Leaves in the Wind

by A. G. Gardiner

ON A SMILE IN A SHAVING GLASS

As I looked into the shaving glass in the privacy of the bathroom this morning, I noticed that there was a very pronounced smile on my face. I was surprised. Not that I am a smileless person in ordinary: on the contrary, I fancy I have an average measure of mirthfulness—a little patchy perhaps, but enough in quantity if unequal in distribution. But I have not been hilarious for a week past. There is not much to be hilarious about in these anxious days when the tide of war is sweeping back over the hills and valleys of the Somme and every hour comes burdened with dark tidings. I find the light-hearted person a trial, and gaiety an offence, like a foolish snigger breaking in on the mad agony of Lear.

Why, then, this smiling face in the glass? Only last night, coming up on the top of the late bus, I was irritated by the good humour of a fat man who came and sat in front of me. He looked up at the brilliant moonlit sky and round at the passengers, and then began humming to himself as though he was full of good news and cheerfulness. When he was tired of humming he began whistling, and his whistling was more intolerable than his humming, for it was noisier. Hang the fellow, thought I, what is he humming and whistling about? This moon that is touching the London streets with beauty—what scenes of horror and carnage it looks down on only a few score miles away! What nameless heroisms are being done for us as we sit under the quiet stars in security and ease! What mighty issues are in the balance! ... And this fellow hums and whistles as though he had had no end of a good day. Perhaps he is a profiteer. Anyhow, I was relieved when he went down the stairs, and his vacuous whistling died on the air.... Yet this face in the glass looked as though it could hum or whistle quite as readily as that fat man whom I judged so harshly last night.

It was certainly not the sunny morning that was responsible. The beauty of these wonderful days would, in ordinary circumstances, charge my spirits to the brim, but now I wake to them with a feeling of resentment. They are like a satire on our tragedy—like marriage garments robing the skeleton of death. Moreover, they are a practical as well as a spiritual grievance. They are the ally of the enemy. They have come when he needed them, just as they deserted us last autumn when we needed them, and when day after day our gallant men floundered to the attack in Flanders through seas of mud. No, most Imperial Sun, I cannot welcome you. I would you would hide your face from the tortured earth, and leave the rough elements to deal out even justice between the disputants in this great argument.... No, this smile cannot be for you. And it is not wholly a tribute to the letter that has just come from that stalwart boy of nineteen, boy of the honest, open face and the frequent hearty laugh, stopped on the eve of his first leave and plunged into this hell of death. Dated Saturday. All well up to Saturday. The first two terrible days survived. Those who love him can breathe more freely.

But though that was perhaps the foundation, it did not explain the smile. Ah, I had got it! It was that paragraph I had read in the newspaper recording the Kaiser's message to his wife on the victory of his armies, and concluding its flamboyant braying with the familiar blasphemy, "God is with us." I find that when I am cheerless a message from the Kaiser always provides a tonic, and that his patronage of the Almighty gives me confidence. This crude, humourless vanity cannot be destined to win the world. It cannot be that humanity is to suffer so grotesque a jest as to fall under the heel of this inflated buffoon and of the system of which he is the symbol. I know that other warriors have claimed the Almighty and have justified the claim have won even in virtue of the claim. Mohammedanism swept the Christian world before it to the cry of "Allah-il-Allah," and to Cromwell the presence of the Lord of Hosts at his side was as real as the presence of Jehovah was to the warriors of Israel. Stonewall Jackson was all the more terrible for the grim, fanatical faith that burned in him from the days of his conversion in Mexico, and, though Lincoln had no orthodox creed, the sense of divine purpose was always present to him, and no one used the name of the Almighty in great moments with more sincere and impressive beauty.

You have only to turn to Lincoln or Cromwell to feel the vast gulf between their piety and this vulgar impiety. And the reason is simple. They believed in the spiritual governance of human life. Cromwell may have been mistaken in his conception of God, but it was a God of the spirit whom he served and whose unworthy instrument he was in achieving the spiritual redemption of men. The material victory was nothing to him except as a means of accomplishing the emancipation of the soul of man, of which political liberty was only the elementary expression. But the Kaiser's conception of God is a denial of everything that is spiritual and humane. He talks of his God as if he were a brigand chief, or an image of blood and iron wrought in his own likeness, a family deity, a sort of sleeping partner of the firm of Hohenzollern, to be left snoring when villainy is afoot and nudged into wakefulness to adorn a triumph. It is the negation of the God of the spirit. It is the God of brute force, of violence and terror, trampling on the garden of the soul in man. It is the God of materialism at war with all that is spiritual. In a word, this thing that the Kaiser calls God is not God at all. It is the Devil.

On this question of the partisanship of the Almighty in regard to our human quarrels, the best attitude is silence. Lincoln, with his unfailing wisdom, set the subject in its right relationship when a lady asked him for the assurance that God was on their side. "The important thing," he said, "is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are on the side of God." This attitude will save us from blasphemous arrogance and from a good deal of perplexity. For when we claim that God is our champion and is fighting exclusively for us we get into difficulties. We have only finite tests to apply to an infinite purpose, and by those tests neither the loyalty nor the omnipotence of the Almighty will be sustained. And what will you do then? Will you, when things go wrong, ask with the poet,

Is he deaf and blind, our God? ... Is he indeed at all?

The Greeks disposed of the dilemma by having many deities who took the most intimate share in human quarrels, but adopted opposite sides. They could do much for their earthly clients, but their efforts were neutralised by the power of the gods briefed on the other side. Vulcan could forge an impenetrable shield for Achilles, and Juno could warn him, through the mouth of his horse Xanthus, of his approaching doom, but neither could save him. This guess at the spiritual world supplied a crude working explanation of the queer contrariness of things on the human plane, but it left the gods pale and ineffectual shadows of the mind.

We have lost this ingenuous explanation of the strange drama of our life. We do not know what powers encompass us about, or in what vast rhythm the tumultuous surges and wild discords of our being are engulfed. No voice comes from the void and no portents are in the sky. The stars are infinitely aloof and the face of nature offers us neither comfort nor revelation. But within us we feel the impulse of the human spirit, seeking the free air, turning to the light of beautiful and reasonable things as the flower turns to the face of the sun. And in that impulse we find the echo to whatever far-off, divine strain we move. We cannot doubt its validity. It is the authentic, indestructible note of humanity. We may falter in the measure, stumble in our steps, get bewildered amidst the complexity of intractable and unintelligible things. But the spiritual movement goes on, like the Pilgrim's Chorus fighting its way through the torrent of the world. It may be submerged to-day, to-morrow, for generations; but in the end it wins—in the end the moral law prevails over the law of the jungle. The stream of tendency has many turnings, but it makes for righteousness and saps ceaselessly the foundations of the god of violence. It is to that god of harsh, material things that the Kaiser appeals against the eternal strivings of man towards the divine prerogative of freedom. Like the false prophets of old he leaps on his altar, gashes himself with knives till the blood pours out and cries, "Oh, Baal, hear us." And it is because Baal is an idol of wood and stone in a world subject to the governance of the spirit that, even in the darkest hour of the war, we need not lose faith.