England and the War Part 4

If the press (or perhaps the Government, which controls the press) is not afraid of the people, why does it tell them so little about our reverses, and the merits of our enemies? For information concerning these things we have to depend wholly on conversation with returned soldiers. For instance, the horrible stories that we hear of the brutal treatment of our prisoners are numerous, and are true, and make a heavy bill against Germany, which bill we mean to present. But are they fair examples of the average treatment? We cannot tell; the accounts published are almost exclusively confined to the worst happenings. Most of the officers with whom I have talked who had been in several German military prisons said that they had nothing serious to complain of.

Prison is not a good place, and it is not pleasant to have your pea-soup and your coffee, one after the other, in the same tin dipper; but they were soldiers, and they agreed that it would be absurd to make a grievance of things like that. One private soldier was an even greater philosopher. 'No', he said, 'I have nothing to complain of. Of course, they do spit at you a good deal.' That man was unconquerable.

In s.h.i.+pping returns and the like we are given averages; why are we told nothing at all of the milder experiences of our soldier prisoners? It would not make us less resolved to do all that we can to better the lot of those who are suffering insult and torture, and to exact full retribution from the enemy. And it would bring some hope to those whose husbands or children or friends are in German military prisons, and who are racked every day by tales of what, in fact, are exceptional atrocities.

Or take the question of the conduct of German officers. We know that the Prussian military Government, in its approved handbooks, teaches its officers the use of brutality and terror as military weapons. The German philosophy of war, of which this is a part, is not really a philosophy of war; it is a philosophy of victory. For a long time now the Germans have been accustomed to victory, and have studied the arts of breaking the spirit and torturing the mind of the peoples whom they invade. Their philosophy of war will have to be rewritten when the time comes for them to accommodate their doctrine to their own defeat. In the meantime they teach frightfulness to their officers, and most of their officers prove ready pupils. There must be some, one would think, here and there, if only a sprinkling, who fall short of the Prussian doctrine, and are betrayed by human feeling into what we should recognize as decent and honourable conduct. And so there are; only we do not hear of them through the press. I should like to tell two stories which come to me from personal sources. The first may be called the story of the Christmas truce and the German captain. In the lull which fell on the fighting at the time of the first Christmas of the War, a British officer was disquieted to notice that his men were fraternizing with the Germans, who were standing about with them in No-man's land, laughing and talking. He went out to them at once, to bring them back to their own trenches. When he came up to his men, he met a German captain who had arrived on the same errand. The two officers, British and German, fell into talk, and while they were standing together, in not unfriendly fas.h.i.+on, one of the men took a snapshot photograph of them, copies of which were afterwards circulated in the trenches. Then the men were recalled to their duty, on the one side and the other, and, after an interval of some days, the war began again. A little time after this the British officer was in charge of a patrol, and, having lost his way, found himself in the German trenches, where he and his men were surrounded and captured. As they were being marched off along the trenches, they met the German captain, who ordered the men to be taken to the rear, and then, addressing the officer without any sign of recognition, said in a loud voice, 'You, follow me!' He led him by complicated ways along a whole series of trenches and up a sap, at the end of which he stopped, saluted, and, pointing with his hand, said 'Your trenches are there. Good day.'

My second story, the story of the British lieutenant in No-man's land, is briefer. I was with a friend of mine, a young officer back from the front, wounded, and the conduct of German officers was being discussed.

He said, 'You can't expect me to be very hard on German officers, for one of them saved my life'. He then told how he and a companion crept out into No-man's land to bring in some of our wounded who were lying there. When they had reached the wounded, and were preparing to bring them in, they were discovered by the Germans opposite, who at once whipped up a machine-gun and turned it on them. Their lives were not worth half a minute's purchase, when suddenly a German officer leapt up on to the parapet, and, angrily waving back the machine-gunners, called out, in English, 'That's all right. You may take them in.'

These are no doubt exceptional cases; the rule is very different. But a good many of such cases are known to soldiers, and I have seen none of them in the press. Soldiers are silent by law, and journalists either do not hear these things, or, believing that hate is a valuable a.s.set, suppress all mention of them. If England could ever be disgraced by a mishap, she would be disgraced by having given birth to those Englishmen, few and wretched, who, when an enemy behaves generously, conceal or deny the fact. And consider the effect of this silence on the Germans. There are some German officers, as I said, who are better than the German military handbooks, and better than their monstrous chiefs.

