Essays in Rebellion Part 17

Thus as the heaven's many-coloured flames At sunset are but dust in rich disguise, The ascending earthquake-dust of battle frames G.o.d's picture in the skies."[19]

We are no longer compelled to regard the dogmas of Christianity or the opinions of eminent Christians as authoritative. The appeal to Christianity, which used to be regarded as decisive in favour of peace, is no longer decisive one way or other. Christ's own teaching is submitted to critical examination like any other teacher's, and I should be the last to decry the representatives of the Prince of Peace for acclaiming the virtues of war, if they think their Master was mistaken.

When bishops and deans and leading Nonconformists thirst for war's red rain, we must take account of their craving as part of man's nature. We must remember also that war has popular elements sometimes overlooked in its general horror. It is believed that in the American Civil War nearly a million men lost their lives; but against this loss we must set the peculiar longevity with which the survivors have been endowed, and the increasing number of heroes who enjoyed the State's reward for their services of fifty years before. Even during the South African War certain compensations were found. A charitable lady went on a visit of condolence to a poor woman whose husband's name had just appeared in the list of the killed at Spion Kop. "Ah, Mum," exclaimed the widow with feeling, "you don't know how many happy homes this war has made!"

Before we absolutely condemn war we must take account of these religious, medicinal, and domestic considerations. On the side of peace I think it is of little avail to plead the horrors and unreason of war.

We all know how horrible and silly it is for two countries to pretend to settle a dispute by ordering large numbers of innocent men to kill each other. If horrors would stop it, anyone who has known war could a tale unfold surpa.s.sing all that the ghost of Hamlet's father had seen in h.e.l.l. There are sights on a battlefield under sh.e.l.l-fire, and in a country devastated by troops, so horrible that even war correspondents have silently agreed to leave them undescribed. But the truth is that people who are not present in war enjoy the horror. That is what they like reading about in their back-gardens, clubs, and city offices. The more you talk of the horrors of war the more warlike they become, and I have met no one quite so bloodthirsty as the warrior of peace. Nor is it any good pleading for reason when about ninety-nine per cent. of every man's motives are not reasonable, but spring from pa.s.sion, taste, or interest. The appeal even to expense falls flat in a country like ours, where about 200,000 horses, valued at 12,000,000, and maintained at a charge of 8,000,000 a year, are kept entirely for the pursuit of foxes, which are preserved alive at great cost in order that they may be pursued to death.[20] Protests against the horrors, the unreason, and even the expense of war have hitherto had very small effect.

The real argument in favour of war welcomes horror, defies reason, and disregards expense. There are certain military qualities and aspects of life, it says, that are worth preserving at the cost of all the horror, unreason, and waste of war. The stern military character, brave but tender, is a type of human nature for which we cannot pay too much.

Consider physical courage alone, how valuable it is, and how rare. With what speed the citizen runs at the first glimpse of danger! With what pleasure or shamefaced cowardice citizens look on while women are being violently and indecently a.s.saulted when attempting to vindicate their political rights! How gladly everyone shouts with the largest crowd!

Consider how many n.o.ble actions men leave undone through fear of being hurt or killed. "Dogs! would you live for ever?" cried Frederick the Great to his soldiers, in defeat; and most of us would certainly answer: "Yes, we would, if you please!" Only through war, or the training for war, says the argument, can this loathly cowardice be kept in check.

Only by war can the spirit be maintained that redeems the world from sinking into a Pigs' Paradise. Only in the expectation or reality of war can life be kept sweet, strong, and at its height. War is life in extremes; it is worth preserving even for its discipline and training.

"Manhood training [said Mr. Garvin, editor of the _Observer_, in the issue of January 22, 1911]--manhood training has become the basis of public life, not only in every great European State, but in young democratic countries, like Australia and South Africa. 'One vote, one rifle,' says ex-President Steyn.... As a means of developing the physical efficiency of whole nations, of increasing their patriotic cohesion, of implanting in individuals the sense of political reality and responsibility, no subst.i.tute for manhood training has yet been discovered."

