Part 9

So Lenin is dead at last. He dies on the eve of the recognition of the Soviet Government by the Western Powers. For most practical purposes the work of Lenin was over before 1920. His death now or a little later will make only the smallest difference in the destinies of Russia.

For the Communist Party which still controls Russia has this in common with the Catholic Church, that it is sustained by a system of dogmas, disciplines and, now, experiences and traditions so much stronger than any single individual, that individuals, though they may serve it more or less effectively, cannot control nor deflect it. They must move inside its limitations. Russia, under the Communist rule, is at the opposite pole to such a phase of affairs as would evoke a Cæsarism. It is over the Western Latin democracies, subjected to the adventures and ravages of uncontrolled rich men, that the dictators arise. Lenin was never in reality a dictator as Mussolini is a dictator. He impressed one as being in the grip of forces quite beyond his control, albeit they are forces he had himself helped to develop and organise. Communism is definite, directive, compelling; Fascism is dramatic and empty, a puerile, vague, violent thing, a young ass to be ridden anywhere by a bold, competent rider. A score of Lenins might die and Communism would go on as though nothing had changed. Without Mussolini the Fascisti might do anything--fall into a torrent, get lost, destroy society, vanish.

I saw Lenin in 1920 in the Kremlin. He was an extraordinarily fragile little thing, small hands clasped together upon the corner of his desk and little feet that dangled from his chair far off the ground. He was very bald. I learn now with astonishment that I was the older man. He put his amusing Mongoloid face a little on one side as we talked, with something of the wary expression of a fencer. When he found out I didn’t want to score points for or against Communism, but to learn what they proposed to do next and particularly what they proposed to do about the peasants, he dropped any appearance of controversy and laid his views and plans before me very frankly.

In return I tried to tell him things about England, but he seemed to have been stuffed up with a lot of nonsense about British conditions. He believed that a certain obscure paper called the _Dreadnought_, or the _Woman’s Dreadnought_, or some such title, edited by Miss Sylvia Pankhurst, represented millions of insurgent British proletarians, and that the violent struggle then going on in Ireland was, in some slightly obscured form, a struggle between Capitalism and Communism. It was difficult to readjust his perspectives.

His schemes for the reorganisation of Russia seemed to me to be right-minded, honestly conceived, and very, very artless. He had a scheme for the “Electrification of Russia” that struck my usually quite sufficiently imaginative mind as hopelessly impractical. It ignored distances, and Russia is a country consisting mostly of distances.

I suppose no gambler who stakes his all upon a single throw against great odds and wins was ever so astonished as the Bolsheviks when they came into power in 1917. They went into Russia like good revolutionists to make trouble and die. They found themselves presently in scarcely disputed possession of a completely exhausted country. Even in 1920 they seemed still a little incredulous to find themselves still there. Never was there such rant and nonsense as the stuff Mr. Winston Churchill, for example, talks about the Bolsheviks seizing upon and ruining Russia. So far from seizing, there was nothing to oppose them but brigands and hopelessly incapable military adventurers, and so far from ruining, the ruin was already complete. In this chaos the Bolsheviks grasped power, according to all the accepted revolutionary examples. There was not so much an organised resistance to their seizure as a lawless disregard. They had to shoot. All revolutionists have to shoot. It is their privilege and their danger. But it is usually conceded that the Bolsheviks shot too much and went on shooting too long, and acquired almost a habit of shooting.

It is not that they were bloodthirsty men, but that they were inexperienced and unprepared. They murdered in a fit of Russian nerves. And they were equally inexperienced and unprepared for the task of government, once their power was secure. They served Russia well in defending her from France, Poland, Churchill, Kolchak, Judenitch, Deniken, Wrangel, and all the evil horde that beset her from without, but they rebuilt within slowly and experimentally and wastefully. And they had the bad luck of two famine years.

Still, they are on their feet now; they are making headway, and it is from the red root of Communist theory that the new Russian order will grow. It is manifestly destined to be a very great system, a United States in the Old World, stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific.

