THE IDEALISM OF WAR.
COUNT TOLSTOI'S remarkable denunciation of war published in the Times on Monday must have set many people thinking on the grave question which it raises. Abstract idealism, stated in its extreme logical form, is a strong intellectual stimulant. It compels thought by the very extravagance of its terms. Making nothing of the considera- tions which govern life—the possibility, the expediency of a project—it raises the whole discussion into a rarefied atmo- sphere; and the ordinary man, not accustomed to move on such a plane, gasps for breath. Idealism can only be met by a counter-idealism, just as a false affection can only be dis- placed by a true. Like is the antidote to like, and to answer fanaticism with prudential maxims, or attempt to check enthusiasm by an appeal to experience, is as hopeless a task as to try to quell a popular revolution with an epigram. Count Tolstoi repeats many of the threadbare pleas against war, but, being a man of genius, be does not plead on the lines of a M. de Bloch. For him there is no prudential half-way house. Much of the argument, indeed, is irrelevant to his main con- tention, as when he sneers at the politicians who sit at home while soldiers fight their battles, and when he attempts to support his case on economic grounds. But his main thesis is simple, and of universal application. War, he says in effect, is a sin against God's law and against the moral well-being of mankind. But the collective conscience of the world is deadened : the individual conscience must be aroused. He, therefore, calls upon all concerned to halt and "bethink them- selves." The Czar must say to himself:—" I have promised to fulfil what is demanded of me by the Higher Will which sent me into life. These demands I not only know, but feel in my heart. They consist, as it is expressed in the Christian law, which I profess, in that I should submit to the will of God, and fulfil that which it requires of me, that I should love my neighbour, and serve him and act towards him as I could wish others to act towards me. Am I doing this P" The soldier, the Minister, the journalist, must each put the same questions to himself. The moment all classes examine them- selves in this way, war, Count Tolstoi thinks, will cease of itself. "The most effective and certain deliverance of men from all the calamities which they inflict upon themselves, and from the most dreadful of all—war—is attainable, not by any external general measures, but merely by that simple appeal to the consciousness of each separate man, which, one thousand nine hundred years ago, was proposed by Jesus,— that every man bethink himself, and ask himself, who is he, why he lives, and what he should and should not do." This is the true idealism, an appeal to a spiritual tribunal, a plea for a spiritual transformation. It is not met by any of the ordinary forms of military advocacy. It is not even met by the argument that human life is a aeries of compromises, and that if this pitiless examination were applied to the details of life, man would give up the business and sit like a Buddhist contemplating a riddle he was powerless to solve. Count Tolstoi is unswervingly logical. Is it the truth and the right ? Then at all costs man must follow it or suffer moral shame.
The answer must -come from other sources. War, too, has its idealism, an idealism so old, and so firmly rooted in the foundations of human nature, that it is rarely expressed. "Enlightened men," says Count Tolstoi, "cannot but know that occasions for war are not worth one human life." This is the axiom of his idealism, and it is this axiom that our counter-idealism resolutely denies. Mankind possesses, in- dividually and in nations, certain old beliefs and loyalties— love of home, religion, patriotism, justice, mercy—often enough contradictory loyalties when set against each other, but living creeds to the man who holds them. So long as such ideals have dynamic force there must be war. To say this is not to argue that in each campaign right is clearly on one side. Common ideals held with a difference are, unhappily, as strong disruptive forces as clear opposites. The point is that for the man and the nation one particular form seems the whole truth, and while it has this credence it makes its votaries crusaders. In all true wars each side has been convinced that it has been in the right. To prohibit men t< fight for a cause in which they believe—that is, to devote to it their most valuable possessions, their lives—is to strike at the root of faith. It is no answer to say that religion is an exploded folly, and patriotism a shallow prejudice. For such an argument we are prepared with other answers : it is Count Tolstoi we are dealing with, who makes it an affair of con- science only, and to conscience also we appeal. Let us by all means examine ourselves. If the soldier fights only for lust or plunder, he will fight ill ; if he fights like the armies of the Revolution for a civic ideal, or like the Cromwellians for a pure creed, he fights well because he fights the battles not of the flesh but of the spirit. When ideals become faint war may cease, but while they are living creeds to their followers war is inevitable. It is the conflict between the real and the ideal, an attempt on the part of man to hasten the work of time, and by his sacrifices to realise his dreams. To deny its value is to cast doubt upon the highest instinct of our mortal nature.
The truth is that this denunciation of war rests at bottom upon a gross materialism. The horrors of war are obvious enough ; but it may reasonably be argued that they are not greater than the horrors of peace. There can be no sacrifice without a price, no spiritual conflict without material suffering. To see only the horrors, and to see in them the be-all and end-all of warfare, is to be guilty of that singular blindness, le vulgaire des sages, which is possible only to the morbidly intelligent. Pain, on this theory, is the one great evil; to avoid pain any sacrifice of honour, self-respect, and wholesome ambition is justifiable. It is a repulsive doctrine when set down explicitly in words, but it under- lies much of the so-called " humanity " of the apostles of peace. Is our self-examination to result in the con- fession: "There is nothing in the world worth the deaths of our fellow-men and the tears of women and orphans " ? The ordinary conscience is, happily, above such a creed. While the world remains what it is, nothing of value can come into being without a struggle, and war is the colossal form of this dire necessity. Limit the chances of strife as much as we may, and mitigate its atrocities, we must face its ultimate certainty ; and the true way in which to ennoble war is not to declare it in all its forms the work of the Devil, but to emphasise the spiritual and idealist element which it contains. It is a kind of national sacrament, a grave matter into which no one can enter lightly and for which all are responsible, more especially in these days when wars are not the creation of princes and statesmen but of peoples. War, on such a view, can only be banished from the world by debasing human nature; for war implies seriousness, and if the human race is only made frivolous enough, the Saturnian era will no doubt begin. Count Tolstoi appeals for support to the "sincere, serious, rational man " ; but his appeal is more logical if addressed to the trifler. Let militarism, which is the degeneration of the fighting spirit, once become a power in the land, and we shall have a guarantee of peace, because the ideals which support war will have been destroyed, and the last appeal of humanity turned into a game. In a world of overgrown armaments and huge lifeless armies there will be neither the impulse to fight nor any real machinery to fight with. If we can imagine Europe in the kind of military strait-waistcoat which adorned the forces that were scattered at Jena, we should have the soundest guarantee of a sodden and hideous tranquillity. Or let the nations become incurably frivolous, incapable of honest ambition, and therefore of honest sacrifice, and we shall get the same pleasing result. Any word of war would be promptly hushed up, for would not war disturb the great international motor-race next week, or the inter-European wrestling match which is fixed for the summer ? The truth of the matter is that until nationality and national ideals are abolished, and all the races and States are fused into one, to make war impos- sible you must destroy, not the baser desires of man, but his essential idealism. If reformers are prepared to go thus far, they have logic on their side, whatever we may think of their wisdom ; but to counsel a universal apathy in the interests of truth and righteousness seems to LIB neither logical nor wise.
Previous page
