HEARTBREAK HOUSE

A FANTASIA IN THE RUSSIAN MANNER ON ENGLISH THEMES


By Bernard Shaw


1913-1916




HEARTBREAK HOUSE AND HORSEBACK HALL


Where Heartbreak House Stands

Heartbreak House is not merely the name of the play which follows this
preface. It is cultured, leisured Europe before the war. When the
play was begun not a shot had been fired; and only the professional
diplomatists and the very few amateurs whose hobby is foreign policy
even knew that the guns were loaded. A Russian playwright, Tchekov, had
produced four fascinating dramatic studies of Heartbreak House, of
which three, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull, had been
performed in England. Tolstoy, in his Fruits of Enlightenment, had shown
us through it in his most ferociously contemptuous manner. Tolstoy did
not waste any sympathy on it: it was to him the house in which Europe
was stifling its soul; and he knew that our utter enervation and
futilization in that overheated drawingroom atmosphere was delivering
the world over to the control of ignorant and soulless cunning and
energy, with the frightful consequences which have now overtaken
it. Tolstoy was no pessimist: he was not disposed to leave the house
standing if he could bring it down about the ears of its pretty and
amiable voluptuaries; and he wielded the pickaxe with a will. He treated
the case of the inmates as one of opium poisoning, to be dealt with by
seizing the patients roughly and exercising them violently until they
were broad awake. Tchekov, more of a fatalist, had no faith in these
charming people extricating themselves. They would, he thought, be sold
up and sent adrift by the bailiffs; and he therefore had no scruple in
exploiting and even flattering their charm.



The Inhabitants

Tchekov's plays, being less lucrative than swings and roundabouts,
got no further in England, where theatres are only ordinary commercial
affairs, than a couple of performances by the Stage Society. We stared
and said, "How Russian!" They did not strike me in that way. Just
as Ibsen's intensely Norwegian plays exactly fitted every middle and
professional class suburb in Europe, these intensely Russian plays
fitted all the country houses in Europe in which the pleasures of music,
art, literature, and the theatre had supplanted hunting, shooting,
fishing, flirting, eating, and drinking. The same nice people, the same
utter futility. The nice people could read; some of them could
write; and they were the sole repositories of culture who had social
opportunities of contact with our politicians, administrators, and
newspaper proprietors, or any chance of sharing or influencing their
activities. But they shrank from that contact. They hated politics. They
did not wish to realize Utopia for the common people: they wished to
realize their favorite fictions and poems in their own lives; and, when
they could, they lived without scruple on incomes which they did nothing
to earn. The women in their girlhood made themselves look like variety
theatre stars, and settled down later into the types of beauty imagined
by the previous generation of painters. They took the only part of our
society in which there was leisure for high culture, and made it an
economic, political and; as far as practicable, a moral vacuum; and as
Nature, abhorring the vacuum, immediately filled it up with sex and with
all sorts of refined pleasures, it was a very delightful place at its
best for moments of relaxation. In other moments it was disastrous. For
prime ministers and their like, it was a veritable Capua.



Horseback Hall

But where were our front benchers to nest if not here? The alternative
to Heartbreak House was Horseback Hall, consisting of a prison for
horses with an annex for the ladies and gentlemen who rode them, hunted
them, talked about them, bought them and sold them, and gave nine-tenths
of their lives to them, dividing the other tenth between charity,
churchgoing (as a substitute for religion), and conservative
electioneering (as a substitute for politics). It is true that the two
establishments got mixed at the edges. Exiles from the library, the
music room, and the picture gallery would be found languishing among the
stables, miserably discontented; and hardy horsewomen who slept at the
first chord of Schumann were born, horribly misplaced, into the garden
of Klingsor; but sometimes one came upon horsebreakers and heartbreakers
who could make the best of both worlds. As a rule, however, the two were
apart and knew little of one another; so the prime minister folk had
to choose between barbarism and Capua. And of the two atmospheres it is
hard to say which was the more fatal to statesmanship.


Revolution on the Shelf

Heartbreak House was quite familiar with revolutionary ideas on paper.
It aimed at being advanced and freethinking, and hardly ever went to
church or kept the Sabbath except by a little extra fun at weekends.
When you spent a Friday to Tuesday in it you found on the shelf in your
bedroom not only the books of poets and novelists, but of revolutionary
biologists and even economists. Without at least a few plays by myself
and Mr Granville Barker, and a few stories by Mr H. G. Wells, Mr Arnold
Bennett, and Mr John Galsworthy, the house would have been out of the
movement. You would find Blake among the poets, and beside him Bergson,
Butler, Scott Haldane, the poems of Meredith and Thomas Hardy, and,
generally speaking, all the literary implements for forming the mind of
the perfect modern Socialist and Creative Evolutionist. It was a curious
experience to spend Sunday in dipping into these books, and the Monday
morning to read in the daily paper that the country had just been
brought to the verge of anarchy because a new Home Secretary or chief of
police without an idea in his head that his great-grandmother might
not have had to apologize for, had refused to "recognize" some powerful
Trade Union, just as a gondola might refuse to recognize a 20,000-ton
liner.