It is very important to grasp the fact that the former Russian political and social order was bankrupt and collapsed of its own accord, because it is the lesson that the private adventurers of the West are most loath to learn. Communism is not a dragon that devours healthy States; it is rather the scavenger of the rotten and fallen. You cannot say, for example, that Communism is either very strong nor spreading very rapidly as an aggressive doctrine in Europe. And yet it may still come to prevail over great parts of Europe. Europe is sick and obstinately set against its own cure; the decay of its monetary system (without which, as Mr. Keynes has pointed out, private capitalism is a totally unworkable system) spreads, and the European community, saturated with ideas of eager private gain, destitute of a sufficiently strong sense of the collective good, and enslaved by narrow individualistic and partisan and patriotic obsessions, makes no effort sufficiently comprehensive and intelligent to arrest the decay. The European system is not being seriously attacked from without at the present time, and least of all by Communism; the whole Communist propaganda in Western Europe does not amount to much more than the advertisement organisation of a typewriter seller or a patent medicine vendor. But the European system is being attacked from within by its own speculators and profit-makers, its tariffs and its combines for the restraint and deflection of trade. It has taught all its children competitive self-seeking, and it crumbles and collapses now for the lack of creative effort.

I am not one of those who minimise and detract from the great achievements of the nineteenth century, and deep in my nature is a craving for irresponsible liberty. Temperamentally I dislike Communism. I am a collectivist but not a Communist. I have always clung and still cling to the belief that the sprawling social and economic life in which I have grown up might be progressively organised into a secure, generous, and scientific system without any abrupt and violent destructive change. But I must confess to a deepening and increasing doubt whether the present European system can right itself. The collapse continues so steadily and disconcertingly. The little nations sit within their boundaries scheming for small advantages, none heeding the general good. Germany follows Russia; her enemies without and her “big-business” fools within have prepared another great area in which the Communist may make his experiments. And the collapse shows no tendency to end at the Rhine. The Western exchanges totter.

It may be that the hopes of such as I are excessive, that tinkering cannot save the European system now, that it is destined to profounder and more drastic changes than we are willing to admit as necessary. Perhaps the root is too rotten with self-seeking. Perhaps the Communist, with all his faults, his wastefulness and ugliness of method, has something vital to teach the world, if it is no more than discipline and devoted subordination to large ideas. Perhaps the whole European system, like Russia, may after all need to be regrafted upon this new strange root of Communism before it enters upon a fresh creative phase. I do not know. But it is plain to me that the years pass and the recovery of Europe does not begin.

XXIII

THE FANTASIES OF MR. BELLOC AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD

16.2.24

Mr. Belloc has written a small imposing book about America and England, called _The Contrast_. Small it is in length and substance, but imposing in its English edition at least by reason of large print, vast margins, thick paper, and all that makes a book physically impressive. It is the sort of book that has the first sentence of Chapter I on page nine. To the student of current events it is a very noteworthy book indeed. It betrays the drift of a very complex group of forces at work in our educational, journalistic, and literary world, a group of forces desiring the separation of America from Europe, clamouring for the disengagement of America from participation in the development of a new phase of civilisation, and the arrest of that development.

Mr. Belloc is too often treated by American and English critics as a merely comic figure. Comic figure no doubt this bulky, gesticulating Frenchman is, with his pretensions to an enormous bibulousness, with his affectation of a fastidious but non-existent scholarship, with the immense emphasis of his wild impromptu classifications and his magnificent caricature of a victorious dialectic. His prose style becomes more and more wonderfully suggestive of the after-dinner talker at his richest and jolliest. The sudden lapses into intense whispering italics; the abrupt glorification of some phrase by the thick loud enunciation of unexpected capitals! He is quick to imitate any form of dignity, even the dignity of the scientific exponent at his solemnest. Could anything be more sublimely funny, for instance, than this pseudo-illuminating experiment to illustrate the profound truth (in italics) that “_intense individual contact and energy make for uniformity_”?

“Put a number of smooth, round balls upon a billiard table. Give them each a slow and slight movement, and you will see no general movement appearing. There will be little clatter, few and rare collisions. Impart to them each a very rapid motion, that is, an individual intensity, and while you raise very greatly the noise of the shocks (which is a superficial phenomenon), and while you increase even more the number and frequency of collisions (which is the cause of the noise), you also soon develop a resultant of all the directions. If the sharp speed of each be maintained you will soon perceive in the movement of the whole a general swing, and all that great mass of balls will be moving in a crowd. So it is with a human society.”

One likes to think of that rosy dinner party adjourned to the billiard-room and “poon thesh soshial lawsh to pra’l tes’” by imparting the motion as directed.

