But please, mark my meaning: the efficacy and wholesomeness of this critcism and counteraction lies in its variety, in its representing different states of feeling, different points of view, different temperaments and interests, different heres and nows; in fact the imperfect piecemeal individual being integrated by the greater number of different other individuals standing to one another as conflicting, collaborating and compensating.

It is impossible to imagine anything more utterly unlike this (to me) desirable state of affairs than the domination of the multitude, of the magnified and blurred Ego called We. Since, inasmuch as we, unanimity means loss of everything distinguishing one individual compound from another; loss of everything which can correct the one individual by the other individuals. The we (when it really is a we), the unified Nation, sect or class or school, is an average of all that is similar in the component individuals. It is a huge individual, artificially or accidentally made up, with all differences left out and all resemblances magnified. The multitude which speaks of itself as We, has the intensity, the passion of the individual Ego, but instead of being subjected to vivifying criticism, correction and selection, it is set apart in safe and enormous isolation.

"Pourquoi suit-on la pluralité ?" asked Pascal, answering: "Parce qu'elle a plus de force."

By no means only that; but quite as much because it has, what Pascal denied it, plus de raison; that is to say, a greater repetition and volume of raison. Now, if it is a heterogeneous plurality as opposed to a homogeneous one, it will, because it is a plurality, represent the greater amount of reasons, of experience and reflection; hence whenever such various reasons, experience and reflection coincide, the greatest amount of presumable knowledge, intelligence and good sense will result. Only, for this to be the case, the unity must be established by the coincidence, the convergence of independent reasons and experience, not the mere repetition, the mere multiplication of the same reasons and experience. In the vastest as well as in the humblest concerns of life, the rule of scientific research holds good, which is: many separate, independent experiments or documents lead to truth; but a

merely re-stated experiment, a copied document, results only in worthless repetition.

IV

Like other philosophers, Mr. Bertrand Russell has pointed out that war gives long-desired opportunities to long-suppressed instincts.

Of course. But first and foremost it gives to mediocre personalities an opportunity to increase their volume and weight by uniting till all sense of mediocrity is lost. L'union fait la force a crowd feels strong, it often is strong; and what is more to the point a crowd feels safe. It must be an entranc

ing experience to find oneself doing, once in a way, what all one's life one has been afraid of doing in company, and sometimes ashamed, let alone unable to do, by one's self: to kill, to lynch, nay, merely to bawl down or out-vote.

The kind of persons one may call by the title of Dostoievsky's novel Humiliès et Offensès, though humiliated and offended, not so much by social as by natural, inferiority, must have the time of their life, their Faust moment, when they can thus crush with comparatively little moral effort some one or some opinion they would perchance have run away from in ordinary life. By the magic of numbers, War undoubtedly makes Heroes and Religious Revivals make Saints.

But what the poor world of reality really requires is heroes who can be heroic, and saints who can be saintly, on their own account, without a crowd to back them.

War, like religion, affords a much-needed satisfaction of the desire to feel oneself in the right, which is one of the strongest though the least noticed of human vital instincts. To feel oneself in the right means an attitude, a particular gait and deportment, a whole way of being. It is probably as conducive to good circulation and digestion as these are obviously conducive to good opinion of ourselves. To feel oneself in the right means that one has standing room, that one stretches into the infinite instead of being squashed into a corner. Now, many individuals have no special reason for this feeling; and if they indulge in it none the less, they are

apt to pay dearly for this indulgence at the hands of their neighbours' similar desire to feel in the right. And when what you feel right about is a collective opinion or an attitude shared by your neighbours against a more or less distant and partly imaginary opponent, you can expand without fear, you can stand on your rights as a man. Or more properly: you can, in a different sense of the word, trample upon the rights of some man who does not happen to form part of that crowd. Esprit de corps is the least altruistic and occasionally the least courageous of all spirits, though it enables men to do, and to do without, much whereof they would be unable if set down by their lone selves.

The Drum is so justly popular an instrument not only because it helps you to march and even to attack, but also because it helps you to hold up your head, to stiffen your back and to strut. April, 1916.

Before putting the Drum back on its stand, let me add that, on second thoughts, however useful an occasional bona fide hero or saint, what the poor real world really wants is not anything so exceptional or so suited to only exceptional circumstances. The world wants a social habit of certain kinds of behaviour, a habit organized by being collective and traditional, but perpetually questioned, checked, renovated, given a new lease of life, by individual and reciprocal criticism. We want habits made easy and firm by automatism but at the same time accepted voluntarily and with benefit of inventory and running the gauntlet of conscious criticism.

We want a fiddle made of varied, select and well-fitted bits of wood whose fibres have been tempered by age and much good playing; a fiddle which must, at whatever cost of delay and trouble, be tuned afresh each time. We have got, or ought to be getting, beyond the use of the Drum, save for the occasional making of mock thunder in the overtures to operas.

INDIGNATION

April, 1916.

This is a majestic passion as well as one which doubtless has But it is not how express my thoughts without

its use.

being cynical?—it is not majestic all over and right through. Indignation, splendidly wrathful like young Achilles, has a vulnerable heel through which meanness can poison it. It can be petty because it is partisan. It wants to launch out, its very nature is launching out, punishing, devastating. Hence it can never afford to be fair; never listen to the other side, for that would stay its hand, hinder its full angelic swoop. And in its swoops and strides, in the vast execution which it does, it accumulates the objects of its wrath. The bigger the heap, the better; the larger the mass of conflagration, the more superb the purifying flames. Unknown to itself, Indignation requires adequate guilt, and piles it up, eking out scantiness of evil with credulity. For Indignation is not only a passion, like every passion, concentrated on itself; Indignation (let us admit and try to remember this depressing truth!)-Indignation is a passion which enjoys itself. I have dared to apply to Indignation what must seem, I am afraid, an almost profane adjective, namely pettiness. Yet no one can deny that Indignation almost invariably leaves off in the very place where charity is said to begin, at home, or with one's friends and allies. Indeed with one's own self. In the most magnificent of all records of Indignation, that of Jehovah, the cause of these cosmic fires is always indignation at his own commandments being disobeyed, his own gifts and position receiving less recognition than they deserved. The unpardonable offence is " going a-whoring" after other Gods. "I am a jealous God frequently insists, and acts up to the character.

PITY

February, 1919.

he

It is her close kinship to Indignation which at times makes Pity dangerous. But for that flaming twin dragging her along on devastating pinions, Pity might transform into the very thing which Indignation dislikes most, namely Sympathy, itself in turn metamorphosing into Comprehension, and thence into True Justice, the Justice which, so far from being blindfold, sees, scrutinizes, and discriminates. Most often, as already hinted, Indignation drags Pity along, prevents that beneficent double transformation, and makes Pity pitiless.

SATAN'S BENEDICTION

"Ye are going forth, O Nations, to join in Death's dance even as candid highhearted Virgins who have been decoyed by fair show into the house of prostitution. . . ."-p. 45.

I

We know from the Parable that Virgins are not invariably wise. And it seems likely that calamities worse than missing a sight of the Bridegroom would befall rather the foolish than the wise ones. Or, when the Virgins stand for Nations, rather those entrusted to foolish guardians; since Virgins of this kind (and self-governing nations no more than those under the thumb of despots) are not allowed the degree of freedom enjoyed by the present younger generation and seemingly by those scriptural bride's-maids, but are in the position rather of the old-fashioned heroine of romance looked after by some disastrously silly parent, or even chaperoned, like Goethe's Gretchen, by a self-seeking pseudo-pious Martha helping to entangle them (for surely the Entente Cordiale authorizes reference to a French classic ?) in Liaisons Dangereuses. Nations are nowadays as Virgins were in Clarissa's day they are not encouraged to know certain things; their innocence is ignorance; they are foolish Virgins bred up and led about by foolish though often cunning guardians; whence in the present instance the misadventure described by my Puppet Satan. If the Nations, all and sundry, were not more given to laying blame upon one another, they might say like Gretchen, "Und alles was dazu mich trieb, ach, war so gut! ach war so lieb." And doubtless, even as the voice of the Eternal answered for the poor heroine when Mephistopheles exultingly cried out : "Sie ist gerichtet," so likewise, the Eternities will say of everyone of these present Nations chorus peccatorum : "Sie ist gerettet." Absolved assuredly in the life of memory; but alas, not saved, any more than Gretchen, from the crime, the torture and the shame upon earth.

What sentence, or what absolution, will be the lot of those grave and reverend seniors who allowed, or encouraged, the downfall of those poor foolish Virgins dancing in Satan's