WHAT IS THIS OTHER CONTINENT?

A s the name of the author suggests, Mr. Van Loon’s America is a work of the Dutch School. Every page reminds us of the cleanliness and the brightness and the neatness of Holland. The innumerable facts are piled up as tidily as the red cheeses in the market-place of Alkmaar; phases of history lie as clearly defined as the fields of different sorts of bulbs on the plains; the scenes and the characters appear before us in the gay colours, clear as children’s eyes, that show under the temperate sunshine of that not too northern sky. There are no heights here, no moments of inspiration; but there is the very best use that can be made of the flat-lands. And there is abundant evidence of that fastidiousness which makes for spotless little cities with cobbled streets as clear as the untrodden clouds, for houses where mice die for want in midst of plenty and the furniture shines as if it were made of mirror and had grown dark only because of the super-position of reflections through the centuries.

This, of course, is the quality that gives distinction to Mr. Van Loon’s cartoons, which far more than these popular histories are what make one hold him high. In each of them he sees some insincerity that has crept into contemporary life, decides that if he is to live there the place must be kept clean, and out this thing must go. So he takes up his broom and sweeps it out into the gutter. His movements are not light, they are not very graceful, but they are immensely effective. That particular piece of ordure has gone. One’s world is cleaner. One feels towards him, therefore, a gratitude of a curiously personal nature, as if he performed some basically essential service to the community and was as truly useful as the iceman. Other writers may excite more lively emotions, but they come in on a lower level of indispensability; say, for most of them, along with the piano-tuner.

This quality of blunt and energetic fastidiousness is active enough in Mr. Van Loon’s book on America to tackle the main insincerity of history, which is to disclaim nervously the economic motive. For some reason a nation feels as shy about admitting that it ever went forth to war for the sake of more wealth as a man would about admitting that he had accepted an invitation just for the sake of the food. This is one of humanity’s most profound imbecilities, as perhaps the only justification for asking one’s fellow-men to endure the horrors of war would be the knowledge that if they did not fight they would starve. And it gets short shrift in Mr. Van Loon’s discussion of the forces leading to the European competition for settlements in the New World, of the War of Independence, of the War of 1812, of the Civil War. There is no muckraking here; there is none of that automatic response to all human activities in the words, ‘Aw, it’s all bunk,’ which is perhaps the most pernicious and certainly the least helpful way of talking bunk. Simply he recognizes the primal necessities of mankind, and when he is showing you round the house he opens the door and says with a proper emphasis, ‘This is the kitchen.’ Nevertheless, at times a certain insincerity succeeds in getting past Mr. Van Loon’s broom. It is the very powerful insincerity of over-simplification, and oddly enough though Mr. Van Loon was born and brought up. in Europe, it manifests itself more in its handling of European affairs than it does when he writes of America. What is the use, for example, of writing that, ‘Most unfortunately for them (the Indians) the discovery of Columbus came at the very moment when the Spaniards, after about six hundred years of uninterrupted warfare, had just driven the last of the Mohammedan caliphs out of their own country. Spain was still full of that strange crusading spirit which is ready to commit the most hideous crimes in the name of the most exalted of religions’? What is the use of repeating without explanation that the Spanish commander who put to the sword the entire Huguenot community founded in Florida by Admiral de Coligny said that he did it, ‘not because they were French, but because they were Protestants’?

It is of course true that the Spanish were cruel beyond belief in their persecution of heretics within the confines of the kingdom and overseas. John Addington Symonds, in an interesting passage in his History of the Renaissance in Italy, puts them down as preeminently the cruellest nation in medieval or Renaissance Europe; which was going some. But it is also true that this cruelty was an inevitable result of their history. Islam had conquered Spain and had maintained itself there through centuries and during that time had produced a very profound culture. But it was not in the least Christian bigotry which laboured to expel the Moors and destroy that culture. The weakness which led to their defeat made them deserve to be defeated. The caliphs were beaten because they had never attained unity among themselves and broke their front by savage struggles among themselves. They kept Spain in a bloodstained state of inter-tribal warfare in which no one, least of all the common man, labouring on his patch of land, could know security. Horsemen coming down the road might mean that his head stayed on his shoulders just another five minutes, or that he and his family wandered from a smoking farmstead to a delayed death on the hills. It was to rid themselves of this barbarian insecurity, to be sure of their bread and their breath, that the Spaniards drove out the Moors.

