by John Buchan
Regard for the past has been therefore both an article of my creed and a principal source of my pleasure in life. But I realise that, while the philosophical doctrine is inexpugnable, connoisseurship in memories is a more debatable business. They are brittle, as I have said, and clumsy hands can destroy them. They may conduce to a maudlin sentimentality. They are also not without a disruptive power, for storms can be brewed by delicious things like salt air and sunshine. If I have escaped these perils (as I trust I have) it is because my life has been so much more one of action than of contemplation. If I philosophised it had to be done like the Athenians of Pericles ±½µ½ ¼±»±º¹±. I am very conscious of the pathos of lost things. It is only human to regret the passing of even the shadow of what once was great; we shall always hear the voice along the Aegean capes announcing the death of Pan, and the one eye-ancient, who was Odin, telling King Olaf Tryggvason tales of a vanished world. But I suppose I have a prosaic fibre in me, and though I sigh I do not sigh too deeply or too long. Devotion to the past should be like a salad with vinegar; it should have just enough melancholy in it to keep it from cloying.
My lifetime has included more drastic changes in manners and customs and modes of thought than can be shown, I think, by any similar period in history. The mechanical apparatus of living has been transformed. At twenty I thought it an adventure to take a bicycle over certain Highland hill-roads; at sixty I was flying across the pack-ice in the Arctic! Creeds in politics, in economics, in many branches of science have gone into the melting-pot, and it is not yet clear what is to succeed them. The old classes have been levelled down, and new class distinctions have appeared in many lands based on something much crueller and coarser than the former inequalities.
It is an ugly and comfortless world, but it is a world not without hope — a better world in spite of its confusion than the one that in despondent moods I have foreseen. The things which we value may be overlaid and obscured, but I do not think they will be destroyed at the root. My worst nightmare has removed itself. Let me set down the points of that fearsome wildfowl.
II
All of us in the last War had moments when we felt the stable universe dissolving about us. We were like pilgrims who, journeying on a road to an assured and desirable goal, suddenly found themselves on the edge of a precipice with nothing beyond but a great void. The common way of describing such moods was to say that our civilisation had become insecure and was in danger of perishing.
What did we mean by civilisation? The little comforts which made life easy and pleasant and gave us leisure; an ordered ritual which enabled us to plan for the future? But our dread was based upon something deeper than the loss of such amenities. By civilisation we meant especially the rule of law which gave us freedom to possess our souls. What we feared was a welter of anarchy which would reduce life to its bare rudiments. We defined civilisation as something more than the cushioned life made possible by science. It was not a mechanical apparatus but a spirit. The Greeks of the fifth century before Christ had an existence so simple that to our modern appetites it seems almost brutish. They lived chiefly on fruits and vegetables, their clothes were plain, their amusements were few, their transport was rudimentary, but no one can deny their high civilisation. So most of us came to define civilisation as the free development of the personality. That involved physical conditions of life lifted above the primitive man’s struggle for bread. It involved an ordered society and the rule of law. But, since these things are negative only, it involved also a soul to develop, a mind which could rejoice in the things of the mind, an impulse towards spiritual perfection.
Clearly such an inner life would not be possible if our whole complex material apparatus were wrecked and we returned to primitive conditions. It demanded an existence raised above the level of urgent bodily wants. What mind prehistoric man possessed must have been wholly engrossed in getting food for himself and his family, in sheltering from the weather, and in saving his skin from the clutches of a sabre-toothed tiger or the malevolence of a neighbour with a club. We can all remember expeditions in the wilds when we were reduced to the extremes of bodily fatigue and could think of nothing except food and rest. For most of us the urgency of physical needs puts an effective damper on any mental activity. Primeval man cannot have had much of an intellectual life. Beyond doubt a return to barbarism, to primitive physical conditions, would play havoc with civilisation.
I was never really afraid that this would happen. The modern appurtenances of life seemed to be too firmly established, and the face of the world had been too fully remodelled to meet human needs. I found it impossible to conceive that those inventions on which our community rests could suddenly vanish and reduce us to the days of flint and steel and wooden spades and mud cabins. But imaginative novelists bemused themselves with this conception, and pictured a war which laid the whole world waste and left the few survivors in the condition of the cave man. They called it a return to the Dark Ages, by which they meant that epoch in our history which lasted from the fifth century, when the Roman Empire was crumbling, to the eleventh, when the Middle Ages began to develop their own culture.
