The Other Side of the Hill

I

SIR WALTER SCOTT had a pleasant phrase for middle life; he called it reaching the other side of the hill. It is a stage which no doubt has its drawbacks. The wind is not so good, the limbs are not so tireless as in the ascent; the stride is shortened, and since we are descending we must be careful in placing the feet. But on the upward road the view was blocked by the slopes and there was no far prospect to be had except by looking backwards. Now the course is mercifully adapted to failing legs; we can rest and reflect, since the summit has been passed; and there is a wide country before us, though the horizon is mist and shadow.

My reminiscences have been written several thousand miles from England, in a country of new problems and high hopes, where the mind has, none the less, been clouded by ihe secular anxieties of Europe. Half-detached and halfembroiled, Canada seems to be in a position much like my own. I have in my lifetime passed from an era of peace through various unsettled stages into a world which, in Sir Thomas More’s phrase, is ‘ruffled and fallen into a wildness,’ but I retain enough of the disengagement of the earlier world to refuse to surrender my right to cheerfulness. I was brought up in times when one was not ashamed to be happy, and I have never learned the art of pessimism. I preserve my devotion to things ‘afar from the sphere of our sorrow.’ It seems to me that those who loudly proclaim their disenchantment with life have never been really enchanted by it; their complaints about the low levels they dwell in ring hollow, for they have not known the uplands.

The memories of a happy past are in themselves a solid possession: —

The possession is the more valuable if such memories arc readily evoked, so that past and present dwell in friendly proximity. This gift has always been mine. I cannot recover the vigor of youth for my limbs, but through memory I can recapture something of its ardor for my mind. The smell of wood smoke and heather, for instance, or a whiff of salt will recall shining morning-lands of the spirit.

But this world of recollection demands gentle handling. It is brittle, like all spiritual things. If too coarsely approached, the bloom wall be rubbed off it like the down on a butterfly’s wing. It will endure in the face of the rudest blast s of change, but it will endure only in clear and bracing weather. If used as an opiate for the mind it becomes a vulgar drug of commerce. Moreover, ‘we receive but what we give.’ It demands a certain tolerant, charitable, enjoying habit of thought, quick to observe and to distill the soul of goodness. The rhetor Dio of Prusa said of Homer that he ‘praised almost everything — animals and plants, water and earth, weapons and horses. He passed over nothing without somehow honoring and glorifying it. Even the one man whom he abused, Thersites, he called “a clear-voiced speaker.”

I have little patience with the antiquarian habit which magnifies the past and shrinks from the present. It is a vicious business to look backward unless the feet are set steadfastly on a forward road. Change is inevitable, at once a penalty and a privilege. The greatest of the Ionian philosophers wrote, ‘It is necessary that things should pass away into that from which they are born. For things must pay one another the penalty of compensation for their injustice according to the ordinances of time.'

An open and flexible mind, which recognizes the need of transformation and faithfully sets itself to apprehend new conditions, is a prerequisite of man’s usefulness. But those who take my point of view will try to bring all change into harmony with the fundamentals drawn from the past. If the past to a man is nothing but a dead hand, then in common honesty he must be an advocate of revolution. But if it is regarded as the matrix of present and future, whose potency takes many forms but is not diminished, then he will cherish it scrupulously and labor to read its lessons, and shun the heady short-cuts which end only in blank walls. He will realize that in the cycle to which we belong we can see only a fraction of the curve, and that properly to appraise the curve, and therefore look ahead, we may have to look back a few centuries to its beginning.

Regard for the past has been therefore both an article of my creed and a principal source of my pleasure in life. But I realize that, while the philosophical doctrine is inexpugnable, connoisseurship in memories is a more debatable business. They are brittle, as I have said, and clumsy hands can destroy them. They may conduce to a maudlin sentimentality. They are also not without a disruptive power, for storms can be brewed by delicious things like salt air and sunshine. If I have escaped these perils (as I trust I have) it is because my life has been so much more one of action than of contemplation. I am very conscious of the pathos of lost things. It is only human to regret the passing of even the shadow of what once was great, a regret which has been the occasion of famous legends: the voice along the Ægean capes that announced the death of Pan; the one-eyed ancient who was Odin and who told King Olaf Tryggvason tales of a vanished world. But I suppose I have a tough prosaic fibre in me, and though I sigh I do not sigh too deeply or too long. Devotion to the past should be like a salad with vinegar; it should have just enough melancholy in it to keep it from cloying.

My lifetime has included more drastic changes in manners and customs and modes of thought than can be shown, I think, by any similar period in history. The mechanical apparatus of living has been transformed. At twenty I thought it an adventure to take a bicycle over certain Highland hill roads; at sixty I was flying across the pack ice in the Arctic! Creeds in politics, in economics, in many branches of science, have gone into the melting pot, and it is not yet clear what is to succeed them. The old classes have been leveled down, and new class distinctions have appeared in many lands based on something much crueler and coarser than the former inequalities.

It is an ugly and comfortless world, but it is a world not without hope — a better world, in spite of its confusion, than the one that in despondent moods I have foreseen. The things which we value may be overlaid and obscured, but I do not think they will be destroyed at the root. My worst nightmare has removed itself. Let me set down the points of that fearsome wildfowl.

II

All of us in the last war had moments when we felt the stable universe dissolving about us. We were like pilgrims who, journeying on a road to an assured and desirable goal, suddenly found themselves on the edge of a precipice with nothing beyond but a great void. The usual way of describing such moods was to say that our civilization had become insecure and was in danger of perishing.

What did we mean by civilization? The little comforts which made life easy and pleasant and gave us leisure; an ordered ritual which enabled us to plan for the future. But our dread was based upon something deeper than the loss of such amenities. By civilization we meant especially the rule of law which gave us freedom to possess our souls. What we feared was a welter of anarchy which would reduce life to its bare rudiments. We defined civilization as something more than the cushioned life made possible by science. It was not a mechanical apparatus, but a spirit. The Greeks of the fifth century before Christ had an existence so simple that to our fevered modern appetites it seems almost brutish. They lived chiefly on fruits and vegetables, their clothes were plain, their amusements were few, their transport was rudimentary; but no one can deny their high civilization. So most of us came to define civilization as the free development of the personality. That involved physical conditions of life lifted above the primitive man’s struggle for bread. It involved an orderly society and the rule of law. But, since these things are negative only, it involved also a soul to develop, a mind which could rejoice in the things of the mind, an impulse towards spiritual perfection.

Clearly such an inner life would not be possible if our whole complex material apparatus were wrecked and we returned to primitive conditions. It demanded an existence raised above the level of urgent bodily wants. What mind prehistoric man possessed must have been wholly engrossed in getting food for himself and his family, in sheltering from the weather, and in saving his skin from the clutches of a sabre-toothed tiger or the malevolence of a neighbor with a club. We can all remember expeditions in the wilds when we were reduced to the extremity of bodily fatigue and could think of nothing except food and rest. For most of us the urgency of physical needs puts an effective damper on any mental activity. Primeval man cannot have had much of an intellectual life. Beyond doubt a return to barbarism, to primitive physical conditions, would play havoc with civilization.

I was never really afraid that this would happen. The modern appurtenances of life seemed to be too firmly established, and the face of the world had been too fully remodeled to meet human needs. I found it impossible to conceive that those inventions on which our community rests could suddenly vanish and reduce us to the days of flint and steel and wooden spades and mud cabins. But imaginative novelists bemused themselves with this conception and pictured a war which laid the whole world waste and left the few survivors in the condition of the cave man. They called it a return to the Dark Ages, by which they meant that epoch in our history which lasted from the fifth century, when the Roman Empire was crumbling, to the eleventh, when the Middle Ages began to develop their own culture.

