Disillusionment
We can hardly fail to perceive that we are living to-day in a period of profound disillusionment. There is nothing strange about that. Every great war has brought disillusionment in its wake. What is of interest is to examine the nature of the disillusionment and estimate its probable results.
In the first year or two after the Armistice it was a bitter and passionate thing, almost as sharply felt among civilians as among the returned soldiers. Life appeared barren and profitless, religion a mockery, civilization a myth. The young cursed the old for creating such a mess; the old, though not conscious of having deliberately created anything of the sort, were broken-hearted at the spectacle of what some one must have done—and who, then, if not they? Governments were a mirthless laughing-stock. Moral laws were thrown overboard; for if all that moral laws had resulted in was this, of what possible value were they? Marriage all but went to smash in favour of a cheap promiscuity. No one believed in anything, no one trusted any one else; life resolved itself into three elemental desires—for food and drink, excitement and the gratification of sex. With all of which unrestraint, there was far less happiness in the world than before. People were ‘fed up’—‘fed up’ even in the midst of their most reckless adventures in gaiety.
This summary of the state of mind in the year of grace 1919 is, of course, exaggerated, but such was undoubtedly the impression one received in any country that had seen the worst of the war.
The reason for the impression and also the reason why it was only a fractionally true impression was that the hubbub was being raised by the articulate minority. As some one has already pointed out, a considerable majority of the world’s inhabitants were not disillusioned by the war, having had no illusions to shed. Life had been hostile to them; they had always been forced to give a great deal to get a very little; they had never had the slightest faith in governments or in human goodness; knowing marriage stripped to its bare essentials, they had always seen it as a fact like any other, never as something sacred and beautiful; they had always been as promiscuous as possible; they had never had the opportunity to dress life up and worship it. Times were either a little harder now or maybe not quite so hard. There was no occasion for all this fuss, though, naturally, they took advantage of it to get as much more for themselves as they could.
No, it was the articulate minority that was upset. But this, though distinctly a minority, is very large. It does not consist of any one class in a rigid social sense, but simply of all the people for whom existence is relatively easy. I do not mean the people who have no worries, are never hard-up, never in danger of bankruptcy, nor even altogether people who do not work with their hands; I mean those whose daily life is not among the hard primitive facts, who have not suffered actual griping hunger, whose mental existence follows some sort of order, whose work is not the deadening physical labour of mines, steel-plants or the most squalid factories, and whose homes, however imperfect, offer something better than the horrible promiscuity of one or two crowded rooms. This class, if you can call it such, sees life altogether differently than the majority beneath sees it, and it is almost solely from this class that come the interpreters of life—the thinkers, the writers, the artists, the journalists. Also the two classes never really touch. The minds of each are alien to the minds of the other. There are to-day many individuals among the minority who are trying to get at and understand the minds of the majority; but they cannot, because the majority live among facts, they among ideas about facts. The attempt is as impossible as for a painted figure to step down from its picture and walk the earth—or vice versa, since I do not in the least mean that ideas about facts are necessarily less real than the facts themselves. In short, one half not only does not but cannot know how the other half lives. This is so true that when sometimes, rarely, a writer of genius, such as Gorki, has struggled up from that great, incoherently muttering sea, the account he gives of life there is to us of the minority, even while it moves us, as strange as though it were indeed an account of life in another element.
It was this minority that was disillusioned by the war, and, frankly, I think we deserved to be—though perhaps somewhat less rudely. Not because we had ideas about life, but because we had such ideas—so smooth, so smug, so unrelated to the facts, so inconsistent with what, if we had only looked honestly, we might have seen in ourselves. For example, individually none of us was more than spasmodically happy, none contented; cowardice alone or, at best, habit and lack of initiative restrained each of us from committing the most dastardly acts; selfishness lay at the bottom of our behaviour; honest introspection would have revealed to any one of us a handful of impulsive good deeds to show against a lifetime of petty greedy actions the motives for which had been painstakingly disguised: yet, by and large, we believed, really did believe, that the world was growing steadily better, that there was more good than evil in human nature (by which, if we had been honest and intelligent, each of us could only have meant in the nature of every one save himself), that certain things (of which every one of us was capable) simply were not done by decent people, and that, given the high state of moral progress in the world, wars were unthinkable.
The shock of the awakening (which did not come at its fullest during the war, when thought was suspended, but afterward) was tremendous and painful. And the pain and anger were all the worse for being, even if we recognized it but dimly, directed against ourselves. That was the secret of the wretchedness, the disillusionment, that the reason for feeling ‘fed up.’ We blamed it on civilization or governments or God; at heart we knew it was ourselves who were to blame. Beginning with the hurt recognition that the world was not as we had pictured it, we went on logically to the gloomier recognition that we were not what we had fancied ourselves. This was inevitable. A man who distrusts the honesty of others is a man who secretly does not believe in his own honesty; a man who is afraid to leave his wife and his friend alone together is a man with whom his friend’s wife would not be safe.