In short, power and culture were in separate compartments. The
barbarians were not only literally in the saddle, but on the front
bench in the House of commons, with nobody to correct their incredible
ignorance of modern thought and political science but upstarts from
the counting-house, who had spent their lives furnishing their pockets
instead of their minds. Both, however, were practised in dealing with
money and with men, as far as acquiring the one and exploiting the other
went; and although this is as undesirable an expertness as that of the
medieval robber baron, it qualifies men to keep an estate or a business
going in its old routine without necessarily understanding it, just as
Bond Street tradesmen and domestic servants keep fashionable society
going without any instruction in sociology.



The Cherry Orchard

The Heartbreak people neither could nor would do anything of the sort.
With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G. Wells as
the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the anticipations of
Erasmus or Sir Thomas More, they refused the drudgery of politics, and
would have made a very poor job of it if they had changed their minds.
Not that they would have been allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through
the accident of being a hereditary peer can anyone in these days of
Votes for Everybody get into parliament if handicapped by a serious
modern cultural equipment; but if they had, their habit of living in a
vacuum would have left them helpless end ineffective in public
affairs. Even in private life they were often helpless wasters of their
inheritance, like the people in Tchekov's Cherry Orchard. Even those who
lived within their incomes were really kept going by their solicitors
and agents, being unable to manage an estate or run a business without
continual prompting from those who have to learn how to do such things
or starve.

From what is called Democracy no corrective to this state of things
could be hoped. It is said that every people has the Government
it deserves. It is more to the point that every Government has the
electorate it deserves; for the orators of the front bench can edify or
debauch an ignorant electorate at will. Thus our democracy moves in a
vicious circle of reciprocal worthiness and unworthiness.



Nature's Long Credits

Nature's way of dealing with unhealthy conditions is unfortunately not
one that compels us to conduct a solvent hygiene on a cash basis. She
demoralizes us with long credits and reckless overdrafts, and then pulls
us up cruelly with catastrophic bankruptcies. Take, for example, common
domestic sanitation. A whole city generation may neglect it utterly
and scandalously, if not with absolute impunity, yet without any evil
consequences that anyone thinks of tracing to it. In a hospital two
generations of medical students way tolerate dirt and carelessness, and
then go out into general practice to spread the doctrine that fresh
air is a fad, and sanitation an imposture set up to make profits for
plumbers. Then suddenly Nature takes her revenge. She strikes at the
city with a pestilence and at the hospital with an epidemic of hospital
gangrene, slaughtering right and left until the innocent young have paid
for the guilty old, and the account is balanced. And then she goes to
sleep again and gives another period of credit, with the same result.

This is what has just happened in our political hygiene. Political
science has been as recklessly neglected by Governments and electorates
during my lifetime as sanitary science was in the days of Charles the
Second. In international relations diplomacy has been a boyishly lawless
affair of family intrigues, commercial and territorial brigandage,
torpors of pseudo-goodnature produced by laziness and spasms of
ferocious activity produced by terror. But in these islands we muddled
through. Nature gave us a longer credit than she gave to France or
Germany or Russia. To British centenarians who died in their beds in
1914, any dread of having to hide underground in London from the
shells of an enemy seemed more remote and fantastic than a dread of the
appearance of a colony of cobras and rattlesnakes in Kensington Gardens.
In the prophetic works of Charles Dickens we were warned against
many evils which have since come to pass; but of the evil of being
slaughtered by a foreign foe on our own doorsteps there was no shadow.
Nature gave us a very long credit; and we abused it to the utmost. But
when she struck at last she struck with a vengeance. For four years
she smote our firstborn and heaped on us plagues of which Egypt never
dreamed. They were all as preventable as the great Plague of London, and
came solely because they had not been prevented. They were not undone by
winning the war. The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the
victors.



The Wicked Half Century

It is difficult to say whether indifference and neglect are worse than
false doctrine; but Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall unfortunately
suffered from both. For half a century before the war civilization had
been going to the devil very precipitately under the influence of a
pseudo-science as disastrous as the blackest Calvinism. Calvinism taught
that as we are predestinately saved or damned, nothing that we can do
can alter our destiny. Still, as Calvinism gave the individual no clue
as to whether he had drawn a lucky number or an unlucky one, it left
him a fairly strong interest in encouraging his hopes of salvation and
allaying his fear of damnation by behaving as one of the elect might
be expected to behave rather than as one of the reprobate. But in the
middle of the nineteenth century naturalists and physicists assured
the world, in the name of Science, that salvation and damnation are
all nonsense, and that predestination is the central truth of religion,
inasmuch as human beings are produced by their environment, their sins
and good deeds being only a series of chemical and mechanical reactions
over which they have no control. Such figments as mind, choice, purpose,
conscience, will, and so forth, are, they taught, mere illusions,
produced because they are useful in the continual struggle of the human
machine to maintain its environment in a favorable condition, a process
incidentally involving the ruthless destruction or subjection of its
competitors for the supply (assumed to be limited) of subsistence
available. We taught Prussia this religion; and Prussia bettered our
instruction so effectively that we presently found ourselves confronted
with the necessity of destroying Prussia to prevent Prussia destroying
us. And that has just ended in each destroying the other to an extent
doubtfully reparable in our time.

