The Passionate Friends
the crops and beasts and all the life is as it was in Greece and Italy,
Phoenicia and Judea before the very dawn of history.
By imperceptible degrees I came to realize that this matter of
expropriation and enslavement and control, which bulks so vastly upon
the modern consciousness, which the Socialists treat as though it was
the comprehensive present process of mankind, is no more than one aspect
of an overlife that struggles out of a massive ancient and traditional
common way of living, struggles out again and again--blindly and always
so far with a disorderly insuccess....
I began to see in their proper proportion the vast enduring normal human
existence, the peasant's agricultural life, unlettered, laborious and
essentially unchanging on the one hand, and on the other those
excrescences of multitudinous city aggregation, those stormy excesses of
productive energy that flare up out of that life, establish for a time
great unstable strangenesses of human living, palaces, cities, roads,
empires, literatures, and then totter and fall back again into ruin. In
India even more than about the Mediterranean all this is spectacular.
There the peasant goes about his work according to the usage of fifty
thousand years. He has a primitive version of religion, a moral
tradition, a social usage, closely adapted by countless years of trial
and survival to his needs, and the whole land is littered with the
vestiges and abandoned material of those newer, bolder, more
experimental beginnings, beginnings that merely began.
It was when I was going through the panther-haunted palaces of Akbar at
Fatehpur Sikri that I first felt how tremendously the ruins of the past
may face towards the future; the thing there is like a frozen wave that
rose and never broke; and once I had caught that light upon things, I
found the same quality in all the ruins I saw, in Amber and Vijayanagar
and Chitor, and in all that I have seen or heard of, in ancient Rome and
ancient Verona, in Pæstum and Cnossus and ancient Athens. None of these
places was ever really finished and done with; the Basilicas of Cæsar
and Constantine just as much as the baths and galleries and halls of
audience at Fatehpur Sikri express not ends achieved but thwarted
intentions of permanence. They embody repulse and rejection. They are
trials, abandoned trials, towards ends vaguely apprehended, ends felt
rather than known. Even so was I moved by the Bruges-like emptinesses of
Pekin, in the vast pretensions of its Forbidden City, which are like a
cry, long sustained, that at last dies away in a wail. I saw the place
in 1905 in that slack interval after the European looting and before the
great awakening that followed the Russo-Japanese war. Pekin in a century
or so may be added in its turn to the list of abandoned endeavors.
Insensibly the sceptre passes.... Nearer home than any of these places
have I imagined the same thing; in Paris it seemed to me I felt the
first chill shadow of that same arrest, that impalpable ebb and
cessation at the very crest of things, that voice which opposes to all
the hasty ambitions and gathering eagerness of men: "It is not here, it
is not yet."
Only the other day as I came back from Paris to this quiet place and
walked across the fields from the railway station to this house, I saw
an old woman, a grandmother, a bent old crone with two children playing
about her as she cut grass by the wayside, and she cut it, except that
her sickle was steel, exactly as old women were cutting grass before
there was writing, before the dawn of history, before men laid the first
stones one upon the other of the first city that ever became a ruin....
You see Civilization has never yet existed, it has only continually and
obstinately attempted to be. Our Civilization is but the indistinct
twilight before the dawn. It is still only a confused attempt, a
flourish out of barbarism, and the normal life of men, the toiling
earthy life of the field and the byre, goes on still like a stream that
at once supports and carries to destruction the experimental ships of
some still imperfect inventor. India gives it all from first to last,
and now the modern movement, the latest half-conscious struggle of the
New Thing in mankind, throws up Bombay and Calcutta, vast feverish
pustules upon the face of the peninsula, bridges the sacred rivers with
hideous iron lattice-work and smears the sky of the dusty ruin-girdled
city of Delhi,--each ruin is the vestige of an empire,--with the black
smoke of factory chimneys.
Altogether scattered over that sun-burnt plain there are the remains of
five or six extinguished Delhis, that played their dramas of frustration
before the Delhi of the Great Mogul. This present phase of human
living--its symbol at Delhi is now, I suppose, a scaffold-bristling pile
of neo-Georgian building--is the latest of the constructive synthetic
efforts to make a newer and fuller life for mankind. Who dares call it
the last? I question myself constantly whether this life we live to-day,
whether that too, is more than a trial of these blind constructive
forces, more universal perhaps, more powerful perhaps than any
predecessor but still a trial, to litter the world with rusting material
when the phase of recession recurs.
But yet I can never quite think that is so. This time, surely, it is
different. This time may indeed be the beginning of a permanent change;
this time there are new elements, new methods and a new spirit at work
upon construction that the world has never known before. Mankind may be
now in the dawn of a fresh phase of living altogether. It is possible.
The forces of construction are proportionally gigantic. There was never
so much clear and critical thought in the world as there is now, never
so large a body of generally accessible knowledge and suggestion, never
anything like the same breadth of outlook, the same universality of
imaginative freedom. That is so in spite of infinite turmoil and
confusion. Moreover the effort now is less concentrated, less dramatic.