This kind of argument implies despair of perpetual, or even of long-continued, peace. It is true that those who advocate a national training of all our manhood for war generally urge upon us that it is the best security for peace. In the same way, peaceful Anarchists might plead that they maintained several enormous bomb-factories in order to impress upon rulers the advantages of freedom. But if peace were the real and only object of Conscription, and if Conscription precluded the probability of war, military training, after some years, would almost certainly decline, and its supposed advantages would be lost. When you breed game-c.o.c.ks, they will fight; but if you forbid c.o.c.k-fighting, the breed will decline. You cannot have training for war without the expectation of war. For many years I was a strong advocate of national service, even though I knew it would never be adopted in this country until we had seen the realities of war in our very midst, and had sat in morning trains to the City stopped by the enemy's batteries outside Liverpool Street and London Bridge. I also foresaw the extreme difficulty of enforcing military training upon Quakers, the Salvation Army, the Peace Society, and many Nonconformists and Rationalists.

Nevertheless, twenty-five years ago I advocated Conscription in a carefully-reasoned article that appeared in Mr. Stead's _Pall Mall Gazette_. It was received with a howl of rage and derision by both parties in the State, and by all newspapers that noticed it at all. It is significant--perhaps terribly significant--that it would not be received with derision now, but that nearly the whole of one party and the great majority of newspapers would welcome it only too gladly.

It seemed to me at that time--and it seems to me still--one of the most horrible things in modern British life that we bribe the unemployed, that we compel them by fear of starvation, to do our killing and dying for us. I have pa.s.sed more men into the army, probably, than any recruiting sergeant, and I have never known a man who wished to recruit unless he was unemployed. The Recruiting Report issued by the War Office for 1911 shows ninety per cent. of the recruits "out of work." I should have put the percentage still higher. But when you next see a full company of a hundred soldiers, and reflect that ninety of them have been persuaded to kill and die for you simply through fear of starvation under our country's social system--I say, whether you seek peace or admire war, the thought is horrible; it is hardly to be endured.

To wipe out this hideous shame, to put ourselves all in one boat, and, if war is licensed murder, at all events to share the murder that we license, and not to starve the poor into criminals for our own relief, perhaps Conscription would not be too high a price to pay. Other advantages are more obvious--the physical advantage of two years'

regular food and healthy air and exercise for rich and poor alike, the social advantage of the mixture of all cla.s.ses in the ranks, the moral advantage of giving the effeminate sons of luxury a stern and bitter time. For all this we would willingly pay a very heavy price. I would pay almost any price.

But should we pay the price of compulsion? That is the only price that makes me hesitate. I used to cherish a frail belief in discipline and obedience to authority and the State. My belief in discipline is still alive--discipline in the sense of entire mutual confidence between comrades fighting for the same cause; but I have come to regard obedience to external authority as one of the most dangerous virtues. I doubt if any possible advantage could balance an increase of that danger; and every form of military life is almost certain to increase it. To me the chief peril of our time is the growing power of the State, its growing interference in personal opinion and personal life, the intrusion of an inhuman being called an expert or official into the most intimate, inexplicable, and changing affairs of our lives and souls, and the arrogant social legislation of a secret and self-appointed Cabal or Cabinet, which refuses even to consult the wishes of that half of the population which social restrictions touch most nearly. If general military service would tend to increase respect and obedience to external authority of this kind, it might be too big a price to pay for all its other advantages. And I do think it would tend to increase that abhorrent virtue of indiscriminate obedience. Put a man in uniform, and ten to one he will shoot his mother, if you order him. Yet the shame of our present enlistment by hunger is so overwhelming that I confess I still hesitate between the two systems, if we must a.s.sume that the continuance of war is inevitable, or to be desired.

