The Modern Student's Book of English Literature

tures, telephones in bedrooms, more newspapers than we want to read, and extremely punctilious diagnosis of maladies. A doctor examined a young lady the other day, and among his notes were these: "Not afraid of small rooms, ghosts, or thunderstorms; not made drunk by hearing Wagner; brown hair, artistic hands; had a craving for chocolate in 1918." The Age is most thorough and accomplished, but with a kind of deadly practicality. All for to-day, nothing for tomorrow! The future will never think us mad for attempting what we do attempt; we build no Seville cathedrals. We never get ahead of time. We have just let slip a chance to revitalise country life. At demobilisation we might have put hundreds of thousands on land, which needs them so very badly. And we have put in all not so many as the war took off the land. Life on the land means hard work and few cinemas; but it also means hearty stock for the next generation, and the power of feeding ourselves on an island which the next war might completely isolate. A nation concerned only with its present is like the man who was fishing and, feeling sleepy, propped his rod up on the bank with the line in the water. wag spied him sleeping, took the rod, waded across the river, propped up the rod on the opposite bank, and lay down. behind a hedge to watch for the awakening. Such is the awakening in store for nations which enjoy their present, and forget their future.

The pursuit of Beauty as a national ideal, the building of that castle in Spain, required long and patient labour and steadfastness of ideal before we can begin to see rise a really fair edifice of human life upon this earth.

All literary men can tell people what they ought not to be; that is literature. But to tell them what they ought to do is politics, of which no literary man is guilty; for politics and literature afford the only instance known in virtuous countries of divorce by mutual consent.

It would be sheer impertinence for a literary man to suggest anything practical!

But let him, at least, make a few affirmations. He believes that modern man is a little further from being a mere animal than the men of the Dark Ages, however great the Castle in Spain those men left for us to look upon; but he is sure that we are in far greater danger than ever they were of a swift decline. From that decline he is convinced that only the love. and cult of Beauty will save us!

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By the love and cult of Beauty he means a great deal; A higher and wider conception of the dignity of human life; the teaching of what Beauty is, to all merely to the few; the cultivation of goodwill, so that we wish and work and dream that not only ourselves but everybody may be healthy and happy; and, above all, the fostering of the habit of doing things and making things well, for the joy of the work and the pleasure of achievement, rather than for the gain they will bring us. With these as the rules, instead of, as now, the riders, the wheels of an insensate scientific industrialism, whose one idea is to make money and get ahead of other people, careless of direction towards heaven or hell, might conceivably be spoked. Our Age lacks an Ideal, expressed with sufficient concreteness to be like a vision, beckoning. In these unsuperstitious days no other ideal seems worthy of us, or, indeed, possible to us, save Beauty or call it if you will, the Dignity of Human Life.

Writers sometimes urge the need for more spiritual beauty in our lives; but it is unfortunate to talk of spiritual beauty. We must be able to smell, and see, hear, feel, and taste our Ideal as well; must know by plain evidence that it is lifting human life, the heritage of all, not merely of the refined and leisured among us. The body and soul are one for the purpose of all real evolution, and regrettable is any term which suggests a divorce between them. The Dignity of Human Life is an unmistakable and comprehensive phrase. Offence against that Ideal is the modern Satan. And the only way in which each one can say "Retro, Satanas," is to leave his or her tiny corner

of the universe a little more dignified, lovely and lovable than he or she found it.

The world's general mood at the moment is disillusionment and spite world so cross-eyed that when it weeps out of one eye the tear runs down the other cheek. It is difficult, no doubt, to be in love with a lady like that, and hard in these days not to be a cynic. Latest opinion unless there is a later assigns eight or ten thousand years as the time during which what we know as civilisation has been at work. But ten thousand years is a considerable period of mollification, and one had rashly hoped that mankind was not to be so speedily stampeded; that traditions of gentleness, fair play, chivalry, had more strength among Western peoples than they have been proved to have since 1914; that mob feeling might have been less, instead of, as it seems, more potent. And yet, alongside of stupidity, savagery, greed and mob violence, run an amazing individual patience, good humour, endurance, and heroism, which save man from turning his back on himself and the world, with the words: "Cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats; all life is there!" Fear, after all, is at the back of nearly all savagery; and man must infallibly succumb to the infections of Fear if there be not present in him that potent antidote the sense of Human Dignity, which is but a love of and a belief in Beauty. What applies to the individual applies to the civilisation of which he forms a part. Our civilisation, if it is to endure, must have an Ideal, a Star on which to fix its eyes- something distant and magnetic to draw it on, something to strive towards, beyond the trou

bled and shifting needs and passions and prejudices of the moment. Those who wish to raise the Dignity of Human Life, should try to give civilisation that ideal, to equip the world with the only vision which can save it from spite and the crazy competitions which lead thereto. The past seven years have been the result of the past seven hundred years. The war was no spasmodic visitation, but the culmination of age-long competitions. The past seven years have devoured many millions of grown men, more millions of little children prevented their birth, killed them, or withered them for life. If modern individuals and modern nations pursue again these crazy competitions, without regard for Beauty or the Dignity of Human Life, we shall live to see ten millions perish for every million perished in this war. We shall live to curse the day, when, at the end of so great a lesson, we were too practical and business-like to take it to heart.

We must look things in the face. Ideals should be grounded in reality; and it is no use blinking the general nature of man, or thinking that Rome can be built in a day. But with all our prejudices and passions, and all our "business instinct," we have also the instinct for Beauty, and a sense of what is dignified. On that we must build, if we wish to leave to those who come after us the foundations of a Castle in Spain such as the world has not yet seen; to leave our successors in mood and heart to continue our work, so that one hundred and fifty years, perhaps, from now, human life may really be dignified and beautiful, not just a breathless, grudging, visionless scramble from birth to death, of a night with no star out.