M. Anatole France requires no visitants from another world to ensure the destruction of his nightmare. He does not even need the national jealousies and insanities of Mr. Wells equipped with new weapons of destruction. His vision of a Penguin Chicago at Paris finally falls to pieces from its own internal rottenness. Anarchists, wielding tremendous explosives, accepted as deliverers by the enslaved and degenerate proletariat, smash Society into pieces. One of them, a clerk in the Electricity Trust, an afternoon in June, from the heights of Fort Saint-Michel, witnesses the beginning of the end. To a little child, playing there all unconscious of the coming cataclysm, he tells the story of human progress. “A fisherman once threw his net into the sea, and drew out a little sealed copper pot, which he opened with his knife. Smoke came out of it, and as it mounted up to the clouds the smoke grew thicker and thicker, and became a giant, who gave such a terrible yawn that the whole world was blown to dust.” The “yawn” is the weariness of a vast disillusionment: the awakening of a slave population to the futility of its further continuance. At first the Anarchists waged war on the Trusts, while the people stood aloof, resentful, indifferent. Later, in the panic that accompanied the immense ruin of property, the mob ceased work and indulged in a pandemonium of destruction. Men fought for food and for plunder in the darkened ways of the city. Society lost its structure and deliquesced into a kind of sloppy morass. Epidemics followed the fighting, bred from unburied corpses. Famine carried off those whom pestilence had spared. “Reforms were introduced into institutions, and great changes took place in habits and customs; but the country never recovered the loss of its capital, and never regained its former prosperity. Commerce and industry dwindled away. Civilisation abandoned those countries which for so long it had preferred to all others. They became insalubrious and sterile. The territories that had supported so many millions of men became nothing more than a desert. On the hill of Fort Saint-Michel wild horses cropped the coarse grass.”
The diastole had been followed by a systole. Mankind after the European, as after the Roman, civilisation fell back into darkness. A catastrophe of centuries was occupied by the evening, the midnight, and the dawn. As once the barbarians walked with wonder along the deserted Roman roads or suddenly emerged from forest and plain to gaze astonished on the vast ruins of aqueducts and coliseums and once populous cities, so the new child peoples which survived the cosmic catastrophe contemplated the embankments, the crumbling bridges, the tattered, torn fragments of deserted towns which marked the memories of our dead race. The wheel of history slowly revolved through the centuries, and after a time once again the unending cyclic process was renewed and another “civilisation” erected which thought itself the last word of human progress.
“Days flowed like water from the fountains, and the centuries passed like drops falling from the ends of stalactites. Hunters came to chase the bears upon the hills that covered the forgotten city. Shepherds fed their flocks upon them. Labourers turned up the soil with their ploughs. Gardeners cultivated their lettuces and grafted their pear trees. They were not rich, and they had no arts. The walls of their cabins were covered with old vines and roses. A goat-skin clothed their tanned limbs, while their wives dressed themselves with the wool that they themselves had spun. The goat-herds moulded little figures of men and animals out of clay, or sang songs about the young girl who follows her lover through woods or among the browsing goats; while the pine trees whisper together, and the water utters its murmuring sound. The master of the house grew angry with the beetles who devoured his figs. He planned snares to protect his fowls from the velvet-tailed fox, and he poured out wine for his neighbours, saying, ‘Drink! the flies have not spoilt my vintage; the vines were dry before they came.’
“In the course of ages the wealth of the villages and the corn that filled the fields were pillaged by barbarian invaders. The country changed its masters many times. The conquerors built castles on the hills. Cultivation increased: mills, forges, tanneries, and looms were established. Roads were opened through the woods and over the marshes. The river was covered with boats. The hamlets became large villages, and, joining together, formed a town which protected itself by deep trenches and lofty walls. Later, becoming the capital of a great State, it found itself straitened within its now useless ramparts, and it converted them into grass-grown villas. It grew very rich and large beyond measure.