Is it inevitable? Is it to be desired? If it were dying out in the world, should we make efforts to preserve war artificially, as we preserve sport, which would die out unless we maintained it at great expense? The sportsman is an amateur butcher--a butcher for love. Ought we to maintain soldiers for love--for fear of losing the advantages of war? Those advantages are thought considerable. War has inspired much art and much literature. It is the background or foreground in nearly all history; it sheds a gleam of uniforms and romance upon a drab world; it delivers us from the horrors of peace--the softness, the monotony, the sensual corruption, the enfeebling relaxation. No one desires a population slack of nerve, soft of body, cruel through fear of pain, and incapable of endurance or high endeavour.

"It is a calumny on men," said Carlyle, "to say they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense in this world or the next. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man."[21]

At times war appears as a kind of Last Judgment, sentencing folly and sensuality to h.e.l.l. The shame of France was consumed by the fire of 1870, and her true genius was restored. Abominable as the Boer War was, the mind of England was less pestilential after it than before. Pa.s.sion purifies, and surely there can be no pa.s.sion stronger than one which drives you to kill or die.

The trouble is that, in modern wars, pa.s.sion does not drive _you_, but you drive someone else, who probably feels no pa.s.sion at all. It is thought a reproach against an unwarlike soldier that "he has never seen a shot fired in anger." But in these days he might have been through many battles without seeing a shot fired in anger. Except in the Balkans, few fire in anger now. What pa.s.sion can an unemployed workman feel when he is firing at an invisible unemployed workman or semi-savage in the interest of a mining concession? Nor is it true that war in these days encourages eugenics by promoting the survival of the fittest. On the contrary, the fittest, the bravest, and the biggest are the most likely to be killed. The smallest, the cowards, the men who get behind stones and stick there, will probably survive. And as to the dangers of effeminate peace, it is only the very small circle of the rich, the overfed, the over-educated, and the over-sensitive who are exposed to them. There is no present fear of the working cla.s.ses becoming too soft.

The molten iron, the flaming mine, the whirling machine, the engulfing sea, and hunger always at the door take care of that. Every working man lives in perpetual danger. Compared to him, and compared to any woman in childbirth, a soldier is secure, even under fire. The daily peril, the daily toil, the fear for the daily bread harden most working men and women enough, and for that very reason we should welcome the fine suggestion of Professor William James--his last great service--that the rich and highly educated should pa.s.s through a conscription of labour side by side with the working cla.s.ses, who would heartily enjoy the sight of young dukes, capitalists, barristers, and curates toiling in the stokeholes, coal-mines, factories, and fis.h.i.+ng-fleets, to the incalculable advantage of their souls and bodies.

So the balance swings this way and that, and neither scale will definitely settle down. It is very likely that the bias of temperament makes us incapable of decision. What is called the personal equation holds the two scales of our minds painfully equal, and while we meditate perpetual peace we suddenly hear the trumpet blowing. In many of us a primitive instinct survives which blinds and warps the reason, and calls us like a bugle to the silly and atrocious field. For the immediate future, I can only hope, as I confidently believe, that the present age of capitalist war will pa.s.s, as the age of dynastic war has pa.s.sed, for ever into the inferno where slavery and religious persecution now lie burning, though they seemed so natural and strong. I think it will not much longer be possible to fool the working cla.s.ses into wars for concessions or the extension of empires. I believe that already the peoples of the greatest countries are awakening to the folly of entrusting their foreign politics, involving questions of peace and war, to the guidance of rulers, Ministers, and diplomatists who serve the interests of their own cla.s.s, and have no knowledge or care for the desires or interests of the vast populations beneath them. I look forward to the time when the extreme arbitrament of war will be resorted to mainly in the form of civil or cla.s.s contentions, involving one or other of the n.o.blest and most profound principles of human existence. Or if war is to be international, we may hope that the finest peoples of the world will resolve only to declare it in defence of the threatened independence of some small but gallant race, or for the a.s.sistance of rebel peoples in revolt for freedom against an intolerable tyranny.