The disillusionment, then, was potentially salutary. Stripping men of false ideas and ideals, it forced them to look into their own hearts.
Only potentially salutary, however. In its first results it was sheerly destructive; and this, too, was logical. The great Chicago fire of 1871 was doubtless a good thing in that it wiped out a sordid and ugly city, but the first reaction to it of the inhabitants must have been despair. Despair, at any rate, was the prevailing emotion in the hearts of most thinking members of the minority during the chaotic period that followed the Armistice. All these centuries to work with, and we had achieved—this!
But there are two very noble traits in men, or in the best of them: a fundamental love of truth and a refusal to accept defeat. So presently such men began to shake off despair and to look about them clear-sightedly, like Noah and his companions after they had emerged from the Ark. And their love of truth, burning more clearly now that the lamp was less encrusted with illusions, showed them some very heartening facts: that the thirty centuries of recorded human life were not as barren a waste as all that; that always, as far back as eye could see, even in the midst of war, pestilence and external chaos, some men had laboured patiently, and for no other reward than the satisfaction of their love of truth, to guard and, bee-like, add a few drops to the small store of knowledge transmitted to them; that explorers had charted the earth and its seas, and astronomers mapped the movements of the stars; that to have worked up from nothing more than a few primitive sounds to the indescribable beauty of a Mozart symphony was an achievement beyond all praise. True, men were also beasts. Nothing could justify this war or ever excuse it. It was unmitigatedly evil, a crime without a reason, for which not one or two or a dozen, but all men, were responsible. But there, too, was that other side of men, that grazed divinity. All was not lost, though ten million human lives were. Civilization, many said gravely, might come to an end. Sad, if true, but, at bottom, what of it? It would only be one civilization. Another would follow. For what goes on indestructibly is the steady soul of man, loving truth and never defeated. So I conceive such men as meditating for a little while before going back to their patient work.
These, whether they knew it or not, were themselves among the lonely guarders of the flame. But others besides them, many others among the rest of us, have profited by our disillusionment. Indeed, we have profited more than they, since their lives had always a noble directive never entirely obscured, ours none.
One thing that we have gained is the spirit of wholesome mockery for grandiloquent twaddle. This bubbled up to us perhaps from that great mass beneath, which has moments when it is not inarticulate. In Italy, some time about the weary middle of the war, when, as always, generals, politicians, journalists, and diplomats at banquets never opened their mouths or lifted their pens save to speak or write of ‘the Cause of Liberty, Justice and Civilization’ and all the rest of it, a ribald soldiers’ song suddenly swept the country and set it rocking with tonic mirth, though how the song got about so universally is a mystery, since it could not be sung in public. It had many verses, all equally scurrilous, but it will suffice to quote one, the best known:
Il General Cadorna
Scrisse a la Regina:
‘Se vuol veder Trieste
Si compri una cartolina.’
Ah! Ah! Ah!
Ah! Ah! Ah!
(General Cadorna wrote to the Queen: ‘If you want to see Trieste, buy a picture postcard.’ Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!)
The music fitted the words outrageously, and the mocking insolence of those six ‘Ah’s,’ each accented, at the end of every stanza, was ineffable (do, mi, re; si, re, do). They were so utterly final—a funeral march for rhetoric.
For obvious reasons there was all too little of this spirit awake during the war; now, since the war, it blows freely through the air and is one of the healthiest results of disillusionment. It makes men read their newspapers sceptically and glance back to see where a dispatch came from before accepting it as truth; it causes them to look with an ironic eye on politicians, governments, philanthropists, institutions of learning, and all other institutions, on everything and every one professionally noble; it supplies readers for such irreverent publications as the American Mercury, and makes satirical novels, like Babbitt, actually popular. It reveals the grosser forms of credulity as precisely that. Held to be something dreadful, the Ku Klux Klan would wax in strength, but people find it ridiculous; it is doomed. Even before the ‘Protocols’ were exposed as forgeries an amazingly large number of people were unable to swallow them; they were too silly. The Saturday Evening Post, the Red Book and the others go on their tawdrily romantic way, but I doubt extremely that the millions who read the stories they contain accept these as anything save sheer senseless relaxation, since the same millions read and take to their hearts the comic strips—Mr. and Mrs., The Gumps, etc.—which are so sordid, so blowzy, so disillusioned, in both drawing and captions, as to make Babbitt appear by comparison a lilting romance and Mr. H. L. Mencken a blood-brother of Mr. Harold Bell Wright. In short, though it is still possible to ‘get away with’ a good deal of nonsense, it is not possible, even in America, the most sentimental nation under the sun, to ‘get away with’ anywhere near as much as once upon a time.
