Читать книгу A Rebel's Vision Splendid - James H. G. Chapple - Страница 5
ОглавлениеA NEW ORIENTATION AND NOT MATERIALISTIC
There is a fresh facing, a new bearing. The hour strikes for truth, and it is the duty for everyone who sees below the surface of things to speak or write in order to get mental comfort and soul satisfaction. To criticise and challenge what is wrong and to encourage what is right; but it is the rebel and heretic who knows the right and sees the truth most clearly. The hands stretched towards heaven to-day are the hands of the heretics. Said one, in a kind of chuckling glee: “To-day, in order to find God, one has to leave the traditional churches!” This is the result of a new orientation, and it is not an orientation of materialism, but the reverse. Neither is it confined to religion, for it means a new orientation in the political sphere. There is a new power, a new force, abroad, and it is of the Spirit. The poor people who make the wealth and who are overburdened with rents, dear food and uncertain employment are beginning to feel their power and are arousing themselves. On looking back, one is almost staggered at their patience and docility.
Said a recent speaker: “England wants quiet peace and pre-war conditions.” Does she? Well, until she sweeps away her social injustices she won’t get these things. The writer is a New Zealander, but at the present time in beautiful little Grasmere, in Westmorland, the spot that Wordsworth said was “The loveliest spot that man hath yet found.” During the past months he has travelled with open eyes over the domain reaching from London to Inverness, to and fro, hither and thither, and he asserts that the old time quiet peace and pre-war conditions cannot and will not return. May the good God forbid it! That fake peace allowing the upper classes to spend their days (when the London and Continental season closes) in shooting grouse, partridges and pheasants! At the beginning of the grouse season in Scotland the trains from the south were so overcrowded that additional trains were needed. One rich gun-man from the south ran out of cartridges for his specially designed gun when on the moors. An aeroplane was hired to go to Paris for a thousand cartridges, which cost six hundred pounds by the time the aeronaut got back. Think of it; about sixteen shillings per shot, while multitudes are on the dole, while the third estate toils on, if they are lucky enough to get work, and while the fourth estate live in slums and dirt. So meanwhile kings, castes and political parties—Tory and Liberal—are dreading the unknown forces; and well they might, for thus far shalt thou go and no farther.
Well did Emerson write: “The dice of God are loaded!” Truly the dice of God are loaded against them, and they cannot win out—they may stave off—even by the development of an English Fascisti movement—they may stave off the evil day, but they cannot win out. God’s dice are loaded against them! The odds seem to lie the other way, for the political patriots are aiming at the old competitive trade conditions in order to get wealth and power by the workers’ surplus profit; the hydra-headed journalists are encouraging them, while the pulpiteers who have Iscariotised the religion of the Nazarene and turned Christianity into a caricature are trying unwittingly to hustle God out of His Universe. But the dice of God are loaded against them! The nation without a vision will perish!
The clock of destiny has a long pendulum. The man-made profiteering and imperialistic war has loaded dice to contend with, for God’s thunderbolt is going to hit the mark, for the dice of God are loaded on the side of love, peace, truth, justice, co-operation, internationalism, brotherhood and universalism. What a wonderful nest of words! Yet to the nationalists and imperialists these are all more or less poison. The imperialists, too, have a nest of words they roll over on the tongue like sweet morsels, i.e. competition, nationalism, imperialism, capitalism and militarism. All these come from the dusty chambers of thought and are the outgrowth of feudalism; it infests the whole atmosphere of thought and results in that modern trinity of evil P’s—Press, Pulpit, Politics. All arrayed and in seeming collusion against God’s Kingdom on the earth; but the dice of God are loaded.
The Conservative soul is dull at forecasting. Confucius said: “The good man is able to presage.” But in this the Conservative does not answer the requirements. The vulgar grasping soul of the money-making bourgeoise is also dull at forecasting. There is no moral ideal in either class—Tory or Liberal. We have to look elsewhere—in the ranks of Labour, and God’s dice are heavily loaded for and on the industrial side. The revolt of Labour is the Spirit of Humanity (which is, too, the Spirit of God) in revolt! It is the upheaval of the Divine Spirit! It is the voice of the one Common Humanity in articulation—it is the Spirit of God—even as the candle-light is the same as the sunlight only in lesser degree. The awakened soul sees this and rejoices in the new orientation—the new orientation of ethics: ethics that will outlaw all that makes war possible:
THE “MORAL” DAMAGE OF WAR
But war—as war is now, and always was—
A dirty, loathsome, servile murder-job;—
Men lousy, sleepless, ulcerous, afraid;
Men stunned to brainlessness, and gibbering;
Men maimed and blinded; men against machines—
Flesh versus iron, concrete, flame, and wire;
Men choking out their souls in poison-gas;
Men squelched into the slime by trampling feet:
Dead bodies used to build a trench again:
Men disembowelled by guns five miles away,
Cursing with their last breath the living God
Because he made them in his image; men ...
So—were your talent mine—I’d write of war
For those who, coming after, know it not.