Which of them will pay the smallest attention to what our papers say when he finds that they collect only atrocities, and are blind to humanity if they see it in an enemy? He will regard our press accounts of the German army as the work of malicious cripples; and our perfectly true narrative of the unspeakable brutality and filthiness of the German army's doings will lose credit with him.

If I had my way, I would staff the newspaper offices, as far as possible, with wounded soldiers, and I would give some of the present staff a holiday as stretcher-bearers. Then we should hear more of the truth.

Is it feared that we should have no heart for the War if once we are convinced that among the Germans there are some human beings? Is it believed that our people can be heroic on one condition only, that they shall be asked to fight no one but orangoutangs? Our airmen fight as well as any one, in this world or above it, has ever fought; and we owe them a great debt of thanks for maintaining, and, by their example, actually teaching the Germans to maintain, a high standard of decency.

This War has shown, what we might have gathered from our history, that we fight best up hill. From our history also we may learn that it does not relax our sinews to be told that our enemy has some good qualities.

We should like him better as an enemy if he had more. We know what we have believed; and we are not going to fail in resolve or perseverance because we find that our task is difficult, and that we have not a monopoly of all the virtues.

Most of us will not live to see it, for our recovery from this disease will be long and troublesome, but the War will do great things for us.

It will make a reality of the British Commonwealth, which until now has been only an aspiration and a dream. It will lay the sure foundation of a League of Nations in the affection and understanding which it has promoted among all English-speaking peoples, and in the relations of mutual respect and mutual service which it has established between the English-speaking peoples and the Latin races. Our united Rolls of Honour make the most magnificent list of benefactors that the world has ever seen. In the end, the War may perhaps even save the soul of the main criminal, awaken him from his b.l.o.o.d.y dream, and lead him back by degrees to the possibility of innocence and goodwill.

SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND

_Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, delivered July 4, 1918_

There is nothing new and important to be said of Shakespeare. In recent years antiquaries have made some additions to our knowledge of the facts of his life. These additions are all tantalizing and comparatively insignificant. The history of the publication of his works has also become clearer and more intelligible, especially by the labours of Mr.

Pollard; but the whole question of quartos and folios remains th.o.r.n.y and difficult, so that no one can reach any definite conclusion in this matter without a liberal use of conjecture.

I propose to return to the old catholic doctrine which has been illuminated by so many disciples of Shakespeare, and to speak of him as our great national poet. He embodies and exemplifies all the virtues, and most of the faults, of England. Any one who reads and understands him understands England. This method of studying Shakespeare by reading him has perhaps gone somewhat out of vogue in favour of more roundabout ways of approach, but it is the best method for all that. Shakespeare tells us more about himself and his mind than we could learn even from those who knew him in his habit as he lived, if they were all alive and all talking. To learn what he tells we have only to listen.

I think there is no national poet, of any great nation whatsoever, who is so completely representative of his own people as Shakespeare is representative of the English. There is certainly no other English poet who comes near to Shakespeare in embodying our character and our foibles. No one, in this connexion, would venture even to mention Spenser or Milton. Chaucer is English, but he lived at a time when England was not yet completely English, so that he is only half-conscious of his nation. Wordsworth is English, but he was a recluse. Browning is English, but he lived apart or abroad, and was a tourist of genius. The most English of all our great men of letters, next to Shakespeare, is certainly Dr. Johnson, but he was no great poet.

Shakespeare, it may be suspected, is too poetic to be a perfect Englishman; but his works refute that suspicion. He is the Englishman endowed, by a fortunate chance, with matchless powers of expression. He is not silent or dull; but he understands silent men, and he enters into the minds of dull men. Moreover, the Englishman seems duller than he is.

It is a point of pride with him not to be witty and not to give voice to his feelings. The shepherd Corin, who was never in court, has the true philosophy. 'He that hath learned no wit by nature nor art may complain of good breeding or comes of a very dull kindred.'

Shakespeare knew nothing of the British Empire. He was an islander, and his patriotism was centred on

This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands.

When he speaks of Britons and British he always means the Celtic peoples of the island. Once only he makes a slip. There is a pa.s.sage in _King Lear_ (IV. vi. 249) where the followers of the King, who in the text of the quarto versions are correctly called 'the British party', appear in the folio version as 'the English party'. Perhaps the quartos contain Shakespeare's own correction of his own inadvertence; but those of us, and we are many, who have been blamed by northern patriots for the misuse of the word English may claim Shakespeare as a brother in misfortune.

Our critics, at home and abroad, accuse us of arrogance. I doubt if we can prove them wrong; but they do not always understand the nature of English arrogance. It does not commonly take the form of self-a.s.sertion.

Shakespeare's casual allusions to our national characteristics are almost all of a kind; they are humorous and depreciatory. Here are some of them. Every holiday fool in England, we learn from Trinculo in _The Tempest_, would give a piece of silver to see a strange fish, though no one will give a doit to relieve a lame beggar. The English are quarrelsome, Master Slender testifies, at the game of bear-baiting. They are great drinkers, says Iago, 'most potent in potting; your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander are nothing to your English'.

They are epicures, says Macbeth. They will eat like wolves and fight like devils, says the Constable of France. An English n.o.bleman, according to the Lady of Belmont, can speak no language but his own. An English tailor, according to the porter of Macbeth's castle, will steal cloth where there is hardly any cloth to be stolen, out of a French hose. The devil, says the clown in _All's Well_, has an English name; he is called the Black Prince.

Nothing has been changed in this vein of humorous banter since Shakespeare died. One of the best pieces of Shakespeare criticism ever written is contained in four words of the present Poet Laureate's Ode for the Tercentenary of Shakespeare, 'London's laughter is thine'. The wit of our trenches in this war, especially perhaps among the c.o.c.kney and South country regiments, is pure Shakespeare. Falstaff would find himself at home there, and would recognize a brother in Old Bill.

The best known of Shakespeare's allusions to England are no doubt those splendid outbursts of patriotism which occur in _King John_, and _Richard II,_ and _Henry V_. And of these the dying speech of John of Gaunt, in _Richard II_, is the deepest in feeling. It is a lament upon the decay of England, 'this dear, dear land'. Since we began to be a nation we have always lamented our decay. I am afraid that the Germans, whose self-esteem takes another form, were deceived by this. To the right English temper all bragging is a thing of evil omen. That temper is well expressed, where perhaps you would least expect to find it, in the speech of King Henry V to the French herald:

To say the sooth,-- Though 'tis no wisdom to confess so much Unto an enemy of craft and vantage,-- My people are with sickness much enfeebled, My numbers lessened, and those few I have Almost no better than so many French; Who, when they were in health, I tell thee, herald, I thought upon one pair of English legs Did march three Frenchmen. Yet, forgive me, G.o.d, That I do brag thus! This your air of France Hath blown that vice in me; I must repent.

Go therefore, tell thy master here I am: My ransom is this frail and worthless trunk; My army but a weak and sickly guard; Yet, G.o.d before, tell him we will come on, Though France himself and such another neighbour Stand in our way. There's for thy labour, Montjoy.

Go bid thy master well advise himself: If we may pa.s.s, we will; if we be hindered, We shall your tawny ground with your red blood Discolour; and so, Montjoy, fare you well.

The sum of all our answer is but this: We would not seek a battle as we are; Nor, as we are, we say we will not shun it; So tell your master.

That speech might have been written for the war which we are waging to-day against a less honourable enemy. But, indeed, Shakespeare is full of prophecy. Here is his description of the volunteers who flocked to the colours in the early days of the war:

Rash inconsiderate fiery voluntaries, With ladies' faces and fierce dragons' spleens, Have sold their fortunes at their native homes, Bearing their birthrights proudly on their backs, To make a hazard of new fortunes here.

In brief, a braver choice of dauntless spirits Than now the English bottoms have waft o'er Did never float upon the swelling tide.

And here is his sermon on national unity, preached by the Bishop of Carlisle:

O, if you rear this house against this house, It will the woefullest division prove That ever fell upon this cursed earth.

Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so, Lest child, child's children, cry against you 'Woe!'

The patriotism of the women is described by the b.a.s.t.a.r.d in _King John_:

Your own ladies and pale-visag'd maids Like Amazons come tripping after drums: Their thimbles into armed gauntlets change, Their needles to lances, and their gentle hearts To fierce and b.l.o.o.d.y inclination.

Lastly, Queen Isabella's blessing, spoken over King Henry V and his French bride, predicts an enduring friends.h.i.+p between England and France:

As man and wife, being two, are one in love, So be there 'twixt your kingdoms such a spousal, That never may ill office, or fell jealousy, Which troubles oft the bed of blessed marriage, Thrust in between the paction of these kingdoms, To make divorce of their incorporate league; That English may as French, French Englishmen, Receive each other! G.o.d speak this Amen!

One of the delights of a literature as rich and as old as ours is that at every step we take backwards we find ourselves again. We are delivered from that foolish vein of thought, so dear to ignorant conceit, which degrades the past in order to exalt the present and the future. It is easy to feel ourselves superior to men who no longer breathe and walk, and whom we do not trouble to understand. Here is the real benefit of scholars.h.i.+p; it reduces men to kins.h.i.+p with their race.

Science, pressing forward, and beating against the bars which guard the secrets of the future, has no such sympathy in its gift.

Anyhow, in Shakespeare's time, England was already old England; which if she could ever cease to be, she might be Jerusalem, or Paradise, but would not be England at all. What Shakespeare and his fellows of the sixteenth century gave her was a new self-consciousness and a new self-confidence. They foraged in the past; they recognized themselves in their ancestors; they found feudal England, which had existed for many hundreds of years, a dumb thing; and when she did not know her own meaning, they endowed her purposes with words. They gave her a new delight in herself, a new sense of power and exhilaration, which has remained with her to this day, surviving all the airy philosophic theories of humanity which thought to supersede the old solid national temper. The English national temper is better fitted for traffic with the world than any mere doctrine can ever be, for it is marked by an immense tolerance. And this, too, Shakespeare has expressed. Falstaff is perhaps the most tolerant man who was ever made in G.o.d's image. But it is rather late in the day to introduce Falstaff to an English audience.

Perhaps you will let me modernize a brief scene from Shakespeare, altering nothing essential, to ill.u.s.trate how completely his spirit is the spirit of our troops in Flanders and France.

A small British expeditionary force, bound on an international mission, finds itself stranded in an unknown country. The force is composed of men very various in rank and profession. Two of them, whom we may call a non-commissioned officer and a private, go exploring by themselves, and take one of the natives of the place prisoner. This native is an ugly low-born creature, of great physical strength and violent criminal tendencies, a liar, and ready at any time for theft, rape, and murder.

He is a child of Nature, a lover of music, slavish in his devotion to power and rank, and very easily imposed upon by authority. His captors do not fear him, and, which is more, they do not dislike him. They found him lying out in a kind of no-man's land, drenched to the skin, so they determine to keep him as a souvenir, and to take him home with them.

They nickname him, in friendly fas.h.i.+on, the monster, and the mooncalf, as who should say Fritz, or the Boche. But their first care is to give him a drink, and to make him swear allegiance upon the bottle. 'Where the devil should he learn our language?' says the non-commissioned officer, when the monster speaks. 'I will give him some relief, if it be but for that.' The prisoner then offers to kiss the foot of his captor.

'I shall laugh myself to death', says the private, 'at this puppy-headed monster. A most scurvy monster! I could find in my heart to beat him, but that the poor monster's in drink.' When the private continues to rail at the monster, his officer calls him to order. 'Trinculo, keep a good tongue in your head: if you prove a mutineer, the next tree------ The poor monster's my subject, and he shall not suffer indignity.'

In this scene from _The Tempest_, everything is English except the names. The incident has been repeated many times in the last four years.

'This is Bill,' one private said, introducing a German soldier to his company. 'He's my prisoner. I wounded him, and I took him, and where I go he goes. Come on, Bill, old man.' The Germans have known many failures since they began the War, but one failure is more tragic than all the rest. They love to be impressive, to produce a panic of apprehension and a thrill of reverence in their enemy; and they have completely failed to impress the ordinary British private. He remains incurably humorous, and so little moved to pa.s.sion that his daily offices of kindness are hardly interrupted.

Shakespeare's tolerance, which is no greater than the tolerance of the common English soldier, may be well seen in his treatment of his villains. Is a liar, or a thief, merely a bad man? Shakespeare does not much encourage you to think so. Is a murderer a bad man? He would be an undiscerning critic who should accept that phrase as a true and adequate description of Macbeth. Shakespeare does not dislike liars, thieves, and murderers as such, and he does not pretend to dislike them. He has his own dislikes. I once asked a friend of mine, long since dead, who refused to condemn almost anything, whether there were any vices that he could not find it in his heart to tolerate. He replied at once that there were two--cruelty, and bilking; which, if the word is not academic, I may paraphrase as cheating the helpless, swindling a child out of its pennies, or leaving a house by the back door in order to avoid paying your cabman his lawful fare. These exclusions from mercy Shakespeare would accept; and I think he would add a third. His worst villains are all theorists, who cheat and murder by the book of arithmetic. They are men of principle, and are ready to expound their principle and to defend it in argument. They follow it, without remorse or mitigation, wherever it leads them. It is Iago's logic that makes him so terrible; his mind is as cold as a snake and as hard as a surgeon's knife. The Italian Renaissance did produce some such men; the modern German imitation is a grosser and feebler thing, brutality trying to emulate the glitter and flourish of refined cruelty.

