“Smash up,” did not seem to alarm Peter.
“Nowadays,” said Peter, “so many people read and write, so much has been thought out, there is so big a literature of ideas in existence, that I think we could recover from a very considerable amount of smashing. I’m pro-smash. We have to smash. What holds us back are fixed ideas. Take Profit. We’re used to Profit. Most business is done for profit still. But why should the world tolerate profit at all? It doesn’t stimulate enterprise; it only stimulates knavery. And Capital, Financial Capital is just blackmail by gold—gold rent. We think the state itself even can’t start a business going or employ people without first borrowing money. Why should it borrow money? Why not, for state purposes, create it? Yes. No money would be any good if it hadn’t the state guarantee. Gold standard, fixed money fund, legitimate profits and so on; that’s the sort of fixed idea that gets in the way nowadays. It won’t get out of the way just for reason’s sake. The employers keep on with these old fixed ideas, naturally, because so it is they have been made, but the workpeople believe in them less and less. There must be a smash of some sort—just to shake ideas loose....”
Oswald surveyed his ward. So this was the young man’s theory. Not a bad theory. Fixed Ideas!
“There’s something to be said for this notion of Fixed Ideas,” he said. “Yes. But isn’t this ’I’m a Rebel’ business, isn’t that itself a Fixed Idea?”
“Oh certainly!” said Peter cheerfully. “We poor human beings are always letting our ideas coagulate. That’s where the whole business seems to me so hopeless....”
§ 8
In the ’eighties and ’nineties every question had been positive and objective. “People,” you said, “think so and so. Is it right?” That seemed to cover the grounds for discussion in those days. One believed in a superior universal reason to which all decisions must ultimately bow. The new generation was beginning where its predecessors left off, with what had been open questions decided and carried beyond discussion. It was at home now on what had once been battlefields of opinion. The new generation was reading William James and Bergson and Freud and becoming more and more psychological. “People,” it said, “think so and so. Why do they do so?”
So when at last Oswald carried off Peter to Dublin—which he did not do at Easter as he had planned but at Whitsuntide for a mere long week-end—to see at close hand this perplexing Irish Question that seemed drifting steadily and uncontrollably towards bloodshed, he found that while he was asking “who is in the right and who is in the wrong here? Who is most to blame and who should have the upper hand?” Peter was asking with a terrible impartiality, “Why are all these people talking nonsense?” and “Why have they got their minds and affairs into this dangerous mess?” Sir Horace Plunkett, Peter had a certain toleration for; but it was evident he suspected A.E. Peter did not talk very much, but he listened with a bright scepticism to brilliant displays of good talk—he had never heard such good anecdotal talk before—and betrayed rather than expressed his conviction that Nationalism, Larkinism, Sinn Feinism, Ulsterism and Unionism were all insults to the human intelligence, material for the alienist rather than serious propositions.
It wasn’t that he felt himself to be in possession of any conclusive solution, or that he obtruded his disbelief with any sense of superiority. In spite of his extreme youth he did not for a moment assume the attitude of a superior person. Life was evidently troubling him profoundly, and he was realizing that there was no apparent answer to many of his perplexities. But he was at least trying hard to get an answer. What shocked him in the world of Dublin was its manifest disinclination to get any answer to anything. They jeered at people who sought solutions. They liked the fun of disorder; it gave more scope for their irrepressible passion for character study. He began to recognize one particular phrase as the keynote of Dublin’s animation: “Hev ye hurrd the letest?”
On the Sunday afternoon of their stay in Dublin, Powys motored them through the city by way of Donnybrook and so on round the bay to Howth to see the view from Howth Head. Powys drove with a stray guest beside him. Behind, Peter imparted impressions to Oswald.