Since Rome was, in indisputable fact, the centre of what they saw in the real world around them corresponding to the ideal of social order which had inspired them to revolt, it is not surprising that they should attach a certain importance to the Roman religion. It is also not surprising that their minds established a correspondence between the fact that the caliphs were heretics and they had misgoverned. And in that, it must be said, they were probably right. Islam certainly did not mitigate the wars of its followers by any counsels of mercy, and may well have inhibited the development of such parts of their mind as might develop such ideals as social order. For the strong point of Christianity is that it has always aroused in its believers a keen sense of personal guilt, which in its turn has aroused in them a desire to gain salvation by expiatory works of body and mind. The Christian therefore explores all avenues of advancement, even such as lead to worlds of abstraction and altruism not too congenial to thegross spirit of man, but a necessary habitation if any theory of social order is to be enforced. Islam, however, tells its followers that they are fine fellows, just as they are, and if they only obey the Army regulations are sure to be saved. The Islamite has naturally enough taken him at his word and is content to be the type of fine fellow to which Mohammed addressed this assurance, to live in the same concrete world, simply furnished with such tangibilities as sound and sun, war and women.

So when the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients. It would probably be an excellent thing for the future of the United States if every time a manufacturer confessed to a success magazine that his favourite writer was Frank Crane, the populace cried out among itself, ‘Disaster will fall upon our community if all these means of production are in the hands of a man who can swallow such bunk, who is happy in contact with mental processes so antithetical to those which we know to be productive of culture and civilization,’ and conducted an auto-da-fé at the nearest filling station. Nor were the Spaniards altogether unreasonable in their lack of discrimination against heresies, in their persecution of Jews andProtestants as well as Mohammedans. Considering the general level of intelligence at the time, as the only established social order they had seen when they were fighting it out with the Moslem was the product of Roman Catholicism, that was the only faith it was safe to tolerate.

The thing, of course, went grotesquely worse and worse. The consequence of six centuries of warfare is that military men assume a position of too great importance in the country, which is always a mistake, not because they are men of blood, but because they lead too exemplary lives of industry and devotion to duty. The business of the statesman is to form sound general ideas, and that cannot be done by people who specialize early in an exacting profession, The same reason makes business men’s pronouncements on political matters hardly ever worthy of attention. Furthermore, such a situation created the need of a strong unifying dynasty, and it is hard to have that without some time sooner or later producing a king who takes his job seriously and treats the more or less urgent need that brought him into being as a sacred mission that he can make himself a half-god by fulfilling.

Then, under the stimulus of that semi-religious imperialism, the killing habit, which has been established as a matter of physical necessity, becomes a grandiose delight. It begins to satisfy the need of the soul which, if life is to continue, must go hungry. There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die. We can make a false sublimation of the will to die if we kill others, if we feed death with them in our stead. This dark and idiotic impulse is for ever with us; it stands beside us whenever we have to handle the means of punishment, assuring us that not only are we serving our immediate end, but buying a more profound salvation, and that it can be done again. That is why there has never been a period in history when there have been necessary killings which has not been instantly followed by a period when there have been unnecessary killings. This force is not easily to be suppressed, once unnatural death has been invoked.

There was surely an attempt on the part of the Spanish to control it, in the way the examination of the heretics was left to the Church. There was a shuddering repulsion of the soul at its own black content in the relinquishment of the prey to the mediator, ‘You are the representative of justice and of mercy. I will not kill him unless you say I should.’ But too often that plea for cancellation of the business in hand was only a brief barrier between the soul and its service of death and unreason, because this unformulable force is too strong for any formulated faith, and can speak its decision through lips and heart sincerely dedicated to life and holiness. This drama was not of man’s choosing; it should not be used for an easy reproach against man.

This oppression which came thus early on the spirit of Spain, which has left it through the succeeding centuries too sick, too weak to speak save when genius fills it like a deep breath and it speaks with a voice which is like no other, is a warning that it matters not what natural endowment a race may have if it prostitutes itself to the service of death, whether in the name of religion, law and order, or whatever might quite possibly be treated in a summary way by an artist of the Dutch School because of its remoteness from his cheerful scope.