“The houses were never high enough to satisfy the people. They kept on making them still higher. They built them of thirty or forty storeys, with offices, shops, banks, societies, one above another. They dug cellars and tunnels ever deeper downwards. Fifteen millions of men laboured in a giant town.”[30]
After a time, says a great writer, the earth grows sick of her children, like exhausted ground that will bear fruit no more. It is impossible that society could “blow up” with such rapidity as is here pictured; the process is, in any case, foreshortened. But any student who has followed the history of Rome’s destruction—the gradual disintegration of a society exceedingly complex and rational—will never conceal from himself the possibility of similar vast changes in the world of to-morrow. The process is always incredible to those who think that mankind henceforth has but to settle down and be comfortable in a world where tranquillity is secure. Dr. Dill has described such a life under the Roman peace, with the municipalities competing in magnificence of building, the arts of life secure, the farmhouse (in one picture) with the peacocks in the garden under the sunlight, and every accompanying element of enjoyment and repose. The only sorrow which disturbed such an age was the sometimes transient regret that all the great things had been accomplished; that humanity, in a completely rational society, had nothing to contemplate in the future but a continuous repetition of the present—an endless end of the world. A few generations later that farmhouse lies deserted, the cities are crumbling into ruin, society itself has fallen to pieces, terror, and with terror childlike superstition and ferocity, have achieved dominance. Night has resumed her ancient Empire. What guarantee does the present offer against the repetition of a similar catastrophe? Civilisation possesses weapons adequate to protection against forces without. It has no protection against forces within. One of the passing figures in Mr. Wells’s vision of desolation mourns over the vanishing of all the bright hopes of a transfigured world. “The sense of fine beginnings! It was all a sham. There were no beginnings. We’re just ants in ant-hill circles, in a world that doesn’t matter: that goes on and rambles into nothingness. New York—New York doesn’t even strike me as horrible. New York was nothing but an ant-hill kicked to pieces by a fool.”
These observers are justified at least in one contention: that the future, whether in orderly progress or with sudden or gradual retrogression, will be astonished at the “illusion of security” in which to-day society reposes; forgetting that but a thin crust separates it from the central elemental fires, that the heart of the earth is a flame. There are forces of resistance to disintegration and decay, even amongst this shabby crowd which appears to the indignant observer but an aggregation of aimless, impossible lives. Mr. Wells himself in earlier work has shown us the humanity and romantic ardour of Mr. Hoopdriver and the resolute hope of Mr. Lewisham, even if in later effort he can see little but the fatuous ineptitude of Mr. “Art” Kipps or the ineffective blunderings of Mr. Bert Smallways. Mr. Anatole France has revealed in his studies of contemporary life kindly intelligent citizens, doing bravely the work of the day. In no panic fear, certainly with no acquiescence and despair, the reformer to-day will contemplate the possible future of a society beyond measure complex, baffling and uncertain in its energies and aims. But the warning, always useful, but now more than ever necessary, cannot be too strongly emphasised: that with the vertical division between nation and nation armed to the teeth, and the horizontal division between rich and poor which has become a cosmopolitan fissure, the future of progress is still doubtful and precarious. Humanity—at best—appears but as a shipwrecked crew which has taken refuge on a narrow ledge of rock, beaten by wind and wave; which cannot tell how many, if any at all, will survive when the long night gives place to morning. The wise man will still go softly all his days; working always for greater economic equality on the one hand, for understanding between estranged peoples on the other; apprehending always how slight an effort of stupidity or violence could strike a death-blow to twentieth-century civilisation, and elevate the forces of destruction triumphant over the ruins of a world.
CHAPTER XI
POSTSCRIPT
SO at the end we are compelled to confess an essential ignorance. To-day’s “human comedy” still remains unwritten. Those who have essayed it are always unconsciously or deliberately foreshortening or distorting: exhibiting excess of darkness or sunshine. We know little of the forces fermenting in that strange laboratory which is the birthplace of the coming time. We are uncertain whether civilisation is about to blossom into flower, or wither in tangle of dead leaves and faded gold. We can find no answer to the inquiry, whether we are about to plunge into a new period of tumult and upheaval, whether we are destined to an indefinite prolongation of the present half-lights and shadows, whether, as we sometimes try to anticipate, a door is to be suddenly opened, revealing unimaginable glories.