CUI BONO?

Evening Star, Issue 15139, 22 March 1913, Page 2

CUI BONO?

Is our ago beginning to lose heart? Are our leading thinkers and writers coming to doubt if Progress has any goal, and Life anv worthy end? It certainly looks like it. It is a good while since Tennyson wrote ' Locksley Hall: Sixty Years After.' Wo recollect lioav in that impressive poem he confesses i his disillusionment. Half a century earlier ho with others looked to tho progress of science and art and social reform for new heavens and new earth. But ho lived long enough to see his millennium die away into mist: Fires that shook mo once; but.now to silent ashes fall'n away. Cold upon the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day. | Tennyson's attitude to Progress in this poem was severely criticised. He was reckohed a lost leader—a. recreant from faith and hope. Yet it would seem as if many of our modern writers are coming round to his position. They are beginning to ask: Where are we marching to? They are raising doubts as to whether or not tho game is worth the candle, as to whether or not the gifts and possessions of life are really worth living for. ******* Here, for instance, is a powerful and painful book called ' From tho Abyss.' It sketches a typical working man<— John Smith. The Writer forecasts a time when by this and the other improvement tho ape and tiger instincts will be eliminated from man. He thinks that lives now insurgent will settle down into vacant, cheerful content. John Smith will go to work six days in tho week, return to his home, where he may have a wife and a few children, smoke his pipe, go over to tho public-house- to hear the news, or to the theatre to watch pictures or plays. On Sundays ho will lie late, then get up, stroll about, or rush oft; on some of the many pleasure excursions which tile clay will provide. Intellectual interests ho has none. He reads the newspapers only to have his sensations stirred by startling or tragic events. He is without religion, or if ho has any, it is like that embodied in Omar Khayyam's lines: Why, says another, some there are who tell Of One who threatens he will toss to Hell The luckless pots he marred in making. Pish! • He's a good fellow, and 'twill all be well. To-day the cities of the world are full of men and women of this type—thousands and millions of them, men and women, numb of heart and brain, living under a grey, lampless sky, and' 'dumbly satisfied with their condition. What is "to be done with these multitudes? Can they be aroused—stirred up to loftier ends? Suppose they can. Suppose you get them drilled, dressed, with money in their pockets, books in their homes, steady work by day, and limitless cigarettes in their mouths—what then? We turn to three of our great living prophets and ask them. We presume most people will agree that we have no more vital or virile imaginations at work in our literature, of today than H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennet, and Algernon Blackwood. Well, what have they to say about the prospect ? Take the first, and read, e.g., the picture which he draws in ' The War of tho Worlds ' of the society of that time. Everybody, he says (we are giving mainly his ideas), believed in Progress. A squittering succession of ideas floated through the minds of the masses about Competition, the Yellow Peril, the White Man's Burden, etc. But they went waggling silly little flags, accumulating endless machines of destruction, talking politics—living for pleasure and egged on to class and race hatreds by a mercenary Press that spawned lies by the hour and pandered to the passions of the crowd. And after a while the world drifted to Armageddon. For science has its Armageddon as well as religion. This is Mr Wells's view of the goal to which wo are marching. It ought perhaps to be said that ho seems a bit scared at this nemesis he has conjured up, for in his later book ho has toned down the picture a little. But ho still gives us the impression that the game of civilisation as now played is not worth the cost of it. Next, we have Mr Arnold Bennet in an article in the ' Strand Magazine' on 'The Case of the Plain Man.' By the Plain Man he means just the plain you and me. He shows the picture of this man through an average day's work. He wakes to it with a feeling "0 Lord! Another day! What a grind!" And we see him at the grind and running a vast business—sending ships and men to all parts of the earth, oscillating like a shuttle daily between office and home, losing his eyesight and his digestion and his health—and for what? All his present profit therefrom is a game of golf with a free mind once a fortnight, or half an hour's intimacy with his wife and mind once a week or so, or a ten minutes' duel with his daughter and a free mind on an occasional evening. And after 40 years of incessant labor, if you ask him where the fun comes in, he has to answer: "Well, when I have time "I take the dog out for a walk. I "enjoy larking with the dog." Nest wo have Mr Algernon BlackAvodd presenting us with a. criticism of modern Progress through the lips of Mr Terence O'Malley in 'The Centaur.' He gives us a picture of our boasted civilisation —men and women by the millions, youths still in their hearts, but shut up in trap-like cages, slaving to make money for things not really wanted, faces bunched about gambling tables, and fair women playing bridge all a summer's day ; countless factories pouring out semi-fraudulent, unnecessary wares, explosives,'and weapons to destroy another nation, or cheap-jack goods to poison their own. And those engaged in the production of these: I thought of the morrow—of mv desk in the lifo insurance office, of tho clerks with their well-oiled hair brushed back from the forehead, all exactly alike, trousers neatly turned up to show fancy socks from' bargain sales, their pockets full of cheap cigarettes, their minds busy with painted actresses and the names of horses—all London paying yearly sums to prevent themselves against —what ? Against escaping from a civilisation that sings hymns over a Progress whose highest achievements are men and women like these. Or if wo turn front ono fiction writer to- plain, matter-of-fact ones, we have the London ' Tilnes ' arriving at precisely similar conclusions. Recently it declared that "tho whole "machinery of modern life was insig- " nificant and inhuman." And it is this specialisation and the division of labor that have robbed work of all its charm. Men feel that what they are doing is of no consequence to themselves or others. Tho worker who is conscious that he is producing something in its wholeness has the joy of