But apart from the almost wilfully preposterous side of Mr. Belloc there is much to interest us in him profoundly. He is vigorously expressive; he speaks for forces in our community that are more often silently active; he gives resistances animation. The least original of contemporary writers, he has retained the leading ideas of an upbringing that was essentially Catholic and Latin in a practically inflexible form. His world, after a few merely preparatory phases and with a polite gesture to the Greeks, begins and ends with Rome. His mind in this age of tumultuous growth is like a naughty and growing child refusing to be put into larger clothes. And yet he is not blind to the great volume of reality outside that narrow old-fashioned scheme of his. He is not a blind man; he has at once vision and an extreme obstinacy. He feels and denies the passing of mediaeval Europe, he struggles against his realisation of the coming of a new order in the world, which shall comprehend, for example, Siberia and China and America, and a world-wide culture into which Islam and Christendom, the wisdom of India and China and the science of Britain and Germany and America and France and North Italy and Russia and Japan shall alike fall and be fused. One probable factor in this synthesis will be the English language, the great political and scientific traditions it carries with it, and the band of English-speaking communities, still growing and still crude, which will bring those traditions into fruitful relationships with a thousand new conditions and a thousand new climatic conditions. Rome will have a scarcely more important place in an English-knitted world than Babylon.

And so Mr. Belloc beats himself against the growing strength of this great net of civilised understandings. It does not exist. The languages diverge. The Americans are more foreign to the British than any Western Europeans. The British are a slightly detached part of some general Western European culture. A Frenchman can understand Keats and an American cannot. Americans are “egalitarian” and the British profoundly aristocratic. The decay of British aristocracy is the end of Britain, but there is always France to fall back upon. The American military mind is French in spirit. A Bellocian storm of such assertions swirls through the entire book, aggressive in manner, self-protective in motive. He emerges where he began. The Americans do not belong to “our” system--“_our_” meaning the intimate close brotherhood of British and French and Italians and Spanish and so forth, the British rather marginal to the Latin Catholic world. The Americans are a “New Thing”--capitals; they are a new culture outside the Western European culture. They are a “new race.” They must follow their own destinies and “we” ours.

Mr. Belloc is writing for American as much as for English readers, and he shows a care for their susceptibilities. But one or two possibilities gleam through, possibilities of a reassuring sort for his dear old Western European world. There may be biological forces at work; “a new race, the fate of which, to survive or to die, we know not.” Or this great new world may presently fall into social disorder, division--and insignificance.

This is the essence of Mr. Belloc’s argument to estrange Americans and Europeans, and particularly the Americans and British. Is it sound? So far as the differences go one concedes the vividness of Mr. Belloc’s vision. (His opening account of the different qualities of American and European scenery, by the way, is an amazingly good piece of writing.) But do the Americans present either a new race or even a new culture? I deny both these propositions. They are racially a still largely unfused mixture of Europeans, and the novel features of their social and cultural life merely mark a new phase into which the British and the European and the Slav cultures are all following America. That is to say, I do not believe that America is diverging upon a line of her own, but is simply ahead along a path that the other great constituents of the coming world community must all presently follow.

Let us state the case briefly and simply. Nobody who knows anything of the facts of the case regards the citizen of the United States as a sort of transplanted Britisher; but with the exception of certain coloured millions and certain Red Indian survivals they are manifestly transplanted Europeans, whose political institutions were originally built up in reaction to the Hanoverian monarchy and as a development of and in close sympathy with European liberalism and British nonconformity. This community of transplanted Europeans had the good fortune to have no strong military neighbour, and it had an almost virgin continent into which to expand. This good fortune enabled the States to realise very swiftly the full social and political possibilities of steamboat, railway, and electric communication.

They have developed a great State on the modern scale, with an unprecedented unity and uniformity of general ideas. A little too favoured by their immunities, they have not perhaps made so good a pace as they might have done with their general elementary education, but altogether their progress has been marvellous. The congested and entangled States of Western Europe--I leave out the Russian and British systems, which are neither of them truly European--are destined to achieve an ultimate unity under the same irresistible forces of transport that have expanded and held together the American United States. Their unification may be complicated or arrested by the unavoidable interweaving of the Slav and British systems with their destinies, and it is surely impossible for anyone outside the Belloc type of mentality to imagine either English-speaking or Latin-speaking America having neither voice nor share in the European part of this recrystallisation of the world’s affairs.

In this new order of life into which our kind is passing, Roman Christendom will become a local tradition and a province, just as Sumeria was swallowed up in Babylonia and just as the Empires of Babylon and Egypt became memories and provinces in the Empire of Rome. We are not developing new races, but merely mingling those we have, and our cultures do not so much differentiate as fuse, so we may reasonably hope to have at last one creative culture, with many aspects, replacing the partial civilisations of the past.