What were those Dark Ages, those six centuries during which a curtain seemed to descend upon Europe? The invasion of the wild Germanic and Slavonic peoples destroyed the civic life of the western world, the writ of Rome ceased to run, and her central authority crumbled. She had devised a host of invendons which made life comfortable and intercourse between nations easy; clothes and fine furniture and pictures and books and statuary; a noble architecture, and a plumbing system unsurpassed until modern America; methods of transport unmatched until a century or so ago; a legal fabric which is still largely our code; a civil service which at its best was probably as efficient as anything the world has known. All this went, and in most parts of Europe the forests overpowered the vineyards and corn-lands, the famous cities lost half their people, and the public buildings fell into ruins. Instead of the imperial law and the imperial bureaucracy new governments were formed by shaggy warriors, who either held to their own customs or gave the Roman code a tribal twist. There was little security for life and property, since the Pax Romana was no more. A man’s hand had once again to keep his head. The world shrank into little pockets of humanity which knew nothing about their neighbours. Food and drink and housing were reduced to their beggarly elements, and clothes to a barbaric bareness or a barbaric gaudiness. Civilisation, remember, is a complex thing, or rather a thing which attains simplicity through complexity. The life of the Dark Ages was rudimentary, and, being rudimentary, ended in being unbelievably complex.
A curtain of darkness seemed to have settled upon a world which had once been so shining and varied. But there were many points of light in that darkness. There was first of all the Christian Church which, behind all its political caprices and theological pedantries, did preserve a continuous tradition of civilisation and the spiritual life. Throughout those centuries it produced saints and missionaries whose names we still honour. It produced poets whose hymns we still sing, and in many a monastery tucked away in the forests there were scholars who studied more than the Church Fathers. Much of the literature of Greece and Rome survived in obscure places. Aristotle, or a part of him, was not forgotten, and men could get to Plato through St. Augustine. Moreover, some subtle impact of the old classical tradition was inciting the new masters of the world to a kind of intellectual activity. The invaders who had wrecked the Roman Empire were beginning to devise a law, a poetry, a political philosophy of their own.
Therefore I think that the right way to look at the Dark Ages is as a time of darkness indeed, but with lights cherished in many places which in the end were to combine into a new dawn. The great Mediterranean tradition was obscured but not destroyed; or, to change the metaphor, the world was a field lying fallow, the soil was rich, the seed had been preserved, and one day there was to be a wide sowing and a bountiful harvest.
So I did not dread a return of the Dark Ag
es. For one thing I did not believe that that particular kind of retrogression was possible; for another I did not think that it would be such a terrible thing after all. My nightmare, when I was afflicted by nightmares, was of something very different. My fear was not barbarism, which is civilisation submerged or not yet born, but de-civilisation, which is civilisation gone rotten.
A certain type of flimsy romantic has been too ready with abuse of a mechanical age, just as a certain type of imaginative writer with a smattering of science has been too gross in his adulation. The machine, when mastered and directed by the human spirit, may lead to a noble enlargement of life. Enterprises which make roads across pathless mountains, collect the waters over a hundred thousand miles to set the desert blossoming, build harbours on harbourless coasts, tame the elements to man’s uses — these are the equivalent to-day of the great explorations and adventures of the past. So, too, the patient work of research laboratories, where to the student a new and startling truth may leap at any moment from the void. Those who achieve such things are as much imaginative creators as any poet, as much conquerors as any king. If a man so dominates a machine that it becomes part of him he may thereby pass out of a narrow world to an ampler ether. The true airman is one of the freest of God’s creatures, for he has used a machine to carry him beyond the pale of the Machine. He is a creator and not a mechanic, a master and not a slave.
But suppose that science has gained all its major victories, and that there remain only little polishings and adjustments. It has wrested from nature a full provision for human life, so that there is no longer need for long spells of monotonous toil and a bitter struggle for bread. Victory having been won, the impulse to construct has gone. The world has become a huge, dapper, smooth-running mechanism. Would that be the perfecting of civilisation? Would it not rather mean de-civilisation, a loss of the supreme values of life?
In my nightmare I could picture such a world. I assumed — no doubt an impossible assumption — that mankind was as amply provided for as the inmates of a well-managed orphanage. New inventions and a perfecting of transport had caused the whole earth to huddle together. There was no corner of the globe left unexplored and unexploited, no geographical mysteries to fire the imagination. Broad highways crowded with automobiles threaded the remotest lands, and overhead great air-liners carried week-end tourists to the wilds of Africa and Asia. Everywhere there were guest-houses and luxury hotels and wayside camps and filling-stations. What once were the savage tribes of Equatoria and Polynesia were now in reserves as an attraction to trippers, who bought from them curios and holiday mementoes. The globe, too, was full of pleasure-cities where people could escape the rigour of their own climate and enjoy perpetual holiday.
In such a world everyone would have leisure. But everyone would be restless, for there would be no spiritual discipline in life. Some kind of mechanical philosophy of politics would have triumphed, and everybody would have his neat little part in the state machine. Everybody would be comfortable, but since there could be no great demand for intellectual exertion everybody would be also slightly idiotic. Their shallow minds would be easily bored, and therefore unstable. Their life would be largely a quest for amusement. The raffish existence led to-day by certain groups would have become the normal existence of large sections of society.
