But I am not on my legs to-day to sing the charms and glories of war; my purpose is to argue that, whether glorious or not, it will remain inevitable on this sad mud-pie so long as the great races of men retain the view of it that I have described, and to deduce therefrom the doctrine that pacifism, as a scheme of practical politics, is thus not only unsound but also very dangerous. All that it could conceivably accomplish, imagining it to succeed anywhere, would be to make the nation embracing it highly vulnerable—in brief, a sort of boozy idealist or unarmored butter-and-egg man, roaming the world unprotected, and so holding out irresistible temptations to less moral and more realistic nations.

War, under the sorry scheme that now passes for civilization, has been degraded—transiently only, I hope and believe—to the uses of robbery. Whoever has gold must have an army to guard it, or resign himself to losing it. Especially must he have a guard for it if his public repute is that of one with a not too fine understanding of the difference between meum and tuum. Such a reputation, it must be manifest, is precisely that of the United States to-day. The rest of the world is so passionately convinced that it is a thief that robbing it would take on the high virtue and dignity of a constabulary act. It is not robbed because it is strong. It will not be robbed until it grows weak.

But armed strength, argue the pacifists, does not prevent war: it causes it. Who, reading history, could believe in such transparent nonsense? Let us turn to the late enemy. What kept the peace in Europe for forty-four years if it was not the mighty German army? If it had been weak, France would have struck in 1875, and again in 1882, and again in 1887, and again every two years thereafter. It took nearly half a century to roll up a force sufficient to tackle the colossus, and it took four years to bring it down even then. Our own history is full of examples to the same effect. In 1867 Napoleon III, believing that the United States was war weary and its army disbanded, prepared to move into Mexico and tear the Monroe Doctrine to tatters. He overlooked the large forces engaged in burning barns, robbing hen-roosts and raiding cellars in the late Confederacy. When General Sheridan marched upon the Rio Grande at the head of this army of heroes, Napoleon changed his mind. Three years later he was disposed of by the Germans, and the Continent settled down to forty-four years of peace.

Consider, again, the Venezuela episode. When President Cleveland sent his message to Congress on December 17, 1895, war with England became imminent overnight. What prevented it? Was it the fact that the United States had no army worthy of the name? Or the fact that the United States had a brand-new, highly effective and immensely pugnacious navy, notoriously eager to try its guns? Come, now, to 1898. Of all the nations of Europe, only England sided with us against Spain. The Germans, at Manila, went to great lengths to show their hostility. Did they refrain from attacking Dewey because his fleet was smaller and weaker than theirs, or because it was larger and stronger?

I could multiply instances, but observe the timekeeper reaching for the gong. So far as I know, there is no record in history of a nation that ever gained anything valuable by being unable to defend itself. Such nations, true enough, have sometimes managed to exist for a time—but at what cost! There is the case of Denmark to-day. It is discussing disbanding its army on the ground that any probable or even possible foe could dispose of that army in five days. But what does this mean? It means that the Danes must reconcile themselves to living by the sheer grace of their stronger neighbors—that they must be willing, when the time comes, to see their country made a battle-ground by those neighbors, and without raising a hand. Here I do not indulge in idle talk: I am quoting almost literally a member of the Danish cabinet.

I can’t imagine the people of a truly great nation submitting to any such ignominious destiny. The Danes have been forced into acquiescence by their weakness. But why should the United States invite the same fate by putting off its strength?

II. FOUR MAKERS OF TALES

1
Conrad

SOME time ago I put in a blue afternoon re-reading Joseph Conrad’s “Youth.” A blue afternoon? What nonsense! The touch of the man is like the touch of Schubert. One approaches him in various and unhappy moods: depressed, dubious, despairing; one leaves him in the clear, yellow sunshine that Nietzsche found in Bizet’s music. But here again the phrase is inept. Sunshine suggests the imbecile, barnyard joy of the human kohlrabi—the official optimism of a steadily delighted and increasingly insane Republic. What the enigmatical Pole has to offer is something quite different. If its parallel is to be found in music, it is not in Schubert, but in Beethoven—perhaps even more accurately in Johann Sebastian Bach. It is the joy, not of mere satisfaction, but of understanding—the profound but surely not merry delight which goes with the comprehension of a fundamental fact—above all, of a fact that has been coy and elusive. Certainly the order of the world that Conrad sets forth with such diabolical eloquence and plausibility is no banal moral order, no childish sequence of virtuous causes and edifying effects. Rather it has an atheistic and even demoniacal smack: to the earnest Bible student it must be more than a little disconcerting. The God he visualizes is no loving papa in a house-coat and carpet-slippers, inculcating the great principles of Christian ethics by applying occasional strokes a posteriori. What he sees is something quite different: an extremely ingenious and humorous Improvisatore and Comedian, with a dab of red on His nose and maybe somewhat the worse for drink—a furious and far from amiable banjoist upon the human spine, and rattler of human bones. Kurtz, in “Youth,” makes a capital banjo for that exalted and cynical talent. And the music that issues forth—what a superb Hexentanz it is!

One of the curiosities of critical stupidity is the doctrine that Conrad is without humor. No doubt it flows out of a more general error; to wit, the assumption that tragedy is always pathetic, that death itself is inevitably a gloomy business. That error, I suppose, will persist in the world until some extraordinary astute mime conceives the plan of playing “King Lear” as a farce—I mean deliberately. That it is a farce seems to me quite as obvious as the fact that “Romeo and Juliet” is another, this time lamentably coarse. To adopt the contrary theory—to view it as a great moral and spiritual spectacle, capable of purging and uplifting the psyche like marriage to a red-haired widow or a month in the trenches—to toy with such notions is to borrow the critical standards of a party of old ladies weeping over the damnation of the heathen. In point of fact, death, like love, is intrinsically farcical—a solemn kicking of a brick under a plug-hat—, and most other human agonies, once they transcend the physical—i. e., the unescapably real—have far more of irony in them than of pathos. Looking back upon them after they have eased one seldom shivers: one smiles—perhaps sourly but nevertheless spontaneously. This, at all events, is the notion that seems to me implicit in every line of Conrad. I give you “Heart of Darkness” as the archetype of his whole work and the keystone of his metaphysical system. Here we have all imaginable human hopes and aspirations reduced to one common denominator of folly and failure, and here we have a play of humor that is infinitely mordant and searching. Turn to pages 136 and 137 of the American edition—the story is in the volume called “Youth”—: the burial of the helmsman. Turn then to 178-184: Marlow’s last interview with Kurtz’s intended. The farce mounts by slow stages to dizzy and breath-taking heights. One hears harsh roars of cosmic laughter, vast splutterings of transcendental mirth, echoing and reëchoing down the black corridors of empty space. The curtain descends at last upon a wild dance in a dissecting-room. The mutilated dead rise up and jig....