It may be asked how so imbecile and dangerous a creed ever came to be
accepted by intelligent beings. I will answer that question more fully
in my next volume of plays, which will be entirely devoted to the
subject. For the present I will only say that there were better reasons
than the obvious one that such sham science as this opened a scientific
career to very stupid men, and all the other careers to shameless
rascals, provided they were industrious enough. It is true that
this motive operated very powerfully; but when the new departure in
scientific doctrine which is associated with the name of the great
naturalist Charles Darwin began, it was not only a reaction against a
barbarous pseudo-evangelical teleology intolerably obstructive to all
scientific progress, but was accompanied, as it happened, by discoveries
of extraordinary interest in physics, chemistry, and that lifeless
method of evolution which its investigators called Natural Selection.
Howbeit, there was only one result possible in the ethical sphere, and
that was the banishment of conscience from human affairs, or, as Samuel
Butler vehemently put it, "of mind from the universe."



Hypochondria

Now Heartbreak House, with Butler and Bergson and Scott Haldane
alongside Blake and the other major poets on its shelves (to say nothing
of Wagner and the tone poets), was not so completely blinded by the
doltish materialism of the laboratories as the uncultured world outside.
But being an idle house it was a hypochondriacal house, always running
after cures. It would stop eating meat, not on valid Shelleyan grounds,
but in order to get rid of a bogey called Uric Acid; and it would
actually let you pull all its teeth out to exorcise another demon
named Pyorrhea. It was superstitious, and addicted to table-rapping,
materialization seances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the
like to such an extent that it may be doubted whether ever before in
the history of the world did soothsayers, astrologers, and unregistered
therapeutic specialists of all sorts flourish as they did during this
half century of the drift to the abyss. The registered doctors and
surgeons were hard put to it to compete with the unregistered. They were
not clever enough to appeal to the imagination and sociability of
the Heartbreakers by the arts of the actor, the orator, the poet, the
winning conversationalist. They had to fall back coarsely on the terror
of infection and death. They prescribed inoculations and operations.
Whatever part of a human being could be cut out without necessarily
killing him they cut out; and he often died (unnecessarily of course)
in consequence. From such trifles as uvulas and tonsils they went on
to ovaries and appendices until at last no one's inside was safe. They
explained that the human intestine was too long, and that nothing could
make a child of Adam healthy except short circuiting the pylorus by
cutting a length out of the lower intestine and fastening it directly to
the stomach. As their mechanist theory taught them that medicine was
the business of the chemist's laboratory, and surgery of the carpenter's
shop, and also that Science (by which they meant their practices) was
so important that no consideration for the interests of any individual
creature, whether frog or philosopher, much less the vulgar commonplaces
of sentimental ethics, could weigh for a moment against the remotest
off-chance of an addition to the body of scientific knowledge, they
operated and vivisected and inoculated and lied on a stupendous scale,
clamoring for and actually acquiring such legal powers over the bodies
of their fellow-citizens as neither king, pope, nor parliament dare ever
have claimed. The Inquisition itself was a Liberal institution compared
to the General Medical Council.



Those who do not know how to live must make a Merit of Dying

Heartbreak House was far too lazy and shallow to extricate itself from
this palace of evil enchantment. It rhapsodized about love; but it
believed in cruelty. It was afraid of the cruel people; and it saw that
cruelty was at least effective. Cruelty did things that made money,
whereas Love did nothing but prove the soundness of Larochefoucauld's
saying that very few people would fall in love if they had never read
about it. Heartbreak House, in short, did not know how to live, at which
point all that was left to it was the boast that at least it knew how
to die: a melancholy accomplishment which the outbreak of war presently
gave it practically unlimited opportunities of displaying. Thus were the
firstborn of Heartbreak House smitten; and the young, the innocent, the
hopeful, expiated the folly and worthlessness of their elders.


