear. tSee Mr. Lindsay's admirable pamphlet which bears this title. PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. 7 structive. When Tommy goes off to the front he sings, 1 am told by way of confession of faith : " We're here because we re here' because we're here, because we're here." And a very eood marching song it no doubt is, for Tommy s business is not psychological analysis. When the officer starts on the same errand he has the immense personal joy— a joy perhaps beyond all others— of feeling that at last his profession, his particular job in life, has not only become suddenly real, but the reality of the moment— the thing that counts. Con- sciously or unconsciously, that thought must set his heart aflame. . ; u - With the don it is, of course, just the reverse. His temple of learning war lays in temporary ruins— rums not only material but spiritual. His golden apple, plucked with such rapture from the Tree of Life and Knowledge, turns sudden y to ashes in his mouth. Who cares to-day whole-heartedly for Hittitcs or Minoans? Who raises to-day the question ol the Origins of Tragedy or Comedy ? Learning and still more research is a hard mistress ; she will have your whole heart or none of you, and which of us has the genius to die the great death of Archimedes? War upsets every value ; the beam is suddenlv kicked, and down falls the scale of learning. I heard a mother lament the other day : " Oh ! our education is all wrong. Why don't we teach our girls to nurse and to cook' What is the use of learning Greek?" Learning ts, temporarily, at a discount, but, even in the time of a plague, should we do well all to turn plumbers and doctors t The odd and interesting thing is, not that war should tem- porarily upset values, but that this very upset— this" topsey- urvvdbm which places learning lowest, is positively welcome 1 just by the man who might be expected to resent it— the scholar and thinker. Keen though I was that every friend of mine who was serviceable should serve, I confess that it came at first to me as something of a shock to find that many of them —men and women— went, not reluctantly but with positive alacrity The bugle-call had, for them, whether it sum- moned' to the hospital-ward or the camp, some quite peculiar, compelling magic. Rarely had Cambridge seen so many shining faces. Why? There were diverse reasons, for ol dons there are diverse classes. s PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. There is, first, the don, who is a don merely by circum- stance, who never has— who never will— make his calling and election as a thinker sure. We all of us have among our Vcademic friends men and women, honourable and honoured, whose ideal of life is really not a University but a camp, who love to live and make live by rule, not to gain time for learn- ing, but for sheer love of regulation. Military discipline— nay , even martial law — is the breath of their nostrils. All such and they are sometimes the salt of the earth, answer with shining eyes the bugle-call. To all born organizers War is bringing, in schoolboy phrase, " the time of their lives." But — more surprising — the real student, the born don, is keen to go. This academic alacrity was, of course, widely quoted and commented on — not always kindly. "Trust a don — if he goes at all— for going jingo," said one paper. There was, of course, just a grain of truth in the taunt. The plant of moral violence, the instinctive faith in bloodshed and war is curiously apt to spring up from the soil of Acade- mic life. Treitschke may stand as an instance, and of it the pro- fessional soldier is guiltless. Long before the war broke out Professor Gilbert Murray (f) with his accustomed insight into the human sou! touched this secret Academic weakness. "A man everlastingly wrapped round in good books and safe living cries out for something harsh and real — for blood and swear- words and crude, jagged sentences. A man who (like the Greek poet) escapes with eagerness from a life of war and dirt and brutality and hardship to dwell just a short time among the Muses, naturally likes the Muses to be their very selves, and not remind him of the mud he has just washed off." Academic Man needs — to put it plainly — "a change." But, further, most University men, and many women, have been, from very early days, mercilessly specialized by our public school system. Life has been planned out for them into 1 wo departments, into hard, mental work of the acquisitive and analytic type, and just so much play as is necessary to keep work going. Both departments — work and play — have been unnaturally sharpened and polished by competition to the point of an almost desperate and mechanical efficiencv. The average don is debarred from that wholesome blend of \Euri fides and his Age. P. 103. PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. 9 JJ' Tta*£, he „,o,e self-conscious, the «. com- excessive collectivism of .he camp can ; self probably h. J down consciously sought relief. 