But there is more behind all this than a mere spirit of sceptical mockery; clean and salty as it is, that spirit is only a part of something bigger. The truth is, I think, that people have grown up—part way up, at least. The incredible childishness of a decade ago is gone—I trust, forever. It is not only that we accept less than before, but that we are more level-headed both in accepting and rejecting. A questioning coolness is abroad. Perhaps we expect less of life; certainly we are less enthusiastic over it. That crass optimism about everything, not openly to share which used to make an American taboo, no longer soars and screams. It still lives, but with a broken wing, fluttering clumsily like a hen. A good thing! There was nothing noble in it. At bottom it represented only a desire not to be troubled, and was popular for the same reason that the man is popular who, in response to an inquiry as to his health, grins and shouts: ‘Fine! Fine! Never better!’
What a load of sentimentality has gone overboard with our illusions!—sentimental notions about happiness, about country, about life, about love. That amazing convicton, for example, that the only thing of real importance in a woman was her chastity. Overboard. Drowned a mile deep, as it deserved to be for the cheap and insulting notion it was. In its long day it must have righteously infuriated thousands of women—possibly more those who happened to be chaste than those who happened not to be. Its loss signifies not more accent on the sex-relation, but less, helping to put the relation where it belongs, as merely one of a number of facts. An immense step has been taken toward an honester, decenter understanding between men and women. And a score of other sentimental notions are gone, too, or tottering. The visualizing of the United States as a benevolent disinterested Uncle Sam, a bit homely, a bit awkward, but strong and infinitely kind, like the hero of a Cape Cod melodrama; and of France as a Jeanne d’Arc in glittering armour, eyes shining, face aglow, shedding her life-blood for Liberty—hum...! Mr. E. M. Forster has recently written a very remarkable novel in which he punctures, dispassionately, but once for all, the Kipling legend of the English in India as public school demi-gods; yet in both England and America the book has sold by tens of thousands and met with almost unanimous praise.
Quite possibly a little that was fine and true has gone overboard with the rubbish, but most of the destruction was salutary. And it has served, it seems to me, to bring those two classes, the dumb majority and the articulate minority, closer together than ever before. In a sense it is not a real closeness; for, as I have said, the two can never touch, one living among facts, the other in a picture of facts. But at least the picture now bears some relation to the facts, is by way of becoming what it must become to be of any value—an interpretation of them. This, surely, is something to the credit of our disillusioned period.
It is a puzzling period to study, and would still be so, I think, even were we not in the midst of it. It questions everything, all once accepted premises. Yet it is not like other great periods of change—the Reformation or the Romantic Revival, for instance. They were, in one way or another, periods of revolution, when men brushed aside the past, sure that they had found something better—sure because they felt young and fresh. The present period is not young and fresh; it is very, very tired. And so, despite the obvious and extensive social changes that it has already witnessed, it is not in spirit revolutionary. It questions everything—governments, nationality, economics, religion, human nature, life itself—but it is not young enough or fresh enough to discard recklessly. People question and wonder, yet vote overwhelmingly for the Republicans in America and the Conservatives in England.
Phenomena such as these and others more distressing are frequently cited as evidence that ours is a period of discouraging reaction. I do not agree. The bitter intolerance displayed by such movements as Fascismo—or, for that matter, Fundamentalism—is, to my thinking, a good sign, rather than a bad. It means that violent intolerance is to-day forced back where it belongs—to the outskirts, to the extreme Right or the extreme Left. It is violent and domineering because it dares not be otherwise; it represents only an inconsiderable fraction of the whole, and is afraid. At the moment when I write this, Fascismo still governs Italy, but it has against it probably eighty per cent. of the population, and governs by force alone, suppressing its most dangerous enemies, muzzling the press, forbidding political gatherings, dissolving societies, outraging the constitutional rights of individuals. Such tyranny signifies fear—fear based on the certain knowledge of the Fascisti that they and their policies do not represent the country.
Yet people have not risen up en masse and turned them out. No, and this, too, is characteristic of the period. It lacks the ardent juvenile faith in Utopias essential to drive multitudes to action. Instead, people ask coolly: ‘What have you got, to put in place of what we so unsatisfactorily have?’ But it is also a rather mature, almost wise period, saying: ‘Let the Fascisti rave. Whom the Gods would destroy....’
The Republicans and the Conservatives must watch their step closely. In neither case was the large majority obtained a loving endorsement. A tired period but an extremely clear-eyed one, as periods go, with less belief than usual in miraculous panaceas, but with still less in all things being for the best. It is not a romantic period, though it is full of superficially romantic events; there is no youth in it and small enthusiasm. But it is a period out of which more of permanent value may come than if it were.