The author tempered his mild radicalism with the hard-headed sagacity of Sam Thatcher, a one-armed pointsman, who, while unintellectually aware of the changelessness of change, “figured it out” that life is cyclic; that as experience broadens the attitudes of men they lose their little individualities in a common resignation, defeat, and decay, which to him meant contentment. “I’ve been round the world some—round and round. That’s how things go—round and round—I know, round and round.” Sam thus epitomized an old theory which has so many supporters that it must be wrong. But if we do not go “round and round” in what direction do we go? Nobody knows. If our movement is circular there is the desperate possibility of sufficient momentum to gain new territory by virtue of centrifugal force. We can at least make the circle larger. Races have bloomed, fruited, and passed; planets have shone for an abbreviated eternity and disappeared; baffling facts about life-forms upon the earth have come to light. Our conscious life is young, densely ignorant, and full of pain; our instinctive life is ageless, has perfected its knowledge and can endure, as it has endured, the aeons of change. We shall some day get the idea of change into our consciousness.
Unthinkingly one might regret that Sam was clever enough to sway back toward dogma those wavering minds which might otherwise have yielded to the drama’s punches. But his pathetically amusing romance should have made it clear to respectable auditors flirting with new ideas that he was not a competent critic of their particular class-slice of life. What he said was reassuring, assuaging, brilliantly trite, and an untroubled mind would take it and reject the austere, burning truth of the essential message of the play.
“Naught may endure but mutability”: Shelley thus expressed what every educated man knows. Change is the unvarying order, and yet we are constitutionally averse to it. Comfortable people dislike it. “All great natures love stability.” Why do we make John Prices of ourselves? (I think that H. G. Wells, more than any other literary man, has lived in consonance with the law of change.) An expanding knowledge precludes constancy. All John Prices are obscurantists. Convictions and blind faith based upon glorified ignorance have for thousands of years encysted, cramped, and twisted personal life, but somehow it has burst through the fetters and arrayed itself for successive struggles. Analyzing what we see and know, and confessing what we think we feel, we have the ancient riddle before us. We applaud a play like Change, but seek security and stability in every relationship. Eventually every man must feel what Rousseau wrote: “Everything in this world is a tangled yarn; we taste nothing in its purity, we do not remain two moments in the same state. Our affections, as well as bodies, are in perpetual flux.” Maybe Sam Thatcher was wise, but if we knew that our life were cyclic the joy of it to us would cease. The wiser man does not know so much as Sam professed, but his endless endeavor is to try to know more. The law of change, which he sees enforced everywhere, increases his insatiability.
It is ultimate questions to which Change gives rise, and to such questions there are no satisfactory answers. The social value of the play lies in the graphic clearness with which it illustrates the slow but epochal shifts that are always under way in thinking individuals, families, and nations.
There is no Rock of Ages in the land of courageous knowledge. Nothing endures but mutability. The purpose of a play like Change is to open the inner mind to this glorious truth, so that with a fortitude born of understanding we may accept misfortune, calamity, and death as the effects of unalterable law, and not as donated penalties or inscrutable accidents. Poise, power, and personality are the fruits of this attitude toward change, and whoever achieves these has climbed out of the “reddest hell”
Armoured and militant,
New-pithed, new-souled, new-visioned, up the steeps
To those great altitudes whereat the weak
Live not.