Leaves in the Wind

by A. G. Gardiner

It is a chill, but a chastening thought. It leaves us with a sense of loneliness, but it brings with it, also, a sense of power, the power of the unconquerable human spirit, self-dependent and self-reliant, reaching out to ideals beyond itself, beyond its highest hope of attainment, broken on the wheel of intractable things, but still stumbling forward by its half-lights in search of some Land of Promise that always skips just beyond the horizon.

Happily the moon is skipping beyond the horizon too. Frankly, we have seen enough of her face to last us for a long time. When she comes out again let her clothe herself in good fat clouds and bring the winds in her train. We do not like to think of her as a mere flunkey of the Kaiser and the torch-bearer of his assassins.

IF JEREMY CAME BACK

It is the agreeable illusion of the theatre that life is a rounded tale. We pay our money at the box, go in, see the story begin, progress and end, sadly or cheerfully, and come away with the discords resolved, virtue exalted and villainy abased, and the tangled skein of things neatly unravelled. And so home, content. But on the stage of life there is none of this satisfying completeness and finish. We enter in the midst of a very ancient drama, spend our years in trying to pick up the threads and purport of the action, and go as inopportunely as we came. The curtain does not descend punctually upon an exhausted plot and an accomplished purpose. It descends upon a thrilling but unfinished tale. You have got, perhaps, into the most breathless part of the action, seized at last the clue that will assuredly explain the mystery, when suddenly and irrationally the light fails, and for you the theatre is dark for ever. Your emotions have been stirred, your curiosity awakened, your sympathies aroused in vain. Even the episode you have been permitted to witness is left with ragged ends and unfinished judgments. How did it proceed and how did it end, and what was the sequel? Was virtue or villainy triumphant? Who was the real hero? Were your sympathies on the right side or the wrong? And, more personally, what of those shoots of life you have thrown out to the challenge of the future? Did they wilt or flourish, and what was their fortune? These are among the thousand questions to which we should like an answer, and there is nothing unreasonable in thinking that we may have an answer.

It would be enough to satisfy the curiosity of most of us to have the privilege which Jeremy Bentham confessed that he would like to enjoy. That amiable and industrious philosopher, having spent a blameless life in the development of his comfortable gospel of the "greatest good of the greatest number," entertained the pleasant fancy of returning to the scene of his labours once in every hundred years to see humanity marching triumphantly to the heavenly city of Utilitarianism, along the straight and smooth turnpike road that he had fashioned for its ease and direction. He had the touching confidence of the idealist that humanity only had to be shown the way out of the wilderness to plunge into it with joyous shouts, and hurry along it with eager enthusiasm. And since he had shown the way all would henceforth be well. It is this confidence which makes the idealist an object of pity to the cynic. For the cynic is often only the idealist turned sour. He is the idealist disillusioned by loss of faith, not in his ideals, but in humanity.

This is about the time when Jeremy might be expected back on his first centennial visit to see how we have got along the road to human perfectibility. I can imagine him, poised in the unapparent, looking with round-eyed astonishment upon the answer which a century of time has given to his anticipations. This, the New Jerusalem of his confident vision? This shambles the harvest of a hundred years of progress? And the cynic beside him, tapping his ghostly snuff-box, observes dryly, "They don't seem to have got very far on the way, friend Jeremy; not very far on the way." I can conceive the philosopher returning sadly to the Elysian fields, wondering whether, after all, these visits are worth while. If this is the achievement of a hundred years' enjoyment of the philosophy of Utilitarianism, what unthinkable revelation may await him on his next visit! Perhaps ... yes, perhaps, it will be better to stay away.

But all the answers of time will not be so disquieting. It is probable, for example, that Benjamin Franklin will enjoy his visit immensely. He will find much to delight his curious and adventurous mind. I see him watching the flying machines as joyously as a child and as fondly as a parent. For among his multitudinous activities he experimented with balloons and suffered the gibes of the foolish. Why, asked his critic, did he waste his time over these childish things? What, in the name of heaven, was the use of balloons? And Benjamin made the immortal reply, "What is the use of a new-born baby?" If he is among the presences who watch the events of to-day he will be almost as astonished as his critics to see the dimensions his "new-born baby" has grown to. He will be astonished at other things. He will recall the day when, in his fine flowered-silk garment, he entered, as the delegate of the insurgent farmers of New England, the reception of the great—was it not in Downing Street?—and was spat upon by the noble lords, to whose dim vision the future of the new-born baby across the Atlantic was undecipherable. He will recall how he put his outraged garment away, never to wear it again until he had signed the Declaration of Independence. And now, what miracle is this? England and America reconciled at last. England, no less than France, straining her eyes across the Atlantic for the relief that is hastening to her help in the extremest peril of her history from the giant by whose unquiet cradle he played his part a century and a half ago.... Well, no one will rejoice more at the reconciliation or watch the tide of relief streaming across the ocean with more goodwill than Benjamin, who deplored the breach with England as much as anybody. But the noble lords who spat on him!...

And I can see Napoleon, with his unpleasant familiarity, pinching the spiritual ears of the French scientists of his day and saying, "How now, gentlemen? What do you say to the steamboat now?" Poor wretches, how humiliated they will be. For when Napoleon asked the Academie des Sciences to report as to the possibilities of the newly-invented steamboat, their verdict was, "Idée folle, erreur grossière, absurdité." They saw in it only a foolish toy, and not a new-born baby destined to be the giant who is performing such prodigies on the seas of the world to-day.

But it is not the scientists who will need to hang their heads before the revelations that await them. They will look on with the complacency of those who see the mighty harvest of their sowing. Perhaps among the presences who surround them they may descry a bulky man, with rolling gait, whom they knew in their day on earth as the intellectual autocrat of his generation and who levelled the shafts of his wit at their foolish experiments. They will have lost the very human frailty of retaliation if they do not remind him of some of those shafts that, to the admiring circle which sat at his feet, seemed so well-directed and piercing. Perhaps they will read this to him: