The “Inside” and “Outside” People

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 112, 4 February 1939, Page 1 (Supplement)

The “Inside” and “Outside” People

IN her recently-published book, "The World and Ourselves,” Miss Laura Riding deals with a number of replies to the following questions addressed to 400 people: "What, properly, are international affairs?” she asked in her letter. “They represent a remote, outer traffic, the least, significant kind of contact that may be between people. The profession which has in the past been responsible for such contact is diplomacy. It is the task of diplomacy to reduce these remote, outer affairs to a routine that does not interfere with the routine of national life. The routine of national life is itself an outer operation—when compared with the more intense, more personal course of private life. . . . "Yet we know that all these outside affairs are the less important ones; they are subsidiary to what goes on inside the houses; they are intended to serve the amenities of private life, and all the inner realities of the mind. “We, the ‘inside’ people, have left all these matters to those who seemed functionally best equipped to act as outside people. And at a time when inside problems have reached a high degree of clarity and solution —when personal life and thought have developed to a high potentiality of happiness —we find ourselves continuously gainsaid and agitated by the outside mechanism.” Professor George Maclean Harper, of Princeton University, wrote a most interesting reply:— “Public hysteria, to which even quiet ‘inside’ people are liable, is a cause not only of war, but of unhappiness in time of peace, ami since public disaster is not certain and cannot anyhow be averted by fussing and fretting, it is wise to keep cool,” he said. "Men and women have not yet grown equal to managing the big undertakings to which they are tempted by modern mechanisms,‘and therefore had better not give up the ‘smaller’ life which, after all, is ‘the haunt and the main region’ of human happiness and will remain so, even if they ever do master their machines. "So we should not try to exchange too rapidly an existing welfare for a

doubtful experiment of ‘progress.’ Apprehension of danger from foreign foes leads to armament, and armament leads inevitably to war. What is called ‘foresight’ in public affairs, a supposed prophetic sense of manifest destiny, has done more harm than good. A humble opportunism is safer. “In a letter by Wordsworth published in Professor de Selincourt’s greai edition occurs a passage which supports your contention that persons who have a poet’s sense of values should be satisfied with cultivating the private, inward virtues and joys: ‘lt is an awful truth, that there neither is, nor can be, any genuine enjoyment of Poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those persons who live, or wish to live, in the broad light of the world—among those who either are, or are striving to make themselves, people of consideration in society. This is the truth, and an awful one, because to be incapable of a feeling of Poetry in my sense of the word is to be without love of human nature and reverence for God.’

“If by poetry we mean the perception of eternal and universal Truth, John Seldon in his ‘Table Talk’ uttered the same thought that you express in your letter, when lie says: Tn troubled times you can see little Truth, when times are quiet and settled, then Truth appears.’ "Thus far my reflections were in agreement with your letter. But I chanced to observe that a large, heavy flagstone in the pavement before my house had. during a period of several months, sunk almost an inch below its former level and that this change was caused by the activity of innumerable ants, which had carried grains of sand from beneath it. “There came to me then the thought that the quiet, unobtrusive people of the human species, the women and those whom you term ‘poets,’ have the power and also the duty to influence, by their intelligence and by ultimate reference to ‘inside’ welfare, first their immediate environment and thus, in time, the outside world. That the performance of this duty must often involve a sacrifice of their present happiness, and even of many kinds of present usefulness, is doubtless true: but my Fable of the Ants suggests that we should ‘say not the struggle nought availeth,’ and should do our share in support of public measures of reform and progress.”