War Letters of a Public-School Boy Part 8

Naturalism is illogical because it postulates Nature without mind.

If you do not place faith in humanity, what really is the use of any philosophy of life?

Let us remember St. Paul's injunction, "Bear ye one another's burdens."

It is a thought to make one ponder, that by far the finest Life of Christ was written by an agnostic, Renan.

Action is a great joy in life.

When prehistoric man took up a flint and laboriously beat it into a shape that his brain told him would be of use to him, he laid the foundations of all civilisation. Man's progress is the story of brute force laid low by Thought--which is the one really irresistible influence in the Universe:

"In the world there is nothing great but Man; In Man there is nothing great but Mind."

It is a perplexing reflection that there is no absolute moral standard. The moral law appears to vary with environment and according to conditions of time and place. I am reminded of Pope's lines:

"Where the extreme of vice was ne'er agreed.

Ask where's the North? At York 'tis on the Tweed; In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where."

The greater a man is in one direction, the more p.r.o.ne he usually is to weakness in another: that is why we must never condemn indiscriminately.

The laws governing the Universe, so far from being mechanical and dead, are elements filled with Truth and Beauty.

Materialism is fatal to the higher instincts, because it introduces that most sordid element--earthly pomp, circ.u.mstance and recompense.

The Universe, History, Life are before us. Why should they not be investigated? It is not true that science leads to Atheism or Fatalism. What science does is to destroy that fabric of _Aberglaube_ or superst.i.tion which chokes and asphyxiates the best parts of religion. What science does is to set up a new, purer creed based on certainty and truth.

Of French writers Paul liked most Taine, Sainte-Beuve, and Victor Hugo. His love of reading he took with him into the War. A box of books returned to us with his other effects from France included "The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius," Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason,"

Macaulay's "Essays," Saint-Simon's "Memoirs," Sainte-Beuve's "Causeries," "The Imitation of Christ," Lecky's "History of European Morals," and works by Goethe, Victor Hugo, Dumas the elder, Flaubert, Maurice Barres, and Mrs. Humphry Ward.

CHAPTER X

HISTORY AND POLITICS

_History is philosophy teaching by examples._

BOLINGBROKE.

_The science of Politics is the one science that is deposited by the stream of history, like grains of gold in the sand of a river._

ACTON.

Reared in the home of a political journalist, it was natural that Paul Jones should be attracted to public affairs. He followed with lively curiosity the progress of the two general elections of 1910, and from that year was an interested observer of political events. As he grew older his bent towards politics became more p.r.o.nounced. A youth familiar with Roman, mediaeval and modern history could not fail to be fascinated by the political drama unfolding before his eyes. He watched history in the making with the same eagerness that he read the history of the past. The prevailing tone at Dulwich, as at most public schools, is Conservative. Paul was a perfervid Liberal. In school and out of school, not only did he not disguise, he gloried in his advanced opinions. The extent of his political knowledge and the ripeness of his views were astonis.h.i.+ng in one so young.

From the moment he began to think for himself his sympathies flowed out to the wage-earning cla.s.ses. What he remembered and what he had heard of his Puritan grandfather, William Jones, a grand specimen of the Victorian artisan, who died in December, 1905, on the verge of 80, deepened his regard for them. But his own broad and sympathetic nature would have drawn him instinctively to their side. In his judgment it was on and by the working-cla.s.ses that the wheels of the world moved forward. He had nothing but contempt for the sparrow-like frivolity of fas.h.i.+onable Society, and was repelled from the middle cla.s.ses by their servitude to conventions, their prejudices social and political, and their non-receptivity to ideas. He for his part must breathe an ampler air. He was wont to speak disdainfully of the Victorian era, because, in spite of all the advances it witnessed in the physical sciences and of Britain's rapid growth in wealth between 1850 and 1890, it did so little for social welfare.

For feudal magnates and the _nouveaux riches_ he had scant respect, holding that both the aristocracy and the plutocracy had used their political power for selfish ends. Old feudalism in some respects he regarded as better than new Capital, for the landed aristocracy did at least recognise some obligations to those under their sway, whereas Capital was so concerned with its rights that it forgot altogether its reciprocal duties. His view was that, under shelter of the _laissez-faire_ system, with its false presumption that employers and employed were on a parity in bargaining power, Capital had scandalously evaded its obligations to Labour. He regarded the conditions of life in some of our industrial districts as a grave reproach to the nation. The l.u.s.t for wealth and other unlovely aspects of compet.i.tive commercialism were most repugnant to him. He knew that Nature cares not a rap for equality and lavishes her gifts with a strange caprice. But though there is inequality of natural gifts, he thought it was the duty of the State to ensure equality of opportunity to all its citizens. His ideal was a co-operative commonwealth, in which the compet.i.tive spirit would be held in check by communal needs and aims, and where every career would be opened freely to talent. In one of his essays he deplores the fact that political economists had fallen into the delusion of applying the laws that govern the exchange of commodities without any variation to Labour, and leaving out of account intangibles and imponderables like moral forces and other expressions of the delicate and mysterious human spirit.

Political economy, he thought, would have to be recast and humanised.

"The economists," he said, "have entirely ignored the human factor."