1 ""'"'J „.. hml ,\ zc i and found W f & h °¥o to, £ wlrprWaSfwas not pur- ^oryTo be end^ed'towi/salvation for others, but parad.se, unsought yet won. fProIessor Gilbert Murray, Thoughts on the War. P. 4- IO PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. Yet another thing. War is a savagery — a set-back to civilization — and yet, or rather because of this, it has for the quite young — say, for those under thirty — a singular charm lacking to the middle-aged. // chimes with a modern re- in lien. From the lips of those who have only a childhood's memory of the disastrous Boer W ar and to whom the Franco- Prussian war is mere history, one hears much about " war has its good side "; " man, after all, is a fighting animal, " and hard on the heels of all this follows as a corollary that " we must always have war " — that peace is a poor, emasculate and even effeminate business; and at a woman's college the motion before the house was that " a short war is, under certain cir- cumstances, better than a long peace." The motion was lost by a big majority ; that it could ever have been put is matter for a day of Academic humiliation, spiritual and intellectual. The blunder that underlies such a motion is elementary. War cannot be "better" than Peace, because neither War nor Peace can ever in themselves be either good or evil. As Mr. George Moore long ago showed us, only states of mind are good or evil in themselves. War is not a state of mind ; it is a convenent label for a number of heterogeneous activi- ties, and these activities may bring about an infinite variety of states of mind, some hellish, some heavenly. To try and settle your disputes by killing your opponent is always a stupid brutality, but out of that stupid brutality may arise to others, and even to the slayer, clearer thinking and purified emo- tions. Out even of evil — and war is not evil — can come good. That is the fact we call God. But are we to cause or allow or maintain war that our souls may be saved? Are cathedrals to be shelled and homes laid waste and children butchered that by terror and pity we may be made pure? My God ! No ! No! No! "Slaughter," whatever Coleridge may say, is not 'God's daughter,' and, anyhow, better go down to' the nethermost hell than buy heaven at such a price. The fact remains, however, that War and the modern reaction do chime together, and for a moment the question must be con- sidered — what is this Reaction, and whv does it chime with War? The two questions must be taken together; they th PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. It light on each other. Several months ago I was studying; the Reaction with interest; that interest is now so completely swallowed up by the bigger emotion of the War that, save for the understanding of the spirit of War and Peace, it has ceased to interest me. But, first, I want to say that 1 use the word Reaction with some reluctance and some sense of in- justice. I should prefer " swing of the pendulum." By reaction I imply no blame. The Reaction seems to me, on the whole, a forward movement ; but its own supporters formulate their creed as a return to past ideals. That arch-reactionary the Abbe Dimnet calls his book "France Herself Again." Perhaps it is also fair to add that I am not, save within narrow limits, a reactionary myself. I observe the movement neces- sarily from the banks rather than from mid-stream, so tha' my analysis may strike the more ardent as chilly. The watch- words of my generation — which still set my heart aglow — were Knowledge and Freedom. To put it less pleasantly, we were Intellectualists and Individualists. The rising genera- tion stands broadly for emotion and collectivism. Of collectivism I do not want to say one needless word. Frankly, just now I am rather bored with it. For five long years, in season and out, I have preached collectivism — its relation to life and religion, its inspirations, its perils. 1 cannot have charmed very wisely, for my friends the deaf adders, with one or two exceptions, stopped their ears and glided swiftly into their holes. Nowadays, collectivism is not only booming as a fashionable dogma, it is — a conquest far more significant — astir in every man's heart. A dogma once boomed is, intellectually, stale, and therefore useless ; but a lived experience may remain vital long after its dogmatic death. With collectivism, for argument's sake, I have ceased to conjure. One theoretical point, however, must needs be empha- sized for clearness' sake, and we shall then have done with isms. Intellectualism and individualism go necessarily to- gether ; the marriage is of nature, not convention. In like fashion, collectivism and emotionalism, which re-act_against the two other impulses, cannot be sundered. This lies deep in the very heart of things. A wise physiologist has told us that man is a thing made up of the two ends of his nerves — 12 PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. the end in touch with the outside world, reacting and acting; that we used to call body; the other end secluded by man's separate body within his brain : that we used to call spirit or soul. And yet they are not two, but one man. The outside end touches what we call the actual world, brings us into touch with our fellows, is active and collective. The inside touches the no less actual world of images, imaginations. But, because it is created by the self, the secluded and secluding brain, it is, primarily, individualistic — not ultimately, because it is to some the supreme motor force. The outside end, what we call the actual world of primary sensations, is the stuff of which all our dreams and all our abstractions, all our art and all our science is made, and the return to these primary sensations is of the essence of the modern reaction. Because of this thirst for primary sensations it joins hand with War, and we hear so much of " purgation through primal emotions." To the modern reactionary even art itself is suspect — is not primary enough. Science seems to him simply insignificant. It was a sudden revelation to me when a friend, himself an artist, said : " I am only just beginning to realize, through other people telling me, that there can be any real