Fate has imposed it upon Mr. Belloc that he should see these things and deny them. His lot, I think, might have been happier had he been born and settled in some rich little town in the South of France, and there sat in the café, drinking his good red wine and orating and denying, without the irritation of having seen and known. But it was decreed that he should go to America and come back to report a strange and terrible land where the mountains are not really mountains nor the rivers rivers, and where a strange race grows outside the pale.

And, an exile in modern England, he has been forced, too, to turn his eyes into the depths of the past and see how life arose and how it has come to be man and will pass beyond man. And that also he denies, with much banging of the little round drum of a table on the terrasse. The American is a phantom and geology a lie; the only true world is Latin-made Europe, and if Heaven had not created it specially for jolly men, Mr. Belloc would; and in the warmth and congenial friendliness of it, Mr. Belloc will sit fighting reality with voice and gesture until the good red wine runs out and the sun goes down upon him for the last time.

XXIV

A CREATIVE EDUCATIONAL SCHEME FOR BRITAIN: A TENTATIVE FORECAST

22.2.24

The Labour Government of Great Britain starts its career with a conservative discretion that should reassure even the most excitable inmates of the Rothermere journalistic institutions. For this year at any rate we shall get little that we might not have had from a rather left-handed Liberal Cabinet. The Social Revolution is in no hurry to arrive.

The recognition of Russia is all to the good; and the treatment of foreign politicians in office as though they were statesmen and the serious little visits and talks, are full of promise. If you treat a politician as a statesman sufficiently it is possible that he will become one. It is to be hoped that the economies upon military things will have a certain courage, and that we may see the last of costly Guards’ uniforms and such-like gilt on the Royal gingerbread, this year. A democratic monarchy with a Labour Prime Minister should wear plain clothes. But these are minor matters. The immediate test of the Labour Government’s quality will be its treatment of national education. There is no excuse for just carrying on. The British educational policy since the war has been mean and deadly. The children insist upon growing up, and at present most of them for all practical purposes achieve the status of unemployed adults or undertrained blacklegs at fourteen. Secondary and higher education is a dislocated muddle.

I do not want to undervalue British education. Compared with other countries the common citizen of Britain is well educated and well informed. He is--though many Americans are loath to realise this--better educated and better informed than the average American common citizen. But compared with what is needed in a great modern State he is pitifully and dangerously under-educated. It is impossible for a Labour Government to realise its ideal of a highly organised community inspired not by profit-hunting but by the spirit of co-operative service, and working and producing abundantly for the common good, with the British population at the present level of education. To raise that level is a necessary condition to the successful extension of public service into economic life and the replacement of the money scramble by economic order.

For this reason Mr. C. P. Trevelyan is for me the most interesting and hopeful of all the new Labour Ministers. With his family tradition of high scholarship and liberal innovation, and with the new ferment of modern creative ideas in his mind, we may hope for a very bold and broad handling of the problems of British education. To him is given the opportunity of welding the disconnected parts, some quite good and some extremely inadequate or defective, which make up the British educational resources of to-day, into what may be the first completely comprehensive modern educational system in the world.

The first thing needed for the achievement of such a task is a complete and final recognition of the fact that such an education must go on at least to the age of sixteen, and that it must include a general knowledge of the history of the world and mankind, the elements of political and economic science, some knowledge of the methods and scope of biological and physical science, and a reasonable acquaintance with and use of at least one foreign language. The raising of the leaving age to sixteen was promised some years ago by Mr. Fisher, probably the feeblest statesman who has ever been overruled by his political associates. That promise was made when Britain was to become a land fit for heroes under the eloquent gestures of Mr. Lloyd George. It is for Mr. Trevelyan now to make that promise a reality.

But it is not only upward that the school age should extend, but also downward. It should be possible for poor parents who cannot afford a nursery to send their children to the people’s schools at a quite tender age. The children of prosperous people have a governess, or in towns go to some properly equipped infant school, by the time they are four or five. The children of the working-class woman knock about at home with a mother too busy to give them sufficient educational attention, and their only open air is the street. They miss the beginnings of drawing and modelling and such-like play; they do not get sufficiently talked to; they get little or no music; they start with that much handicap. Vile attempts at economy in British education have meant a grave retrogression in this respect. The schools have to be reopened to infants, and the facilities for infant teaching restored and extended. The public infant school must be the day-nursery of the poor.

Both these extensions of the school age will require more teachers. And even as it is, the British schools are scandalously understaffed. Not only is that so, but many of the existing staffs are under-trained and under-educated for their work. I cannot conceive of British education as a satisfactory system with less than quadruple the number of teachers at work than are now employed.