East And West

( Originally Published 1919 )

THE mystics of the East sink into their contemplation the more directly to commune with the will of humanity. Escaping the brawling noise of every day they can through the silence hear the murmuring of truth, and in silence release it to pass into the turbulence of men and women to sweeten it and to keep them from perishing. And the East accepts that these are holy men and prizes their function in society, even relies on it too much, and acquiesces in the scourges of life poverty, disease, famine against which the West these hundreds of years has been in revolt. Because the mystic cannot stay these scourges he is in the West ignored because his function is not understood, and in the West men imagine that it is better to perish of untruth than of plague. In the struggle against physical afflictions spiritual distempers are ignored, though it is worse for herds of men to perish in mid-life than to be swept away by some raging pestilence, because the harm done to humanity by the morally dead is infinitely worse than that which is done by the actively evil, for this is a flame that burns itself out while that is a smouldering and creeping fire. In all its plagues, famines, poverty and disease the East is far in advance of the West in moral understanding, and can afford to smile at the Occidentals with their irrigation, sanitation, railways, canals, aeroplanes and steamships. These the East can accept and assimilate, without disturbing its traditions, while waiting for the West to understand the meaning of silence and the importance of the distinction between time and eternity. The difference arises from taking up the stick at different ends. The East approaches the mystery of being from what we, following Wordsworth, have called intimations of immortality, while the West attacks rather than approaches it from the phenomena of existence which it elects to call life.

The admission of the single community of humanity brings East and West together without a clash. There may be war between the yellow races and the white, but it will assuredly not be a war over their differences but a matter of commercial advantage; and it can only come through the indecent haste of the Occidentals, or it may only come through the final refusal of the propertied dynasties of the West enthroned in Anglo-Saxon suburbs to surrender their monopoly of credit. All that remains to be seen, but the evolution of society has gone so far that war has lost any significance it ever had, and is henceforth to be classed with the traffic in prostitutes, opium, alcohol and pornographic literature and photographs as an evil to be stamped out. If the West is to instruct the East in physical well being, the East has to tutor the West in spiritual and in the art of practising religion, and of the two the West has the easier task. A nation in these days can become industrialised in a generation, but, as the English have so pain-fully shown, it is by far not enough to be industrialised. Much that was precious in the older and slowly grown civilisations has to be reconstituted. Traditions seem to disappear in the fever of increased production and with that of multiplied population but they remain untouched and bide their time. The English tradition that has seemed to be suspended after the Napoleonic wars found its isolated souls, a Gissing, a Mark Rutherford, in which, however faintly, to express itself. The true tradition of a race is not in those achievements recorded by history, but in its utterance of truth. That is its real contribution to civilisation, and all else follows directly, or indirectly in its train. The English tradition is for quietude and order against which the robust appetites of the English have al-ways been in revolt, just as the ferocious appetites of the French have always been in revolt against their logical genius. There are three logics: that of the spirit, that of the mind, and that of the heart the first is Eastern, the second French, the third English. The Russians, in whom the great drama of East and West is being played, are attempting to reconcile all three. That is the significance and the importance to humanity of the Russian Revolution. Without logic there can be no social structure, The French Revolution pursued the logic of the mind: that is not enough. The English Revolution pursued the logic of the heart: that is not enough. Nor, by itself, is the logic of the spirit enough. Religion has symbolised these three in the Trinity, and that is the symbol to which the Russian Revolution is attempting to restore validity, though its force fias been diverted to the establishment of communist economic theories in order to check-mate the operations of European and American capitalism. Russia, half-Asiatic, is bound to defend itself against the vices of civilisation, even at the cost of anarchy and famine. It is a case in which the beggar cannot without dishonour accept aid from the rich man. Russia, indeed, stands for the revolt of humanity against the rich, who have forced that rebellion by their refusal to admit that they hold their riches upon trust. Centuries ago the Christian Religion was split on this very point, and the Byzantine Church retained more of the mystic quality of the teaching of Jesus than did the Roman.

