Justice or Melodrama?
Notions about justice, in the heads of dull or selfish or angry men, have done so much harm that I sometimes despairingly inquire whether it would not be better if the very principle itself had never been discovered. Dull men follow paths which they have been told are just until they ruin them with ruts. Selfish men are just only to themselves with a complacency denied to those who have no doctrine to sustain them. Angry men vindicate their rages and unreason by pointing to the primitive sense—father of revenge and vendetta—from which we with so much difficulty free ourselves in the long progress toward civil conditions. If justice, according to an enthusiastic hyperbole of Emerson’s, is the rhyme of things, then the vulgar conceptions of it are no more than tinkling couplets. A blow struck must rhyme instanter with a blow received; an eye rhymes with an eye, a tooth with a tooth, burning with burning, and strife with strife. Or, to allude to another mode of literature, justice in its primitive aspects is merely melodrama, wherein virtue is always rewarded with prosperity and evil is always fatally punished.
The mood which followed the war was the mood of melodrama, on a larger scale, perhaps, than ever before in human history. Germany, seen solely as a bully and a brute, had been beaten at her own foul game; therefore let her be joyously annihilated, while the gallery gods who filled the theatre of the world almost from top to bottom hooted and gloried at the justice weighed out to her. What made it harder to contend against the uproar was that the uproar at first thought seemed justifiable. Nemesis never looks like so righteous a doctor as when he feeds a poisoner his own poison. But I always suspect first thoughts. For civilization, after all, is but the substitution for first thoughts of second or third or hundredth thoughts, reason supplanting passion, and polity guiding anarchic instinct. Melodrama is what commonly occurs to us first, in the form of those too neat or too hasty moral conclusions to which we are all more or less prone to jump when we allow ourselves to indulge too amply the sense of primitive justice which we share with all the savages of our ancestry.
Men do not, of course, jump too hastily to conclusions merely by reason of their ruder sense of justice. There is involved also a certain obscure instinct toward art, toward rounding out and completing and closing a chapter. Paradox cheerfully says, not forgetting Oscar Wilde, that affairs in 1918-1920 were trying to conform to dramaturgy, that the war was trying to shape itself a good fifth act. But paradox is not needed, for few things are clearer than that centuries of literature were then indeed influencing the world’s attitude toward the peace and the treaty. Obscurely, again let it be emphasized, men had felt that they were witnessing, or acting, the vastest of dramas. The curtain, for them, rose sharply with the Austrian ultimatum and the invasion of Belgium. The sinking of the Lusitania, say, was the villain’s fatal blunder, which brought against him a fresh, powerful enemy. The odds then deserting him, he hazarded all on a single blow, lost, and came down in a fearful wreck with the spent world falling about him. Was it not due and natural that there should descend another curtain to hide the bloody stage, and that the lights should flash sharply on, and that the spectators should turn away, contented though somewhat subdued, to eat, drink, and make love, possibly commenting upon the actors and their art? Of course the peace on which the curtain fell had to be dramatically satisfying, the villain dead or prostrate and the hero in the ascendant. The sense of form must be served, the taste for melodramatic finality gratified. If the piece ended happily for the victors, justice had been done.
Justice or melodrama? It is only in art, and that not always the truest, that things come out so right. History has no beginning, no middle, no end, but moves everlastingly in some dim direction of which mankind at least does not know the secret. Poets and dramatists may honourably pilfer from history such materials as they require, and may of course work them into forms more compact or conclusive than life itself. But history cannot be handled so masterfully, for one can never be sure at what point in it one is standing. When the Lusitania went down, no one knew whether her loss opened the first act or the last. When America entered the war no one could be sure whether the fourth act of five or of fifty acts had ended. And no one could say that the peace absolutely concluded the drama. The business of the treaty was not to close the war but to open the peace, not to avenge those who died but to preserve those who still lived, not to crown events past with poetic justice, which belongs to the technique of melodrama, but to prepare for events to come by trusting to the higher and humaner justice which is less concerned with righting old wrongs than with trying to foresee and prevent new wrongs—the justice, let me call it, of plain prose.