What were those Dark Ages, those six centuries during which a curtain seemed to descend upon Europe? The invasion of the wild Germanic and Slavonic peoples destroyed the civic life of the western world, the writ of Rome ceased to run, and her central authority crumbled. She had devised a host of inventions which made life comfortable and intercourse between nations easy; clothes and fine furniture and pictures and books and statuary; a nobio architecture, and a plumbing system unsurpassed until modern America; methods of transport unmatched until a century or so ago; a legal fabric which is still largely our code; a civil service which at its best was probably more efficient than any other the world has known. All this went, and in most parts of Europe the forests overpowered the vineyards and cornlands, the famous cities lost half their people, and the public buildings fell into ruins. Instead of the imperial law and the imperial bureaucracy, new governments were formed by shaggy warriors, who either held to their own customs or gave the Roman code a tribal twist. There was little security for life and property, since the Pax Romana was no more. A man’s hand had once again to keep his head. The world shrank into little pockets of humanity who knew nothing about their neighbors. Food and drink and housing were reduced to their beggarly elements, and clothes to a barbaric bareness or a barbaric gaudiness. Civilization, remember, is a complex thing, or rather a thing which attains simplicity through complexity. The life of the Dark Ages was rudimentary, and, being rudimentary, ended in being unbelievably complex.

A curtain of darkness seemed to have settled upon a world which had once been so shining and varied. But there were many points of light in that darkness. There was first of all the Christian Church, which, behind all its political caprices and theological pedantries, did preserve a continuous tradition of civilization and the spiritual life. Throughout those centuries it produced saints and missionaries whose names we still honor. It produced poets whose hymns we slill sing, and in many a monastery tucked away in the forests there were scholars who studied more than the Church Fathers. Much of the literature of Greece and Rome survived in obscure places. Aristotle, or a part of him, was not forgotten, and men could get 1o Plato through Saint Augustine. Moreover, some subtle impact of the old classical tradition was inciting the new masters of the world to a kind of intellectual activity. The invaders who had wrecked the Roman Empire were beginning to devise a law, a poetry, a political philosophy of their own.

Therefore I think that the right way to look at the Dark Ages is as a time of darkness indeed, but with lights cherished in many places which in the end were to combine into a new dawn. The great Mediterranean tradition was obscured but not destroyed; or, to change the metaphor, the world was a field lying fallow, the soil was rich, the seed had been preserved, and one day there were to be a wide sowing and a bountiful harvest.

So I did not dread a return of the Dark Ages. For one thing, I did not believe that that particular kind of retrogression was possible; for another I did not think that it would be such a terrible thing after all. My nightmare, when I was afflicted by nightmare, was of something very different. My fear was not barbarism, which is civilization submerged or not yet born, but decivilization, which is civilization gone rotten.

A certain type of flimsy romantic has been too ready with abuse of a mechanical age, just as a certain type of imaginative writer with a smattering of science has been too gross in his adulation. The machine, when mastered and directed by the human spirit, may lead to a noble enlargement of life. Enterprises which make roads across pathless mountains, collect the waters over a hundred thousand miles to set. the desert blossoming, build harbors on harborless coasts, tame the elements to man’s uses— these are the equivalent today of the great explorations and adventures of the past. So, too, the patient, work of research laboratories, where to the st udent a new and startling truth may leap at any moment from the void. Those who achieve such things are as much imaginative creators as any poet, as much conquerors as any king. If a man so dominates a machine that it becomes part of him, he may thereby pass out of a narrow world to an ampler ether. The true airman is one of the freest of God’s creatures, for he has used a machine to carry him beyond the pale of the machine. He is a creator and not a mechanic, a master and not a slave.

But suppose that science has gained all its major victories, and that there remain only little polishings and adjustments. It has wrested from nature a full provision for human life, so that there is no longer need for long spells of monotonous toil and a bitter struggle for bread. Victory having been won, the impulse to construct has gone. The world has become a huge, dapper, smooth-running mechanism. Would that be the perfecting of civilization? Would it not rather mean de-civilization, a loss of the supreme values of life?

In my nightmare I could picture such a world. I assumed — no doubt an impossible assumption — that mankind was as amply provided for as the inmates of a well-managed orphanage. New inventions and a perfecting of transport had caused the whole earth to huddle together. There was no corner of the globe left unexplored and unexploited, no geographical mysteries to fire the imagination. Broad highways crowded with automobiles threaded the remotest lands, and overhead great air-liners carried week-end tourists to the wilds of Africa and Asia. Everywhere there were guesthouses and luxury hotels and wayside camps and filling stations. What once were the savage tribes of Equatoria and Polynesia were now in reserves as an attraction to trippers, who bought from them curios and holiday mementos. The globe, too, was full of pleasure cities where people could escape the rigor of their own climate and enjoy a perpetual entertainment.

In such a world everyone would have leisure. But everyone would be restless, for there would be no spiritual discipline in life. Some kind of mechanical philosophy of politics would have triumphed, and everybody would have his neat little part in the state machine. Everybody would be comfortable, but, since there could be no great demand for intellectual exertion, everybody would be also slightly idiotic. Men’s shallow minds would be easily bored, and therefore restless. Their life would be largely a quest for amusement. The raffish, jazzcocktail existence led today by certain groups would have become the normal existence of large sections of society.

Some kind of intellectual life no doubt would remain, though the old political disputes would have canceled each other, and the world would not have the stimulus of a contest of political ideals, which is, after all, a spiritual thing. Scientists and philosophers would still spin theories about the universe. Art would be in the hands of coteries, and literature dominated by petites chapelles. There would be religion, too, of a kind, in glossy upholstered churches with elaborate music. It would be a feverish, bustling world, self-satisfied and yet malcontent, and under the mask of a riotous life there would be death at the heart. The soil of human nature, which in the Dark Ages lay fallow, would now be worked out. Men would go everywhere and live nowhere; know everything and understand nothing. In the perpetual hurry of life, there would be no chance of quiet for the sold. In the tumult of a jazz existence, what hope would there be for the still small voices of the prophets and philosophers and poets?

A world which claimed to be a triumph of the human personality would in truth have killed that personality. In such a Utopia, where life would be rationalized and padded with every material comfort, there would be little satisfaction for the immortal part of man. It would be a new Vanity Fair, with Mr. Talkative as the chief figure on the town council. The essence of civilization lies in man’s defiance of an impersonal universe. It makes no difference that a mechanized universe may be his own creation if he allows his handiwork to enslave him. Not for the first time in history have the idols that humanity has shaped for its own ends become its master.

It is a nightmare which may well terrify us, and sometimes I have thought that it was not altogether a nightmare, for it was the logical culmination of certain tendencies which were strong amongst us. It was not the return of the Dark Ages which I feared, but the coming of a too garish age, when life would be lived in the glare of neon lamps and the spirit would have no solitude.

But something has happened. A civilization bemused by an opulent materialism has been met by a rude challenge. The free peoples have been challenged by the serfs. The gutters have exuded a poison which bids fair to infect the world. The beggar-on-horseback will ride more roughshod over the helpless than the cavalier. A combination of multitudes who have lost their nerve and a junta of arrogant demagogues have shattered the comity of nations. The European tradition has been confronted with an Asiatic revolt, with its historic accompaniment of janissaries and assassins. There is in it all, too, an ugly pathological flavor, as if a mature society were being assailed by diseased and vicious children.

For centuries we have enjoyed certain blessings: a stable law, before which the poor man and the rich man were equal; freedom within that law to believe what we pleased, to write what we pleased, to say what we pleased; a system of government which gave the ultimate power to the ordinary man. We have lived by toleration, rational compromise, and freely expressed opinion, and we have lived very well. But we had come to take these blessings for granted, like the air we breathed. They had lost all glamour for us, since they had become too familiar. Indeed, it was a mark of the intellectual to be rather critical and contemptuous of them. Paradoxical young men acquired a cheap reputation by sneering at the liberal spirit in politics, and questioning the value of free discussion, toleration, and compromise.

Today we have seen those principles challenged in the fundamentals, not by a few armchair theorists, but by great powers supported by great armies. We have suddenly discovered that what we took for the enduring presuppositions of our life are in danger of being destroyed. Today we value freedom and toleration, I think, as we have never valued them before. Just as a man never appreciates his home so much as when he is compelled to leave it, so now we realize our inestimable blessings when they are threatened. We have been shaken out of our smugness and warned of a great peril, and in that warning lies our salvation. The dictators have done us a marvelous service in reminding us of the true values of life.

III

These chapters are meant as a record of how the surface of life has appeared to one pilgrim at different stages. They do not contain a confession of faith, in religion, philosophy, or the business of government. I admit an undercurrent of optimism, which, it has been said, is in good times a luxury but in bad times a necessity. With me such cheerfulness, as I prefer to call it, is not a creed to adopt or reject, but a habit of mind, a temperamental bias, a precondition of perception and thought. And it in turn derives from the kind of youth I had. For youth to continue, so that it illumines middle life and old age and pleasantly binds the years together, it must have been spacious, with wide horizons and a tonic air; happy, too, in spite of all the heartbreaks of adolescence. For what it can give to the later phases of life are zest, and freedom, and such gifts are impossible if it was itself bound and frustrate.

In my lifetime I seem to note a change which is a graver thing than our other discontents, which, indeed, is in a large measure the cause of them. The outlook of youth has been narrowed, doors have been sealed, channels have silted up, there is less choice of routes at the crossroads.

This affects principally the middle class. Let me define that odious word. At one end of the social scale is the plutocracy, whose sons will be sufficiently well dowered to indulge their fancy. If they enter a profession they have the security of means behind them. At the other end are the wage-earning classes, who in their health and wealth are largely the care of the State. Between come the ‘middling folk’ in many gradations; their characteristics are that they have to earn their living, since they have no accumulated fortunes, that the State has little responsibility for them, that they have a reasonable average of culture and certain strong traditions of customs, manners, and conduct. This class contains most of the knowledge and skill in the nation. Also, since our nominal aristocracy has been so copiously diluted, it contains most of the older stocks, the people with the longest proved descent.

For this great class the world has become more rigid than I remember it. A young man seems to me to have fewer avenues open to him, and fewer chances in these avenues. I leave out of account the preëminence of mind or character which we call genius, for that will always hew out a course. I am speaking of youth of reasonable capacity and moderate ambitions, which seeks a calling with hope and daylight in it, which is capable of a great effort of patience, but must have a glimpse of some attainable goal.

Wherever I look I seem to detect a deepening and narrowing of ruts. Technological progress, to be sure, has increased their number, but too few emerge into open country. The older universities have now returned to the mediæval practice, and by way of new scholarships are far more accessible to those of scanty means. But what lies at the end of a university course? A high standard of scholarship will no doubt take one into the upper walks of the teaching profession, and a moderate standard perhaps into the civil service, but besides that — what? Too often the only choice is some minor scholastic or clerical job in which a man is apt to stick fast for t he rest of his days. Business is now accepted as a calling for those who have received a liberal education. But does business today give an active man without capital the chances it offered a couple of generations ago? Has it not become so desperately specialized that an ambitious entrant may all his life be condemned to be a minor cog in a huge machine? At the bottom of the class the position is worse. The clerk wdio begins on a pittance may have nothing to look forward to except small yearly increases till he reaches in middle age an income which will just support a household. He has, too, a haunting sense of economic insecurity, for the State takes no interest in his troubles.

The difficulty is not that the path from the log cabin to the White House is not made easy; that wall always need vigorous axe-work and a stout heart. It is that society has become so rigid that average youth is deprived of those modest hopes which are its peculiar grace and the source of its value. And this narrowing of opportunity has come about when its mental outlook has been infinitely broadened. A dozen new means of enlightenment have opened up the world to it and vastly stimulated its interests. The clerk of fifty years ago had no ambition beyond a little house in the suburbs, and was content if he saw himself on the way to its attainment; the same man today, educated, open-eyed, imaginative, chafes bitterly at his confinement in a groove which may be far narrower than that of his predecessors.

The result in the end must be revolution: the most dangerous kind, a revolution of the middle classes. It is on their discontent that the dictators today have based their power. The working classes do not come into the picture; partly because, being nearer the margin of subsistence, they are more likely to be content with what meets their immediate needs and gives them present security; partly because, having less education, they do not suffer from the unsatisfied cravings of the educated. The dictators have won their power largely by an appeal, not to a suffering proletariat, but to the forgotten ’little man’ of the middle classes whom reformers in the past have unaccountably neglected. They have given him a sense of dignity and importance, and opened vistas for him. They have brought him into the inner fold of the State when hitherto he has been a disconsidered outsider. Black and execrable as is most of their work, they have this to their credit: they have restored pride and confidence to large sections of a class which had begun to despair. There lies their strength — and also their doom, when it is realized that the horizon they have revealed to youth is no more than a painted backcloth.