With his wonderful quickness of intuition and his unsurpa.s.sed subtlety of expression Shakespeare drew the characters of the Englishmen that he saw around him. Why is it that he has given us no full-length portrait, carefully drawn, of a hypocrite? It can hardly have been for lack of models. Outside England, not only among our enemies, but among our friends and allies, it is agreed that hypocrisy is our national vice, our ruling pa.s.sion. There must be some meaning in so widely held an opinion; and, on our side, there are damaging admissions by many witnesses. The portrait gallery of Charles d.i.c.kens is crowded with hypocrites. Some of them are greasy and servile, like Mr. Pumblechook or Uriah Heep; others rise to poetic heights of daring, like Mr. Chadband or Mr. Squeers. But Shakespeare's hypocrites enjoy themselves too much; they are artists to the finger-tips. It may be said, no doubt, that Shakespeare lived before organized religious dissent had developed a new type of character among the weaker brethren. But the Low Church Protestant, whom Shakespeare certainly knew, is not very different from the evangelical dissenter of later days; and he did not interest Shakespeare.

My own impression is that Shakespeare had a free and happy childhood, and grew up without much check from his elders. It is the child who sees hypocrites. These preposterous grown-up people, who, if they are well-mannered, do not seem to enjoy their food, who are fussy about meaningless employments, and never give way to natural impulses, must surely a.s.sume this veil of decorum with intent to deceive. Charles d.i.c.kens was hard driven in his childhood, and the impressions that were then burnt into him governed all his seeing. The creative spirit in him transformed his sufferings into delight; but he never outgrew them; and, when he died, the eyes of a child were closed upon a scene touched, it is true, here and there with rapturous pleasure, rich in oddity, and trembling with pathos, but, in the main, as bleak and unsatisfying as the wards of a workhouse. The intense emotions of his childhood made the usual fervours of adolescence a faint thing in the comparison, and if you want to know how lovers think and feel you do not go to d.i.c.kens to tell you. You go to Shakespeare, who put his childhood behind him, so that he almost forgot it, and ran forward to seize life with both hands.

He sometimes looked back on children, and saw them through the eyes of their elders. d.i.c.kens saw men and women as they appear to children.

This comparison suggests a certain lack of sympathy or lack of understanding in those who are quick to see hypocrisy in others. In d.i.c.kens lack of sympathy was a fair revenge; moreover, his hypocrites amused him so much that he did not wish to understand them. What a loss it would have been to the world if he had explained them away! But it is difficult, I think, to see a hypocrite in a man whose intimacy you have cultivated, whose mind you have entered into, as Shakespeare entered into the mind of his creatures. Hypocrisy, in its ordinary forms, is a superficial thing--a skin disease, not a cancer. It is not easy, at best, to bring the outward and inward relations of the soul into perfect harmony; a hypocrite is one who too readily consents to their separation. The English, for I am ready now to return to my point, are a people of a divided mind, slow to drive anything through on principle, very ready to find reason in compromise. They are pa.s.sionate, and they are idealists, but they are also a practical people, and they dare not give the rein to a pa.s.sion or an idea. They know that in this world an unmitigated principle simply will not work; that a clean cut will never take you through the maze. So they restrain themselves, and listen, and seem patient. They are not so patient as they seem; they must be hypocrites! A cruder, simpler people like the Germans feel indignation, not unmixed perhaps with envy, when they hear the quiet voice and see the white lips of the thoroughbred Englishman who is angry. It is not manly or honest, they think, to be angry without getting red in the face. They certainly feel pride in their own honesty when they give explosive vent to their emotions. They have not learned the elements of self-distrust. The Englishman is seldom quite content to be himself; often his thoughts are troubled by something better. He suffers from the divided mind; and earns the reputation of a hypocrite. But the simpler nature that indulges itself and believes in itself has an even heavier penalty to pay. If, in the name of honesty, you cease to distinguish between what you are and what you would wish to be, between how you act and how you would like to act, you are in some danger of reeling back into the beast. It is true that man is an animal; and before long you feel a glow of conscious virtue in proclaiming and ill.u.s.trating that truth. You scorn the hypocrisy of pretending to be better than you are, and that very scorn fixes you in what you are. 'He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still.'