“I am aware of the coarsening of my fibres; I grow more conscious of my body, less conscious of my mind. I am very humble. I know that the meanest hind who turned the ridges under the ploughshare had a truer value than I, the critic, the analyst—I use the words disparagingly—the commentator. He silently constructed while I noisily destroyed.”
Malory continued at great length in this strain, and I read between the lines of his letter that he had devoted much of the intolerable leisure of his soldier’s life to the evolution of a new creed, not really new to him, for its precepts were and must always have been in his blood, but now for perhaps the first time formulated and taken close to his heart. He wrote to me more and more openly, and I knew that I was getting the expression of his inmost thoughts. I have all his letters—for they came now in numbers though with great irregularity—and have sometimes thought that I have not the right, nor he the right to compel me, to keep them to myself. As he said:—
“... All men have creeds, and I behold myself a faddist in a universe of faddists. I cannot be wholly right, nor they wholly wrong. But I argue in my own defence, that a creed such as mine, resting on many pillars, the most mighty of which is the pillar of tolerance, is at least inoffensive in a world it does not even seek to convert. I offer my little gift—and if it is rejected I withdraw my hand, and tender it elsewhere.
“I am not concerned with practical matters, nor with controversial subjects; I am not a political or a social reformer, nor a nut-eater, nor a prophet of the Pit. I am not, I fear, a very practical preacher even in my own region, for my words, were I ever to spread them abroad, could germinate only in the ready tilled field of a contented soul, and will put no bread into the mouth of the hungry. So I desist, for mere reflection is of no value in our times, and he alone has justified his existence who has relieved the poor, benefited the sickly, or fed the starving.”
I do not wholly agree with him.
At least in one particular I will take his advice, and will not dwell further upon those years. We know now that, interminable as they seemed at the time, they passed, and in a golden autumn peace came to the earth like sleep returning after night upon night of insomnia. Malory wrote to me on that occasion also, a letter more full of sarcasm, bitterness, and sorrow than any I had yet received.
“... So here we are at last at the end of this long, long road, more like straight railway-lines than like a road, which is a poetical thing. I look back, and I see iron everywhere: iron hurtling through the air and smashing against the soft flesh of men and the softer hearts of women; iron thundering in the sea; masonry toppling; careful labour destroyed; skies full of black smoke; giant machines. Impressionism is the only medium to express the war. In this chaos little men have laboured, trying to put their brains round the war like putting a string round the globe; and pitting their little bodies against the moving tons of iron, like a new-born baby trying to push against a Titan. What has emerged? a new, a great tradition, greater than the Trojan or the Elizabethan; a new legend for the ornament of art. For it all comes down to art in the end; the legend is greater than the fact; the mind survives the perishing matter. We are the heirs of the past. The man of action is the progenitor of the dreamer. What am I saying? The progenitor? he is the manure, merely the manure dug into the soil on which the dreamer will presently grow. Poor, inarticulate, uncomprehending men have died in their anonymous millions to furnish a song for the future singer, a vicious, invertebrate effete, no doubt; a moral hermaphrodite of a worthless generation.
“How many before me have asked, What is Truth? is it indeed a flower which blooms only on a dung-heap?
“... I have seen so many men here die in their prime, who were precious to mankind or all in all to their individual loves, yet they have been taken, and I, the valueless, the solitary, am left. Is there a purpose behind these things? or am I to believe that fate is, after all, the haphazard of chance?”
We held no peace rejoicings at Pennistans’, for Nancy’s sake; peace was to her an additional sorrow. During the war she had had the feverish interest of having given her greatest sacrifice to the ideal of the moment, but as the horror faded away so the memory of those who had died faded also. Nancy and her kindred ceased to shine as the heroic, and became merely the unfortunate, a sad and scattered population to whom the war would last, not a few years, but all their lives. Shattered women and shattered men; but to us the war appeared already as a nightmare interlude from which we had wakened.