pleasure in getting to know things." Pleasure! It isn't pleasure— it is hunger, it is passion; but a generation "fed up" with knowledge, nur- tured on cheap abstractions knows it not. Such a generation prays with Keats : " Oh, for a life of sensations, rather than thought!" Sated, yes, desolated, by insistent analysis, if seeks to drown individual consciousness in collective mili- tancy and mysticism. The Hound of Heaven is seen to-day chasing back the lost because separated, soul and self. This reaction is most clearly seen among our allies the French, for with them it is logical, explicit, and has found switt and full expression in literature. " Nous sommes a un de ces moments ou l'on s'apercoit tout a coud que quelque chose a bouge. Comme un bateau qui, pendant la nuit toume sur son ancre, la literature a pris une orientation nouvelle." tjacques i Riviere, Le Roman d'Aventure, in La Nouvelle Rev "J '3- 1 • 748. PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. The great Anatole and all he stood for — all the materi- alism, pessimism, the cynicism, the delicate esprit and the conscious art — no longer represent France. Maeterlinck, with his bloodless symbolism, his effortless, pain-stricken shadows, has, now we are told, no following. Young France refuses to roll in the mire or to toss in a nightmare dream. She is up and awake, and out for action. Chief among new leaders arc the "Three B's " — Brunetiere Barres and Bergson — and to them, as marking the transition, may be added the belated con- vert Bourget. The movement is, of course, anti-intellectu- alist. The watchwords are Home and Country. The idols of this new French market-place are the Church and the Army. It is a complete volte-face, and it is something more than a shift of opinion, it is, as M. Bergson has said, a " re- naissance morale, une vraie recreation de la volonte. " It is incarnate in such novels as La Colline inspiree of Barres and La Mais on of Bordeaux — this last a book I tried, but I must admit failed, to read. Cult of the family, the smallest of all groups — cult of la patrie, a group still to the thinking of the old liberalism too narrow — these are the new inspirations, and they are set in definite opposition to the old ideals of the "citizen of the world." You are to draw your inspiration from your local soil, from the very chairs and tables and clocks and mirrors of your ancestral home, as -beautifully shown in Estaunie's ( hoses qui voient. Before all things be local, parochial, patriotic, i.e. — dwell on your differences, and be prepared to fight for them ; cultivate the small, combative herd-emotions, and for your religion M. Peguy will provide it for you. Your god must be the projection of France, as local as Jehovah and as combative. "C'est embetant dit Dieu. Quand il n'y aura plus ces Francais." This god demands — he necessitates — immediate unques- tioning faith, faith so unquestioning that it is a mainspring of acton, faith wholly dogmatic and non-intellectual, whose only function is to pull the trigger. Such faith is in its final analysis a local affirmation of self-confidence, " la croyance c'est la patrie. ' ' For an old liberal to depict such a reaction is to caricature it. In England, necessarily, the reaction is less explicit, and 14 PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. though quite as anti-intcllectualist, much less logical and theo- retical. It therefore takes on shapes that, to the middle- aged, are less grotesque, though still irritating. Reactions are always irritating to those who do not re-act, and the only way to allay this irritation is to track out the cause and try to find the human need that called for the reaction. Ten years ago we were faced by a perfect orgy of egotism and individualism; the younger generation came trampling over their elders, and " their pride was as the pride of young ele- phants." The prostrate ones are just getting their heads up, and they find to their amazement the young ones are back their own tracks. Ten years ago to mention the word " duty was to write yourself down a fogey. The watchwords now are discipline, faith, simplicity, convention, law, obedience Collectivism is the virtue of the young, their vice individualism. A few hoary truths have raised their buried heads. One is " No man liveth to himself." Another : " He that hunts pleasure or even happiness fails to catch her." And another, harder to state, is that, for the fullest realization of life, rhythm, which is law, is wanted as well as movement — which is life. The reaction is obvious enough. That it chimes with the war-spirit is patent. The question remains : What is its purport — the need it satisfies? Why did it come? The ugly, pessi- mistic thought crops up in some elderly minds : These young things re-act because they have got what they wanted. They despised conventions, when conventions restricted their rela- tions, say, with the opposite sex. They are married now, and those very conventions they once despised are ranged on the side of their satisfied desires. They trampled on their parents; they are now parents themselves, and realize the trembling passion of a parent's instinctive protectiveness. So they are all for hearth and home. Now, there is a certain horrid truth about this, but it is true for all generations, for all ages, not for one. We, all of us, all our lives rebel against the convention that hampers — accept the convention that emphasizes, personal desire. Our problem is to account for the particular reaction of a particular generation. The solution is, I think, not far to seek. The present generation