Yes—a new orientation in morals and religion, we who presage, see the grey dawn of internationalism in politics and also universalism in religion. All the world will yet be represented in one parliament, and all the world will yet worship in one temple. The day of the priest will go. The day of the prophet is at hand, and we shall learn that Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus and Mahomet were ONE! There are hindrances to this grand conception, and Labour will remove them. There are obstacles, and Labour will remove them, but the new birth will be painful—all births are—and this social birth especially so, for imperialism in politics, millionairism in finance, wage-slavery in industry, and militarism over all cannot be jettisoned easily. Says Edwin Markham:
Come, clear the way, then, clear the way:
Blind creeds and kings have had their day.
Break the dead branches from the path:
Our hope is in the aftermath—
Our hope is in heroic men,
Star-led to build the world again.
To this Event the ages ran:
Make way for Brotherhood—make way for Man.
A great stumbling-block in the way of The Vision Splendid is the materialistic outlook in the minds of so many to-day. They blunder over the fallacy that man is of one uniform substance, that matter is everything and there is nothing else, that mind is only a function of the brain and such-ike fallacies. A materialism so rank that one public man’s jibe was: “They seem to revel in their mud-bath!” Mind is that which knows and thinks, and matter is that which is known by mind.
Said Descartes: “The essence of mind is thought, and the essence of matter is extension.” Let us explain that in sculpture the matter may be rough marble, but the sculptor is able to communicate spirit to the marble! Which is the greater, matter or spirit? Says the housemaid: “I swept the house with a broom.” Partly so—yes, but she swept the house with her “WILL.” Which is the greater, the broom or the “WILL”?
“It is very easy to make a statue like this,” said the guide, pointing to a figure beautifully carved in Carrara marble. “How?” asked the tourist, somewhat comically puzzled by the remark. “Well,” the guide said, “you only have to chip off the part you don’t want!” To do that requires the Divinity within! That is the work of the inward creator! That is beyond matter. That artistic spirit transcends matter—it is part of God the great Creator!
Said one thinker: “The sun is an unthinkable mass of matter in its immensity,” but surely the mind of man, which is able to measure the sun, is thereby greater than the sun, and is more permanent and indestructible than the sun? If not, then why not? Rational thought has led me to these conclusions, and that shallow rationalist when passing from the study of matter to the study of spirit is at once confronted with difficulties. Materialism may be useful in physiology and medicine, but it does not explain the spirit in man. The mental there argues a higher mental elsewhere. The Greeks were right. In the beginning the LOGOS, the IDEA, the WORD. The word “spirit” correctly means “real.” Where, then, is reality in spirit or matter?
In art we see the great revealer of spirit. Then reason from particulars to universals. If the picture or statue requires a creator, so does the solar system and the constellation. The book is not solely made of type, paper, and binding—there is a spirit within and it is that that gives light, knowledge and warmth, and that is quite beyond matter. One might argue from music, poetry and architecture. Said the poet John Davidson:
I am haunted by the heavens and the earth;
I am besieged by the things I have seen;
Followed and watched by rivers; snared and held
In labyrinthine woods and tangled meads;
Hemmed in by mountains; waylaid by sun;
Environed and set by moon and stars;
Whispered by winds and summoned by the sea.
To which I might say, it is all nonsense if the poet did not know a Divine Spirit immanent in and through all, and which we call God. The things of the spirit irrigate our minds, enlarge our imagination, expand our judgment and kindle our love. They also give us The Vision Splendid. The money-rushing life knows little of this—rather it atrophies and kills the idealism: for idealism is the contra word to materialism. The craving of the idealist is for perfection and beauty, and he cannot rest in the vulgarities and commonplaces of materialism. He can find no resting place for the soles of his feet in mere objective facts apart from spiritual suggestion. Said John Keats, very truly:
(Materialist) Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine,
Unweave a rainbow!
Said a materialist, who was also a physicist: “Tears! I have analysed them and found them to be phosphate of lime, chloride of sodium and water!” But what of the fountains of the great deep that had burst up from the depths of the troubled soul and found vent in a flood of tears? Reality lies there and not in analysis! Truly man lives not by bread alone, and in the new orientation we learn it. We attack a coarse, vulgar, and brutal materialism, for it is a challenge to The Vision Splendid. We stand to-day at the parting of the ways when the orthodox creeds and political creeds and imperial creeds are in the melting-pot, and there is still a danger of the brutalization of man by another war of materialism. Man must head for love, beauty and brotherhood, and all these are things of the spirit and not matter. Said Ella Wheeler Wilcox:
Let there be many windows in your soul,
That all the glory of the universe
May beautify it. Not the narrow pane
Of one poor creed can catch the radiant rays
That shine from countless sources. Tear away
The blinds of superstition; let the light
Pour through fair windows broad as truth itself,
And high as God.
Why should the spirit peer
Through some priest-curtained orifice, and grope
Along dim corridors of doubt, when all
The splendour from unfathomed seas of space
Might bathe it with their golden seas of love?
Sweep up the débris of decaying faiths,
Sweep down the cobwebs of worn-out beliefs,
And throw your soul wide open to the light
Of reason and of knowledge. Tune your ear
To all the wordless music of the stars,
And to the voice of nature, and your heart
Shall turn to truth and goodness, as the plant
Turns to the sun. A thousand unseen hands
Reach down to help you from their peace-crowned heights,
And all the forces of the firmament
Shall fortify your strength. Be not afraid
To thrust aside half-truths and grasp the whole.