But Mr. Van Loon indulges in just as thoroughgoing an over-simplification of the issue when he deals with the relatively trivial questions of the attitude of the English towards the United States in the War of Independence and the Civil War. Just as he treats the Spanish persecution of heretics as if it were due to an isolated factor of cruelty, so he treats the English provocations towards America as if they were due to an equally isolated factor of insolent stupidity. This is not to say that he loses for one moment his scrupulous fairness, for he represents the revolt and the resistance to it without sentimentality as the inevitable economic protests that they were. But he also represents the ineptitudes of Grenville and North as if they proceeded from a pure inability to count, comprehend, or indeed do anything but be rude; and as if they were in power because England liked that sort of thing.

Yet surely it is of the greatest importance to make clear that the blithering incompetence of English statesmen during the War of Independence was a consequence, and the final death-blow in the English mind, of the aristocratic system of government. There has never been an aristocracy formed in more apparently ideal conditions than the English governing class, which came into being under the Tudors with the economic resources of the expanding empire to give them wealth to buy leisure, and the powerful intellectual stimulus of the Reformation to make them use it in creative activity. Yet it deteriorated. It is not given to man to make efforts to deserve power when he is born to the certain enjoyment of power; it is not given to him to feel the need of raising himself above criticism if no censure can remove him from his position. The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli; but it prevents the survival of the aristocrat. The War of Independence was one of the most important proofs England received that this particular governmental experiment she had been trying was a failure; and so far from liking the manner in which those who failed conducted themselves, they made as memorable a legislative manifestation of resentment against it as the world has ever seen. For the trouble England went to in the succeeding century to establish the machinery of democracy was not merely a libertarian cantrip, it was just as much a practical and remedial measure as mending the roof when the rain comes in.

In Mr. Van Loon’s treatment of the English attitude to the Civil War he over-simplifies as much on an even more profound but just as important an issue. He represents the undoubted fact that a great many people in England, comprising perhaps a majority of the governing class, were on the side of the South as also proceeding from an isolated factor of insolent stupidity. He cites: ‘The tactful speech of William Ewart Gladstone (the eminent theologian) wherein this official member of Her Majesty’s Government suggested that England recognize “the nation which that great statesman, Jefferson Davis, has so successfully founded on the other side of the ocean.”’ Now, one is walking in a wild garden, not laid out by the plumb-line of logic, when one explores the mind of William Ewart Gladstone, who was temperamentally as like William Jennings Bryan as makes no matter, an inflamed fundamentalist who would unhesitatingly have become an atheist if any of the Divine Persons had contradicted his cosmogony of Genesis, and a startling disproof of Mr. Van Loon’s theory that America differentiates itself from the nations by its subjection to oratory. To such usages one wants a clue. And one gets a clue when one remembers that Mr. Gladstone came from a family of West Indian planters whose fortune had been founded on slavery, and who, though they had given up their slaves with a good grace, had undoubtedly suffered grave personal inconvenience by doing so. Certain disagreeable considerations as to the consequences of principles when acted upon, particularly along economic lines, were therefore much alive in him, and indeed in the whole possessive class at the time. The establishment of the machinery of democracy had had to be justified by argument in the course of which certain broad propositions had had to be laid down: and there was a strong movement on the part of conscientious members of the governing classes who thought they had a moral duty to be consistent, and on the part of the urbanized labouring population which the industrial revolution had created, to apply these propositions not only politically but economically and socially, so that Jack should be as good as his master.

Now, it was not settled then whether a civilization can exist except as on a basis of slave labour.

In point of historic fact no great civilization ever has. So the upper and middle classes of England were perfectly right in regarding themselves as engaged in an extremely hazardous experiment. Indeed, even to-day we could not answer them with assurances that would wholly satisfy them that their fears had been without foundation. It would certainly have been easier, from a materialist point of view, to conduct the Great War if one could have filled the munition factories with slaves instead of unshackled and organized labour; it would have been easier, too, to conduct the economic reconstruction of Europe. And the desire that many people in the United States have to keep immigrants so far as possible out of full enjoyment of citizenship is a recognition of these facts. Another element which made England feel peculiarly unhappy was that she was by a long way the pioneer in that kind of social reform. She was the dog on which it was being tried. In such a moment no wonder the South, happily enjoying the extremest form of the renounced arrangement of labour, seemed a morsel of the Lost Paradise which ought to be preserved at any cost. Moreover there was just then a strong feeling against coloured people, owing to the Indian Mutiny. It is true that a Hindu is not a Negro; but on the other hand a black brother is a black brother, and any confusion that leads to the feeling that we whites are the elect and uniquely deserving of good treatment is apt to be retained without criticism.

