Questionable
IS the "Age of Hope" only a chimera, cloud vapour with rainbows painted on it — beautiful to see, to sail towards — which hovers over a Niagara Falls? If so Analysis will gain the victory.
For it has a world to remake, a wrong world that has gone out of joint, no soundness of head or heart, and inward spirituality and outward economy lost. Evils may be kin and they often come together; where there is great physical evil one tends to find, as its parent and origin, a proportionately-sized moral evil. Before the faces of the twenty-five million toilers grew as haggard as they were to Mirabeau in his old age, in a nation purportedly Christian where men are known as brothers, an unspeakable dishonesty must have accumulated in its rulers and its spiritual and temporal watchers through the ages. Not only did it accumulate, it will likewise reach a critical point; for as the gospel has it, a lie cannot endure for ever.
If we pierce through the rosy atmosphere of sentimentalism, philanthropy and feasts of morals, a sorry spectacle lies behind it. What bonds which have held a human society together happily, or at all, are in force? The people are unbelieving. They have suppositions, hypotheses and systems of Analysis; their governing belief is that pleasure is pleasant. They hunger for sweetness and recognize the law of hunger; but what other law rules them? — within them, and without them, none that is proper.
Their King and his government gyrate like the weather-cock in every wind which blows. They see no God above them, nor look to heaven except through an astronomical lens. Though the Church still exists, it is submissive and tamed through philosophism, which was quickly done since the hour had come. Some twenty years ago the Archbishop Beaumont would not even permit the burial of the Jansenists; Lomenie Brienne (a rising man who will return later) successfully insisted in the name of the Clergy on having 'put in execution' (Boissy d'Anglas, Vie de Malesherbes, i. 15-22) the anti-Protestant laws to condemn persons to death for preaching. Now Baron Holbach's Atheism itself is unburnt. The Church is passive except in the hunger for tithes; it is content if it may have those and beyond it expects its doom dully. And the twenty million "haggard faces" have only the gallows to guide them and be the finger-post in their struggles. It is a singular golden age with its feasts of morals, its 'sweet manners,' and its sweet institutions (institutions douces); it is said to bring peace, but when it is founded on even greater corruption its doom is to be corrupted.
In the meantime a rotten substance will hold together for a long time provided it is not handled roughly. It stands for generations after life and truth have fled from it; men are loth to leave from old ways and to conquer their inertia to explore the new. Great truly is the Actual; it is the thing which has rescued itself from fathomless deeps of theory and probability and stands as an indisputable Fact, whereby men work and live, or once did so. Men shall cleave to it widely while it stays; they shall quit it reluctantly when it vanishes beneath them. Enthusiasts of change tend not to consider all that habit achieves in our lives; knowledge and practice hang mysteriously over infinite abysses of the unknown and impracticable — our whole being is an infinite abyss, arched over by habit as if it were a thin rind of Earth, laboriously built.
If by ill chance the 'thin Earth-rind' is broken, the fountains of the great deep boil forth while fire-fountains envelope and engulf. The 'Earth-rind' is shattered, swallowed up; instead of a green flowery world, there is a wasting, weltering chaos; and afterwards it must, with tumult and struggle, make itself into a world again.
It must be conceded, on the other hand, that "where thou findest a Lie that is oppressing thee, extinguish it." In what spirit one will do it must be considered; it should not be done with hatred and with impetuous violence, but with a clear heart, with holy energy, and gently. One does not desire to replace an extinct lie with a new lie, and thereby oneself create an injustice and a parent to still further lies.
This world, however, has both an indestructible hope in the Future and a tendency to persevere in the Past, and innovation and conservation wage a perpetual conflict as they can and may. The demonic element which lurks in all humanity may doubtless, once in a thousand years, vent itself. Perhaps we may regret that such a conflict — which is after all not so different from the classical one of "hate-filled Amazons with heroic Youths" and will end in amity — is generally spasmodic. Conservation, strengthened by the mightiest quality of indolence in us, sits for ages victorious as it should be, but also tyrannical and incommunicative. While it holds its adversary as annihilated, its adversary lies like a buried Enceladus who must gain the smallest freedom by stirring a whole Trinacria and with it Aetnas.
Therefore it is permissible to honour a Paper Age and an era of hope. In the frightful process of an Enceladus-like revolt, when a task which no one would willingly embark upon has become both imperative and inevitable, it may well be even a kindness of nature that she lures us onward through cheerful promises, whether they are fallacious or not, so that an entire generation is plunged into the Erebus blackness with the light of an era of hope before it:
"Man is based on Hope; he has properly no other possession but Hope; this habitation of his is named the Place of Hope."
Original text found and available at Gutenberg.org (chapter 1.2.III).
No comments:
Post a Comment