On the Deceptibility of Youth

familiar as mutton-chops. I myself am just old enough to remember seeing such things at least in old family-albums and early photographs. So that the Chelsea artist does not look to me in the least like a Spanish anarchist. He looks like a rather dowdy Victorian stockbroker; as if he had gone to a masquerade ball as his own grandfather. Many an ardent youth may have followed the Futuristic vision of Plus-Fours where his elders could see nothing but a faint ancestral memory of Pegtop-Trousers. The disappearance of beards in the twentieth century would not seem new to a Shavian Methuselah, who remembered them disappearing in the seventeenth century; nor would he hail it as a cosmic daybreak, or salute the happy and hairy morn, even if fashion imitated the beard of D. H. Lawrence, exactly as it might have imitated the beard of Alfred Tennyson. But a very young person, following immediately on the age of D. H. Lawrence, might regard a beard as a bold bad Bolshevist sort of thing. The question of these recurrences and resemblances, or partial resemblances, is almost entirely a question of living long enough; and a woman who lived long enough might find herself, after a century or two of progress, as particular about powdering her nose as she had once been about powdering her hair. In any case, these trivialities reveal the real truth as clearly as do more serious truths. The new generation may be admirable in a hundred ways; it may be superior to any number of old generations in any number of ways. There is only one thing which the new generation cannot possibly or conceivably be. It cannot be the best judge of what is new.

I entirely agree that it does not supremely matter whether it is new, so long as it is true. A generation might reproduce unconsciously and almost automatically a whole social system as dead as ancient Egypt or Etruria, imagining it was a brand-new Utopia that even Mr. Wells had never thought of. And it would not very much matter, so long as Etruria really had some of the virtues of Utopia. But it does make a difference in the tone and spirit of the innovator; precisely because we know that Etruria was not Utopia. We might bring back a better state of things out of the past, but no sensible person thinks there was a perfect state of things in the past; though many are strictly and very strangely taught to suppose that there must be one in the future. That is the real difference between the man who knows he is restoring an old thing and the man who thinks he knows that he is inventing a new thing. We may see men wearing three-cornered hats and declaring them to be founded on the new mathematical diagrams; we may see them covering themselves with armour in battle and calling it an entirely new extension of the Steel Industry; we may see them wearing sandals like the ancient Romans and imagining they are improving on the latest fad of the latest Russians; we may see them wearing nothing but Woad and calling it Nudism and the New Simplicity. But there will always be that amount of difference between these innocent characters and those who may do similar things, but who possess a knowledge of history, which is simply a knowledge of humanity. These latter will always know that even the return of good things will not be the return of perfect things. Sandals may or may not favour simplicity; but they did not turn Nero into a saint or even a vegetarian. The days when knights were bold were days when a reasonable number of knights were bad; and three-cornered hats may be in mathematical shapes, but they rested on a good many unmathematical heads. These are but burlesque instances; but the truth is equally true of symbols and associations that are quite seriously believed. There have been many intelligent and distinguished moderns, who have thought quite gravely that certain great changes in habit or manners, in diet or discipline of life, would make practically all men good and happy. There is only one person who is immune from that illusion. And that is the man who happens to know that nearly every one of these diets and disciplines has already existed somewhere; where it did not prevent people from being as naughty or silly as they chose.

The same principle can be seen in practical politics. Many great revolts or reforms, or other social outbreaks, can best be explained by noting the date at which some old experience was no longer even dated, but had gone really and truly out of date. It had become so old that it could easily become new. Thus such revolutions happen, not at the moment when men have found something, but rather at the moment when they have forgotten something. Something has gone out of sight just long enough for people to see it as quite different, if it appears again. Not enough note has been taken in history of these dates of oblivion; as distinct from dates of recognition; for, indeed, they are dates of lack of recognition.

By the time that Europe, especially Northern Eu-rope, threw itself so enthusiastically into national politics, and a complete division of the provinces of Christendom from each other, it had had time to forget what an infernal nuisance it had once been found to live in an anarchy of tribes and towns, all with different gods and incompatible ambitions; as it had been before the Order of the Roman Empire; before politics had been unified by Caesar or religion by Constantine. When men had got far enough away from barbarism and blind wars to forget what they were like, they instantly plunged into them again. The moment, of all moments, in which we should be most careful to recall the real dangers and difficulties of any idea, is the moment when it comes back revived, and perhaps rightly revived, after long periods of neglect, and refreshed by the sleep of centuries. I do not say that we should not welcome its revival, or accept its return to triumph; but I do say that it is at exactly that moment that we should remember its demerits, while trying to restore its merits. The danger is that we shall produce some sort of frozen and fanatical copy; for which one generation will be madly enthusiastic, and with which the next generation will probably be bored stiff. The great men of the French Revolution, who were none the less great because many small reactionary schools have tried to belittle them, did undoubtedly fall very heavily into this error. It was so many thousand years since anybody had really inhabited a small and primitive City State, of the early Pagan model, that they dug up their ideal republics like buried temples and worshipped the statues of the Virtues as idols so strange as to be almost new. Because they had at last grown a little tired of Aquinas and Scotus, they never thought how quickly the very schoolboys they taught would grow tired of Cato and Seneca. This warning from the Revolution is a warning also to the Counter-Revolution; and the Fascists must be careful that we do not grow as weary of the Black Shirt as most of us have of the Red.

XVIII On the Duke of Marlborough

THE newspapers have always associated Mr. Winston Churchill with dashing and daring enterprises; and it is not taking sides to say that his experiments in war and politics have been condemned by his foes as imprudent, and praised even by his friends as impetuous. Whatever name be given to the diversions of Gallipoli or Antwerp, there can be no doubt that he has since started out on the bold and steep and even staggering adventure of white-washing the moral character of the original John Churchill. Intellectual courage of that order demands respect and even a sort of sympathy. It is true that we live in an age in which the justification of Judas Iscariot has become quite a hackneyed piece of sentiment for the films. But at least Judas Iscariot was not a soldier. And John Churchill did not hang himself.

The debate that revolves, or will probably revolve, round this book concerns me here rather than the book itself. For the question divides itself into two parts; one of which is doubtless dealt with very ably in the book; and the other is dealt with almost exclu-