Some kind of intellectual life no doubt would remain, though the old political disputes would have cancelled each other out, and the world would not have the stimulus of a contest of political ideals, which is, after all, a spiritual thing. Scientists and philosophers would still spin theories about the universe. Art would be in the hands of coteries, and literature dominated by petites chapelles. There would be religion, too, of a kind, in glossy upholstered churches with elaborate music. It would be a feverish, bustling world, self-satisfied and yet malcontent, and under the mask of a riotous life there would be death at the heart. The soil of human nature, which in the Dark Ages lay fallow, would now be worked out. Men would go everywhere and live nowhere; know everything and understand nothing. In the perpetual hurry of life there would be no chance of quiet for the soul. In the tumult of a jazz existence what hope would there be for the still small voices of the prophets and philosophers and poets? A world which claimed to be a triumph of the human personality would in truth have killed that personality In such a bagman’s paradise, where life would be rationalised and padded with every material comfort, there would be little satisfaction for the immortal part of man. It would be a new Vanity Fair with Mr. Talkative as the chief figure on the town council. The essence of civilisation lies in man’s defiance of an impersonal universe. It makes no difference that a mechanised universe may be his own creation if he allows his handiwork to enslave him. Not for the first time in history have the idols that humanity has shaped for its own ends become its master.
It is a nightmare which may well terrify us, and sometimes I have thought that it was not altogether a nightmare, for it was the logical culmination of certain tendencies which were strong amongst us. It was not the return of the Dark Ages that I feared, but the coming of a too garish age, when life would be lived in the glare of neon lamps and the spirit would have no solitude.
But something has happened. A civilisation bemused by an opulent materialism has been met by a rude challenge. The free peoples have been challenged by the serfs. The gutters have exuded a poison which bids fair to infect the world. The beggar-on-horseback rides more roughshod over the helpless than the cavalier. A combination of multitudes who have lost their nerve and a junta of arrogant demagogues has shattered the comity of nations. The European tradition has been confronted with an Asiatic revolt, with its historic accompaniment of janissaries and assassins. There is in it all, too, an ugly pathological savour, as if a mature society were being assailed by diseased and vicious children.
For centuries we have enjoyed certain blessings; a stable law, before which the poor man and the rich man were equal; freedom within that law to believe what we pleased, to write what we pleased, to say what we pleased; a system of government which gave the ultimate power to the ordinary man. We have lived by toleration, rational compromise and freely expressed opinion, and we have lived very well. But we had come to take these blessings for granted, like the air we breathed. They had lost all glamour for us since they had become too familiar. Indeed, it was a mark of the intellectual to be rather critical and contemptuous of them. Paradoxical young men acquired a cheap reputation by sneering at the liberal spirit in politics, and questioning the value of free discussion, toleration and compromise.
To-day we have seen those principles challenged in the fundamentals, not by a few arm-chair theorists, but by great Powers supported by great armies. We have suddenly discovered that what we took for the enduring presuppositions of our life are in danger of being destroyed. To-day we value freedom, I think, as we have not valued it before. Just as a man never appreciates his home so much as when he is compelled to leave it, so now we realise our inestimable blessings when they are threatened. We have been shaken out of our smugness and warned of a great peril, and in that warning lies our salvation. The dictators have done us a marvellous service in reminding us of the true values of life.
III
These chapters are meant as a record of how the surface of life has appeared to one pilgrim at different stages. They do not contain a confession of faith, in religion, philosophy, or the business of government. I admit an undercurrent of optimism, which, it has been said, is in good times a luxury but in bad times a necessity. With me such cheerfulness, as I prefer to call it, is not a creed to adopt or reject, but a habit of mind, a temperamental bias, a pre-condition of perception and thought. And it in turn derives from the kind of youth I had. For youth to continue, so that it illumines middle life and old age and pleasantly binds the years together, it must have been spacious, with wide horizons and a tonic air; happy, too, in spite of all the heart-breaks of adolescence. For what it can give to the later phases of life are zest and f
reedom, and such gifts are impossible if it was itself bound and frustrate.
In my lifetime I seem to note a change which is a graver thing than our other discontents, which, indeed, is in a large measure the cause of them. The outlook of youth has been narrowed, doors have been sealed, channels have silted up, there is less choice of routes at the cross-roads.
This affects principally the middle class. Let me define that odious word. At one end of the social scale is the plutocracy, whose sons will be sufficiently well dowered to indulge their fancy. If they enter a profession they have the security of means behind them. At the other end are the wage- earning classes, who in their health and wealth are largely the care of the State. Between come the “middling folk” in many gradations; their characteristics are that they have to earn their living, since they have no accumulated fortunes, that the State has little responsibility for them, that they have a reasonable average of culture and certain strong traditions in customs, manners and conduct. The class contains most of the knowledge and skill in the nation. Also, since our nominal aristocracy has been so copiously diluted, it contains most of the older stocks, the people with the longest proven descent.