When a military expert wishes to be very technical and professional he refers to the killed, wounded, and missing as the wastage of an army. To those who do not share his preoccupation with the problems of grand strategy, the word connotes a cold and calculated horror based on a fatal disregard of human cost. It is natural, then, to fall back upon the old platitude that in war life is cheap; cheaper than guns, cheaper than dreadnoughts, cheaper even than intelligent diplomacy.
If we go behind this simple idea, however, we find curious distinctions reflected in ordinary feelings about the war. There was General Joffre's statement that the French would not waste men in furious assaults. In England this was received with approval, mixed with the feeling that the British were standing the worst of the racket. Most curious, however, was the English attitude towards the Russians. The Russians were conceived as an inexhaustible horde which could be poured endlessly against German guns. The value of individual Russians was ridiculously low as compared with individual Englishmen. In America the loss of two thousand Austrians would seem as nothing beside the loss of two thousand Englishmen. If the Canadians were to suffer heavily, we should feel it still more, no doubt.
When the Titanic sank, it was very noticeable that the anguish of the first-cabin passengers meant more to the newspapers than did that of the crew or steerage; and of the first-cabin passengers, it was the well known people in whom was dramatized the full terror of the disaster. When a man is run over, the amount of space given to a report of the accident seems to depend very closely either on his social importance in the community, or on whether he is injured under circumstances which might apply to highly regarded elements of the population. The injuries of foreign born laborers on construction work are hardly reported. It is estimated that one man is killed for every floor added to a skyscraper, but the fact does not rise to the level of popular interest. The value of a life seems to increase only as it emerges from a mass and becomes individualized. So long as great populations remain politically inert, so long as they can be treated in lumps, so long as they can be manipulated from above, they will be lightly used or easily disregarded.
It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it. That is why democracies tend to be peaceful. In them the importance of each person has been enlarged, and the greater the equality, the less able are small groups to use their fellows as brute instruments. Democracies are compelled to look toward peaceful adjustments because the cost of war is too tremendous for them. The mere fact that at a certain level of comfort and self-respect the birth-rate declines makes the conservation of life imperative. It is in democracies based on fairly well distributed economic opportunity and a modicum of education that birth ceases to be a wholesale accident and becomes a considered purpose. France is such a democracy, and France does not spend life easily.
The large measure of equality which she has achieved by a prudent birth-rate, a tolerable level of well-being, and a tradition of human rights, has made dreams of lavish conquest forever impossible to her. She will defend what she has with superb courage, but she cannot dominate the world.
There, perhaps, is the most important relation between social reform and the problem of peace. The aggressors of the future are likely to be the nations in which life is cheap, and the hope of international order rests with those countries in whom personality has become too valuable to be squandered. This is why the whole world waits the democratization of Germany, Russia and Japan.
But even the so-called democracies are far from a decent sense of the value of life. Here in America life is extraordinarily cheap. There is almost no task so dull, so degrading or so useless but you can find plenty of human beings to do it. You can hire a man to walk up and down the avenue carrying a sign which advertises a quack dentist. You can hire rows of men for the back line of the chorus, just standing them there to fill up space. You can hire a man to sit next to the chauffeur; he is called a footman and his purpose is to make the owner of the car a bit more comfortable and a great deal more magnificent. There are women known as lady's maids whose business it is to dress up other women. There are flunkies whose mission it is to powder their hair, put on white stockings and gold-trimmed knee-breeches and flank the threshold of great houses. It is possible to hire any number of caretakers for empty houses, bellhops to fetch for you, even mourners to mourn for you.
Every city is full of women whose lives are gray with emptiness, who sit for hours looking out of the window, who rock their chairs and gossip, and long for the excitement that never comes. Unloved and unloving, and tragically unused, the world seems to have passed them by. Our cities are full of those caricatured homes, the dose, curtained boarding houses to which people come from the day's drudgery to the evening's depression, the thousands of hall bedrooms in which hope dies and lives the ghost of itself in baseball scores and in movies, in the funny page and in Beatrice Fairfax, in purchased romance and in stunted reflections of the music-hall.
