V
You may be disillusioned about the value of things, or about their security, either coming to feel that your house is a poor place to live in or that, pleasant or not, it is likely enough to come down on your head. Of these two forms of discomfort our friend experiences both. Much that he took to be fairly noble now looks pretty mean; and much that seemed reassuringly stable is seen to be shaky. Civilization itself, the at any rate habitable dwelling which was to be shored up by the war, wears a strange new air of precariousness.
Even before the war a series of melancholy public misadventures had gone some way to awake the disquieting notion that civilization, the whole ordered, fruitful joint action of a nation, a continent, or the whole world, was only a bluff. When the world is at peace and fares well, the party of order and decency, justice and mercy and self-control, is really bluffing a much larger party of egoism and greed that would bully and grab if it dared. The deep antisocial offence of the “suffragettes,” with their hatchets and hunger-strikes, was that they gave away, in some measure, the bluff by which non-criminal people had hitherto kept some control over reluctant assentors to the rule of mutual protection and forbearance. They helped the baser sort to see that the bluff of civilization is at the mercy of anyone ready to run a little bodily risk in calling it. Sir Edward Carson took up the work. He “called” the bluff of the Pax Britannica, the presumption that armed treason to the law and order of the British Empire must lead to the discomfiture of the traitor, whoever he was; he presented Sinn Fein and every other would-be insurgent with proof that treason may securely do much more than peep at what it would; British subjects, he showed, might quite well conspire for armed revolt against the King’s peace and not be any losers, in their own persons, by doing it.
The greatest of all bluffs, the general peace of the world and the joint civilization of Europe, remained uncalled for a year or two more. It was a high moral bluff. People were everywhere saying that world-war was too appalling, too frantically wicked a thing for any government to invite or procure. Peace, they argued, held a hand irresistibly strong. Had she not, among her cards, every acknowledged precept of Christianity and of morality, even of wisdom for a man’s self or a nation’s? Potsdam called the world’s bluff, and the world’s hand was found to be empty. Potsdam lost the game in the end, but it had not called wholly in vain. To a Europe exhausted, divided, and degraded by five years of return to the morals of the Stone Age it had suggested how many things are as they are, how many things are owned as they are, how many lives are safely continued, merely because our birds of prey have not yet had the wit to see what would come of a sudden snatch made with a will and with assurance. The total number of policemen on a racecourse is always a minute percentage of the total number of its thieves and roughs. The bad men are not held down by force; they are only bluffed by the pretence of it. They have got the tip now, and the plain man is dimly aware how surprisingly little there is to keep us all from slipping back into the state we were in when a man would kill another to steal a piece of food that he had got, and when a young woman was not safe on a road out of sight of her friends.
The plain man, so far as I know him, is neither aghast nor gleeful at this revelation. For the most part he looks somewhat listlessly on, as at a probable dogfight in which there is no dog of his. A sense of moral horror does not come easily when you have supped full of horrors on most of the days of three or four years; sacrilege has to go far, indeed, to shock men who have seen their old gods looking extremely human and blowing out, one by one, the candles before their own shrines. Some new god, or devil, of course, may enter at any time into this disfurnished soul.
Genius in some leader might either possess it with an anarchic passion to smash and delete all the old institutions that disappointed in the day of trial or fire it with a new craving to lift itself clear of the wrack and possess itself on the heights. For either a Lenin or a St. Francis there is a wide field to till, cleared, but of pretty stiff clay. Persistently sane in his disenchantment as he had been in his rapture, the common man, whose affection and trust the old order wore out in the war, is still slow to enlist out-and-out in any Satanist unit. There’s reason, he still feels, in everything. So he remains, for the time, like one of the angels whom the Renaissance poet represented as reincarnate in man; the ones who in the insurrection of Lucifer were not for Jehovah nor yet for his enemy.
XV
Any Cure?
I
How shall it all be set right? For it must be, of course. A people that did not wait to be pushed off its seat by the Kaiser is not likely now to turn its face to the wall and die inertly of shortage of faith and general moral debility. Some day soon we shall have to cease squatting among the potsherds and crabbing each other, and give all the strength we have left to the job of regaining the old control of
