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Page 24
Now of you who are listening to me, there are some, I feel sure, who
have received this message, and taken it to heart, and are day by
day fighting the battle that it calls on you to fight: to you I can
say nothing but that if any word I speak discourage you, I shall
heartily wish I had never spoken at all: but to be shown the enemy,
and the castle we have got to storm, is not to be bidden to run from
him; nor am I telling you to sit down deedless in the desert because
between you and the promised land lies many a trouble, and death
itself maybe: the hope before you you know, and nothing that I can
say can take it away from you; but friend may with advantage cry out
to friend in the battle that a stroke is coming from this side or
that: take my hasty words in that sense, I beg of you.
But I think there will be others of you in whom vague discontent is
stirring: who are oppressed by the life that surrounds you;
confused and troubled by that oppression, and not knowing on which
side to seek a remedy, though you are fain to do so: well, we, who
have gone further into those troubles, believe that we can help you:
true we cannot at once take your trouble from you; nay, we may at
first rather add to it; but we can tell you what we think of the way
out of it; and then amidst the many things you will have to do to
set yourselves and others fairly on that way, you will many days,
nay most days, forget your trouble in thinking of the good that lies
beyond it, for which you are working.
But, again, there are others amongst you (and to speak plainly, I
daresay they are the majority), who are not by any means troubled by
doubt of the road the world is going, nor excited by any hope of its
bettering that road: to them the cause of civilisation is simple
and even commonplace: it wonder, hope, and fear no longer hang
about it; has become to us like the rising and setting of the sun;
it cannot err, and we have no call to meddle with it, either to
complain of its course, or to try to direct it.
There is a ground of reason and wisdom in that way of looking at the
matter: surely the world will go on its ways, thrust forward by
impulses which we cannot understand or sway: but as it grows in
strength for the journey, its necessary food is the life and
aspirations of ALL of us: and we discontented strugglers with what
at times seems the hurrying blindness of civilisation, no less than
those who see nothing but smooth, unvarying progress in it, are bred
of civilisation also, and shall be used up to further it in some way
or other, I doubt not: and it may be of some service to those who
think themselves the only loyal subjects of progress to hear of our
existence, since their not hearing of it would not make an end of
it: it may set them a-thinking not unprofitably to hear of burdens
that they do not help to bear, but which are nevertheless real and
weighty enough to some of their fellow-men, who are helping, even as
they are, to form the civilisation that is to be.
The danger that the present course of civilisation will destroy the
beauty of life--these are hard words, and I wish I could mend them,
but I cannot, while I speak what I believe to be the truth.
That the beauty of life is a thing of no moment, I suppose few
people would venture to assert, and yet most civilised people act as
if it were of none, and in so doing are wronging both themselves and
those that are to come after them; for that beauty, which is what is
meant by ART, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no
mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they
choose, but a positive necessity of life, if we are to live as
nature meant us to; that is, unless we are content to be less than
men.
Now I ask you, as I have been asking myself this long while, what
proportion of the population in civilised countries has any share at
all in that necessity of life?
I say that the answer which must be made to that question justifies
my fear that modern civilisation is on the road to trample out all
the beauty of life, and to make us less than men.
Now if there should be any here who will say: It was always so;
there always was a mass of rough ignorance that knew and cared
nothing about art; I answer first, that if that be the case, then it
was always wrong, and we, as soon as we have become conscious of
that wrong, are bound to set it right if we can.
But moreover, strange to say, and in spite of all the suffering that
the world has wantonly made for itself, and has in all ages so
persistently clung to, as if it were a good and holy thing, this
wrong of the mass of men being regardless of art was NOT always so.
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