It is not strange that in war we spend life so easily, or that our anxiety to lower the death-rate of babies, to keep the sick alive, to help the criminal and save the feeble-minded, seems to many a trifling humanitarianism. The notion that every person is sacred, that no one is a means to some one else's end, this sentiment which is the heart of democracy, has taken only slight hold upon the modern world. It is still hardly questioned that men should die to protect concessions, to collect debts, to hold markets, to glorify their king, to avenge imaginary insults. In the industrial world men are used as 'hands,' kept waiting in idle crowds to fill casual jobs, put at work that exhausts and pays almost nothing, blocked in occupations from which they cannot learn, from which they become forever unfitted to escape. Women are used as drudges, as recreation, as things to jest about or to appropriate, because all through our civilization there runs an appalling insensitiveness and disregard. We have not yet made life dignified and valuable in itself, we have not yet made it a sufficient treasury of good things, have not infused it with the riches which men will not wantonly waste.
Human life will become valuable as we invest in it. The child that is worth bearing, nursing, tending and rearing, worth educating, worth making happy, worth building good schools and laying out playgrounds for, worth all the subtle effort of modern educational science, is becoming too valuable for drudgery, too valuable for the food of cannon. It is because for some years we have been putting positive values into life that this war appalls us more than it would have appalled our ancestors. And just so far as we can induce the state to sink money and attention in human beings, by just so much do we insure ourselves against idle destruction.
This is the best internal defense against those amongst us who may be dreaming of aggression. Every dollar and every moment of care devoted to increasing the individual importance of people, all skill and training, all fine organization to humanize work, every increase of political expression, is a protection against idle use of our military power, against any attempt to convert legitimate and necessary preparation for defense into an instrument of conquest. It may be said with justice that the man is dangerous who talks loudly about military preparation and is uninterested in social reform. It is the people engaged in adding to the value of civilization who have earned the right to talk about its defense.
The opposition to a minimum wage law for women is curiously compounded of interested employers, abstract theorists and conservative and radical unionists. It presents a picture of the I.W.W., department store managers, Samuel Gompers, and a half dozen professional economists fighting side by side. The relation between republican France and autocratic Russia is a simple harmony compared this group of allies so single-minded for such various reasons. We do not pretend to have fathomed the reasons, for they range all the way from the reasons of employers who liked sweating, through those of thinkers who believe in laissez-faire, to those of labor unionists who wish to monopolize the interests of the workers. In this network of confused opposition the New York State Factory Investigation Commission is now hesitating. The Commission is to report to the Legislature in January, but its decision is now in the making, and there is danger that the strength of the opposition may balk its recommendations.
Against every form of opposition must be weighted the supreme fact that there are industries in the State which do no pay enough wages to support life. Even if the minimum wage did not have behind it a long record of fairly successful practice, any proposal to end such a condition would be an experiment which New York State could afford to try, and should. No other agency has yet been suggested which reaches the most deeply exploited groups of women workers, and none which proposes in direct and dignified fashion to place them within the state bulwarks below which American civilization shall not sink.
To those who complain that the sweated industries could not survive, the obvious and irrefutable answer is that industries which can’t support themselves are uneconomic and should not be subsidized out of the health and sanity of their employees. If any subsidy is necessary, if the real cause of bad conditions isn’t an intolerable inefficiency, then the subsidy should be public and frank. To those who fear State interference the answer is that voluntary action has failed. To those who point out that much of this sweated labor is incompetent the reply is that it must either be made competent of treated openly as a public charge. To those who realize the administrative difficulties of minimum wage legislation the reply is that wisdom and skill are made by experience.