was born at the end of a century marked by two things— by an intellectual expansion, perhaps PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. unparalleled and, as the consequence of this intellectual ex- pansion, by an amazingly swift accession of material wealth. It was cradled in a perfect slough of delicate, scientifically thought-out personal comfort, masking as sanitation. The atmosphere of personal luxury is a small matter, easily lived through by any robust nature. The atmosphere of second-hand, traditional intellectualism is more serious, be- cause, as we have seen, it involves at its best individualism — at its worst egotism. It is against this preponderant intel- lectualism, with its attendant egotism, that the present gene- ration instinctively reacts. Amazingly clever though it is, it has felt itself, somehow, sterile in motive power. It desires to feel afresh, even that it may think anew. It asks to be born again. I do not know whether I am singular in my experience, but what has most impressed me in the young is their extreme old age — their hoary wisdom. The youth of the past was in love with ideas, drunk with ideals, avid of ana- lysis; the youth of to-day sees life steadily, and sees it whole. Above all, it craves for action, and only for such thinking as is immediately translatable into action. For souls so sick or so new-born the army is not a penitentiary, but a paradise. But what has all this to do with patriotism? Much. Let us take a concrete instance. The idol of the modern reactionary is the Russian, and among Russians, Dostoievsky. Russia is, someone has said, the land of Worship, Failure and Pity. Her characteristic son is, to many of us, the patient, faithful moujik, who, through all his suffering, yet believes that there is something' in " God's light," — as he beautifully calls the world — besides greed and pain. Russia, as one.of her great sons (t) tells us, "is so large and so strong that material power has ceased to be attractive to her thinkers." He tells us, too, thai the leaders of public opinion in Russia are " pacific, cosmopolitan, and humanitarian to a fault." When Russia's political exiles are released from Siberia then we shall know that leaders and rulers are one. Till then we believe and — tremble. tProfessor Vinogradoff, Russia: The Psychology of a Nation. Pp. 12, 13. i6 PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. We all adore Russia in her literature. Even through the spotted, disfiguring veil of a translation the beauty of her sad face beckons us. But why specially Dostoievsky? There arc many reasons why the reactionary soul goes out to him, and of these 1 can only deal with the one which is all important for my argument, and bring me to the heart of it. Dostoiev- sky stands for patriotism, and reactionaries are all ardent patriots. Their enthusiasm is national, rather than inter- national ; and here I believe that the reactionaries have struck on a real truth, somewhat neglected by us older liberals, and a truth that, if only it can be carefully guarded, ought to be fruitful. Patriotism to us older liberals was not an inspiring word. It spelled narrowness — limitations. We aspired to be citizens of the world, and against that world-wide aspira- tion, widened to abstraction, might be brought, with some jus- tice, the accusation that we "aimed at a million, missing a unit." The young reactionary actualist, always practical and realistic, sees the function of the smaller group, the family, the nation ; he distrusts, even hates, the larger abstractions which inspired us, and, in a measure, he is right. By the same show- ing, he looks for differentiation rather than unity; his mind resents classes. But, first as to Dostoievsky. We have all dreamt of him as Christ-like. We have all been moved to our uttermost depths by the figure of the Idiot Mushkin ; we have all fallen on our knees with Father Zozima before Dimitri and his suf- ferings to come. These were appeals to our common human- ity. We have been perhaps not wholly surprised to find that the man who created these amazing figures was himself not only epileptic and dissolute, but also an arch-egotist to the verge of madness— that his letters are full of his own suffer- ings, not the sorrows of others — his own debts, paid again and again by others— his own wrongs, which, from nature and the state were hideous— with the supreme importance of his books and their publication His passion for Christ was the instinct of a soul bound by the fetters of egotism, reaching out to the salvation of altruist love. This arch-egotist— this humanitarian — is also as hp appears in his letters, supremely a patriot, and that in the nar- rowest sense. He really hated the international ideal, just as PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. 