sunshine of a transforming world. A new literature, a new
interpretation of history were springing into existence, a new
teaching was already in the schools, a new faith in the young.
The worthy man who forestalled the building of a research city
for the English upon the Sussex downs by buying up a series of
estates, was dispossessed and laughed out of court when he made
his demand for some preposterous compensation; the owner of the
discredited Dass patents makes his last appearance upon the
scroll of history as the insolvent proprietor of a paper called
The Cry for Justice, in which he duns the world for a hundred
million pounds. That was the ingenuous Dass's idea of justice,
that he ought to be paid about five million pounds annually
because he had annexed the selvage of one of Holsten's
discoveries. Dass came at last to believe quite firmly in his
right, and he died a victim of conspiracy mania in a private
hospital at Nice. Both of these men would probably have ended
their days enormously wealthy, and of course ennobled in the
England of the opening twentieth century, and it is just this
novelty of their fates that marks the quality of the new age.
The new government early discovered the need of a universal
education to fit men to the great conceptions of its universal
rule. It made no wrangling attacks on the local, racial, and
sectarian forms of religious profession that at that time divided
the earth into a patchwork of hatreds and distrusts; it left
these organisations to make their peace with God in their own
time; but it proclaimed as if it were a mere secular truth that
sacrifice was expected from all, that respect had to be shown to
all; it revived schools or set them up afresh all around the
world, and everywhere these schools taught the history of war and
the consequences and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was
taught not as a sentiment but as a matter of fact that the
salvation of the world from waste and contention was the common
duty and occupation of all men and women. These things which are
now the elementary commonplaces of human intercourse seemed to
the councillors of Brissago, when first they dared to proclaim
them, marvellously daring discoveries, not untouched by doubt,
that flushed the cheek and fired the eye.
The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the
hands of a committee of men and women, which did its work during
the next few decades with remarkable breadth and effectiveness.
This educational committee was, and is, the correlative upon the
mental and spiritual side of the redistribution committee. And
prominent upon it, and indeed for a time quite dominating it, was
a Russian named Karenin, who was singular in being a congenital
cripple. His body was bent so that he walked with difficulty,
suffered much pain as he grew older, and had at last to undergo
two operations. The second killed him. Already malformation,
which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle ages so
that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature of
the human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world.
It had a curious effect upon Karenin's colleagues; their feeling
towards him was mingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that
it needed usage rather than reason to overcome. He had a strong
face, with little bright brown eyes rather deeply sunken and a
large resolute thin-lipped mouth. His skin was very yellow and
wrinkled, and his hair iron gray. He was at all times an
impatient and sometimes an angry man, but this was forgiven him
because of the hot wire of suffering that was manifestly thrust
through his being. At the end of his life his personal prestige
was very great. To him far more than to any contemporary is it
due that self-abnegation, self-identification with the world
spirit, was made the basis of universal education. That general
memorandum to the teachers which is the key-note of the modern
educational system, was probably entirely his work.
'Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,' he wrote. 'That is
the device upon the seal of this document, and the starting point
of all we have to do. It is a mistake to regard it as anything
but a plain statement of fact. It is the basis for your work.
You have to teach self-forgetfulness, and everything else that
you have to teach is contributory and subordinate to that end.
Education is the release of man from self. You have to widen the
horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their
curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge
their sympathies. That is what you are for. Under your guidance
and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they have to
shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities, and
passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of the
universe. The little circles of their egotisms have to be opened
out until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose.
And this that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously
yourselves. Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort of skill,
every sort of service, love: these are the means of salvation
from that narrow loneliness of desire, that brooding
preoccupation with self and egotistical relationships, which is
hell for the individual, treason to the race, and exile from
God…'
Section 12
As things round themselves off and accomplish themselves, one
begins for the first time to see them clearly. From the
perspectives of a new age one can look back upon the great and
widening stream of literature with a complete understanding.
Things link up that seemed disconnected, and things that were
once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be but factors in
the statement of a gigantic problem. An enormous bulk of the
sincerer writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth
centuries falls together now into an unanticipated unanimity; one
sees it as a huge tissue of variations upon one theme, the
conflict of human egotism and personal passion and narrow
imaginations on the one hand, against the growing sense of wider
necessities and a possible, more spacious life.
That conflict is in evidence in so early a work as Voltaire's
Candide, for example, in which the