War Delirium

Only those who have lived through a first-rate war, not in the
field, but at home, and kept their heads, can possibly understand
the bitterness of Shakespeare and Swift, who both went through this
experience. The horror of Peer Gynt in the madhouse, when the lunatics,
exalted by illusions of splendid talent and visions of a dawning
millennium, crowned him as their emperor, was tame in comparison. I do
not know whether anyone really kept his head completely except those
who had to keep it because they had to conduct the war at first hand.
I should not have kept my own (as far as I did keep it) if I had not at
once understood that as a scribe and speaker I too was under the most
serious public obligation to keep my grip on realities; but this did
not save me from a considerable degree of hyperaesthesia. There were of
course some happy people to whom the war meant nothing: all political
and general matters lying outside their little circle of interest. But
the ordinary war-conscious civilian went mad, the main symptom being a
conviction that the whole order of nature had been reversed. All
foods, he felt, must now be adulterated. All schools must be closed.
No advertisements must be sent to the newspapers, of which new editions
must appear and be bought up every ten minutes. Travelling must be
stopped, or, that being impossible, greatly hindered. All pretences
about fine art and culture and the like must be flung off as an
intolerable affectation; and the picture galleries and museums and
schools at once occupied by war workers. The British Museum itself was
saved only by a hair's breadth. The sincerity of all this, and of much
more which would not be believed if I chronicled it, may be established
by one conclusive instance of the general craziness. Men were seized
with the illusion that they could win the war by giving away money.
And they not only subscribed millions to Funds of all sorts with no
discoverable object, and to ridiculous voluntary organizations for doing
what was plainly the business of the civil and military authorities,
but actually handed out money to any thief in the street who had the
presence of mind to pretend that he (or she) was "collecting" it for the
annihilation of the enemy. Swindlers were emboldened to take offices;
label themselves Anti-Enemy Leagues; and simply pocket the money that
was heaped on them. Attractively dressed young women found that they had
nothing to do but parade the streets, collecting-box in hand, and live
gloriously on the profits. Many months elapsed before, as a first sign
of returning sanity, the police swept an Anti-Enemy secretary into
prison pour encourages les autres, and the passionate penny collecting
of the Flag Days was brought under some sort of regulation.



Madness in Court

The demoralization did not spare the Law Courts. Soldiers were
acquitted, even on fully proved indictments for wilful murder, until at
last the judges and magistrates had to announce that what was called the
Unwritten Law, which meant simply that a soldier could do what he liked
with impunity in civil life, was not the law of the land, and that a
Victoria Cross did not carry with it a perpetual plenary indulgence.
Unfortunately the insanity of the juries and magistrates did not always
manifest itself in indulgence. No person unlucky enough to be charged
with any sort of conduct, however reasonable and salutary, that did not
smack of war delirium, had the slightest chance of acquittal. There were
in the country, too, a certain number of people who had conscientious
objections to war as criminal or unchristian. The Act of Parliament
introducing Compulsory Military Service thoughtlessly exempted these
persons, merely requiring them to prove the genuineness of their
convictions. Those who did so were very ill-advised from the point
of view of their own personal interest; for they were persecuted with
savage logicality in spite of the law; whilst those who made no pretence
of having any objection to war at all, and had not only had military
training in Officers' Training Corps, but had proclaimed on public
occasions that they were perfectly ready to engage in civil war on
behalf of their political opinions, were allowed the benefit of the Act
on the ground that they did not approve of this particular war. For the
Christians there was no mercy. In cases where the evidence as to their
being killed by ill treatment was so unequivocal that the verdict
would certainly have been one of wilful murder had the prejudice of
the coroner's jury been on the other side, their tormentors were
gratuitously declared to be blameless. There was only one virtue,
pugnacity: only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of
war; but the Government had not the courage to legislate accordingly;
and its law was set aside for Lynch law.

The climax of legal lawlessness was reached in France. The greatest
Socialist statesman in Europe, Jaures, was shot and killed by a
gentleman who resented his efforts to avert the war. M. Clemenceau was
shot by another gentleman of less popular opinions, and happily came off
no worse than having to spend a precautionary couple of days in bed.
The slayer of Jaures was recklessly acquitted: the would-be slayer of M.
Clemenceau was carefully found guilty. There is no reason to doubt that
the same thing would have happened in England if the war had begun
with a successful attempt to assassinate Keir Hardie, and ended with an
unsuccessful one to assassinate Mr Lloyd George.



The Long Arm of War

The pestilence which is the usual accompaniment of war was called
influenza. Whether it was really a war pestilence or not was made
doubtful by the fact that it did its worst in places remote from the
battlefields, notably on the west coast of North America and in India.
But the moral pestilence, which was unquestionably a war pestilence,
reproduced this phenomenon. One would have supposed that the war fever
would have raged most furiously in the countries actually under fire,
and that the others would be more reasonable. Belgium and Flanders,
where over large districts literally not one stone was left upon another
as the opposed armies drove each other back and forward over it
after terrific preliminary bombardments, might have been pardoned for
relieving their feelings more emphatically than by shrugging their
shoulders and saying, "C'est la guerre." England, inviolate for so many
centuries that the swoop of war on her homesteads had long ceased to be
more credible than a return of the Flood, could hardly be expected
to keep her temper sweet when she knew at last what it was to hide in
cellars and underground railway stations, or lie quaking in bed, whilst
bombs crashed, houses crumbled, and aircraft guns distributed shrapnel
on friend and foe alike until certain shop windows in London, formerly
full of fashionable hats, were filled with steel helmets. Slain and
mutilated women and children, and burnt and wrecked dwellings, excuse a
good deal of violent language, and produce a wrath on which many suns go
down before it is appeased. Yet it was in the United States of America
where nobody slept the worse for the war, that the war fever went
beyond all sense and reason. In European Courts there was vindictive
illegality: in American Courts there was raving lunacy. It is not for me
to chronicle the extravagances of an Ally: let some candid American do
that. I can only say that to us sitting in our gardens in England,
with the guns in France making themselves felt by a throb in the air as
unmistakeable as an audible sound, or with tightening hearts studying
the phases of the moon in London in their bearing on the chances whether
our houses would be standing or ourselves alive next morning, the
newspaper accounts of the sentences American Courts were passing on
young girls and old men alike for the expression of opinions which were
being uttered amid thundering applause before huge audiences in England,
and the more private records of the methods by which the American
War Loans were raised, were so amazing that they put the guns and the
possibilities of a raid clean out of our heads for the moment.