The dictatorship of Senator Long presents a question of principle about which there is a dangerous confusion in the minds of many who believe in democracy. The question is whether men must acquiesce in the overthrow of democracy if the dictator can obtain the support of a majority of the voters. I believe there can be only one answer to that question. To answer in the affirmative would be to reduce democracy to an absurdity. It would mean that today's majority had the right to deprive tomorrow's majority of its rights. Who can make such a claim? Who will say that a dictator may use free institutions to destroy free institutions? That a temporary majority may impose its transient will upon all future majorities? That men may use freedom of speech to acquire the power to destroy freedom of speech? That they may use elections to abolish elections? That they may exploit the constitutional guarantees to subvert them?
The idea that a dictatorship may be established by democratic processes is a sophistry. It could be entertained only in an age when men had enjoyed liberty so long that they had for-gotten what it means and how it was won.
One can have respect for dictators who overthrow free institutions by force and frankly say they intend to rule by force. But dictators who were elected, and then pretend to rule by popular consent, though they have destroyed the institutions through which the popular will can express itself freely, are practicing an ugly fraud. And those who acquiesce in the tyranny because it was achieved by majority rule are pretending to be convinced when in fact they are cowed.
Free institutions are not the property of any majority. They do not confer upon majorities unlimited powers. The rights of the majority are limited rights. They are limited not only by the constitutional guarantees but by the moral principle implied in those guarantees. That principle is that men may not use the facilities of liberty to impair them. No man may invoke a right in order to destroy it. The right of free speech belongs to those who are willing to preserve it. The right to elect belongs to those who mean to transmit that right to their successors. The rule of the majority is morally justified only if another majority is free to reverse that rule.
To hold any other view than this is to believe that democracy alone, of all forms of government, is prohibited by its own principles from insuring its own preservation. It is high time that free men repudiated so preposterous a doctrine. There is nothing in the principles of democracy which requires a people to surrender democracy or relieves them of the obligation to defend it.
In many countries in the world today there are armed bands of men using the democratic liberties of free assemblage and of free speech to organize for the overthrow of democratic liberties. Is there any doubt that democratic governments have the right to suppress them? If they become strong, that they have the duty to suppress them? That there is no democratic right to destroy democracy and that revolutionists against democracy may be tolerated only if they are so weak as to be negligible ?
A free nation can tolerate much, and ordinarily toleration is its best defense. It can telerate feeble Communist parties and feeble Fascist parties as long as it is certain that they have no hope of success. But once they cease to be debating societies and become formidable organizations for action, they present a challenge which it is suicidal to ignore. They use liberty to assemble force to destroy liberty. When that challenge is actually offered, when it really exists in the judgment of the sober and the well-informed, it is a betrayal of liberty not to defend it with all the power that free men possess.
Of all sneers none is so carelessly thrown as the charge of cowardice. To call a man a coward is almost to obliterate him from discussion. The man who uses the term always implies that he himself, of course, is a brave man. He acquires at once a kind of moral superiority, and puts his opponent on the defensive. Caution and reason thus become positive vices, every honest doubt is made the mark of a timid soul. Those who want twenty dreadnoughts regard as cowards those who want ten; the advocates of forty dreadnoughts look with scorn upon the advocates of twenty. Men who wish to prepare against one possible enemy are cowards in the eyes of those who wish to prepare against two possible enemies. The proposers of a much larger army are tinged with yellow in the eyes of the conscriptionists. In America we are fast getting into the frame of mind where the scale of courage is measured by what the wildest jingo proposes as the correct method of licking creation.
Since all men resent being known as cowards, the jingo has an enormous advantage in any argument. He bullies men into agreeing with him by playing on their fear of appearing to be cowardly. He hammers upon moral cowardice in order to drive people into an attitude of rhetorical bravery. It is an old, old trick, but it works. Take two elderly men both over military age. Let the rumor of war appear. The man who is ready to sacrifice other people's lives at short notice appears as the hero; the moderate person who resists the stampede and braves the denunciation for doing so, is somehow labeled coward. In the German Reichstag the men who upheld the war party could pose as the gallant pacifists; Liebknecht, who stood up unmoved against the storm, was put down a coward. But, by any just estimate, where was the courage and where the timidity? Who had that iron in his soul of which free men are made? In England there is now bitter discussion between those who want a sensible peace and those who will set no limits to their vengeance. Which position is the easy one, the soft one, the one of the molly-coddles? Which position requires courage, and which requires nothing but the willingness to drift with the current?
