IV
A few of the passing generation have retained their vision; many more have acquired a new vision from the heart-searching of war. The conscious striving after beauty and the gift of laughter alone differentiate man from the beasts; and to these few the attainment of beauty still matters here and elsewhere. London is still the greatest city of the world; it is no less true than in Dr. Johnson's day that, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; but it is difficult for any one who has lived for thirty years in its midst to look patiently on while the lessons of the war are forgotten and the debt owing to all who died in the war is repudiated. This lapse into futility is, perhaps, only a temporary reaction from the war; no man, thinking otherwise, would want to go on living, for in little more than thirty years the generation of which the time has now come to take leave has lost the greater part of those things which it valued. For a few, their country has been handed over to the blind violence and madness of anarchy; for more, their political idols have been flung on their faces; for all, their relations and friends have died in scores. The world of the survivors, like that corner of it in which they assembled at Oxford, is peopled with shades; the mood of the survivors is that of H. W. Garrod, when he wrote his Intruders.
"One day, I knew, it had to be:
Sooner or later I must see
Another race of men invade
Rooms which the men I knew had made,
With books, with pictures on the wall,
With pipes and caps, with bat or ball,
Obscurely individual.
I hate your steps upon the stair,
Your vacant voices on the air ...
I hate your chatter overhead.
And your jests that fall like lead
Where only golden things were said
By the men that are dead, the men that are dead."
It is not a mood of resignation or acquiescence, but of resolution, hope and preparation to pay a debt and to take up, with hands howsoever much enfeebled and reduced, the task left unfinished "by the men that are dead." "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church"; and, unless that seed bring forth a spirit of peace abroad and of community at home, the blood will have been spilled to no purpose. The survivors of this decimated generation have to resist, to control or to convert the languid fatalists who would drift helplessly and hopelessly into revolution or into another war; they have to subdue and to convince the anarchist of Hyde Park and of Park Lane, to drive "blood-sucker" from the lips of the one and "Bolshevist" from the lips of the other, to mitigate the credulity alike of those who find Russian gold in the pocket of every opponent and of those who scent in all opposition a plot for enslaving the proletariat. In a country that has endured, bleeding but alive, after four years and three months of fighting, there must be no talk of class-wars: and it must be realised that the miscreant who bases political salvation on the lamp-posts of Whitehall is own brother to the miscreant who would win economic peace by shooting strike-leaders. If the war has not made of the English, at least, a united people, the task lies ready to the hand of those liberals who have survived it; if they lack a leader, it is only for a moment.
One movement is ended. An intermezzo is playing, perhaps is already drawing to a close. Soon the new movement will begin.
"This world has been harsh and strange;
Something is wrong: there needeth a change.
But what, or where? at the last or first?
In one point only we sinned, at worst.
The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,
And again in his border see Israel set.
When Judah beholds Jerusalem,
The stranger-seed shall be joined to them.
To Jacob's House shall the Gentiles cleave,
So the Prophet saith and his sons believe.
Ay, the children of the chosen race
Shall carry and bring them to their place:
In the land of the Lord shall lead the same,
Bondsmen and handmaids...."
THE END