The Rabid Watchdogs of Liberty

Not content with these rancorous abuses of the existing law, the war
maniacs made a frantic rush to abolish all constitutional guarantees of
liberty and well-being. The ordinary law was superseded by Acts under
which newspapers were seized and their printing machinery destroyed by
simple police raids a la Russe, and persons arrested and shot without
any pretence of trial by jury or publicity of procedure or evidence.
Though it was urgently necessary that production should be increased
by the most scientific organization and economy of labor, and though no
fact was better established than that excessive duration and intensity
of toil reduces production heavily instead of increasing it, the factory
laws were suspended, and men and women recklessly over-worked until the
loss of their efficiency became too glaring to be ignored. Remonstrances
and warnings were met either with an accusation of pro-Germanism or the
formula, "Remember that we are at war now." I have said that men assumed
that war had reversed the order of nature, and that all was lost unless
we did the exact opposite of everything we had found necessary and
beneficial in peace. But the truth was worse than that. The war did not
change men's minds in any such impossible way. What really happened was
that the impact of physical death and destruction, the one reality that
every fool can understand, tore off the masks of education, art, science
and religion from our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorying
grotesquely in the licence suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and
most abject terrors. Ever since Thucydides wrote his history, it has
been on record that when the angel of death sounds his trumpet the
pretences of civilization are blown from men's heads into the mud like
hats in a gust of wind. But when this scripture was fulfilled among us,
the shock was not the less appalling because a few students of Greek
history were not surprised by it. Indeed these students threw themselves
into the orgy as shamelessly as the illiterate. The Christian priest,
joining in the war dance without even throwing off his cassock first,
and the respectable school governor expelling the German professor with
insult and bodily violence, and declaring that no English child should
ever again be taught the language of Luther and Goethe, were kept
in countenance by the most impudent repudiations of every decency of
civilization and every lesson of political experience on the part of the
very persons who, as university professors, historians, philosophers,
and men of science, were the accredited custodians of culture. It was
crudely natural, and perhaps necessary for recruiting purposes, that
German militarism and German dynastic ambition should be painted by
journalists and recruiters in black and red as European dangers (as in
fact they are), leaving it to be inferred that our own militarism and
our own political constitution are millennially democratic (which they
certainly are not); but when it came to frantic denunciations of
German chemistry, German biology, German poetry, German music, German
literature, German philosophy, and even German engineering, as malignant
abominations standing towards British and French chemistry and so forth
in the relation of heaven to hell, it was clear that the utterers of
such barbarous ravings had never really understood or cared for the
arts and sciences they professed and were profaning, and were only the
appallingly degenerate descendants of the men of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries who, recognizing no national frontiers in the great
realm of the human mind, kept the European comity of that realm loftily
and even ostentatiously above the rancors of the battle-field. Tearing
the Garter from the Kaiser's leg, striking the German dukes from the
roll of our peerage, changing the King's illustrious and historically
appropriate surname (for the war was the old war of Guelph against
Ghibelline, with the Kaiser as Arch-Ghibelline) to that of a
traditionless locality. One felt that the figure of St. George and the
Dragon on our coinage should be replaced by that of the soldier driving
his spear through Archimedes. But by that time there was no coinage:
only paper money in which ten shillings called itself a pound as
confidently as the people who were disgracing their country called
themselves patriots.



The Sufferings of the Sane

The mental distress of living amid the obscene din of all these
carmagnoles and corobberies was not the only burden that lay on sane
people during the war. There was also the emotional strain, complicated
by the offended economic sense, produced by the casualty lists. The
stupid, the selfish, the narrow-minded, the callous and unimaginative
were spared a great deal. "Blood and destruction shall be so in use that
mothers shall but smile when they behold their infantes quartered by the
hands of war," was a Shakespearean prophecy that very nearly came true;
for when nearly every house had a slaughtered son to mourn, we should
all have gone quite out of our senses if we had taken our own and our
friend's bereavements at their peace value. It became necessary to give
them a false value; to proclaim the young life worthily and gloriously
sacrificed to redeem the liberty of mankind, instead of to expiate the
heedlessness and folly of their fathers, and expiate it in vain. We
had even to assume that the parents and not the children had made the
sacrifice, until at last the comic papers were driven to satirize fat
old men, sitting comfortably in club chairs, and boasting of the sons
they had "given" to their country.

