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 ourselves and our fate which, in the days of our health, could only be kept by putting forth constantly the whole force of the will. "not to be done," you may say. and, of course, it will be a miracle. but only the everyday miracle done in somebody's body, or else in his soul. when the skin shines white and tight over the joints, and the face is only a skull with some varieties of expression, and the very flame flickers and jumps in the lamp, the body will bend itself up to expel a disease that it could not, in all its first splendour of health, keep from the door. in all the breeds of cowardly livers—drunkards, thieves, liars, sorners, drug-takers, all the kinds that have run from the enemy, throwing away as they ran every weapon that better men use to repel him—you will find some that turn in the end and rend with their bare hands the fiend that they could not face with their bow and their spear.
but these recoveries only come upon terms: no going back to heaven except through a certain purgatorial passage. there, while it lasts, the invalid must not expect to enjoy either the heady visions of the fever that is now taking its leave or the more temperate beatitude of the health that may presently come. he lies reduced to animal, almost vegetable, matter, quite joyless and unthrilled, and has to abide in numb passivity, like an unborn child's, whatever may come of the million minute molecular changes going on unseen in the enigmatic darkness of his tissues, where tiny cell is adding itself to tiny cell to build he knows not what. and then some day the real thing, the second birth as wonderful as the first, comes of itself and the stars are singing together all right and the sons of god shouting for joy. the same way with the spirit, except that the body faints, and so is eased, at some point in any rising scale of torment: the spirit has to go on through the mill without such an?sthetics as fainting. so the man who has gone far off the rails in matters of conduct, and tries to get back to them, has such hells of patience to live through, and out of, as no liquid fire known to the war chemists could make for the flesh. to possess your soul in patience, with all the skin and some of the flesh burnt off your face and hands, is a job for a boy compared with the pains of a man who has lived pretty long in the exhilarating world that drugs or strong waters seem to create and is trying to live now in the first bald desolation created by knocking them off, the time in which
the dulled heart feels
that somewhere, sealed with hopeless seals,
the unmeaning heaven about him reels,
and he lies hurled
beyond the roar of all the wheels
of all the world.
and yet no other way out. disease and imbecility and an early and ignoble death, or else that stoic facing, through interminable days, of an easily escapable dulness that may be anything from an ache up to an agony.
ii
that is about where we stand as a nation. of course, a few fortunates mailed in a happy, indefeasible genius of wonder and delight at everything round them are all right. and so are a few clods of whole-hog insensibility. most of us, on the whole, find that effort is less fun than it was, and many things somewhat dull that used to sparkle with interest; the salt has lost, not all, but some of its savour; the grasshopper is a bit of a burden; old hobbies of politics, social causes, liberal comradeships, the loves and wars of letters and art, which used to excite, look at times as if they might only have been, at the best, rather a much ado about nothing; buzzing about our heads there come importunate suspicions that much of what we used to do so keenly was hardly worth doing, and that the dim, far goals we used to struggle towards were only possibly worth trying for and are, anyhow, out of reach now. that is the somewhat sick spirit's condition. the limp apathy that we see at elections, the curious indifference in presence of public wrongs and horrors, the epidemic of sneaking pilferage, the slackening of sexual self-control—all these are symptomatic like the furred tongue, subnormal heat, and muddy eye.
like the hard drinker next morning, we suffer a touch of hamlet's complaint, the malady of the dyspeptic soul, of indolent kings and of pampered youth before it has found any man's work to try itself on—
how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
to me are all the uses of the world!
not the despair of the battered, vanquished, or oppressed, but the moping of the relaxed, the surfeited, or the morbid. glad as we all were to be done with the war, its ends left even the strongest of us a little let down, as the ends of other long and intense excitements, good or bad, do. as ibsen's young woman out in search of thrills would have said, there were harps in the air during the war. many of them were disagreeable in their timbre, but still they were harps. since the war a good many of the weaker vessels have somehow failed to find harps in the air, though there are really plenty of them in full vibration. so they have run about looking for little pick-me-ups and nips of something mildly exciting to keep up to par their sagging sense of the adventuresomeness of life. derby sweeps never had such a vogue; every kind of gamble has boomed; dealers in public entertainment have found that the rawest sensationalism pays better than ever—anything that will give a fillip, any poor new-whisky fillip, to jaded nerves.