17 he hated and caricatured the Nihilists. The Socialists he re- garded as honest visionaries with a, to him, quite inexplica able parti pris for principles. The young Progressivists are to him a snarling, peevish crew. The devotion of his life was not to a principle, but to a personal Christ. He is through and through a reactionary of the most modern type — in his realism, his anti-intellectualism. Yet he was, in date, middle- Victorian. If anyone wants to sneer at the out-of-date think- ing- of the last century, he does well to remember that it was on Dec. 22, 1849, that the death-sentence was read, Dostoiev- sky stood up in his shirt against the prison-wall to be shot. Salvation, then, for Dostoievsky was to be found, not in the doctrines of foreign socialists, but, first, in the person of Christ, and, next, in national life and custom. His debts obliged him to live abroad, but, out of Russia, he is always "a slice cut off a loaf. " His utter inability to see any good in foreign lands would be childish if it were not the source of such poignant misery. Geneva touches him with no thought of either Calvin or Voltaire. It is a miserable, desolate place, where there are open fireplaces instead of stoves and no Rus- sian double-windows. Italy is no better. Most of all, oddly and modernly enough, he hates Germany. The faith in Europe and the power of civilization got on my nerves, he writes — the German got on my nerves, and perhaps the main root of his ugly hatred of Turgeniev was Turgeniev's " tail- wagging to the German." Alive and breathing love and hate, we see in Dostoievsky the figure of the reactionary incarnate., realist, anti-intellectu- alist, collectivist of the small group — the nation — a patriot through and through. But it will instantly be said, every nation, is, of course, patriotic; there is nothing specially Russian about that, nothing specially reactionary. Yes, there is, and it is here that we have to learn in all humility a great lesson from reactionaries and Russians before we can attain to the Patriotism that is own sister to Peace. For a moment let us look at the Patriotism of Germany, alas ! now the hand- maid of War. Deutschland, Dcutschland neber Alles. A noble and patriotic sentiment, to begin with. Self, with all its pettiness PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. lost in love for one's country (t) — a song that has warmed a thousand simple, generous German hearts. But alas ! alas ! how soon — how almost inevitably — a noble collectivism passes over into an ignoble imperialism, for " L eber Alles in der Welt " includes our fellow-men, with their other and some- times alien ideals. It is that fell ueber — over — above. How long ago the Greeks warned us against " uppishness " — It is worth keeping up a classical education that our youth may know how ugly and how fatal " uppishness " is. But iippit is, after all, not quite what I mean. For the vice that, to my mind, sins worst against patriotism — a vice alien, it would seem, to the Russian, but far from alien to the Englishman, is perhaps best expressed in German — sick imponiren — to impose oneself. Now, mark, Dostoievsky, the reactionary patriot, never tried sick imponiren. He was Rus- sia for the Russian, but not Russia for the Germans, for the French, or for the Swiss. He never tried to impose Russian- ism as a gospel or a panacea, and, short of imposing it, he never even tried to infuse the Russian spirit as the salt of the earth. Sich imponiren is the very spirit of war — true patriot- ism, national differentiation, of peace. For note another point. War which seems to be nur- tured by patriotism — which seems the uttermost expression of it — turns at last on patriotism and slays it. The patriot loves his country because it is different from others, because of its local colour, flavour, smell, because of its living per- sonality. But let that country " impose itself," make other countries obey its laws, accept its customs, adopt its very language, and all these distinctions, lovely and beloved, lapse into a grey uniformity. It is indeed by the analogy of language that one best realizes the meaning and the magic of patriotism. Jehovah at the Tower of Babel was the arch-patriot. There are people, I believe, who long for a universal language because it would + It is, I think, a rather crass injustice, though committed by our Prime Minister, to quote this song as expressing world dominion only. The whole focus, as the context shows, is on collectivism, the sacrifice of the individual and all his interests to a united Germany. PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. •9 be "so convenient," and it would " bring people together." Now, for certain purposes, 1 do not want to deny the utility of — say — Esperanto — and, for those purposes, we might all be well advised to learn it. But if Esperanto alone w ere spoken throughout the world think of the desolation of it ! To some of us life would be barely worth the living. And should we really draw nearer to other nations? We should meet our fellows, it is true, at a dreary, half-way public-house, but never see them and feel them at home. When we take the trouble to learn a people's language it is then we draw near and touch their innermost, unconscious souls. What made the Germans, then, take that fatal step, slide over from a noble patriotism into their ugly pan-imperialism that must end in the death of patriotism? The plain, material causes — the failure of the small German states, the victory in the Franco-Prussian war, the insistent fear of a powerful neighbour, the jealousy of British sea-power — all these have been dealt with by writers more competent, but behind all these things lies a spiritual or intellectual cause, which it is, 1 think, important to stress, and which brings Germany into sharp and significant contrast with Russia and France, and, in somewhat different fashion, with England. Germany is over-theoretical. Untouched, it would seem, by modern real- ism, she still worships abstractions ; she is a belated idealist. She sees her own " Kultur " as a thing that can be labelled, deported, imposed, a coat of paint that she can put on the other European Savages. She forgets that there is no such thing as " Kultur," though there are cultivated men. She lacks Russian realism — the sense of the live fact — of actuality, always parti-coloured. The sin, or rather blunder, of over-intellectualism, of seeking to understand and rule the world by abstractions, is confined to no one race ; but it remains perhaps true that " no Teuton born can resist a generalization." The Russian Intel- ligentsia, of course, fell for a time into the like snare, but they were rescued or rather ruined by the Revolution. As Dr. Wil- liams says (t) : " The Revolution brought the Intelligentsia into rude and sudden contact with reality, and put its dogmas ■[Russia of the Russians. P. 135. 