The Ancient Wisdom

( Originally Published 1920 )

BY LUCAS MALET

IN reply to this question is it permitted to ask another, namely, do we not habitually ask too much of events, of revelations, and catastrophes alike ? In our natural craving for stability, security, for some anchorage in which mind and soul can rest, do we not drag at and stretch the poor things until the fabric of them splits, and if a mixed metaphor may be forgiven me we fall through the hole our impatience has torn in them into quite superfluous pits of angry despair ?

The cry of a New World, for a New World, echoes for ever down the corridors of history. It, and the intoxicating promise of it, has been in the mouth of every conqueror, from Alexander to Attila, from Roman Caesar to Corsican Bonaparte, and where religious and secular interests meet from Mahomet the prophet to Mannix the, just now, extremely inconvenient antipodean archbishop. Desire of a New World and hope for it has supplied the motive power of every revolution in every age and every country. In idea, it stood behind the excesses of the eighteenth-century Paris mob, as it stands to-day behind the atrocities of the Russian Bolsheviks. Essentially it is neither insincere nor ignoble. Whether issuing from a single mind, or the collective mind of a multitude, it represents a recognition of imperfection and craving for betterment in its initial stage, at all events. Nevertheless, it is in fact the worship of Maia, of illusion, a worship which has cost, and still is costing, humanity millions of lives and oceans of blood.

Though never quite enough lives, never quite enough blood. For successfully to obliterate the Old World and call a new one into existence you must extirpate and exterminate more thoroughly than the most ruthless conqueror, the most impassioned idealist —the two have curiously much in common has ever had sufficient moral or animal courage to extirpate and exterminate yet. Before the end was attained each, in turn, has grown weary in this singular form of well-doing. Pity crept in, or satiety, or frank disgust. The task proved too great.

It is possible to go a step further, and returning for the moment to the ingenuously literal biblical interpretations of our youth to suggest that in this particular brand of courage, Divine Providence itself is somewhat deficient. For when, the perversities of mankind smelling a little over-rank, it seemed well to High Heaven that offending earth should be cleansed by a flood, mercy stayed the hand of justice, or rather of logic, inasmuch as it granted one apparently respectable family means of escape. This, in respect of any production of a New World proved a fatal, if an amiable, mistake. For, alas 1 the family in question was already tainted, as the sequel lament-ably demonstrates. Going on board the Ark, certain members of it carried the germs of former corruption along with them, which germs notwithstanding solemn ceremonies of thanksgiving and self-dedication when that astonishing craft went aground on Mount Ararat presently developed objectionable activity. Is it not recorded how the patriarch Noah so far forgot himself as to get most exceedingly drunk, while his second son But concerning that primitive scandal modern propriety counsels reticence.

TIME TO TAKE BREATH

Suffice it, then, to submit that Scripture itself forces home the conclusion that, so long as a single fertile human couple remains in possession here upon earth, the same world that we know, and that history so long has known, will remain, not only potentially but substantially in possession also. If we are resolved to have a new one, we must spare neither ourselves nor others, but make a clean sweep thus and thus only can we secure our object, the human race in its entirety being dead. From whence common-sense would seem to derive the further conclusion, that Divine Providence, High Heaven call the eternal, the final, and ineffable mystery by what name you will--is not particularly keen on the production of a New World; and that the agreeable story of Noah and his Ark is, not impossibly, designed to teach us the inherent futility of crying out for, or trying our-selves to create one by means of deluges, whether aqueous or sanguinary, local or universal by deluges, in fine, of any description or sort.

And if this, to would-be conquerors, to idealists, and extremists, is an exasperating pronouncement, to average sober-minded persons of whom the large majority of our fellow-countrymen and women does, thank goodness, still consist it is one of comfort. For it tends to restore confidence, and give time sorely needed just now by most of us in which to take breath.

After the amazements and dislocations of the last six years we badly want to get ourselves, and whatever of friendship and fortune is left to us, in some sort of mental perspective ; want to arrange our notes on recent experiences, and cast up our accounts generally with fact. Towards acquisition of such inward equilibrium, the assurance that we are called upon to reckon, not with some new uncharted world, however big with millennial promise, but with a world wherein, though war-worn and distracted, we still find accustomed, time-honoured land and sea marks, must powerfully contribute. Extravagant though the shoutings of conflicting pioneers and prophets both small and great may be, the Ancient Wisdom is neither falsified nor silenced. Amid the raging of the peoples, the noisy downfall of thrones and of systems, it still subsists. These brutal convulsions, indeed, go in the main to confirm its verdicts. Truth is the same as ever, so are right and wrong, honour and dishonour. Above all, human nature is the same as ever in its manifold inconsistency, its magnificence and degradation, its delicious cleverness and piteous folly, its singular alacrity in running after strange flesh and strange gods.

Let this much be said for the encouragement of all sober-minded persons who desire space in which to take breath and get to some extent abreast of circumstance, before embarking upon further adventures or throwing in their lot with any one of the opposing camps.

LOVE OF LIBERTY

The foundations are unshaken. There is no break in historic or moral continuity any more than there is a break in the rotation of the seasons, the regular coming of day and night. The last six years have produced nothing, revealed nothing, the possibility of which has not been actually in existence since the beginning of time. But, just as any great natural upheaval sets free imprisoned vapours and brings fresh soil, fresh surfaces to light, so in the human sphere does the upheaval of war ; with the consequence that modifications and adjustments, many and, in direction, uncertain, of necessity result. Every relation in every class is slightly shifted. Political and economic values are affected. In no department of private or social life is pressure unfelt. Also many heretofore buried or half-buried fools, faddists, fanatics, are brought to the top. The sound of them goes forth on the four winds of heaven to the four corners of the earth for a little while. It cannot be otherwise. It is not the first time these things have happened. It is wholly improbable that it will be the last. Let us, therefore, refuse to force any hasty climax, even in respect of fool-silencing ; but give the present highly experimental conditions opportunity to settle down, to wear themselves out.

And this with the greater confidence, in as far as our own country and Empire is concerned, because, against the obscene and monstrous background of war, one fact stands out in clear and very beautiful relief the fact that the English race is neither degenerate nor effete, that its spirit is unbroken, its conscience sensitive, actively ready to affront momentous decisions and accept incalculable risks. We are over fond of trumpeting our congenital ineptitudes, of advertising our not infrequent blunders and mistakes. For once let us agree to sound a less self-depreciatory note and declare that, as nations go, for sanity and cleanliness our own by no means figures at the bottom of the list.

In this connection, since how to heal the wounds of the Old World the only world we have had or ever shall have here upon earth rather than how to rock the cradle of a new one, would appear to be the question at issue, mention may be made of our possession of one specially useful asset. We love liberty, honest, practical, even stupid personal liberty. May this continue, continue all the more because democracy has come to stay for the next few score years in any case. Tyranny, a tyranny of ideas, a blind faith in systems notwithstanding the telling object-lessons under this head so liberally afforded us, first by Imperial Germany and now by Soviet Russia —would appear to constitute the peculiar danger of modern democracies. At heart they are very young, afraid of themselves, afraid of humanity and hence nervously anxious to shackle it. " The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath." However good the cause, the form of government, the institution or State, it becomes evil, a thing to be repudiated and cast out, when it, rather than the individual liberty of its members and the individual responsibility which goes with such liberty becomes the object of man's worship and faith.