iii
of course, 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 radio-activity 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 pow-wow or palaver of congress, conference, general committee, sub-committee, 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 the end of his days, by anyone who has ever had it. this is the power of taking delight in a thing, or rather in anything, everything, not as a means to some other end, but just because it is what it is, as the lover dotes on whatever may be the traits of the beloved object. a child in the full health of his mind will put his hand flat on the summer turf, feel it, and give a little shiver of private glee at the elastic firmness of the globe. he is not thinking how well it will do for some game or to feed sheep upon. that would be the way of the wooer whose mind runs on his mistress's money. the child's is sheer affection, the true ecstatic sense of the thing's inherent characteristics. no matter what the things may be, no matter what they are good or no good for, there they are, each with a thrilling unique look and feel of its own, like a face; the iron astringently cool under its paint, the painted wood familiarly warmer, the clod crumbling enchantingly down in the hands, with its little dry smell of the sun and of hot nettles; each common thing a personality marked by delicious differences.
this joy of an adam new to the garden and just looking round is brought by the normal child to the things that he does as well as those that he sees. to be suffered to do some plain work with the real spade used by mankind can give him a mystical exaltation: to come home with his legs, as the french say, re-entering his body from the fatigue of helping the gardener to weed beds sends him to sleep in the glow of a beatitude that is an end in itself. then the paradoxes of conduct begin to twinkle into sight; sugar is good, but there is a time to refrain from taking it though you can; a lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie. divine unreason, as little scrutable and yet as surely a friend as the star that hangs a lamp out from the pole to show you the way across gorse-covered commons in surrey. so he will toe the line of a duty, not with a mere release from dismay, but exultantly, with the fire and lifting of heart of the strong man and the bridegroom, feeling always the same secret and almost sensuous transport, while he suppresses a base impulse, that he felt when he pressed the warm turf with his hand or the crumbling clay trickled warm between his fingers.
the right education, if we could find it, would work up this creative faculty of delight into all its branching possibilities of knowledge, wisdom, and nobility. of all three it is the beginning, condition, or raw material. at present it almost seems to be the aim of the commonplace teacher to take it firmly away from any pupil so blessed as to possess it. how we all know the kind of public school master whose manner expresses breezy comradeship with the boys in facing jointly the boredom of admittedly beastly but still unavoidable lessons! and the assumption that life out of school is too dull to be faced without the aid of infinitely elaborated games! and the girl schools where it seems to be feared that evil must come in any space of free time in which neither a game nor a dance nor a concert nor a lecture with a lantern intervenes to rescue the girls from the presumed tedium of mere youth and health! everywhere the assumption that simple things have failed; that anything like hardy mental living and looking about for oneself, to find interests, is destined to end ill; that the only hope is to keep up the full dose of drugs, to be always pulling and pushing, prompting and coaxing and tickling the youthful mind into condescending to be interested. you know the effects: the adolescent whose mind seems to drop when taken out of the school shafts, or at least to look round, utterly at a loss, with a plaintive appeal for a suggestion of something to do, some excitement to come, something to make it worth while to be alive on this dull earth. we saw the effects in our hapless brain work in the war.
but if we were to wait to save england till thousands of men and women brought up in this way see what they have lost and insist on a better fate for their children we might as well write england off as one with tyre and sidon already. her case is too pressing. she cannot wait for big, slowly telling improvements in big institutions, although improvements must come. she has to be saved by a change in the individual temper. we each have to fall back, with a will, on the only way of life in which the sane simplicity of joy in plain things and in common rightness of action can be generated. health of mind or body comes of doing wholesome things—perhaps for a long time without joy in doing them, as the sick man lies chafing, eating the slops that are all he is fit for, or as the dipsomaniac drinks in weariness and depression the insipid water that is to save him. then, on some great day, self-control may cease to be merely the sum of many dreary acts of abstention; it may take life again as an inspiriting force, both a warmth and a light, such as makes nations great.