I suppose a man's truest happiness lies in the keenest energy, the conquest of difficulties, the highest fulfilment of his own nature; and I think it possible that, under the conditions of our existence as men, the finest happiness--the happiness of ecstasy--can only exist against a very dark background, or in quick succession after extreme toil and danger. It can only blaze like lightning against the thunder-cloud, or like the sun's radiance after storm. For most of us other perils or disasters or calls for energy supply that terrific background to joy; but it is none the less significant that most people who have shared in perilous and violent contests would, in retrospect, choose to omit any part of active and happy lives rather than the wars and revolutions in which they have been present, no matter how terrible the misery, the sickness, the hunger and thirst, the fear and danger, the loss of friends, the overwhelming horror, and even the defeat.

We must not take as argument a personal note that may sound only from a primitive and unregenerate mind. But when I look back upon the long travail of our race, it appears to me still impossible to adopt the peace position of non-resistance. As a matter of bare fact, in reviewing history would not all of us most desire to have chased the enslaving Persian host into the sea at Marathon, to have driven the Austrians back from the Swiss mountains, to have charged with Joan of Arc at Orleans, to have gone with Garibaldi and his Thousand to the wild redemption of Sicily's freedom, to have severed the invader's sinews with De Wet, to have shaken an ancient tyranny with the Russian revolutionists, or to have cleaned up the Sultan's shambles with the Young Turks? Probably there is no man or woman who would not choose scenes and actions like those, if the choice were offered. To very few do such opportunities come; but we must hold ourselves in daily readiness. We do well to extol peace, to confront the dangers, labour, and temptations of peace, and to hope for the general happiness of man in her continuance. But from time to time there come awful moments to which Heaven has joined great issues, when the fire kindles, the savage indignation tears the heart, and the soul, arising against some incarnate symbol of iniquity, exclaims, "By G.o.d, you shall not do that. I will kill you rather. I will rather die!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 7: An address delivered at South Place Inst.i.tute in London on Moncure Conway's birthday, March 17, 1911.]

[Footnote 8: Address on William Penn at d.i.c.kinson College, April 1907 (_Addresses and Reprints_, p. 415).]

[Footnote 9: _Ibid_., p. 411.]

[Footnote 10: _Autobiography_, vol. i. p. 239.]

[Footnote 11: _Ibid_., vol. i. p. 320.]

[Footnote 12: _Autobiography_, vol. i. p. 341 (from "The Rejected Stone").]

[Footnote 13: _Autobiography_, vol. ii. pp. 453, 454.]

[Footnote 14: _Addresses and Reprints_, p. 432.]

[Footnote 15: Speech before the American International Arbitration Society, January 1911.]

[Footnote 16: See Mr. Hobson's _Imperialism_ and _The Psychology of Jingoism_; Norman Angell's _The Great Illusion_.]

[Footnote 17: "It is especially in the domain of war that we, the bearers of men's bodies, who supply its most valuable munition, who, not amid the clamour and ardour of battle, but singly and alone, with a three-in-the-morning courage, shed our blood and face death that the battlefield may have its food--a food more precious to us than our heart's blood; it is we especially who, in the domain of war, have our word to say--a word no man can say for us. It is our intention to enter into the domain of war, and to labour there till, in the course of generations, we have extinguished it"--Olive Schreiner's _Woman and Labour_, p. 178.]

[Footnote 18: Of course, other causes combined for the Barcelona outbreak--hatred of the religious orders, chiefly economic, and the Catalonian hatred of Castile; but the refusal of reservists to embark for Melilla was the occasion and the main cause.]

[Footnote 19: Quoted in J.A. Hobson's _Psychology of Jingoism_, p. 52.]

[Footnote 20: Figures from an article by Mr. Leonard Willoughby in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ for November 1910.]

[Footnote 21: _The Hero as Prophet_, p. 65.]

