Nor are the younger writers of to-day entirely free from this infection of fatigue and of revolt against the triumphant forces of the modern world. In the days of the Reaction in politics, a few were conspicuous both for the vigour of their attacks against its falsities and cowardices, and also for their undismayed assertion of another ideal. Yet after that Reaction’s overthrow they seem to find little satisfaction: and reveal in their criticism a rejection, not merely of systems of government or worship of false gods in modern life, but of the whole soul of a civilisation visibly—as it appears to them—sick unto death. Mr. Belloc—one of our few living masters of irony—has advanced from the limited survey of “Mr. Burden” an attack, with some kindliness and some good nature, upon a particular phase of financial manipulation, to the bitter and mirthless impeachment of “Mr. Clutterbuck”—an attack on modern life itself as fundamentally a thing unclean. Rich men struggle for money or worldly honour as dogs fight over offal. Middle classes, vacuous in intelligence, humourless in daily existence, reveal as sole ambition, longing for wealth and rank and social advancement. Behind is a shadowy background of inert, vacant “populace,” ignorant, violent, despicable, only appearing in the scene to be cajoled and deluded in popular elections. The general result is the picture of a Society afflicted with an incurable decay, a carcase eaten of maggots and worms. Mr. Chesterton, again, first entered the arena of controversy in another spirit: crashing upon the stage sword in hand, and with a breath of jolly fresh air offering to lead all humanity to the downfall of Doubting Castle. His challenge and defiance were to all pessimisms and life denials, to all who refused to affirm that to-day was the first of days, and every dawn a miracle. The slums of the cities were stupendous, the suburbs sublime. Each fat red pillar-box was a symbol of enchantment. Dragons’ eyes glared from the lights of engines, and the lamp-posts shouted, like the sons of God, for joy that they were made. But to-day in our solitary and splendid optimist the rejoicing has already become sickled o’er with the pale cast of doubt. The music of his rustic flute has kept not for long its happy country tone, and has taken a stormier note from the tempest-tossed children of mankind. So the sunlight fades in the vision of a people which has abandoned Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, of political parties bought for ignoble ends, a nation which has turned its back upon the clean ways of progress, and lies deferential and prostrate before an oligarchy of rich men; who only cannot be bought because they have sold themselves already.
And in a thousand lesser ways in various efforts through industrious novelists and essayists, in the newspaper and the pulpit, there is made manifest this bewilderment, doubt, and uncertainty of the future. “Neither hast Thou saved Thy people at all,” is the summary of many who hoped so much from the discoveries and progresses of the last century, and now find their hopes unexpectedly baffled. The majority of writers are in revolt against the organisation of present-day society. Some call themselves Socialists. But by “Socialist” they mean little but an impeachment of the present. With some that impeachment is definitely of certain specific and economic evils. Poverty in the midst of plenty, extravagance of wealth helpless before extravagance of penury, a growing absorption in pleasure, lack of simplicity, of patriotism, or of impersonal ideals, are the subjects which fill their pages with lamentation. There are others, however, in whom the criticism goes deeper, with whom complaint against life’s ironies and injustices has passed into complaint against life itself. They can see present wrongs, but if all these wrongs were righted, they can see no rational or satisfying ideal. Level the poor to the rich, convert Poplar or Wapping into Belgravia or Mayfair, make every labourer’s cottage, as by the waving of a fairy wand, into the security and splendour of the country house. What after all, they declare, have you accomplished but the conversion of a society scourged with hunger and cold into a society afflicted with a great weariness. Humanity, at last self-conscious, has understood the meaning of the World Process and will be no longer fooled by its futile, irrational demands.
What can be discovered, in this evidence of wasting and decay, of another character: of a literature which accepts the present with rejoicing, or looks through the present to a transfigured future, or sees the present itself transfigured by a perpetual benediction? Can there still be descried, under grey skies and in an age of comfort rather than of inspiration, those who still assert the reality of the Vision Splendid, and essay adventure down all the great ways of the world.
Still two voyages are being accepted: a voyage without, in the actual encounter with primitive and hostile forces, and in a universe of salt and bracing challenges; and a voyage within, across distant horizons and to stranger countries than any visible to the actual senses. In the latter there is revealed a continuous tradition through the older mystics, of those who are secure in whatever wild whirlpools or stretches of sullen marsh the river of time may flow, because their goods are gathered
“Where change is not, nor parting any more,
Nor revolution of the moon and sun.”
