From the archives of The Memory Hole |
Introductory
The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked
characteristic of mankind. Very few of us realise with conviction the
intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature
of the economic organisation by which Western Europe has lived for the
last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of
our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and
we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we
scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue
our animosities and particular ambitions, and feel ourselves with
enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage, civil conflict in the
European family. Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the
German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and
built. But the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the
risk of completing the ruin which Germany began, by a peace which, if
it is carried into effect, must impair yet further, when it might have
restored, the delicate, complicated organisation, already shaken and
broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can employ
themselves and live.
In England the outward aspect of life does not yet teach us to feel
or realise in the least that an age is over. We are busy picking up the
threads of our life where we dropped them, with this difference only,
that many of us seem a good deal richer than we were before. Where we
spent millions before the war, we have now learnt that we can spend
hundreds of millions and apparently not suffer for it. Evidently we did
not exploit to the utmost the possibilities of our economic life. We
look, therefore, not only to a return to the comforts of 1914, but to
an immense broadening and intensification of them. All classes alike
thus build their plans, the rich to spend more and save less, the poor
to spend more and work less.
But perhaps it is only in England (and America) that it is possible
to be so unconscious. In continental Europe the earth heaves and no one
but is aware of the rumblings. There it is not just a matter of
extravagance or 'labour troubles'; but of life and death, of starvation
and existence, and of the fearful convulsions of a dying civilisation.
For one who spent in Paris the greater part of the six months which
succeeded the armistice an occasional visit to London was a strange
experience. England still stands outside Europe. Europe's voiceless
tremors do not reach her. Europe is apart and England is not of her
flesh and body. But Europe is solid with herself. France, Germany,
Italy, Austria, and Holland, Russia and Roumania and Poland, throb
together, and their structure and civilisation are essentially one.
They flourished together, they have rocked together in a war which we,
in spite of our enormous contributions and sacrifices (like though in a
less degree than America), economically stood outside, and they may
fall together. In this lies the destructive significance of the Peace
of Paris. If the European civil war is to end with France and Italy
abusing their momentary victorious power to destroy Germany and
Austria-Hungary now prostrate, they invite their own destruction also,
being so deeply and inextricably intertwined with their victims by
hidden psychic and economic bonds. At any rate an Englishman who took
part in the Conference of Paris and was during those months a member of
the Supreme Economic Council of the Allied Powers, was bound to become
for him a new experience a European in his cares and outlook.
There, at the nerve centre of the European system, his British
preoccupations must largely fall away and he must be haunted by other
and more dreadful spectres. Paris was a nightmare, and everyone there
was morbid. A sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous
scene; the futility and smallness of man before the great events
confronting him; the mingled significance and unreality of the
decisions; levity, blindness, insolence, confused cries from
without-all the elements of ancient tragedy were there. Seated indeed
amid the theatrical trappings of the French saloons of state, one could
wonder if the extraordinary visages of Wilson and of Clemenceau, with
their fixed hue and unchanging characterisation, were really faces at
all and not the tragic-comic masks of some strange drama or
puppet-show.
The proceedings of Paris all had this air of extraordinary
importance and unimportance at the same time. The decisions seemed
charged with consequences to the future of human society; yet the air
whispered that the word was not flesh, that it was futile,
insignificant, of no effect, dissociated from events; and one felt most
strongly the impression, described by Tolstoy in War and Peace or by
Hardy in The Dynasts, of events marching on to their fated conclusion
uninfluenced and unaffected by the cerebrations of statesmen in
council:
Spirit of the Years
Observe that all wide sight and self-command
Deserts these throngs now driven to demonry
By the Immanent Unrecking. Nought remains
But vindictiveness here amid the strong,
And there amid the weak an impotent rage.Spirit of the Pities
Why prompts the Will so senseless-shaped a doing?
Spirit of the Years
I have told thee that It works unwittingly,
As one possessed not judging.
In Paris, where those connected with the Supreme Economic Council
received almost hourly the reports of the misery, disorder, and
decaying organisation of all Central and Eastern Europe, Allied and
enemy alike, and learnt from the lips of the financial representatives
of Germany and Austria unanswerable evidence of the terrible exhaustion
of their countries, an occasional visit to the hot, dry room in the
President's house, where the Four fulfilled their destinies in empty
and arid intrigue, only added to the sense of nightmare. Yet there in
Paris the problems of Europe were terrible and clamant, and an
occasional return to the vast unconcern of London a little
disconcerting. For in London these questions were very far away, and
our own lesser problems alone troubling. London believed that Paris was
making a great confusion of its business, but remained uninterested. In
this spirit the British people received the treaty without reading it.
But it is under the influence of Paris, not London, that this book has
been written by one who, though an Englishman, feels himself a European
also, and, because of too vivid recent experience, cannot disinterest
himself from the further unfolding of the great historic drama of these
days which will destroy great institutions, but may also create a new
world.