(General Cadorna wrote to the Queen: ‘If you want to see Trieste, buy a picture postcard.’ Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!)
The music fitted the words outrageously, and the mocking insolence of those six ‘Ah’s,’ each accented, at the end of every stanza, was ineffable (do, mi, re; si, re, do). They were so utterly final—a funeral march for rhetoric.
For obvious reasons there was all too little of this spirit awake during the war; now, since the war, it blows freely through the air and is one of the healthiest results of disillusionment. It makes men read their newspapers sceptically and glance back to see where a dispatch came from before accepting it as truth; it causes them to look with an ironic eye on politicians, governments, philanthropists, institutions of learning, and all other institutions, on everything and every one professionally noble; it supplies readers for such irreverent publications as the American Mercury, and makes satirical novels, like Babbitt, actually popular. It reveals the grosser forms of credulity as precisely that. Held to be something dreadful, the Ku Klux Klan would wax in strength, but people find it ridiculous; it is doomed. Even before the ‘Protocols’ were exposed as forgeries an amazingly large number of people were unable to swallow them; they were too silly. The Saturday Evening Post, the Red Book and the others go on their tawdrily romantic way, but I doubt extremely that the millions who read the stories they contain accept these as anything save sheer senseless relaxation, since the same millions read and take to their hearts the comic strips—Mr. and Mrs., The Gumps, etc.—which are so sordid, so blowzy, so disillusioned, in both drawing and captions, as to make Babbitt appear by comparison a lilting romance and Mr. H. L. Mencken a blood-brother of Mr. Harold Bell Wright. In short, though it is still possible to ‘get away with’ a good deal of nonsense, it is not possible, even in America, the most sentimental nation under the sun, to ‘get away with’ anywhere near as much as once upon a time.
But there is more behind all this than a mere spirit of sceptical mockery; clean and salty as it is, that spirit is only a part of something bigger. The truth is, I think, that people have grown up—part way up, at least. The incredible childishness of a decade ago is gone—I trust, forever. It is not only that we accept less than before, but that we are more level-headed both in accepting and rejecting. A questioning coolness is abroad. Perhaps we expect less of life; certainly we are less enthusiastic over it. That crass optimism about everything, not openly to share which used to make an American taboo, no longer soars and screams. It still lives, but with a broken wing, fluttering clumsily like a hen. A good thing! There was nothing noble in it. At bottom it represented only a desire not to be troubled, and was popular for the same reason that the man is popular who, in response to an inquiry as to his health, grins and shouts: ‘Fine! Fine! Never better!’
What a load of sentimentality has gone overboard with our illusions!—sentimental notions about happiness, about country, about life, about love. That amazing convicton, for example, that the only thing of real importance in a woman was her chastity. Overboard. Drowned a mile deep, as it deserved to be for the cheap and insulting notion it was. In its long day it must have righteously infuriated thousands of women—possibly more those who happened to be chaste than those who happened not to be. Its loss signifies not more accent on the sex-relation, but less, helping to put the relation where it belongs, as merely one of a number of facts. An immense step has been taken toward an honester, decenter understanding between men and women. And a score of other sentimental notions are gone, too, or tottering. The visualizing of the United States as a benevolent disinterested Uncle Sam, a bit homely, a bit awkward, but strong and infinitely kind, like the hero of a Cape Cod melodrama; and of France as a Jeanne d’Arc in glittering armour, eyes shining, face aglow, shedding her life-blood for Liberty—hum ...! Mr. E. M. Forster has recently written a very remarkable novel in which he punctures, dispassionately, but once for all, the Kipling legend of the English in India as public school demi-gods; yet in both England and America the book has sold by tens of thousands and met with almost unanimous praise.
Quite possibly a little that was fine and true has gone overboard with the rubbish, but most of the destruction was salutary. And it has served, it seems to me, to bring those two classes, the dumb majority and the articulate minority, closer together than ever before. In a sense it is not a real closeness; for, as I have said, the two can never touch, one living among facts, the other in a picture of facts. But at least the picture now bears some relation to the facts, is by way of becoming what it must become to be of any value—an interpretation of them. This, surely, is something to the credit of our disillusioned period.
It is a puzzling period to study, and would still be so, I think, even were we not in the midst of it. It questions everything, all once accepted premises. Yet it is not like other great periods of change—the Reformation or the Romantic Revival, for instance. They were, in one way or another, periods of revolution, when men brushed aside the past, sure that they had found something better—sure because they felt young and fresh. The present period is not young and fresh; it is very, very tired. And so, despite the obvious and extensive social changes that it has already witnessed, it is not in spirit revolutionary. It questions everything—governments, nationality, economics, religion, human nature, life itself—but it is not young enough or fresh enough to discard recklessly. People question and wonder, yet vote overwhelmingly for the Republicans in America and the Conservatives in England.
Phenomena such as these and others more distressing are frequently cited as evidence that ours is a period of discouraging reaction. I do not agree. The bitter intolerance displayed by such movements as Fascismo—or, for that matter, Fundamentalism—is, to my thinking, a good sign, rather than a bad. It means that violent intolerance is to-day forced back where it belongs—to the outskirts, to the extreme Right or the extreme Left. It is violent and domineering because it dares not be otherwise; it represents only an inconsiderable fraction of the whole, and is afraid. At the moment when I write this, Fascismo still governs Italy, but it has against it probably eighty per cent. of the population, and governs by force alone, suppressing its most dangerous enemies, muzzling the press, forbidding political gatherings, dissolving societies, outraging the constitutional rights of individuals. Such tyranny signifies fear—fear based on the certain knowledge of the Fascisti that they and their policies do not represent the country.
Yet people have not risen up en masse and turned them out. No, and this, too, is characteristic of the period. It lacks the ardent juvenile faith in Utopias essential to drive multitudes to action. Instead, people ask coolly: ‘What have you got, to put in place of what we so unsatisfactorily have?’ But it is also a rather mature, almost wise period, saying: ‘Let the Fascisti rave. Whom the Gods would destroy....’
The Republicans and the Conservatives must watch their step closely. In neither case was the large majority obtained a loving endorsement. A tired period but an extremely clear-eyed one, as periods go, with less belief than usual in miraculous panaceas, but with still less in all things being for the best. It is not a romantic period, though it is full of superficially romantic events; there is no youth in it and small enthusiasm. But it is a period out of which more of permanent value may come than if it were.