Disenchantment

life itself is all right. It never grows dull. All dullness is in the mind; it comes out thence and diffuses itself over everything round the dull person, and then he terms everything dull, and thinks himself the victim of the impact of dull things. In stupid rich people, in boys and girls deadeningly taught at dead-alive schools, in all disappointed weaklings and in declining nations, this loss of power to shed anything but dullness upon what one sees and hears is common enough. Second-rate academic people, Victorian official art, the French Second Empire drama, late Latin literature exhibit its ravages well. In healthy children, in men and women of high mental vitality, in places where any of the radioactivity of gifted teaching breaks out for a while, and in swiftly and worthily rising nations the mind is easily delighted and absorbed by almost any atom of ordinary experience and its relation to the rest. The wonder and beauty and humour of life go on just the same as ever whether Spain or Holland or Italy feel them or miss them; youth would somewhere hear the chimes at midnight with the stir they made in Shakespeare’s wits although all England were peopled for ages with dullards whose pastors and masters had trained them to find the divine Falstaffiad as dull as a thaw.

It need not come to that. Sick as we are, we have still in reserve the last resource of the sick, that saving miracle of recuperative force with which I have bored you. To let the sick part of our soul just be still and recover; to make our alcoholized tissues just do their work long enough on plain water⁠—that, if we can but do it, is all the sweeping and garnishing needed to make us possible dwelling-places again for the vitalizing spirit of sane delight in whatever adventure befalls us. How, then, to do it? Not, I fancy, by any kind of powwow or palaver of congress, conference, general committee, subcommittee, or other expedient for talking in company instead of working alone. This is an individual’s job, and a somewhat lonely one, though a nation has to be saved by it. To get down to work, whoever else idles; to tell no lies, whoever else may thrive on their uses; to keep fit, and the beast in you down; to help any who need it; to take less from your world than you give it; to go without the old drams to the nerves⁠—the hero stunt, the sob story, all the darling liqueurs of war emotionalism, war vanity, war spite, war rant and cant of every kind; and to do it all, not in a sentimental mood of self-pity like some actor mounting in an empty theatre and thinking what treasures the absent audience has lost, but like a man on a sheep-farm in the mountains, as much alone and at peace with his work of maintaining the world as God was when he made it.

You remember the little French towns which the pestle and mortar of war had so ground into dust, red and white, that each separate brick went back at last, dust to dust, to mix with the earth from which it had come. The very clay of them has to be put into moulds and fired again. To some such remaking of bricks, some shaping and hardening anew of the most elementary, plainest units of rightness in action, we have to get back. Humdrum decencies, patiently practised through millions of undistinguished lives, were the myriad bricks out of which all the advanced architecture of conduct was built⁠—the solemn temples of creeds, gorgeous palaces of romantic heroism, cloud-capped towers of patriotic exaltation. And now, just when there seems to be such a babble as never before about these grandiose structures, bricks have run short.

Something simple, minute, and obscure, wholly good and not pulled up at all, something almost atomic⁠—a grain of wheat, a thread of wool, a crystal of clean salt, figures best the kind of human excellence of which our world has now most need. We would seem to have plunged on too fast and too far, like boys who have taken to spouting six-syllabled words until they forget what they had learnt of the alphabet. The moral beauty of perfect contrition is preached to a beaten enemy by our Press while the vitals of England are rotting with unprecedented growths of venereal disease: an England of boundlessly advertised heroes and saints has ousted the England in which you would never, wherever you travelled, be given wrong change on a bus.

The wise man saved his little city, “yet no man remembered that same poor man,” and no one had better take to this way of saving England if what he wants is public distinction. It will be a career as undistinguished as that of one of the extra corpuscles formed in the blood to enable a lowland man to live on Himalayan heights. Our best friends for a long time to come will not be any of the standing cynosures of reporters’ eyes; they will find a part of their satisfaction in being nobodies; assured of the truth of the saying that there is no limit to what a man can do so long as he does not care a straw who gets the credit for it. Working apart from the whole overblown world of war valuations, the scramble for honours earned and unearned, the plotting and jostling for front places on the stage and larger letters on the bill, the whole life that is commonly held up to admiration as great and enviable, they will live in a kind of retreat almost cloistral; plenty of work for the faculties, plenty of rest for the nerves, control for desire and atrophy for conceit. Hard?⁠—yes, but England is worth it.

IV

Among the mind’s powers is one that comes of itself to many children and artists. It need not be lost, to