The courage of the battlefield and the courage of the editorial sanctum are not identical. Courage is not so simple a virtue. At a dinner table, in a drawing-room, on the stump, in the Senate, the easy attitude is to follow the loudest declamation, to go with, not against, the violence of the tribe. It involves usually no risk, and it is almost always a cheap way to approval. Yet there is no guarantee that the fiber of a people is sound because no one appears who is willing to risk the sneers of the angriest. It may be that the people who are ready to sacrifice popularity, to face ridicule, to stand out for reason and adjustment, are the people who really have the bravery that freedom requires. Not to be afraid of being called a coward has been often recognized as a high order of courage.
It would be a great gain if our military agitators would use words like coward and poltroon with more discrimination. They are not synonymous with a desire for peace, with an opposition to conscription, with a determination not to invade Mexico because some bandits have committed a crime. All men less violent than the most violent have not white hearts and yellow souls. All are not cowards who wish to weigh carefully the purpose of armaments that mean a break with the whole tradition of American life. All are not poltroons who insist upon analyzing the intention of those who wish to make us the greatest military nation on earth. All are not spineless who think that the honor of a democracy is not that of a Spanish grandee.
The cause of preparedness is not helped by floating it upon a stream of jingoism. Many of us think there are powerful reasons for re-defining American policy and preparing armaments to uphold it, but the cause is endangered and made odious by those who treat it as an issue between cowards and heroes. The military propagandists will, if they don't look out, have taken so extreme a position that the American people may regard them as a greater danger than any possible foreign enemy. They are feeding the deep and experienced suspicion of ordinary men that all armament leads to militarism, that any concession provokes the appetite of those who like the virtues of war better than the virtues of peace, who like military equipment for its own sake and propose to rule the nation in its interest.
There is in America today the beginning of that very military arrogance which we are told this war is being fought to abolish. It shows itself in contempt for all efforts toward peace, in programs of armament that are the vistas of a nightmare, in denunciation of the virtues that make a free and tolerant people, in a hatred of other points of view, in the attempt to haze and ostracize those who have different opinions, and in the assertion of a brittle, touchy impatience at the thought that anything human can be adjusted without slamming the table and rattling the windows.
The militarists are forcing the issue in such a way as to consolidate the opposition. If the American people have to choose between their virulence and the amiable intentions of the official pacifists they will follow the pacifists. They will risk the Monroe Doctrine and American prestige in the East, they will prefer the defeat of a foreign policy in some future war to any proposal to deliver the country into the hands of those who in the last months have got deeper and deeper into their own violence. The real desire of Americans is to make a civilization in America. They will prepare what is necessary to defend that; they may even be induced to take a share in the policing of the world. But they do not, want to be told that war is a gymnasium of the virtues; they know it to be the stinking thing that it is. They want no extra gold lace and no more tom-toms than are necessary. They do not wish to spend their energy in dreaming war games. If they have to fight they will do it sadly, and with as little bombast as possible. Their condemnation of Germany in this war is based on what they believe to be a dangerous military psychology in the rules of Germany, and they are shrewd enough to detect and resent that same psychology when it crops up in America.