Mysticism implies an intensification of life, not an escape from it. The East has under-stood this, while the West, crude enough to be in a hurry even in its hope of Heaven, has de-graded religion to the level of a syrup for weariness of the soul, with the result that the logic of the mind has been fanatically pursued in Europe to end in a social theory by which human nature is repelled. This mood of repulsion, dragging through generations, has given the materially minded the opportunity which they have not been slow to use, and they have developed and organised the commercial side of international intercourse, but no other, and life which should have been intensified has been relaxed. With greater opportunities for life than their predecessors, men in the modern world live less, and are more fatally unable to rise to the height of a great occasion. Great communities crumble into desuetude out of sheer physical and mental inanition. They have lost the thread of the logic of the spirit largely because under modern organisation men and women live too much in public. The monotony of daily and excessive toil has reduced them to a dull uniformity of shallow thoughts and superficial emotions. A sophisticated life has been established in the West without achieving the simplicity which is the object of sophistication. The problem is, as always, how to preserve in society the natural and beautiful simplicity of Man, which, if it be assailed, he is ferocious to defend. A society that knows only political and economic aims is injurious to that simplicity, and creates, as we have seen during the nineteenth century with its tragic climax, a growing sullen discontent, a blind animosity, a feverish jealousy. Such a society sophisticates, but deadens and disappoints the soul. It creates millions of characterless beings, whose dullness creeps into the institutions they labour to support; and these, for lack of sustaining vitality, crash under the strain put upon them. When an institution becomes a burden to the people for whom it has been evolved it must be destroyed, and it is not always desirable that it should be replaced. There is always the possibility that they may have outgrown the need for it.

