It is amazing to remember the power and depth of that malice. In a perverse way, it is almost encouraging to remember it: it proves so excellently that this earth is still the fallen star, the cindered Eden, in which merely human failings incur more than human angers. What a gruesome life that of politics must be! And yet when, in our recent history, were more positive virtues and high-minded hopes brought into the muddled ferment of national politics? Do you remember how this man lay at death’s door for many silent months, and how ill suppressed were the satisfaction and the sneer? What was his crime? We used to wonder. Only that he had believed the world was ripe for some strokes of simplicity and unselfishness.
Little by little the minds of fair-hearted men are returning to realization and gratitude. There is nothing now accomplished, or even accomplishable, in matters of international dealing, that Woodrow Wilson was not fighting for three years ago. The granolithic minds of the old stand-patters and the luxurious sniffs of young, hot doctrinaires formed for a while a quaint partnership of scorn. Nor would we ourself deny that there were many things to lament. But the world still waits for a competent, understanding, and judicial expression of Woodrow Wilson’s service to men. It was not a perfect service, for it was marred by necessary mortal blunders and qualms. For that perhaps we reverence it the more. And when the just tribute comes, perhaps it will come from the hand of some great writer to whom the puerilities of partisan squabble fade into their deserved shadow; to whom the humour and the pathos will be evident; and most evident of all, the dignity and austerity of a great human hope, frustrated and postponed, but an addition to the honour of the race. Perhaps it will come from the hand of some great dramatist, with the dramatist’s art that can revive great figures, great moments; can purge the occasion of what was merely peevish and fortuitous, and remind us of truths and visions we lost in the hurly-burly of the time.
It is sheer selfishness on our part to hope that some such expression may come soon. We are jealous for the credit of this generation. We are proud to have lived in days when men suffered so hideously and yet did and said and wrote great things. We would like it to be said of this generation that it recognized greatness in its own time. That would be an honourable thing to be able to say. Have we erected, from our imagination, a figure that is not really there? We think not. And so, with humility and hesitation, but impelled by a motive we cannot resist, we would like to say to Woodrow Wilson that there are many who gratefully wish him Merry Christmas.
SYMBOLS AND PARADOXES
We always suspected, after reading The Flying Inn, that G. K. Chesterton is fond of dogs. And now, reading his book, The New Jerusalem (which is full of very gorgeous matter), we learn that at his home in Beaconsfield he is host to both a dog (called “Winkle”) and a donkey (called “Trotsky”). Very genial is his picture of the start of his pilgrimage to Palestine and his last farewell to these beasts:
The reader will learn with surprise that my first feeling of fellowship went out to the dog; I am well aware that I lay open my guard to a lunge of wit.... He jumped about me, barking like a small battery, under the impression that I was going for a walk; but I could not, alas, take him with me on a stroll to Palestine.... The dog’s very lawlessness is but an extravagance of loyalty; he will go mad with joy three times on the same day at going out for a walk down the same road. We hear strangely little of the real merits of animals; and one of them surely is this innocence of all boredom; perhaps such simplicity is the absence of sin. I have some sense myself of the sacred duty of surprise; and the need of seeing the old road as a new road. But I cannot claim that whenever I go out for a walk with my family and friends, I rush in front of them volleying vociferous shouts of happiness; or even leap up round them attempting to lick their faces. It is in this power of beginning again with energy upon familiar and homely things that the dog is really the eternal type of the Western civilization.
The only thing that bothers us in this: If it had occurred to G. K. C. to prove that the scraper on his doorstep, or the radish growing in the garden, was the “eternal type” of Western civilization, would he not have made out an equally agreeable and convincing case for it? In fact, only a few steps away from his home, he came to the crossroads (and well we remember that crossroads, and the pub thereby—which is it, Mr. Chesterton: the Saracen’s Head, or the Royal White Hart?) and there decided that they were the symbol of civilization which had lost its way. And then, a few minutes later (in the train, we suppose) the glorious creature was noticing the heavy clouds that lay over the landscape, and decided that they were the emblem of our civilization. It takes a good deal of agility to pursue our pilgrim through this book, for every olive tree, signboard, sunset, gateway, proves to be a magnificent symbol of some spiritual gorgeousness.
We were sorry that Mr. Chesterton, when leaving Beaconsfield, did not find some symbolism in a thing which impressed us when we went pilgriming in those parts. Edmund Burke lived there at one time, and we remember reading in some guide-book that his home was “bounded in front by a ha-ha.” We thought to ourself at that time, how excellently symbolic it would have been if G. K. C. had bounded his own house in the same way. In fact, we often went along his road to listen for it.