The Atlantic Monthly has just published an article by Mr. R. K. Hack called 'Drift' which sets itself the task of explaining why the world is in such confusion. The true father of the essay is Mr. Chesterton, though the breed has been crossed with that peculiar hysterical pedantry which has affected Boston culture since August, 1914. Chesterton is visible not only in the vein of jocose theology and overwhelming intimacy with God but also in that famous rhetorical trick which consists in beginning with an earthly joke and ending with a divine pun. Used by Mr. Chesterton the method, when it does not rattle and creak like a penny-a-liner, often produces a flamboyant wisdom and a gorgeous playfulness. But in Mr. Hack's hands it produces screaming nonsense like his description of Hobbes as 'the great atheist, coward and logician,' and the worst case of muddle-headedness recently printed in a responsible periodical.
Mr. Hack begins by asking why we are where we are. He turns to the historians, and in two pages rejects them. The historians he has happened to read did not predict the war; therefore, says Mr. Hack, 'let us not blame them overmuch, but let us not trust them at all.' That there is a whole library of books by students of affairs which predicted the war with extraordinary accuracy Mr. Hack seems entirely unaware. He doesn't like 'historians' as a species, and he has a thesis to prove. This thesis is that we drift because we have been wrong for a century in our ideas about the function of the state and the function of science.
No doubt we have been wrong about the state and no one will quarrel with Mr. Hack for offering a homily about the evil of blind partisanship and the seriousness of indifference on the part of the ordinary citizen. But it is not carrying the diagnosis very far. Partisanship and indifference must after all have causes which cannot be controlled until they have been studied by that method which drives Mr. Hack to angry epigrams, the method known as science.
Mr. Hack's view of science is based on a simple formula. The Germans are the most scientifically trained people in the world. With science they have produced the Zeppelin which is used to kill babies. Therefore the world is idolatrous if it trusts its future to science. There is true and false science. True science deals only with things that are not 'alive.' False science includes all the studies which 'pretend to deal with living beings'--biology, psychology, sociology, philology, politics, economics, and history. These false sciences have perverted our souls, and that is why we drift.
The formula may be compressed. The Germans are science. Science is the Zeppelin. The Zeppelin is murder. Therefore, science is hell. But is it? Can any one be mad enough to argue that the development of science in the nineteenth century suddenly made mankind cruel? There were 'Huns' before the Germans, and we doubt whether Attila ever read a book on political science. No one would accuse the people who produced the massacre of St. Bartholomew or the Armenian slaughters of a passion for science. It was not 'science' which created the inquisition, the pogrom, the Roman circus, or the old days at Sing Sing. It wasn't science which demanded the burning of witches, the exposure of innocents, the conquest, rapine, and greed of human history. One wonders why a man is endowed with a mind if it leads him to believe that cruelty, greed, and delusion are new phenomena due to a century's application of ordered intelligence to experience.
Because Germany has used science so widely, it does not follow that she has used it everywhere. Indeed, it is precisely to those political ideas which have irritated the world that Germany has not applied her science. If it is true that the Emperor regards himself as a ruler by divine right, he will not find any support for the theory in modern sociology; if Professor So-and-So believes that the Teutons, whoever they may be, are a 'race' with a divine mission he is drawing upon his inner consciousness. If somebody else thinks that war is 'holy,' that is due not to the careful use of his intelligence, but to his rather eccentric notion of what is holy. If Germany had tried to conduct the technique of her com-merce and her warfare with the habit of mind in which her spokesmen often glorified her, Germany today would be as inefficient as Venezuela and as helpless as Persia.
Were Mr. Hack to take anything more than a literary interest in scientists he would soon discover that they are quite capable of reserving larger parts of their souls from analysis. They can be scientists about physics and commonplace or superstitious about politics, and that, it seems to us, is what the articulate Germans have proved themselves to be. In those areas which Mr. Hack calls 'living' they have remained romantic and obscurantist and religiously patriotic. The moral of the war is not that science has given men the Zeppelin where formerly they had to be content with the spear and the arrow, but that the scientific habit has not yet invaded those dogmas of glory and power and self-interest which are our primitive inheritance.