There is no one vital center to the modern movement which disaster can
strike or decay undermine. If Paris or New York slacken and grow dull
and materialist, if Berlin and London conspire for a mutual destruction,
Tokio or Baku or Valparaiso or Christiania or Smyrna or Delhi will
shelter and continue the onward impetus.
And this time too it is not any one person, any one dynasty, any one
cult or race which carries our destiny. Human thought has begun to free
itself from individual entanglements and dramatic necessities and
accidental standards. It becomes a collective mind, a collective will
towards achievement, greater than individuals or cities or kingdoms or
peoples, a mind and will to which we all contribute and which none of us
may command nor compromise by our private errors. It ceases to be
aristocratic; it detaches itself from persons and takes possession of us
all. We are involved as it grows free and dominant, we find ourselves,
in spite of ourselves, in spite of quarrels and jealousies and
conflicts, helping and serving in the making of a new world-city, a new
greater State above our legal States, in which all human life becomes a
splendid enterprise, free and beautiful, whose aptest symbol in all our
world is a huge Gothic Cathedral lit to flame by the sun, whose scheme
is the towering conquest of the universe, whose every little detail is
the wrought-out effort of a human soul....
Such were the ideas that grew together in my mind as I went about India
and the East, across those vast sunlit plains, where men and women still
toil in their dusty fields for a harsh living and live in doorless
hovels on floors of trampled cow-dung, persecuted by a hundred hostile
beasts and parasites, caught and eaten by tigers and panthers as cats
eat mice, and grievously afflicted by periodic famine and pestilence,
even as men and women lived before the dawn of history, for untold
centuries, for hundreds of thousands of years.
§ 4
How strange we English seem in India, a little scattered garrison. Are
we anything more than accidental, anything more than the messenger-boy
who has brought the impetus of the new effort towards civilization
through the gates of the East? Are we makers or just a means, casually
taken up and used by the great forces of God?
I do not know, I have never been able to tell. I have never been able to
decide whether we are the greatest or the dullest of peoples.
I think we are an imaginative people with an imagination at once
gigantic, heroic and shy, and also we are a strangely restrained and
disciplined people who are yet neither subdued nor subordinated....
These are flat contradictions to state, and yet how else can one render
the paradox of the English character and this spectacle of a handful of
mute, snobbish, not obviously clever and quite obviously ill-educated
men, holding together kingdoms, tongues and races, three hundred
millions of them, in a restless fermenting peace? Again and again in
India I would find myself in little circles of the official
English,-supercilious, pretentious, conventional, carefully "turned out"
people, living gawkily, thinking gawkily, talking nothing but sport and
gossip, relaxing at rare intervals into sentimentality and levity as
mean as a banjo tune, and a kind of despairful disgust would engulf me.
And then in some man's work, in some huge irrigation scheme, some feat
of strategic foresight, some simple, penetrating realization of
deep-lying things, I would find an effect, as if out of a thickly rusted
sheath one had pulled a sword and found it--flame....
I recall one evening I spent at a little station in Bengal, between
Lucknow and Delhi, an evening given over to private theatricals. The
theatre was a huge tent, and the little roughly improvised stage was lit
by a row of oil footlights and so small as barely to give a foothold for
the actors and actresses in the more crowded scenes. About me were the
great people, the colonel's wife, a touring young man of family,
officers and the wife of the manager of the big sugar refinery close at
hand. Behind were English of a more dubious social position, also
connected with the sugar refinery, a Eurasian family or so, very dressy
and aggressive and terribly snubbed, and then I think various Portuguese
and other nondescripts and groups of non-commissioned officers and men,
some with their wives. The play, admirably chosen, was that
crystallization of liberal Victorian snobbery, _Caste_, and I remember
there was a sub-current of amusement because the young officer who
played--what _is_ the name of the hero's friend? I forget--had in the
haste of his superficiality adopted a moustache that would not keep on
and an eyeglass that would not keep in.
Everybody was acting very badly, nobody was word-perfect and a rasping
prompter would not keep ahead as he ought to have done; the scenery and
the make-ups were daubs, and I was filled with amazement that having
quite wantonly undertaken to do this thing these people could then do it
so slackly. Then a certain sudden warmth in the applause about me
quickened my attention, and I realized the satirical purport of drunken
old father Eccles, and the moral intention of his son-in-law, the
plumber. Between them they expressed the whole duty of the workingman as
the prosperous Victorians conceived it. He was to work hard always at
any job he could find for any wages he could get, and if he didn't he
was a "drunken shirker" and the dupe of "paid agitators." A comforting
but misleading doctrine. And here were these people a decade on in the
twentieth century, with Time, Death, and Judgment close upon them, still
eagerly applauding, eager to excuse their minds with this one-sided,