I went on to talk of the disappointment of the peace. Which had failed us most, intelligence or moral force? Both had failed us. For four years now Europe had been disintegrating. This poor League of Nations at Geneva, snubbed and brow-beaten by the French and Italians, who belonged to it and did not believe in it, and distrusted and hated by the excluded Russians and Germans, seemed to confirm the futility of any constructive effort. Things grew worse instead of better. Tariffs, currency manipulation, the cost of armaments, were destroying urban and industrial life under our eyes. The parasitic speculator flourished; the peasant in his self-centred way held on; the rest faded out. If one did not foresee another Great War one foresaw the certainty of endless little ones.
And so talking, and perhaps a little forgetful of my hearer, sitting almost knee to knee, intent to translate whatever he could catch of my talk and hand it out in his own phrases and colouring, I recalled a conversation I had had quite recently in Paris with my friend Philippe Millet, who is now dead. We were old friends. We had talked about the affairs of the world in Paris both before the war and during the war and at Washington during the Conference; and even in 1921 at Washington we could still believe that the Western world in which we were born and by which we lived might yet make an effort sufficiently creative and generous to save itself and develop a new and greater phase of civilisation. I was then publicly denouncing the French for their trust in submarines and Senegalese, but that made no difference in our mutual good will. He understood the spirit that moved me. But this last summer, when we met for the last time, Millet was an ailing and disillusioned man.
“My dear Wells,” he said, “you expect too much of this world. In the early part of the war there was splendid heroism and devotion—especially among the young. And they died. That was tragedy. But there is no tragedy now. There is nothing left great enough in Europe now for tragedy. It is a comedy now, a grotesque comedy of haggling and bargaining while the ship sinks. The sinking makes no difference. Absurd and preposterous people will still remain absurd and preposterous, even when they are running about on a sinking ship that they will not even observe to be sinking.” It was a point of view I had been approaching, but which it needed the push of his assertion for me to reach. It is a seizing and desolating point of view.
Suppose it is true that this system in which we live in Europe, the system of national sovereignty reacting upon an economic system of privately owned, profit-seeking capital, is entirely unteachable and inadaptable. Suppose its competitions are incurably destructive. Suppose there is indeed nothing sufficient to arrest this decay. Suppose that in consequence all Europe has to go on breaking down as Russia has broken down, as Germany breaks down, as Poland and Hungary will probably soon break down, with no sufficient attempt at transition or reconstruction, then what are we to do—we who have some vision of what is happening? How are we going to live through it? Whole generations may have to live through it.
I think that we are justified in saving ourselves as far as possible. I think we are bound to do whatever we can to salvage science and art and social experience against the days when the breakdown reaches its final phase and a real rebuilding is possible. I think we have to do all we can to maintain and extend an educational process and educational methods that will lay the foundations of a new order, a civilisation of service. And to do such things at all effectively we must keep our minds as sweet as we can and press our purposes as good-temperedly as possible.
“Grotesque comedy”!—in a world of that quality we must not simply “live dangerously,” but humorously. With aggressive wealth and canting patriotism floundering destructively about us, in an atmosphere of catchwords and wild misconceptions, with masses of people angry, distressed, and misinformed, and with worse to follow, the straight path to martyrdom is a mere evasion of our responsibilities. You cannot make a new world in gaols and exile; you must make it in schools and books, in Legislatures and business affairs, humorously, obstinately, and incessantly. This monstrous, distressful, pathetic, but preposterous social disarticulation is too intricate and complicated for any simple act or any simple formula to avail. We must all do what we can, but our best efforts may, after all, be not so much right as right-ish. It would be hard enough to struggle in a world in which other people did not understand, but in which we at least were sure we were right; it is infinitely harder to struggle, as many of us are doing now, with a realisation that our own understanding is limited and faulty.
In such circumstances a jest, laughter, may come as relief, as illumination. Of all men of modern times, I am inclined to think Lincoln was the greatest. He held on; he, more than anyone, saved the unity of the New World. And throughout the worst of that dark and weary struggle against disruption he joked, he told stories. Nobody has ever attempted yet to make an anthology of those extraordinary stories. But they were of infinite benefit to him and the world. They kept him supple. They saved him from the rigor of a pose.
And now, in still darker and more perplexing times, our need for the flexible reconciliations of humour is still greater....
To this effect I thought aloud in the presence of the bright young man who had come to make an interview out of me. He thanked me profusely, won my foolish permission to write something about our “most inspiring” talk, and went out to report to the world that the notorious prophet foretold an age of fun, and was, so to speak, painting his nose for the festival.