Deep answered unto deep. In Germany, too, the pibrochs of the professors were rending the skies, and poets of C4 medical grade were tearing the mask from the hideous face of peace. The din throughout the bookish parts of Central and Western Europe suggested to an irreverent mind a stage with a quaint figure of some shortsighted pedagogue of tradition coming upon it, round-shouldered, curly-toed, print-fed, physically inept, to play the part of the warhorse in Job, swallowing the ground with fierceness and rage, and “saying among the trumpets ‘Ha, ha!’ ” You may see it all as a joke. Or as something rather more than a joke, in its effects. Mr. Yeats suggested that an all-seeing eye might perceive the Trojan War to have come because of a tune that a boy had once piped in Thessaly. What if all our millions of men had to be killed because some academic Struwwelpeter, fifty years since, took on himself to pipe up “Take the nasty peace away!” and kick the shins of Concord, his most kindly nurse?
III
If he did, it was natural. All Struwwelpeters are natural. All heirs-apparent are said to take the opposite side to their fathers still on the throne. And those learned men were heirs to the age of the Crystal Palace, the age of the first “Locksley Hall,” with its “parliament of man” and “federation of the world,” the age that laid a railway line along the city moat of Amiens and opened capacious Hôtels de la Paix throughout Latin Europe, the age when passports withered and Baedeker was more and more, the age that in one of its supreme moments of ecstasy founded the London International College, an English public school (now naturally dead) in which the boys were to pass some of their terms among the heathen in Germany or France.
The cause of peace, like all triumphant causes, good as they may be, had made many second-rate friends. It had become safe, and even sound, for the worldly to follow. The dullards, the people who live by phrases alone, the scribes who write by rote and not with authority—most of these had drifted into its service. It had become a provocation, a challenge, vexing those “discoursing wits” who “count it,” Bacon says, “a bondage to fix a belief.” A rebound had to come. And those arch-rebounders were men of the teaching and writing trades, wherein the newest fashions in thought are most eagerly canvassed, and any inveterate acquiescence in mere common sense afflicts many bosoms with the fear of lagging yards and yards behind the foremost files of time; perhaps—that keenest agony—of having nothing piquant or startling to say, no little bombs handy for conversational purposes. “I sat down,” the deserving young author says in The Vicar of Wakefield, “and, finding that the best things remained to be said on the wrong side, I resolved to write a book that should be wholly new. I therefore dressed up three paradoxes with some ingenuity. They were false, indeed, but they were new. The jewels of truth have been so often imported by others that nothing was left for me to import but some splendid things that, at a distance, looked every bit as well.” “Peace on earth, goodwill towards men,” “Blessed are the peacemakers”—these and the like might be jewels; but they were demoded; they were old tags; they were clichés of bourgeois morality; they were vieux jeu, like the garnets with which, in She Stoops to Conquer, the young woman of fashion declined to be pacified when her heart cried out for the diamonds.
IV
Then the Church itself must needs take a hand—or that part of the Church which ever cocks an eye at the latest fashions in public opinion, the “blessed fellows,” like Poins, that “think as every man thinks” and help to swell every passing shout into a roar. I find among old papers a letter written in Queen Victoria’s reign by an unfashionable curmudgeon whose thought would not keep to the roadway like theirs. “I see,” this rude ironist writes, “that ‘the Church’s duty in regard to war’ is to be discussed at the Church Congress. That is right. For a year the heads of our Church have been telling us what war is and does—that it is a school of character, that it sobers men, cleans them, strengthens them, knits their hearts, makes them brave, patient, humble, tender, prone to self-sacrifice. Watered by ‘war’s red rain,’ one bishop tells us, virtue grows; a cannonade, he points out, is an ‘oratorio’—almost a form of worship. True; and to the Church men look for help to save their souls from starving for lack of this good school, this kindly rain, this sacred music. Congresses are apt to lose themselves in wastes of words. This one must not—surely cannot—so straight is the way to the goal. It has simply to draft and submit a new Collect for ‘war in our time,’ and to call for the reverent but firm emendation, in the spirit of the best modern thought, of those passages in Bible and Prayerbook by which even the truest of Christians and the best of men have at times been blinded to the duty of seeking war and ensuing it.
“Still, man’s moral nature cannot, I admit, live by war alone. Nor do I say, with some, that peace is wholly bad. Even amid the horrors of peace you will find little shoots of