It certainly looks as though men in the East had long outgrown institutions that the Occidentals are still bloodily fighting to preserve. In China, at any rate, men have achieved what has never been done in the West, save by a few rare individuals that simplicity, through sophistication, which is not superhuman, but is simply human nature released from its cramping obsessions and perplexing passions and taking the integrity of the soul as a mat-ter of course, and no more to be disputed than the act of breathing or seeing or loving. A Chinese poet can understand liberty, while a Western poet can only be lyrical or rhetorical about it. Between the two there is the difference between adolescence and manhood, and that is the difference that has to be spanned between the East and the West. The boyish adventurers of Europe have lived by robbing the world's orchards, lustily imagining that they were opening up Eldorado, only to find that there are men in the East who know more of life and the world than they, without even troubling to cross their thresholds. Disconcerting to Western ideas though the simplicity of the peasant and the savage have always been, it can be and has been answered with the machine-gun, but that is a sorry weapon against the simplicity of sophistication, which is a purely aristocratic state, inimical only to vulgarity and mediocrity, and not at all to the spirit of democracy. Because that simplicity is known in the East more than in the West, it is likely that democracy will be established there sooner than in Europe and America; because the issues will be less confused and the desirable thing, a democracy of aristocrats, is discernible as it is not in conditions perturbed by war, revolution and industrial feuds. In a time of stress simplification is the only outlet, and those survive best who do not allow any idea or any emotion to usurp the sovereignty of the soul. They alone can see whither they are going, the dangers that have to be met, the risks that must be taken, and they waste no energy in arguing or wrangling or in thwarting others. They alone can recognise an event before it takes shape in life, and are therefore in a position to combine with their fellows to meet it. This power of foresight and combination is of the essence of policy, and without it there can be no guidance : but without the swift logic of the spirit it is impossible. Even intuition is not enough, for with-out the vision the logics of the mind and the heart are without premises, they can reach no precise conclusions, and are often driven into action before the occasion is ripe for it or the probable outcome is discernible. The wise man, the wise nation, knows that the course of events is decided long before human responsibility arises, and that nothing can alter it, though human action can interfere with its effect upon human affairs, and the relations, happy or unhappy, of men with each other and with the rest of creation. The happiness of men and women depends entirely upon the degree of their understanding, which is therefore the only thing to be desired. A state of society which stultifies understanding must be amended, or, if it is too rigid for that, then destroyed. When civilisation is perverted and understanding is corrupt, then even the keenest intelligence is impotent to save the wretched peoples from disaster. To this is attributable the present helplessness of the European nations. At no time can the level of intelligence have been so high, knowledge so widely spread, information so readily available, methods of communication so adequate, and yet for lack of understanding there is no co-ordination of these advantages or power to turn them to the use of all. Russia, on the threshold of industrial civilisation, refuses to enter it for this reason. Russia cannot divorce herself from the East, and the West cannot afford to abandon her, and therefore Russia insists that in the soul of her race East and West shall meet to reconcile the simple, inactive, aristocratic spirit with the seething turbulent spirit of democracy. It is not a question of choosing the always ruinous middle way, but of the meeting of extremes, that aristocracy may learn its purpose, and democracy the meaning of the rights it clamours for so vociferously and so vainly. To achieve this it is necessary for the European races to admit that they have common interests and passions higher than those of war. It is upon this that Russia is insisting, asserting her will and vision against the organised military and economic power of the Allies in whom neither will nor vision appear. Once more in an acute form has arisen the deadlock between East and West that they have no common terms in which to meet. Will can speak to will, vision can signal to vision, but what has will to say to economic power, and how should military force see vision? The West calls economic and military organisation democracy, but the East knows that it is only machinery, more than half of which is unnecessary and wasteful, and the East, through Russia, demands the sacrifice of it before entering into the common effort for the deliverance of humanity from the scourges that now inflict it. With railways and steamships it should be easy to avert famine; with medicine and scientific hygiene it should be possible to stamp out epidemic plagues ; with a communal spirit it should be within the power of the present generation to rid the world of war, and the East, through Russia, calls on the West to cooperate. If the barbarians of Europe can learn anything at all they should have learned it by now, and if they are capable of consummating the Revolution begun in 1789 they can hardly set about it too soon. Unable for a century to find spiritual confidence they have accepted material security as a stop-gap only to find it intolerable. They know that civilisation is possible, that it has been achieved by humanity, for the soul of man is one and yields up its secrets to the suffering, and they know also that civilisation is not an end but a means. To regard it as an end is to enthrone mediocrity, to achieve stagnation and through that corruption. France, England, Germany, Italy, America have all achieved the stagnation of mediocrity which Russia, in the name of the East, and of humanity, refuses to accept, because it is a worse state than barbarism; being, indeed, barbarism intensified by the arts of combination, for the mediocre in their insensible complacency deny the only two real virtues, the simplicity of the primitive and the simplicity of the sophisticated, and abhor logic of any kind, preferring to drift and to fight if necessary to preserve the illusion of security they have set up as their sole aim and end. That illusion is the chief impediment in the way of the healthy growth of civilisation. The Europeans have been imprisoned in it for so long, that even though it is now possible for them to escape from it they cannot seize their opportunity; and when they use phrases like "making the world safe for democracy" can only interpret them as meaning that they must admit the rest of humanity to their prison, which is the very last thing that the rest of humanity desires. It is true, of course, that the only security lies in democracy, but democracy is a far greater and a far more simple thing than the economic and military organisation which the Western nations are pleased to call by that name. Democracy is organised goodwill, and it is not to be achieved by the methods of hatred, jealousy, cupidity and exploitation. These can lead to the success of the adventurous and the bold in a community, but not to the well-being of the community, without which any success is barren, because, though a community may throw up great men, they can do nothing if they are urged solely in the direction of economic or military conquest. Marcus Aurelius could not save the Roman Empire from decay.