XXIV

THE MAID

From the early morning of Sunday, August 18, 1909, till evening came, the Square of St. Peter's in Rome and the interior of the great basilica itself were thronged from end to end with wors.h.i.+ppers and pilgrims. The scene was brilliant with innumerable lamps, with the robes of many cardinals and the vestments of bishops, archbishops, and all the ranks of priesthood. The ceremony of adding one more to the calendar of the Blessed was performed, a solemn "Te Deum" was sung in praise of G.o.d's eternal greatness, and Pontifical Ma.s.s was celebrated, with all the splendour of ancient ritual and music of the grandest harmony. In the afternoon Christ's Vicar himself entered from his palace, attended by fifteen cardinals, seventy of the archbishops and bishops of France, with an equal number of their rank from elsewhere, and, amid the gleaming lights of scarlet and gold, of green and violet, of jewels and holy flames, he prostrated himself before the figure of the Blessed One, to whom effectual prayer might now be offered even by the Head of the Church militant here on earth. Till late at night the vast cathedral was crowded with increasing mult.i.tudes a.s.sembled for the honour of one whom the Church which judges securely as the world, commanded them to revere.

It was a simple peasant girl--"just the simplest peasant you could ever see"--whom the Head of the Church thus wors.h.i.+pped and crowds delighted to honour. Short and deep-chested she was, capable of a man's endurance, and with black hair cut like a boy's. She could not write or read, was so ignorant as to astonish ladies, and had only the peasant arts. The earliest description tells of her "common red frock carefully patched."

"I could beat any woman in Rouen at spinning and st.i.tching," she said to her judges, who, to be sure, had no special knowledge of anything beyond theology. "I'm only a poor girl, and can't ride or fight," she said when first she conceived her mission, and she had just the common instincts of the working woman. We may suppose her fond of children, for wherever she went she held the newborn babies at the font. She hated death and cruelty. "The sight of French blood," she said, "always makes my hair stand on end," and even to the enemy she always offered peace. "Or, if you want to fight," she sent a message to the Duke of Burgundy, "you might go and fight the Saracens." She never killed anyone, she said at her trial. Just an ordinary peasant girl she seemed--"la plus simple bergerette qu'on veit onques"--with no apparent distinction but a sweet and attractive voice. To be sure, she could put that sweet voice to shrewd use when she pleased. "What tongue do your Visions speak?" a theologian kept asking her. "A better tongue than yours!" she answered with the retort of an open-air meeting. But in those days there were theologians who would try the patience of a saint, and Joan of Arc is not a saint even yet, having been only Beatified on that Sunday, nearly five centuries after her death.

And she was only nineteen when they burnt her. At least, she thought she was about nineteen, but was not quite sure. Few years had pa.s.sed since she was a child dancing under the big trees which fairies haunted still. Her days of glory had lasted only a few months, and now she had lain week after week in prison, weighed down with chains and b.a.l.l.s of iron, watched day and night by men in the cell, because she always claimed a prisoner's right to escape if she could. Her trial before the Bishop of Beauvais and all the learning and theology of Paris University lasted nearly three months. Sometimes forty men were present, sometimes over sixty, for it was a remarkable case, and gave fine opportunity for the display of the superhuman knowledge and wisdom upon which divines exist. Human compa.s.sion they displayed also, hurrying away just before the burning began one May morning, and shedding tears of pity over the sins of one so young. Indeed, their preachings and exhortations to her whilst the stake and fire were being arranged continued so long that the rude English soldiers, so often deaf to the beauty of theology, asked whether they were going to be kept waiting there past dinner-time.