I have had much to do with young men on several continents and in many countries, and I regard this shrinking of opportunity as one of the gravest facts of our age. It will remain an urgent matter long after the guns are silent. Somehow or other we must make our social and economic world more fluid. We must widen the approaches so that honest ambition and honorable discontent may have elbowroom. The world must remain an oyster for youth to open. If not, youth will cease to be young, and that will be the end of everything.

There is another side to the problem. With all our reservoir of skill and knowledge, there is a lamentable dearth today of the higher talent. Or rather, while this talent must exist, it is uncommonly difficult to lay one’s hand on it. Anyone who has had experience in such matters knows how hard it often is to find men for the higher posts in finance, industry, journalism, and academic and political life. Admittedly the talent is somewhere, if we have any confidence in our fellow men, but how to find it? The Miltons may remain forever mute and inglorious, the Hampdens only village worthies. If our society were more open-meshed and elastic it should be possible for a shining gift to reveal itself before it is too late. Were I a multimillionaire, I would devote my fortune to making an inquisition for the discovery of genius, so that those fitted to be our leaders should get their feet out of the mire in time to help the world. For in the last resort it is not the machine that matters, but the man.

IV

The dominant thought of youth is the bigness of the world, of age its smallness. As we grow older we escape from the tyranny of matter and recognize that the true centre of gravity is in the mind. Also we lose that sense of relativity which is so useful in normal life, provided it does not sour into cynicism, and come more and more to acclaim absolute things — goodness, truth, beauty. From a wise American scholar I take this sentence: ‘The tragedy of man is that he has developed an intelligence eager to uncover mysteries, but not strong enough to penetrate them. With minds but slightly evolved beyond those of our animal relations, we are tortured with precocious desires, and pose questions, which we are sometimes capable of asking but rarely are able to answer.’ With the recognition of our limitations comes a glimpse of the majesty of the ‘Power not ourselves.’ Religion is born when we accept the ultimate frustration of mere human effort, and at the same time realize the strength which comes from union with superhuman reality.

Today the quality of our religion is being put to the test. The conflict is not only between the graces of civilization and the rawness of barbarism. More is being challenged than the system of ethics which we believe to be the basis of our laws and liberties. I am of Blake’s view: ‘Man must and will have some religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus he will have the religion of Satan, and will erect a synagogue of Satan.’ There have been high civilizations in the past which have not been Christian, but in the world as we know it I believe that civilization must have a Christian basis, and must ultimately rest on the Christian Church. Today the Faith is being attacked, and the attack is succeeding. Thirty years ago Europe was nominally a Christian continent. It is no longer so today. In Europe, as in the era before Constantine, Christianity is in a minority. What Gladstone wrote seventy years ago, in a moment of depression, has become a shattering truth: ‘I am convinced that the welfare of mankind does not now depend on the State and the world of politics; the real battle is being fought in the world of thought, where a deadly attack is made with great tenacity of purpose and over a wide field upon the greatest treasure of mankind, the belief in God and the Gospel of Christ.’

The Christian in name has in recent years been growing cold in his devotion. Our achievement in perfecting the material apparatus of life has produced a mood of self-confidence and pride. Our peril has been indifference, and that is a grave peril, for rust will crumble a metal when hammer blows will only harden it. I believe — and this is my crowning optimism — that the challenge with which we are now faced may restore to us that manly humility which alone gives power. It may bring us back to God. In that case our victory is assured. The Faith is an anvil which has worn out many hammers.

We are condemned to fumble in these times, for the mist is too thick to see far down the road. But in all our uncertainty we can have Cromwell’s hope. ‘ To be a Seeker is to be of the best sect next to a Finder, and such an one shall every faithful, humble Seeker be at the end.’ So, as a tailpiece to these memoirs I would transcribe a sentence of Henry Adams: ‘After all, man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down and pray.’ Dogmatism gives place to questioning, and questioning in the end to prayer.