Now the reason that this over-simplification in Mr. Van Loon’s work is more than a sin of omission is that it bolsters up the perfectly preposterous attitude with which he ends his book. In the last two chapters he informs his readers that Europe has been a failure, and, for the discreditable reason that it ‘made the accumulation of Inanimate Matter the highest of all civic virtues,’ is now in a state of ‘chaos. Chaos, complete and absolute.’ It appears that the end of the war left America with the discovery that ‘evidently something was wrong with the world. By an accursed turn of luck, or by the grace of a merciful God, the American people were called upon to set it right. We can take our choice. But upon our answer depends a great deal more than the future of our own people.

One’s eyebrows shoot up into one’s hair as one reads that ‘our nation, our country, the fortunate strip of land which we call our own, by a strange turn of fate has been called upon to be the guardian of the human race.’ Surely N. B. this is a goke, as Artemus Ward used to say.

But it is quite without irony that Mr. Van Loon attempts to induce a Messiah complex in the younger generation. It is true that he does not do it in any spirit of militant Babbittry, that he is emphatic for the scrapping of all standards based on material success; but nevertheless his suggestion is explicitly that somehow or other the world is to be saved. How the world, on hearing that she is once more to be saved, must shudder and wish that she could get some one to double for her in these really dangerous acts!

This is very dangerous false doctrine. To begin with, it is time that people began to ask themselves what exactly they mean when they talk this nonsense about the failure of Europe. By the test of what success can it be said to have failed? Where is the continent that can regard as inferior in achievement the soil which has produced Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Horace, St. Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, among other local talent? Where is the continent which has the right to look at the beautiful cities of Rome, Paris and Venice and Florence and Innsbruck and Salzburg and Toledo and Seville and Aries and Nîmes and say, ‘We have built better than that’? Where is the continent which has the right to look on the parliamentarianism of England, on the industrial organization of Germany, on the perfected commonwealth of Denmark, on the gracious social life of France, and say, ‘We have done better’? It is not marked on the map, that superior continent. Is there some other reason for judging Europe a failure? Is it because there was a great war, and she suffered horribly? That is a point of view which would be justifiable only if the war had been evitable.

But to regard peace as something which Europe might have had and wantonly chose not to have is naïvely to ignore every important aspect of the phase of the world’s being which is called Europe for short. The work it has done in building up civilization and culture, that is to say in dragging life out of the night where it is suffered into the daylight where it is understood, was bound to be accompanied by strong passions: because only strong passions can supply the dynamic force which enables man to proceed to these activities in despite of the inertia which makes him leave things as they are. Such emotional disturbances are bound to unleash the primitive fantasies at the back of the mind; and peace could only be the result of these unleashings if in the human organism the will to live had an overwhelming ascendancy over the will to die. There is no reason to suppose that this ascendancy exists; indeed, it would obviously be a calamity if it did, since it would make the performance of the biological duty to die infinitely more painful to the individual.

This tendency of the drama not to produce peace was of course heightened by the special difficulties of the problems it had to solve. The supreme importance and complication of that problem which centres round Rome, for example—the problem of how far one can attain stability of living without stopping the natural flux of life—was bound to engender panic and violence in those who puzzled their heads over it. There was also the overwhelming difficulty that in this world where it is hard to understand those within arm’s length, even those within our arms, it is nearly impossible to understand those within our arms, it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh. For England to have understood the American revolutionaries, for the American revolutionaries to have understood England, would have presupposed a diffusion of imagination among the populations which would have made them nations of artists: which is an impossible dream. International relationships are, therefore, preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge, and since peace is determined by international relationships, this is to say that until man had attained an amazing pitch of virtuosity in distinguishing his instinctive follies from his instinctive wisdom and in circumventing them, frequent war was preordained.

If we say that Europe is a failure because out of these battles against the immensest forces with imperfect instruments there came war, then we are applying the name of failure to an essential character of human life. We had better call it effort; and not delude a continent with the hope that if it be full of goodwill it can immediately divest its own life of this character; or cheat it of the just reason for pride it will have in the pattern that character will trace upon its pages.