The political ideas which generated this war, the theories of national interest, prestige, honor, patriotism are not the products of science, but territory which science has still to conquer. The brute and the fool in mankind were not produced in the laboratory. Mr. Hack may rest assured that they are a good deal older than Newton or Darwin. Only in spots has man learned to transfigure the mud from which he rose, but that transfiguration is due to the disciplined use of his intelligence. He has hardly begun to apply his mind to politics, but the beginning is an endless promise, and it is a realization of that promise which has made this war intolerable beyond any other.
A man was taken the other day to a soiree of artists and serious thinkers. He had never been to such a gathering before, and he was totally ignorant of the rules. Fool that he was, he thought it expected of him to show that he too liked art, and it pleased him to think he had been to a recent exhibition. He plunged in and began to describe a picture. It was of a high cliff running down to the sea, and on the little strip of beach lay the body of a young girl. The sun was rising in the background. Those who heard him were horrified, and the friend who had introduced him perspired visibly. 'She had such a wonderful expression on her face---you must have noticed it?’ he concluded. 'Never looked at it .... I'm not interested in brewery advertisements,’ replied one of the party, and left the man feeling as guilty as if he had murdered his aunt.
But he was a dauntless person, and after much careful lecturing from his friend he began to attain artistic respectability. He has worked out a rule of conduct for himself. If the picture looks interesting, he hurries past knowing that it contains a story or a moral, and such things are no longer for him. Among the subjects he has learned to avoid are pretty girls, dancers, Eve and Venus, affectionate dogs, moonlight on snow, mermaids, and motherly old women by the fireside. He has learned to pause in front of torsos, fragments of arms, and sketches consisting of not more than a dozen lines. He has been seen to stand immovable for ten minutes before the portrait of an apple, to imitate the curve of the shadow with a tense motion of his thumb, and walk away scowling at the wretchedness of the lighting arrangements. His conversational apparatus has grown prodigiously. By taking a beam or two from Bergson, a wheel from Freud, some gearing from William James and the discards of alchemists, Hegelians and mental healers, he has provided himself with a vehicle of explanation. This enables him to avoid the vulgar habit of liking too many things, and he rarely makes a break at a soiree. The high quality of his artistic insight is established by the fact, that he is able to grow eloquent over a spot in the upper left hand corner of the most obscure picture in the gallery, while he treats the rest of the exhibition for the low-lived, ill-bred thing it is.
It is not the business of outsiders to criticize him. For he and his circle of artist friends are a close community, and only those who can speak their language are admitted. Philistines say it isn't a language at all, but merely an elaborate and noisy form of the inarticulate. It has even been said that there are circles within the circles using deeper and deeper symbols of the incommunicable, and that in the last analysis the best work done by men in this group is incomprehensible to the men themselves. There is a rumor that one of them remarked: 'When I have evolved artistically, I shall like that painting of mine--some day it will reveal infinity to me. I shall grow to be worthy of it.’
In the meantime the less gifted people have meted out a curious fate to him and his kind. They know nothing of the infinities revealed; after two or three efforts to understand his manifestoes they betray no particular desire to know. But often enough they like the patterns, and are busily engaged in using them for sofa cushions, neckties, wall paper, and ladies evening dresses. At any hour of the day or night it is now possible to see men and women dressed in the scattered remnants of a mysterious metaphysics. Musical comedy costumes are deeply affected by them, magazine covers flaunt them, advertising is full of them, they are to be seen on candy-boxes and doilies and whimsical shoes.
Nor are the outsiders ungrateful. They are much obliged for the improvement in neckties, believing that if it requires a mystery and a cult and a jumble of philosophy to produce it, the price is not too high. But there is a persistent question in their minds which they hardly dare to utter aloud. Standing in front of one of the new products, they have tried their level best to purge themselves through pity and fear, or find a hint of open country beyond. But almost in vain. 'Is this all?’ they ask, for they had been led to believe that art was something more than the decoration of life. 'These things,’ they say, 'are often good carpets and good trimmings, but men pray on a rug, not to it, we have been given better clothes, but we are naked.’