Paul's conviction was that when the rule of enlightened democracy was established wars would cease. "The peoples never want wars," he wrote; "under a pure democracy wars would be impossible." Because of the a.s.sociations cl.u.s.tering around it the word "Imperialism" jarred on him, but he took pride in the greatness of the free and liberal British Empire, with its rule of law, its love of peace, its humane ideals. He had the historical sense in highly developed degree. The story of human progress stretched before the eye of his mind in a series of vivid pictures. Surveying the immense and imposing fabric of recorded events woven by the ceaseless loom of Time, he had an unerring instinct for the s.h.i.+ning figures, the salient characteristic, the determining factor. Away from a library he could have written a quite tolerable essay on any century of the Christian era. Historical characters in whom he was specially interested were Julius Caesar, Octavius, Charlemagne, the Emperor Charles V, Queen Elizabeth, Cromwell, Louis XIV, the elder Pitt, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon; and among the non-political Roger Bacon, Erasmus, Luther, Sir Thomas More, Isaac Newton, Faraday, and Darwin. The Elizabethan age had for him a magnetic attraction, because of the Queen with her enigmatical personality, marvellous statecraft and capacity for inspiring devotion, and of the brilliant galaxy of great men, statesmen and sailors, poets and scholars, who enriched her reign with so much glory. Another epoch he loved to study was that of the French Revolution. I have already referred to his habit of annotating the books he read. From notes he made on political books and from some of his essays I have culled the following:

Man's tool-using power is simply a symbol of man's unique reasoning gifts. Its connotations may be extended to mean the entire intellect.

The savage using his language with joy like a child, gives us the wealth of beautiful mythology about all natural objects.

It is wonderful to think that Julius Caesar's imperial system was handed right down to the nineteenth century, until one not unlike Caesar himself set his foot upon its neck in 1806. But long before it fell the Holy Roman Empire had really ceased, in Voltaire's words, to be holy, or Roman, or an empire.

Froude holds up to admiration the "serene calmness" of Tacitus, and says he took no side. But I ask anyone who has read the sarcastic remarks about Domitian and the Emperors in the "Agricola" whether he thinks Tacitus took no side in writing history.

Nothing can alter the fact that Mohammedanism has done a vast amount of good. Compare Carlyle's appreciation of Mahomet with Gibbon's acrimonious insinuations.

Much that is strange in human history is explained if we remember that aristocracies in the West were political, while in the East they were religious.

Hildebrand, who boldly declared that the Church compared to the State was as the sun to the moon--the State only s.h.i.+ning by light borrowed from the greater orb--was now on the papal throne. His giant intellect and tremendous personality had overawed Henry IV into ignominious capitulation at Canossa. With Europe at his feet Hildebrand cannot but have desired to a.s.sert his authority over the island-State across the Channel. William the Conqueror and Hildebrand were rarely-matched antagonists--the one determined to set bounds to the Pope's scheme of world-domination; the Pope equally determined to bend the stubborn Norman to his will. It was the Conqueror who won.

The conception of the Norman Conquest has s.h.i.+fted from the grotesque over-estimate of Thierry to the under-estimate of Freeman and Maitland. To the moderns the Conquest is now little more than a change of dynasty. A juster estimate would be that the very change of dynasty gave the Conquest its vital importance.... The effects were really immense. The Conquest subst.i.tuted for the degenerate race of Anglo-Saxon kings a virile dynasty able to give to England what it needed--a vigorous central administration--and brought the English people into the stream of European civilisation.

It was the hope of Erasmus that Catholic forms could be blended with the Greek spirit.

Luther's songs express the very soul of old Germany; above all, the great hymn "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott."

Though the Reformation in freeing the mind of man from ecclesiastical tyranny made eventually for political liberty, its whole tendency in England for the time being was in favour of absolute monarchy. Its first outcome here was to set up a secular monarchy, supreme in Church and State, founded on the theory of the divine right of kings, based on an aristocracy made loyal by the instinct of self-interest.

Commerce and national wealth were at stake in the war between England and Spain in the sixteenth century, and not merely, perhaps not even mainly, religion.

Drake was a very great sailor, but he was undoubtedly a buccaneer.

Many Ministers had been sent to the block for offences far less rank than those of Charles I; nevertheless, his execution was absolutely illegal and a fatal mistake in policy.

Few men experienced such hard treatment at the hands of fortune as Cromwell. In every case, save the rule of the major-generals, his const.i.tutional experiments were wise, far-seeing and well-conceived. It was the perverse conduct of those who professed to be his followers that ruined all.

There has never been a shrewder king on a throne than Charles II.

In the popular view, James II will always be regarded as the tyrannical despot, the subverter of the religious and political inst.i.tutions of England, while his brother, Charles II, will be looked upon as a kindly and amiable gentleman, who oppressed no one and treated everyone kindly. Yet in the view of the student of history Charles becomes the tyrant and James an honest though bigoted fool.

To compare the age of Cromwell with that of Charles II is to see the Dorian and Lydian spirits respectively in their most contrasted lights.

The difference between Richelieu and Mazarin is the difference between the creator and the developer.

The political revolution of 1688 was contemporaneous with a revolution in physics, shown by Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood; with a revolution in astronomical thought, shown by Newton's "Principia"; with a small revolution in literature, shown by the rise of English prose; with a revolution in popular feeling all over the world, as shown by the riots against excessive taxation in France and the ejection of de Witt in Holland. All the different threads of life seem to run interwoven, and one cannot be disturbed without disturbing the others.

The character of Frederick the Great was stained by many infamous deeds; he was in many ways unscrupulous, yet he was never petty, and he was devoted to his country. He was the greatest genius in practical reforms and in the art of war that the eighteenth century produced.