The Reverend Thomas Treherne, in a quiet corner of seventeenth-century England, could declare that “all Time was Eternity and a perpetual Sabbath.” “The corn was orient, and immortal wheat which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. The dust and stones of the streets were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world.” “Everything was at rest, free and immortal. I know nothing of sickness or death, or rents or exactions, either for tribute or bread. In the absence of these I was entertained like an Angel with the works of God in their splendour and glory. I saw all in the peace of Eden.”[24] A hundred years later Blake in the dusty byways of dead cities could carry on the tradition of those who accept and yet rejoice—perpetually charging themselves in Whitman’s cheerful proclamation with “contentment and triumph.” Seeing God visibly with the naked eye, angels “with bright angelic wings bespangling every bough with stars” in the trees of Peckham Rye, and the sun not as a golden guinea hung in the sky, but as a multitude of the heavenly host singing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” this master mystic could defiantly proclaim that “though on earth things seem permanent, they are less permanent than a shadow, as we all know too well.” A century afterwards the tradition still abides, and life is still illuminated by an adventure through and beyond the sense-given impression of the outward show, into a universe of fire and splendour. To some it is effort towards a secret, a refusal to accept the knowledge which is given as the last word on the matter: an attempt to get once more behind both science and revelation to the Quiet which lies beyond all the noises of the world. To others it is a spiritual pilgrimage, not so much towards knowledge as towards attainment; an attempt through the will, in the business of life, to identify life as a journey: along a “road which leads to a light on the far horizon and beyond to the presence of God.” In each there is an escape from a tyranny of a present offering grey streets encompassing grey people, evolving itself into a future which offers more grey streets encompassing more grey people. Against so desolate a prospect sounds the summons of high enterprise, in the affirmation of a splendour not yet revealed, of shadowy presences and casements opening upon the perilous seas of fairyland.
In the other voyage, that enterprise is offered in no shadowy region of dreams, but amid the hard and tangible materials of to-day: in that “Romance” whose habitation is everlasting, and kingdom without end. It is the inspiration of Stevenson and his successors: accepting all things, delighting in all things with the solemn engrossing play of children; living in “make-believe,” knowing it make-believe, and yet not desiring to have it otherwise. “He seems to be marching through a land and atmosphere,” says a critic, “where the men are strange men, and the lights are garish, and there is a queer noise of music borne upon the wind. And yet this land, for all its strangeness, is found to be the land we knew before, but seen under a new perspective, upon a more imaginative plane.” He has never lacked successors: some finding in the actual adventure of so-called settled and orderly life all the amazing romance of the vicissitudes of fortune: some, like Mr. Rudyard Kipling, exhibiting just outside the ordered garden the riotous forces of natural and untameable things—the hills and the sea—calling upon man joyfully to an encounter which may be ruinous but is never dull. So there is inspiration in such a great writer as Mr. Joseph Conrad, with his sense of companionship, laughter, and fury in the defiance of wind and tempest: in a lesser example, in that “Beloved Vagabond” who discovered “why I was sent into the world. It was to play the fiddle up and down the sunny land of France.”
II
But this, after all, is “make-believe”—the play of children; and children grow tired of their toys. Dressed up in gorgeous garments, marching through the world with helmet and tin sword, they may pretend that tremendous events accompany every day. If, to the majority, these tremendous events do not accompany every day, they are destined sooner or later to be found out. Lives insurgent and confined may take delight in the vision of strange countries and far horizons, just as Dick Heldar at his window looking over the lights of the enormous city is roused into a sickness of longing by the song of the “Men of the Sea.” But to the general such emotions must remain a passion vicariously experienced. We must seek elsewhere for a spirit, expressing itself through literature, to which any large proportion of the citizens of the twentieth century can respond. It must be a spirit which will reveal the present as itself satisfying, apart from unknown to-morrows and dead yesterdays. It must stand independent of all attainments of political and social changes, as something by which human life will find itself ennobled, when all the old wrongs are righted and an economic basis of possible existence secured for all. It must be a spirit of joy as well as of reason: yielding exultant satisfaction in a delight which is beyond the mere momentary enjoyment of the senses in the dull instincts of thrift and gain. And it must be independent for the immediate future of supernatural securities and definite theories as to the meaning and purpose of the world. Such theories will continue, indeed, to be maintained with greater or less allegiances by large sections and organisations of the new race. These are not likely at any reckonable time to unite upon any single dominant philosophy of life, or, in union, to impose that dominant philosophy upon the people outside. For a large and probably an increasing proportion, relief from a kind of life-weariness must come from some element in the world as it is given; from renewed expression, either in response to the life of the earth, or in the fulfilment of artistic and creative powers, or in new forms of enthusiasm for their fellow-men, of the possibilities before a people which sees existence less as a pilgrimage than as a present boon.