According to this theory of the outsiders, art is made to increase life, by which they mean that it cuts paths for the impulses which are not consumed in ordinary living. It enables men to be heroes and lovers and prophets and villains in a world where there are no practical costs, a world which is literally immortal because death and defeat are vicarious. In that realm they can spend the evening in Purgatory or know the Liebestod before bedtime, abduct Helen and play ball with Nausicaa, do a thousand things they were made to do, and still remain law-abiding citizens. They can compress time and space, and obliterate distance, be omnipotent and free and gorgeously sad. They can live a thousand lives, lift the roofs off houses, open sealed caskets, and see the other side of the moon. Individual man is limited by circumstances, squeezed outrageously in the world of custom, law, responsibility, thwarted by weakness and poverty and the shortness of time. But his soul is profuse, errant, and multiple, not to be contained or employed in a career. It is made of contradictions, some of which must go under in the pressure of events. It cannot satisfy itself in the restricted area of permissible emotions. It longs for things that would kill it, and is ever-lastingly adjusted to compromise and prudence.
This overflow is the itching plague of mankind, haunting it with crimes and heroisms that it is unable to achieve, the corridor of its mind a ghost-walk of lives that it might have lived. Miser and murderer and libertine, grandee and lover and hero tumble after each other in this pageant of lost causes forever conspiring against the peace of that exterior which men show to the world. Art is the liberator of these submerged selves because it enables them to walk in daylight, to be incarnated and to find expression, without wrecking the continuity of organized life.
But art cannot do its work if it remains incommunicable. Man cannot live vicarious lives in a medium in which he does not understand. Above all, he cannot find utterance in decoration or 'externality’ alone. That is why he will not accept the heresy which tells him that the subject of art does not matter, that the picture of a daffodil is as significant as the picture of a soul. He believes persistently that design and pattern are not the end of art, that the artist must respond to those moral conflicts which constitute the living theme of great works. He need not quarrel with those who are unable to be more than craftsmen engaged in making the costumes, utensils and furniture of life. His quarrel is with their pretension that they have usurped the avenues of human expression.
In some such way as that the outsider might reply to those who claim to speak for modern art. In the effort to establish his argument he could do more than point to those creations which have meant most to the inner life of mankind, or ask the obvious question whether there is no qualitative difference between a Greek tragedy and a Greek vase. He would be inclined to turn on the illuminati and ask them whether they have found what they need, and whether in the test of experience they have attained answers to craving and struggle, either rest or new life when they wanted it most? And whether there is not already a creeping disillusionment with trifles and abstractions and incidentals heaped up to leave them unfulfilled? And whether the immense pretentiousness and trumpetings of the millennium and the scrapheap of explanations and titanism are not the signs of men whistling to keep up their courage, shouting to conceal their doubts?
The layman may even hint at a possible explanation. The avoidance of significant themes, the emphasis on treatment and decoration are perhaps due to the fact that we are living now in a society of a scale never known before, in an environment enlarged and complicated beyond anything mankind has ever experienced. We have not learned to adjust human passion to this new situation, to value human motive in the terrifying intricacy of modern life. Moral science, as Socrates understood it, is in perplexity and confusion, and if ever any order is attained it will be by long study and invention. Only then might the material of human conflict be sufficiently understood to furnish art with its greater themes. For painters, poets, novelists are happiest when they live in a moral tradition. The lack of it today has robbed them of themes on which to work.
So they have turned away from the theme and concentrated on the externals of their craft, on technique, or form, or pattern, or color, or on the less important objects of the natural world. Having turned away, they try to justify their result by endless theorizing aimed to show that what they are getting is all that an artist should seek. They despise the theme because today the theme is infinitely difficult to grasp. They have transformed an evasion, a necessary and perhaps an inevitable evasion, into a virtue. They are trying to make their central failure a criterion of success