20 PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. and doctrines to the severest possible test. Doctrines were brushed aside by elemental forces, and instincts, dulled by an inveterate habit of generalization,, failed to respond adequately and decisively to the startling appeal of facts." The Intelli- gentsia was devoted to theories, and put great faith in educa- tion. It had a " Nonconformist conscience," and it wor- shipped ideals. These old ideals are to the Reactionaries as faded photographs. Each generation must be "taken" afresh; Germany stereotyped. When abstractions are hacked by all the forces of collcc- tivism their stupefying power is appalling. To call the Ger- mans " Huns " is as ignorant as it is offensive. Such cruelty as they practice is deliberate — not wanton. They are over- educated, unduly docile, not merely to a military power, but to ideas ; they are drunk, not with beer, but with theories. This domination of the idea strikes us nowadays cold, heartless, inhuman. Mainly for this reason is the verdict of Latin on Teuton true to-day : Tautonici mullius amici. Taken up by a whole nation, with the deadly uniformity of all collectivism, and with the added impact of sich imponi- ren, one-idea-ism verges always on insanity. One-idea-ism, as Professor Claye Shawe (t) has shown us in his interesting discussion of the psychology of the German Emperor, is not insanity. As a momentary state it is, indeed, essential to action ; we do not act till one idea gains such preponderance that it excludes others. " Mono-ideism " tends, almost neces- sarily, to action ; the single line of idea becomes all-compelling, " it allows no rest : it commandeers and fosters anything which tends to nourish it ; it rejects whatever might, as an alien, hinder its course and development." We, all of us, know this state of mind when we are developing a theory. It is essential that this state should be transient, that is, that it should culminate in action — in writing a book, or a pamphlet, or a fly-sheet, and then pass. If mono-ideism persists, that way madness lies. These two fatal impulses — sich imponiren and the cult of abstractions — are, to my mind, the main, inner and spiritual causes that have driven Germany into war. The second of ^Morning Post, Dec. n, 1914. PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. 21 these — the cult of abstractions — offers to our English race comparatively few temptations. As a nation we are intensely practical ; we hate theories, we abominate system. We are proud of being ill-prepared beforehand — of being " good at an emergency." As a people we live at the outer, not the inner, end of our nerves; we are at home with facts and all abroad with images. We have, besides, a certain balance or sanity of soul which comes to us, f think — and it is more than mate- rial safety — from our great sea-mother. Britannia is fond of asserting that she " rules the waves." More than she recks of, in spirit, the waves rule Britannia. God grant they always may ! The old sea-wolf has many faults, but among them is not swelled head, nor yet the ungovernable passion for abstractions. At the German, with his abstractions, his theories, his rules and regulations, his well-thought-out " methodisch " plans, the normal Englishman simply smiles ; but the Junker, the incarnation of " sich imponiren," the upper-class bully, he — as simply — hates. And why? Alas ! for the old reason. That Junker is very near to each one of us. We have him in our very bones. We are Teutons, too — a big, bold, bullying race. We watch the Junker and his offensive " hochniisig " ways, and each one of us unconsciously says : " Mutato no- mine de te. . ." Let us thank Heaven, fasting, for the Norman Conquest, which saved us and our language from racial purity. Let us thank Heaven, fasting, for the day when, some two hundred years ago, a " remarkably thin young man (f) stepped briskly on shore at Dover and planted the small seed of friendship between England and France." For then began that intercourse of two alien cultures which " found its momentous consummation at Mons and Cambrai, on the Oise and the Marne. " We have had the incalculable blessing of alliance with our Allies — alliance with Latin blood and Latin spirit, older and urbaner than our own. If Germany is brusque and awk- ward and self-assertive, need we forget that she is a new nation? She is sure, and rightly sure, of her own splendid tSee Mr. Lytton Strachey's illuminating appreciation of Voltaire in the Edinburgh Review, Oct., 1914. 