No one grudged these anodynes to acute personal grief; but they only
embittered those who knew that the young men were having their teeth
set on edge because their parents had eaten sour political grapes. Then
think of the young men themselves! Many of them had no illusions about
the policy that led to the war: they went clear-sighted to a horribly
repugnant duty. Men essentially gentle and essentially wise, with really
valuable work in hand, laid it down voluntarily and spent months forming
fours in the barrack yard, and stabbing sacks of straw in the public
eye, so that they might go out to kill and maim men as gentle as
themselves. These men, who were perhaps, as a class, our most efficient
soldiers (Frederick Keeling, for example), were not duped for a moment
by the hypocritical melodrama that consoled and stimulated the others.
They left their creative work to drudge at destruction, exactly as they
would have left it to take their turn at the pumps in a sinking ship.
They did not, like some of the conscientious objectors, hold back
because the ship had been neglected by its officers and scuttled by
its wreckers. The ship had to be saved, even if Newton had to leave his
fluxions and Michael Angelo his marbles to save it; so they threw away
the tools of their beneficent and ennobling trades, and took up the
blood-stained bayonet and the murderous bomb, forcing themselves to
pervert their divine instinct for perfect artistic execution to the
effective handling of these diabolical things, and their economic
faculty for organization to the contriving of ruin and slaughter. For
it gave an ironic edge to their tragedy that the very talents they were
forced to prostitute made the prostitution not only effective, but
even interesting; so that some of them were rapidly promoted, and found
themselves actually becoming artists in wax, with a growing relish for
it, like Napoleon and all the other scourges of mankind, in spite of
themselves. For many of them there was not even this consolation. They
"stuck it," and hated it, to the end.



Evil in the Throne of Good

This distress of the gentle was so acute that those who shared it
in civil life, without having to shed blood with their own hands, or
witness destruction with their own eyes, hardly care to obtrude their
own woes. Nevertheless, even when sitting at home in safety, it was not
easy for those who had to write and speak about the war to throw
away their highest conscience, and deliberately work to a standard of
inevitable evil instead of to the ideal of life more abundant. I can
answer for at least one person who found the change from the wisdom of
Jesus and St. Francis to the morals of Richard III and the madness of
Don Quixote extremely irksome. But that change had to be made; and we
are all the worse for it, except those for whom it was not really a
change at all, but only a relief from hypocrisy.

Think, too, of those who, though they had neither to write nor to fight,
and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the inestimable
loss to the world of four years of the life of a generation wasted on
destruction. Hardly one of the epoch-making works of the human mind
might not have been aborted or destroyed by taking their authors
away from their natural work for four critical years. Not only were
Shakespeares and Platos being killed outright; but many of the best
harvests of the survivors had to be sown in the barren soil of the
trenches. And this was no mere British consideration. To the truly
civilized man, to the good European, the slaughter of the German youth
was as disastrous as the slaughter of the English. Fools exulted in
"German losses." They were our losses as well. Imagine exulting in the
death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him his death blow!



Straining at the Gnat and swallowing the Camel

But most people could not comprehend these sorrows. There was a
frivolous exultation in death for its own sake, which was at bottom
an inability to realize that the deaths were real deaths and not stage
ones. Again and again, when an air raider dropped a bomb which tore a
child and its mother limb from limb, the people who saw it, though they
had been reading with great cheerfulness of thousands of such happenings
day after day in their newspapers, suddenly burst into furious
imprecations on "the Huns" as murderers, and shrieked for savage and
satisfying vengeance. At such moments it became clear that the deaths
they had not seen meant no more to them than the mimic death of the
cinema screen. Sometimes it was not necessary that death should be
actually witnessed: it had only to take place under circumstances
of sufficient novelty and proximity to bring it home almost as
sensationally and effectively as if it had been actually visible.