However, the verdict of divine and human law could never be really doubtful from the first, for the charges on which she was found guilty comprehended many grievous sins. The inscription placed over her head as she stood while the flames were being kindled declared this Joan, who called herself the Maid, to be a liar, a plague, a deceiver of the people, a sorceress, superst.i.tious, a blasphemer of G.o.d, presumptuous, a misbeliever in the faith of Christ, a boaster, idolatress, cruel, dissolute, a witch of devils, apostate, schismatic, and heretic. It was a heavy crime-sheet for a mere girl, and there was no knowing into what a monster she might grow up. So the Bishop of Beauvais could not well hesitate in p.r.o.nouncing the final sentence whereby, to avoid further infection to its members, this rotten limb, Joan, was cast out from the unity of the Church, torn from its body, and delivered to the secular power, with a request for moderation in the execution of the sentence.

Accordingly she was burnt alive, and the Voices and Visions to which she had trusted did not save her from the agony of flames.

At first sight the contrast between these two scenes, enacted by the authority of the same Church, may appear a little bewildering. It might tempt us to criticise the consistency of ecclesiastic judgment, did we not know that in theology, as in metaphysics, extreme contradictions are capable of ultimate reconciliation. The Church's att.i.tude was, in fact, definitely fixed in January 1909 by the Papal proclamation declaring that the girl's virtues were heroic and her miracles authentic. One can only regret that the discovery was not made sooner, in time to save her from the fire, when her clerical judges came to the very opposite conclusion. Yet we must not hastily condemn them for an error which, even apart from theological guidance, most of us laymen would probably have committed.

Let us for a moment imagine Joan herself appearing in the England of to-day on much the same mission. It is not difficult to picture the contempt, the derision, the ribaldry, with which she would be greeted.

In nearly every point her reception would be the same as it was, except that fewer people would believe in her inspiration. We have only to read her trial, or even the account given in _Henry VI_, to know what we should say of her now. There would be the same reproaches of unwomanliness, the same reminders that a woman's sphere is the home, the same plea that she should leave serious affairs to men, who, indeed, had carried them on so well that the whole country was tormented with perpetual panic of an enemy over sea. There would be the same taunts of immodesty, the same filthy songs. Since science has presumed to take the place of theology, we should talk about hysteria instead of witchcraft, and hallucination instead of demoniacal possession. Physiologists would expound her enthusiasm as functional disorder of the thyroid gland.

Historians would draw parallels between her recurring Voices and the "tarantism" of the Middle Ages. Superior people would smile with polite curiosity. The vulgar would yell in crowds and throw filth in her face.

The scenes of the fifteenth century in France would be exactly repeated, except that we should not actually burn her in Trafalgar Square. If she escaped the madhouse, the gaol and forcible feeding would be always ready.

So that we must not be hard on that theological conclave which made the mistake of burning a Blessed One alive. They were inspired by the highest motives, political and divine, and they made the fullest use of their knowledge of spiritual things. Being under divine direction, they could not allow any weak sentiment of pity or human consideration to influence their judgment. Their only error was in their failure to discern the authenticity of the girl's miracles, and we must call that a venial error, since it has taken the Church nearly five centuries to give a final decision on the point. The authenticity of miracles! Of all questions that is the most difficult for a contemporary to decide. In the case of Joan's judges, indeed, the solution of this mystery must have been almost impossible, unless they were gifted with prophecy; for most of her miracles were performed only after her death, or at least only then became known. And as to the bare facts they knew of her life--the realities that everyone might have seen or heard, and many thousands had shared in--there was nothing miraculous about them, nothing to detain the attention of theologians. They were natural events.

For a hundred years the country had been rent and devastated by foreign war. The enemy still clutched its very centre. The south-west quarter of the kingdom was his beyond question. By treaty his young king was heir to the whole. The land was depopulated by plague and impoverished by vain revolution. Continuous civil strife tore the people asunder, and the most powerful of the factions fought for the invader's claim. Armies ate up the years like locusts, and there was no refuge for the poor, no preservation of wealth for men or honour for women. Even religion was distracted by schism, divided against herself into two, perhaps into three, conflicting churches. In the midst of the misery and tumult this girl appears, possessed by one thought only--the pity for her country.