Defamed by every charlatan
And soil'd with all ignoble use.
But it will be difficult to persuade me of the loftier spirituality, or even the more abiding solace, involved in ecstatic devotion to a figure of speech.
There are two elements of consolation in life: the things of which we are sure, and the things of which we are unsure. We are sure that man has somehow been launched upon the most romantic adventure that mind can conceive. He has set forth to conquer and subdue the world, including the stupidities and basenesses of his own nature. At first his progress was incalculably slow; then he came on with a rush in the great sub-tropical river basins; and presently, where the brine of the Ægean got into his blood, he achieved such miracles of thought and art that his subsequent history, for well-nigh two thousand years, bore the appearance of retrogression. I have already asked what the Invisible King was about when he suffered the glory that was Athens to sink in the fog-bank that was Alexandria. At all events, that wonderful false-start came to nothing. Rome succeeded to the world-leadership; and Rome, though energetic and capable, was never brilliant. With her, European free thought, investigation, science flickered out, and Asian religion took its place. Truly the slip-back from antiquity to the dark ages offers a specious argument to the atheists—the true and irredeemable atheists—who deny the reality of progress. Specious, but quite insubstantial; for we can analyze the terrestrial conditions which led to that catastrophe, and assure ourselves that the bugbear of their recurrence is nothing more than a bugbear. The printing-press alone is an inestimable safeguard. If the Greeks had hit upon the idea of movable types—and it is little to the credit of the Invisible King that they did not—the onrush of barbarism and Byzantinism would not have been half so disastrous. And even through the Dark Ages the bias towards betterment is still perceptible, though its operation was terribly hampered. Then, at last, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took up the thread of progress where antiquity had dropped it. Science revived, and bade defiance to dogma. The garnering of knowledge began afresh; and true knowledge has this to distinguish it from pseudo-sciences like astrology, theology, and philately, that it is instinct with procreative vigour. Knowledge breeds knowledge with ever-increasing rapidity; and the result is that the past hundred years have seen additions to man's control over the powers of nature which outstrip the wildest imaginings of Eastern romance. When Mr. Gladstone first went to Rome in 1832, his "transportation" was no swifter and scarcely more comfortable than that of Cæsar in the fifties before Christ. Today he could fly over the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa, and then cover the distance from Milan onwards at the rate of seventy miles an hour in a limousine as luxurious as an Empress's boudoir. We are piling up the knowledge which is power at an enormous rate—indeed rather too rapidly, since we have not yet the sense to discriminate between power for good and power for evil. But "burnt bairns dread the fire," and after the present awful experience, there is fair ground for hope that measures will be taken to provide strait-waistcoats for the criminal lunatics whose vanity and greed impel them to let loose the powers of destruction.
Can any thinking man say that the world is quite the same to him since the invention of wireless telegraphy? True it is only one among the multitude of phenomena behind which the Veiled Being dissembles himself. But is it not a phenomenon of a new and perhaps an epoch-marking order? It may not make the veil more diaphanous, but it somehow suggests an alteration—perhaps a progressive alteration—in its texture.
When we say we are sure of the fact of progress, the atheist comes down on us with the retort that we thereby confess ourselves naïve and credulous optimists. As well say that when we express our confidence that the North Western Railway will carry us to Manchester, we thereby imply the belief that Manchester is the Earthly Paradise. It is quite possible—any one who is so minded may say it is quite probable—that progress means advance towards disillusion. What we are sure of is merely this: that life may be, and ought to be, a very different thing from what it now is, and that it is in our own power to make it so. We have not the least doubt that the generations which come after us will say:—
We will not cease from mortal strife,
Nor shall the sword slip from our hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
But whether, when they have built it, they will think Jerusalem worth the building is quite a different matter. It may be that Leopardi was right when he said, "Men are miserable by necessity, but resolute in believing themselves to be miserable by accident." That is a proposition which the individual can accept or reject so far as his own little span is concerned, but on which the race, as such, can pass no valid judgment. Life has never had a fair chance. It has always been so beset with accidental and corrigible evils that no man can say what life, in its ultimate essence, really is. All we know is that many of its miseries are factitious, inessential, eminently curable; and till these are eradicated, how are we to determine whether there are other evils too deep-rooted for our surgery? It may be, for example, that the elimination of Pain would only leave a vacuum for Tedium to rush in; but how are we to decide this à priori? Let us learn what are the true potentialities of life before we undertake to declare whether it is worth living or not.
Perhaps I may be allowed to quote at this point some words of my own which express the idea I am trying to convey as clearly as I am capable of putting it. They are part of the last paragraph of an address entitled Knowledge and Character: The Straight Road in Education:[5]