For example, in the spring of 1915 there was an appalling slaughter of
our young soldiers at Neuve Chapelle and at the Gallipoli landing. I
will not go so far as to say that our civilians were delighted to have
such exciting news to read at breakfast. But I cannot pretend that I
noticed either in the papers, or in general intercourse, any feeling
beyond the usual one that the cinema show at the front was going
splendidly, and that our boys were the bravest of the brave. Suddenly
there came the news that an Atlantic liner, the Lusitania, had been
torpedoed, and that several well-known first-class passengers, including
a famous theatrical manager and the author of a popular farce, had been
drowned, among others. The others included Sir Hugh Lane; but as he had
only laid the country under great obligations in the sphere of the fine
arts, no great stress was laid on that loss. Immediately an amazing
frenzy swept through the country. Men who up to that time had kept their
heads now lost them utterly. "Killing saloon passengers! What next?" was
the essence of the whole agitation; but it is far too trivial a phrase
to convey the faintest notion of the rage which possessed us. To me,
with my mind full of the hideous cost of Neuve Chapelle, Ypres, and
the Gallipoli landing, the fuss about the Lusitania seemed almost a
heartless impertinence, though I was well acquainted personally with
the three best-known victims, and understood, better perhaps than
most people, the misfortune of the death of Lane. I even found a grim
satisfaction, very intelligible to all soldiers, in the fact that the
civilians who found the war such splendid British sport should get a
sharp taste of what it was to the actual combatants. I expressed my
impatience very freely, and found that my very straightforward and
natural feeling in the matter was received as a monstrous and heartless
paradox. When I asked those who gaped at me whether they had anything
to say about the holocaust of Festubert, they gaped wider than before,
having totally forgotten it, or rather, having never realized it. They
were not heartless anymore than I was; but the big catastrophe was too
big for them to grasp, and the little one had been just the right size
for them. I was not surprised. Have I not seen a public body for just
the same reason pass a vote for ВЈ30,000 without a word, and then spend
three special meetings, prolonged into the night, over an item of seven
shillings for refreshments?



Little Minds and Big Battles

Nobody will be able to understand the vagaries of public feeling during
the war unless they bear constantly in mind that the war in its entire
magnitude did not exist for the average civilian. He could not conceive
even a battle, much less a campaign. To the suburbs the war was nothing
but a suburban squabble. To the miner and navvy it was only a series of
bayonet fights between German champions and English ones. The enormity
of it was quite beyond most of us. Its episodes had to be reduced to the
dimensions of a railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce
any effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous bombardments of
Scarborough and Ramsgate were colossal tragedies, and the battle of
Jutland a mere ballad. The words "after thorough artillery preparation"
in the news from the front meant nothing to us; but when our seaside
trippers learned that an elderly gentleman at breakfast in a week-end
marine hotel had been interrupted by a bomb dropping into his egg-cup,
their wrath and horror knew no bounds. They declared that this would put
a new spirit into the army; and had no suspicion that the soldiers in
the trenches roared with laughter over it for days, and told each other
that it would do the blighters at home good to have a taste of what the
army was up against. Sometimes the smallness of view was pathetic. A man
would work at home regardless of the call "to make the world safe for
democracy." His brother would be killed at the front. Immediately he
would throw up his work and take up the war as a family blood feud
against the Germans. Sometimes it was comic. A wounded man, entitled to
his discharge, would return to the trenches with a grim determination to
find the Hun who had wounded him and pay him out for it.

It is impossible to estimate what proportion of us, in khaki or out
of it, grasped the war and its political antecedents as a whole in the
light of any philosophy of history or knowledge of what war is. I doubt
whether it was as high as our proportion of higher mathematicians.
But there can be no doubt that it was prodigiously outnumbered by the
comparatively ignorant and childish. Remember that these people had to
be stimulated to make the sacrifices demanded by the war, and that this
could not be done by appeals to a knowledge which they did not possess,
and a comprehension of which they were incapable. When the armistice
at last set me free to tell the truth about the war at the following
general election, a soldier said to a candidate whom I was supporting,
"If I had known all that in 1914, they would never have got me into
khaki." And that, of course, was precisely why it had been necessary
to stuff him with a romance that any diplomatist would have laughed at.
Thus the natural confusion of ignorance was increased by a deliberately
propagated confusion of nursery bogey stories and melodramatic nonsense,
which at last overreached itself and made it impossible to stop the war
before we had not only achieved the triumph of vanquishing the German
army and thereby overthrowing its militarist monarchy, but made the very
serious mistake of ruining the centre of Europe, a thing that no sane
European State could afford to do.



The Dumb Capables and the Noisy Incapables

Confronted with this picture of insensate delusion and folly, the
critical reader will immediately counterplead that England all this time
was conducting a war which involved the organization of several
millions of fighting men and of the workers who were supplying them with
provisions, munitions, and transport, and that this could not have been
done by a mob of hysterical ranters. This is fortunately true. To pass
from the newspaper offices and political platforms and club fenders and
suburban drawing-rooms to the Army and the munition factories was to
pass from Bedlam to the busiest and sanest of workaday worlds. It was
to rediscover England, and find solid ground for the faith of those who
still believed in her. But a necessary condition of this efficiency
was that those who were efficient should give all their time to their
business and leave the rabble raving to its heart's content. Indeed the
raving was useful to the efficient, because, as it was always wide
of the mark, it often distracted attention very conveniently from
operations that would have been defeated or hindered by publicity. A
precept which I endeavored vainly to popularize early in the war, "If
you have anything to do go and do it: if not, for heaven's sake get out
of the way," was only half carried out. Certainly the capable people
went and did it; but the incapables would by no means get out of the
way: they fussed and bawled and were only prevented from getting very
seriously into the way by the blessed fact that they never knew where
the way was. Thus whilst all the efficiency of England was silent and
invisible, all its imbecility was deafening the heavens with its clamor
and blotting out the sun with its dust. It was also unfortunately
intimidating the Government by its blusterings into using the
irresistible powers of the State to intimidate the sensible people, thus
enabling a despicable minority of would-be lynchers to set up a reign of
terror which could at any time have been broken by a single stern word
from a responsible minister. But our ministers had not that sort of
courage: neither Heartbreak House nor Horseback Hall had bred it, much
less the suburbs. When matters at last came to the looting of shops by
criminals under patriotic pretexts, it was the police force and not the
Government that put its foot down. There was even one deplorable
moment, during the submarine scare, in which the Government yielded to a
childish cry for the maltreatment of naval prisoners of war, and, to our
great disgrace, was forced by the enemy to behave itself. And yet behind
all this public blundering and misconduct and futile mischief, the
effective England was carrying on with the most formidable capacity and
activity. The ostensible England was making the empire sick with its
incontinences, its ignorances, its ferocities, its panics, and its
endless and intolerable blarings of Allied national anthems in season
and out. The esoteric England was proceeding irresistibly to the
conquest of Europe.