22 PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. claims and merits, but not yet quite assured of her position in soc i e ty — her status in the comity of nations. Can we not remember that, "but for the Grace of God," and of France, " there goes John Bull." " Saxon and Norman and Dane are we," and for good breeding commend me to a fine mongrel. We have been saved from some of Germany's spiritual excesses — saved by France, by the sea ; and saved still more we shall be, I believe, by the spirit of pity and worship and realism that comes to us from reactionary Russia. But still within us are the seeds of war. We are still far from that true patriotism and liberty, which, necessarily, mean peace. The essence of that patriotism is, on the positive side, free- dom (t) to be ourselves ; on the negative, the complete renun- ciation in ourselves of the spirit of sich imponiren. Freedom for ourselves must involve freedom for others, else it ceases to be sacred — it is no longer social. This paper began with the feud between don and soldier — the mutual contempt and intolerance of intellectualist and practical man ; the soldier accounting the don a useless prig, the don accounting the soldier an illiterate fool. That feud is healed — at least, for the time. The don has discovered that the soldier can and must think hard, and the soldier, when he sees the don at his drill, discovers that he is not such a fool as he looks. This new union and communion is attained under the stress of a common emotion, and of the closer, more actual, realistic knowledge that this emotion has brought about. At least half the misunderstanding is due, on both sides, to the acceptance of a theory — a man of straw, a bundle of objectionable qualities, in place of a man of fact, a man alive. It is a conflict of ideals ; ideals must cease to conflict. But behind this foolish ignorance, brought about by class and professional severance, remains our savage determination to set one value against another, not to take men as they are and live with them, but to abstract a quality and then set it cock-fighting with another quality. We need more Russian realism — we need more Russian patriotism — but, above all. +For a just analysis of true Freedom see an article " On Freedom " in the Literary Supplement of the Times, Dec. 17, 1914, PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. *3 wc need to get rid of the whole spirit of competition, rivalry, jealousy — for they are all, at heart, one and all, the seeds of war ; they are all part of the spirit which seeks to enhance one by the minishment of another. Even at a civilized univer- sity, if you are " a good egg," it becomes your immediate duty to despise a "bad man." This spirit of jealousy, ot minishment for others, which, in peace, we condemn as un- christian or laugh at as boyish, breaks out in war among those who should be venerable. ' Men of learning, old and emimenc enough to know better, write to the papers and vehemently " deny our debt to German scholarship." The favourite for- mulary of such crude intolerance is : " We hope we shall hear no more of," which means, " we hope, by bullying and blus- tering, to stop the utterance of any opinion that is not our It is the very quintessence of the spirit of war — sick own. imponiren. Now here, I am sure, I shall be told that I am a crazy idealist. War, it will be said, is inherent in man's nature. Clergymen, who should be preaching the gospel of peace, and are hard driven for an argument to defend their apostasy, tell us that, in the last resort, we must appeal to force, because God, in nature, teaches the " survival of the fittest," and by the fittest is meant the strongest. An appalling, bloodthirsty blunder to fasten on Darwin. All nature cries aloud that the fittest are not the strongest. It is the most adaptable— not the strongest— who, as the merest reflection on language mi-ht suggest, survive. The mammoth is gone, the elephant alas ! is going, and the great might of the Bear is now not so much a power as a pathos. More careful thinkers say, true, yet another truth re- mains : Force does not prevail, but fighting must survive because fighting and sex are inextricably bound up. Abolish these primal instincts, and the mainsprings of life are atro phied. Man is and must remain a fighting animal. True as to sex. No sane person seeks to free sex from jealousy, be- cause sex is, in its essence, exclusive. All our most cherished institutions of marriage and the home centre round this quahtv of exclusion. Marriage is exclusion and jealousy, state-sanc- tioned. It is easy to see that here jealousy serves life, and has, therefore, its proper function. But need jealousy and 2 4 PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. exclusiveness spread from sex to the whole of life? So long as they do, so long- we shall, I believe, have war. Till we cleanse our hearts of competition and seek that spirit of " live and let live," which, in individuals, is liberty and among; nations is patriotism, war, though it will be between units ever larger and larger, will not, cannot cease out of the world. Christianity has, so far, failed to abolish War. That is simple matter of fact. Five Christian peoples, Catholic and Protestant, are now at each other's throats. War has indeed, as a Christian scholar himself (f) as candidly as sadly, points out, actually promoted among races a sense of brotherhood unknown to Christianity. " It looks as if the human family would really have made a step towards the ideal of brother- hood by waging war together — as if the cynic had some truth on his side who said : ' There is no bond like a common enmity.' " Another thinker will say, Of course, Christianity failed. Christ taught a splendid impossibility, based on an immediate eschatology. The Kingdom of Heaven would immediately appear upon earth. What mattered war? What mattered anything? Love your enemies. Forsake your father and your mother. The Kingdom of God is at hand. But we who know that we and the race to come have long life lief ore us, work more slowly and more surely. Gradually, not Christianity, but our sheer humanity — will make war to