On Facing Facts . . .

he desires in the present. Anyone of the Utopias, or visions of the future, such as were written by Wells or William Morris or Bellamy or any number of others, is simply a patchwork of the past. It can be taken to pieces, and analysed into its component parts in the memories of mankind; a scientific appliance taken from the nineteenth century; a type of craftsmanship taken from the fourteenth century; a sort of diet taken from the Orientals; a sort of drapery taken from the Greeks. The real disadvantage of this sort of Futurism is that it is much too much disposed to dig in the past; to dig anywhere so long as it is in the past; but, above all, to dig in the most remote past. Thus the Communists tell us that Communism prevailed in some prehistoric period, and many Pacifists support their ideal by a theory that war was a late and artificial addition to the early history of man. Where there is, perhaps, a real need of correction is in correcting this. It is in bringing back these wandering antiquaries from the remote past to the recent past. The most dangerous gap in general knowledge is the gap in the minds of most men about what happened to their own fathers. They often know rather more about what happened to their grandfathers, and much more about what happened to their great-grandfathers.

Let me, like a good patriot, begin by critizing the defects o£ my own country. Nobody understands England today, and nobody will understand England tomorrow, least of all the Englishman, if he does not realize that a thousand things in his whole mind and make-up refer back to a fairly recent fact; that he was in the nineteenth century the richest man in the world; we might even say the only rich man in the world. It was not only prosperity, but this isolation in prosperity, that made him insular. For it is not islands that make us insular. Nobody ever said that the old Greek islands were particularly insular. The materialistic attempt to explain man by material conditions is always wrong. It was this peculiar prosperity of the Englishman in an exhausted Europe, after Waterloo (or, rather, the philosophy producing and pursuing it), that produced endless eccentricities that still remain.

In that very Victorian novel, The Woman in White, that very Victorian villain, Sir Percival Clyde, says to the Italian villain: "You foreigners are all alike." He said it to Count Fosco, who was not at all like most other foreigners, let us hope, and, in any case, was an Italian, and therefore utterly different from a Russian or a Spaniard. But what Sir Percival meant, in the language of his time, was that all foreign Counts were beggarly foreign Counts. Count Fosco, he felt, would have been quite as beggarly if he had been a Spanish -£200;}-

Count or a Russian Count. Now no other nation in Europe had that queer and sweeping generalization. There were any number o£ Jingoes and Imperialists and exaggerated patriots in all the countries of Europe. But no French chauvinist thought that a Prussian was pretty much the same sort o£ person as a Portuguese. No Russian Imperial statesman thought the Poles were the same as the Germans, however much he might be oppressing one or plotting against the other. No Austrian thought the English must be like the Turks, merely because they were not like the Austrians. That peculiar sort of sweeping view of "foreigners" was peculiar to the English mind, and it has not entirely vanished from the English subconscious mind. It was rooted in the mood which first tolerated, and then worshipped, the towering fortunes made by the great Whig nobles, overtopping the Crown itself; as in the celebrated phrase of Queen Victoria herself, who said to one of them: "I come from my house to your palace." It was perfectly true that, compared to those Dukes at that period, almost every foreign Count was a beggarly Count. Only some of us happen to hold a philosophy by which being a beggar might be even better than being a Count.

Now it is the same in another way with the Germans, or, rather, especially with the Prussians. Only I will mingle my confessions with this last patriotic boast; that I do think that the English, however muddle-headed, have more common sense. About the time, or a little after the time, of the great English prosperity came the brief and brilliant period of Prussian victory. At Sadowa, the Prussian sabre suddenly knocked the sceptre out of the hand of the Holy Roman Emperor. Hardly anybody realizes the importance of that stroke, so wholly do we live in our own time and so little in our fathers' time. The effect was enormous; more enormous than the earthquake of 1870 in France. For it has, in fact, transferred the sceptre and everything else from the old German Emperors on the Danube to the new German Emperors on the Spree. It is proved in the very fact that when we said "The Kaiser," we did not mean the old historic Kaiser; that when we say "Germany," we do not mean what men from the twelfth to the eighteenth century meant by the Empire of the Germans. Then followed the more sensational capture of Paris and violent acquisition of two unquestionably French Provinces. Now the Germans have been living ever since on that brief triumphant period, more fully and blindly than we are living on our brief prosperous period. They are a race naturally mythological and living in the clouds, as one of their own greatest poets very truly said. The crash of the economic depression has come to us; and we at least have begun to suspect dimly that we are not quite so rich as we were. But the crash of the Great War, and the defeat, came to them; and they simply could not believe it. For a time they were stunned; which was called the interlude of enlightened government. But they had always been told that they were invincible, and, sooner or later, at some date long enough after the defeat, they were due to begin boasting again that they are invincible.

That is the meaning of Hitler and the whole hysteria of today. Mythology has returned; the clouds are rolling over the landscape, shutting out the broad daylight of fact; and Germans are wandering about saying they will dethrone Christ and set up Odin and Thor, But we cannot understand it by looking only at the last ten years of peace, or even at the original five years of war. The meaning of it, like the meaning of the insular placidity even of the most bewildered Englishman, is hidden in those previous years which are often forgotten, between the end of history and the beginning of journalism. We must realize how strongly the German believed, as in Luther's hymn, that he was in an impregnable fortress; just as the Englishman once believed that he was in an unbreakable Bank. But, as I say, when all is fairly considered, and that without -£203 > insular prejudices, I do think that the English come out the better of the two. We are beginning to let it dawn on us, in a dazed way, that we are not in a position to patronize the whole world in the matter of money, and we shall put up with our poverty in as manly a manner as we may. But at least we do not all go mad and rush out into the street screaming that we are all millionaires; we do not recognize the general rum by shouting that all our own pockets are stuffed with pearls and diamonds; we do not tell an astounded world that we are still as rich as we were when Consols were at their highest. And that would be the commercial parallel to the madness of Mr. Hitler.

XXXII On Free Verse

THE problem of Free Verse, like trie problem of the African Race in the American Republic, seems to be rather more problematical after it has been freed than it was before it was freed. Anybody now can print as much free verse as he likes, without being out of fashion, or even against convention. And yet the thing has never become quite normal; even if it becomes universal. There remains a puzzle about it; about exactly how far a more regular rhythm was a harmony or a restraint, which makes every scrap of verse without metre or rhyme turn into a sort of riddle; and a riddle (we may remark) generally did sound most mystical and alluring when it was in metre and rhyme. The primary case for free verse was always fair enough, so far as it went. There certainly are verbal rhythms which are not exactly those of any classical metre, but which do produce an effect which is not merely that of prose, but rather of a sort of chant or incantation. There are a great many in the English translation of the Bible. "O my son Absalom; O Absalom my son"; "Or ever the silver cord be loosed and the golden bowl is broken;