The movements which restore the health of humanity come from the people. It is only after a generation or two that they find clear expression in great men whose visión is towards the next great movement. There is a confused migration, an interpenetration, much suffering and great tragedy as the weak are swallowed up in the effort of the strong. Leaders of groups appear and disappear, groups form and break, powers burst and authorities crack like old walls against the pressure of growing trees. For a while men can live on their inheritance from the past. When that is exhausted they can sustain themselves with the intoxication of living for the future, but in the end they are brought to the inexorable fact that their duty is to the present. Then slowly order returns: new communities are formed on the ruins of the old, but with a new interfusion of the races and a more realistic geographical sense. The people, it seems, have to learn in a hard practical way what their visionaries have always told them. The generation in which such a movement comes learns as much as it can digest and settles down to work and brood on its lesson, and impatient and practical people want quick results. The generations are jealous of each other, and one cannot to an-other communicate its wisdom directly; but all is carried on the deep stream of humanity from which all life comes, to return again enriched by consciousness. It is idle, then, to look to any system of government for social perfection. That system is best which allows the greatest freedom of movement to the human spirit. The Eastern races seem to have learned that long ago, but the wisdom of the East is only just beginning to dawn upon the West, where the spirit of anarchy has again and again destroyed tradition, and brought ruin to civilisations that imagined themselves to be at their zenith, forgetful that the barbarism most to be dreaded was in themselves. A civilisation which takes too much from the work of the masses who sustain it without giving them the due return of slowly increasing liberty cannot endure. The people wither away and the foundations crumble. No amount of material wealth can then stave off a collapse.

Very pathetic, then, is the attempt of the great nations of the West to avert disaster by increasing power and diminishing liberty. Only the release of human energy can restore the vanished health of the people, but it is still proposed to waste and confine that energy in military effort, by which it is designed to ward off the danger threatened from visionary Russia. Behind Russia is the East, where affairs are dominated by the logic of the spirit, the very instrument that is needed in the West. Because Russia will not and cannot relinquish it, the Russian people are starving and suffering the agonies of civil war. They need also the two logics evolved in the West, but, viewing the West with clear-sighted eyes, they can-not accept them as sufficient; and also as this stupendous drama is being played out in their souls they are aware of their responsibility to humanity and will not betray it, preferring to sink into the very pit of chaos, and, if need be, to begin again at the beginning. No race can accept as right the grim grey dullness and uniformity of the British proletariat. No race in the name of, humanity can admit that such is the just and inevitable price of industrial-ism. Revolution in Russia and Germany is the assertion of that truth. Let us be clear about that. The revolution in Eastern Europe is not merely a political upheaval and a reorganisation of the communities of the three Emperors, it is an emphatic repudiation of the materialism of the West, a protest against the formation of the single community necessitated by the machinery of modern commerce to be dominated by co mmercial calculations, and a vehement declaration that life for the community as for the individual begins where commerce ends.

The human spirit may for a time seem impotent against the economic power of the "Big Five," with their control of raw materials, but that power maintains its monopoly at the cost of repudiating both the aristocratic and the democratic impulses of that spirit which in consequence does not enter into its operations at all, and without it they achieve nothing but a fevered movement without direction or purpose. The British attempt to compromise at material security has led only to an upheaval of those very forces of barbarism and crude appetite which it sought to avoid. At the same time the compromise has given men certain powers over the old limitations of existence, without which the single community cannot become an actuality to the human consciousness. Community of material interests leads to spiritual interpenetration, which by divergence of such interests is distracted and impeded. The blunder that is being committed lies in imagining that the single community has to be created. It exists. It has always existed. The sufferings of men have arisen from the refusal of the component communities to acknowledge it, and that refusal has arisen largely from the lack of effective means of communication. Those have been established, but so ingrained is the piratical habit of the powerful among men that they have been seized as a means of holding recalcitrant communities to ransom. Individuals in the modern world are practically immune from robbery, because it is so much easier to plunder communities. This can be done with impunity, because it is authorised by the laws made and handed down by the robbers of old times. The Big Five in the League of Nations are simply holding up the rest of the world, particularly the East, to force it to accept unmitigated industrialism. The answer of the remaining communities is democracy, for which they, having long passed the elementary stage in which commercial adventure seems the highest possible advance on piracy, are ripe. All the world except the Big Five is ready to admit the existence of the single community. The Big Five, confused with war and warlike conceptions, vainly imagine that the single community is waiting for them to create it. The Big Five are against, the rest of the world is for, humanity. In the long run that which is prevails against that which, however splendidly, appears to be.