cease. We have abolished duelling between individuals, and w ar, w hich is but a duel between nations, must go. Alas ! an illusion. Duelling went out because the horror oi it — the murdered man before your eyes — killed it. From modern war this purgation of horror is, save for the few at the front, absent or remote. In vain we lash our imagination We cannot figure it. We are not personally responsible for it ; the State presses a button and the dogs of war are let loose. We do not personally wage war; even the generals sit, noi upon their chargers leading the attack, but secluded in their bureaus, Even the men lie in their trenches often unseen by and unseeing those other men they kill. There is horror enough Cod knows ! but not for us the personal horror of doing your own killing. Everything— war, commerce, politics, is, nowa- days, huge, abstracted, remote. tMr. Edwyn Bevan in Brothers All. Papers for War Time. No. 4. PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. 2 5 How, then, can War be slain? Not merely, 1 think, though that is our immediate duty, by fighting the Kaiser, but bv slaying the spirit of Kaiserism that is in the very bones of each one of us — this spirit of competition. Of course, 1 shall be told that this doctrine is emasculate and effeminate. 1 do not mind that in the least. Every single advance in civiliza- tion has had to face that taunt. I can myself just remember the days when a man's virility was held to depend on his capa- city for drinking a bottle of port. We are bred up on com- petition, and we fancy we cannot live without it. Cambridge has abolished her senior wrangler, yet I am told the study of mathematics lives on. Work done in competition is work done on a strong stimulant — right, possibly, in an emergency, never permanently sound. And yet our whole edcuation, our public school system is based on two things, sich imponiren of the group — dare at your peril ;o ic c.ifferent, to have per- sonal distinction, and neck-to-neck competition in work and in games. We teach our children to work, not that they may do their best for sheer love of the thing done, but that they may do better than somebody else. Surely always an ugly thing, for someone else is hurt and minished. If children are so reared can we wonder than grown men are at war? Do we really need this stimulus of competition? Is it never possible to be zealous without being jealous? So long as we believe competition to be necessary, it will be. It is only a forward faith that can remove the traditional mountain. And what have we to substitute for competition? Only co- operation. Co-operation is a dull, tarnished word, tarred with the brush of utilitarian economics. But is it really a cold, dull thing to work together to know, to work together to discover, to work together to try and make the world a better place for all of us? How savage we are if we can only herd together, wolf-like, to fight ! War is ennobling, we are told, so long as the rules of civi- lized war are observed— so long as we " play the game." Civi- lized war ! No such thing exists. War may be necessary- it is always barbarous. It is no real settlement of any diffi- culty — no real adaptation of national need to national environ- ment. And " plaving the game " ! In the mouths of civi- lians such words are foolish and pernicious— they obscure the 2 6 PEACE WITH PATRIOTISM. awful issue, the lives cut short of the nations' best and bra- vest, the agony and the devastation. " We must learn to give and take a blow and bear no malice " ; yes, perhaps, though it seems to me simpler and safer to leave the blow ungiven and untaken. But learn to give and take each other's life — well, that may be a possible injunction for those who believe the dead warrior passes from the battlefield to Elysium ; but for those who have no such clear conviction life is supremely pre- cious. There are things worse than death — a thousand times worse — but is there anything better than life, of which death is the end ? The slaying of lile is, in sooth, a ghastly "game." I would not be misunderstood. Of the men at the front — the men who are out to die for the sin of Europe — of them I do not speak ; for them I have no thought of blame — only deep reverence. Whatever they do or feel, their supreme peril and self-sacrifice consecrates them, setting them in a place apart. If they fall back on whatever stimulus or consolation their breeding or training provides, on the spirit of sport in " playing the game," instead of the spirit of solemn execution it is not for me to cavil, sitting at ease at home. If I met a drunken soldier — I have met none such since the War began — my lips would be shut from blame. If my country had set me the work it has set him I could not do it in cold blood and sober. But in times of peace, and for us at home, unconse- crated by the baptism of blood and fire, our plain duty is clear : We must cleanse our hearts not only from hate in war, bur from those subtler poisons that fester unto war — from all rivalry, jealousy, and from all spirit of competition, from the setting of nation against nation, class against class, don against soldier — nay, even from the setting of abstract prin- ciple against abstract principle, and of action against thought. We must learn to believe that the fittest will survive, not be- cause it fights, but because it best adapts itself. We must live and let live, tolerating — nay, fostering — in the life of indi- viduals and of nations an infinite parti-coloured diversity, and s.i at last win— Peace with Patriotism. Christmas Eve, 1914. Newnham College, Cambridge.