the artist in his creation, and with him I toil is not a drudgery but a delight. But where is there room for such feelings when subdivision of work ordains that men may.spend a lifetime in making heads of pins, or merely feed a machine that,does it—when they see themselves reduced to mere automata, able to make no complete thing themselves nor even anything that has relations to the whole of life? It is the cruel and carking consciousness of this that is leading on to.industrial revolt. Pressure of circumstances may make them go on working, but it floes not rob them of their critical faculties or of their desire for power, which must find satisfaction somehow. In the anarchist it finds satistaction in the throwing of bombs. Inere are not many anarchists in action, but there are a vast number in thought—men. and women whose desire for power shows itself in rockJess criticism, who throw bombs at the len Commandments. ******* It may bo a bad thing to "throw bombs at the Ten Commandments." But there may be a worse thing— ft much more dangerous thing. It is to throw bombs at the Authority behind them. The Ten Commandments are the basis of modem civilisation. It has been built up upon them. But the effectiveness of tho Commandments has depended on the source from which they came and the sanction to which they make appeal. That source and sanction have been a living, personal, redeeming God. It was this faith that consolidated the Hebrew slaves and nomads into a united people, and made them the moral loaders of the world. \\e have Started to throw bombs at this faith. We are preparing to discharge this sanction from the Ten Commandments. But wo must find some substitute for it. The only substitute possible for us is the policeman. It remains to bo seen whether the Ten Commandments will continue to survive as the Bulwark of Civilisation when we have exchanged a "Thus saith the for "Thus saith the policeman.' That is the, experiment which wo are about to try. Philosophy of certain schools is coming to its'own at last. Tho pantheism of Spinoza, for instance, loaves no room for anv real progress. It identifies God with the Universe, and the Universe is a constant becoming but never a real arrival anywhere. It is a ceaseless growth and decay without any determined goal. As Mr Masterman, M.P., writes in his brilliant but sombre book 'On the Condition of England ': Austerities, simplicities, and a common danger bind virtues and devotions, which are the parent of prosperity. Prosperity breeds-arrogance, extravagance and hatreds. Opposition and pride in their turn breed national disasters. And = these disasters engender the austerities and simphcitirs, which start the evele anew again. " *• . This is a dismal outlook, but on the principles of the philosophy of pantheism that is where we arrive. And it is this philosophy thus baldly stated which is being filtered down "through fascinating fiction into the minds of the common people. Associated with this comes a reinforcement from materialistic science, of winch Haeckel may be taken as the modern corvpheus, and who was singing his swan song to an Auckland correspondent the other day and cheerfully anticipating for himself the Buddhist Nirvana. -Along this path also we arrive at the same goal: Growth and expansion arc always a journey to decay and extinction. lhe years which develop tho seeedling fhn W trUnk - " Th « child become! the full-grown man, only later on to teach senility and death. And as with the individual so with words, and so ultimately with humanity itselr. All are on the march towards a universal grave over which never rises an Easter morn. , * * ■■■* * * # «. These are the theories that at length are being taken out of the private convictions of the few and passed on to the man m the street, Philosophv and Science are caviare to the crowd. 'They are for a long time the perquisites of the student and sealed up in abstract discussions and learned volumes. But along comes the man of imagination—the poet, the novelist-and he translates these recondite ideas into current com Ho clothes them in flesh and blood and as a tale "they enter m at lowly doors." That is what is happening now Writers of genius, such as Meredith, Wells, Bennet Blackwood, and others are doing this. Wells is perhaps the most spiritually. "!!£ t *?Z ? f tli6 Rro "P' but in ' and Last Things' ho thus puts on record his creed:

S \ Christ,.™ Christ seems iJl\ mco ? barab Lv soulless being, neither god nor man, impossible to reverence or love. As for nerson^ When I die I believe I will disperse booKfriTVrf thG *™*™ VIn this same connection reference may be made to Neitzsche, the rapid translation and circulation of whoso books m English is one of the signs of the rT;<™ .° n . e ° f these books Neitesohe calls Christianity the oiie great curse the one intrinsic depravity." and he calls on his readers to make an end of it as quickly as possible. He is not content with "throwing bombs at the ten Commandments." He says : A new table of the law, 0 my Jwthren, I put over yon-Become +vTl ■ : i'" ' - e P ro Per place for the weak man is the wall . the weak and defective must go to the wall, and we must help them. When principles such as these are being filtered down among the masses, will they have a new motive for work or a n*vr goal of Progress ? Will it fill with a noble purpose the weary and struggling ifo of tho multitudes to-day to be told that in some far age a hew, proud race may arise on their ruins? But if this race, too, shares at last the fate of all preceding ones? If "history is like a lucifer match, whose brief end I 'alone grows quick and worn and luminous by the friction of life only to flicker out finally into primeval dark, how shall we find a satisfying answer to the question Ciii bono? Certainly it will not be found in these theories to which we haV6 referred that are so rapidly leading society. Where only it can be discovered we mav discuss in a subsequent .article.