The Practical Business Men

From the beginning the useless people set up a shriek for "practical
business men." By this they meant men who had become rich by placing
their personal interests before those of the country, and measuring the
success of every activity by the pecuniary profit it brought to them
and to those on whom they depended for their supplies of capital. The
pitiable failure of some conspicuous samples from the first batch we
tried of these poor devils helped to give the whole public side of the
war an air of monstrous and hopeless farce. They proved not only that
they were useless for public work, but that in a well-ordered nation
they would never have been allowed to control private enterprise.



How the Fools shouted the Wise Men down

Thus, like a fertile country flooded with mud, England showed no sign of
her greatness in the days when she was putting forth all her strength to
save herself from the worst consequences of her littleness. Most of
the men of action, occupied to the last hour of their time with urgent
practical work, had to leave to idler people, or to professional
rhetoricians, the presentation of the war to the reason and imagination
of the country and the world in speeches, poems, manifestoes, picture
posters, and newspaper articles. I have had the privilege of hearing
some of our ablest commanders talking about their work; and I have
shared the common lot of reading the accounts of that work given to the
world by the newspapers. No two experiences could be more different. But
in the end the talkers obtained a dangerous ascendancy over the rank and
file of the men of action; for though the great men of action are always
inveterate talkers and often very clever writers, and therefore cannot
have their minds formed for them by others, the average man of action,
like the average fighter with the bayonet, can give no account of
himself in words even to himself, and is apt to pick up and accept what
he reads about himself and other people in the papers, except when the
writer is rash enough to commit himself on technical points. It was not
uncommon during the war to hear a soldier, or a civilian engaged on war
work, describing events within his own experience that reduced to utter
absurdity the ravings and maunderings of his daily paper, and yet echo
the opinions of that paper like a parrot. Thus, to escape from the
prevailing confusion and folly, it was not enough to seek the company of
the ordinary man of action: one had to get into contact with the master
spirits. This was a privilege which only a handful of people could
enjoy. For the unprivileged citizen there was no escape. To him the
whole country seemed mad, futile, silly, incompetent, with no hope of
victory except the hope that the enemy might be just as mad. Only by
very resolute reflection and reasoning could he reassure himself that if
there was nothing more solid beneath their appalling appearances the
war could not possibly have gone on for a single day without a total
breakdown of its organization.



The Mad Election

Happy were the fools and the thoughtless men of action in those days.
The worst of it was that the fools were very strongly represented in
parliament, as fools not only elect fools, but can persuade men of
action to elect them too. The election that immediately followed the
armistice was perhaps the maddest that has ever taken place. Soldiers
who had done voluntary and heroic service in the field were defeated
by persons who had apparently never run a risk or spent a farthing that
they could avoid, and who even had in the course of the election to
apologize publicly for bawling Pacifist or Pro-German at their opponent.
Party leaders seek such followers, who can always be depended on to walk
tamely into the lobby at the party whip's orders, provided the leader
will make their seats safe for them by the process which was called,
in derisive reference to the war rationing system, "giving them the
coupon." Other incidents were so grotesque that I cannot mention them
without enabling the reader to identify the parties, which would not be
fair, as they were no more to blame than thousands of others who must
necessarily be nameless. The general result was patently absurd; and
the electorate, disgusted at its own work, instantly recoiled to the
opposite extreme, and cast out all the coupon candidates at the earliest
bye-elections by equally silly majorities. But the mischief of the
general election could not be undone; and the Government had not only to
pretend to abuse its European victory as it had promised, but actually
to do it by starving the enemies who had thrown down their arms. It had,
in short, won the election by pledging itself to be thriftlessly wicked,
cruel, and vindictive; and it did not find it as easy to escape from
this pledge as it had from nobler ones. The end, as I write, is not yet;
but it is clear that this thoughtless savagery will recoil on the
heads of the Allies so severely that we shall be forced by the sternest
necessity to take up our share of healing the Europe we have wounded
almost to death instead of attempting to complete her destruction.