United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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vox 15 Lord Chesterfield’s four thousand years and whatever may, or s hould be added thereto. Out of scores of available quotations, three will suffice to suggest a deflation of that eloquence which begins “There never was a time in the history of the world. . .” (1) In 115 or thereabouts one Juvenal found himself face to face with a complicating factor in the life of man perennial since man first tried to make a garden of the world. Juvenal tackled the woman problem. I cannot give you all he says in the sixth Satire but it is easy to give you enough to suggest that any risks we run to-day from having women in the world have always been run. Apparently, women have always been at least half of what is the matter with the world. Says Juvenal: “Why need I tell of the purple wraps and the wrestling oils used by the women? Who has not seen one of them smiting a stump, piercing it through and through with a foil, lunging at it with a shield, and going through all the proper motions? . . . What mod¬ esty can you expect in a woman who wears a helmet, abjures her own sex, and delights in feats of strength? . . . Yet these women are the women who find the thinnest of thin robes too hot for them: whose delicate flesh is chafed by the finest of silk tissue. . . What decency does Venus observe when she, is drunken? When she knows not one member from another, and eats giant oysters at midnight. . .drinks out of perfume bowls, while the roof spins dizzily round, the table dances and every light shows double! There is nothing that a woman will not permit herself to do, nothing that she deems shameful, when she encircles her neck with green emeralds and fastens huge pearls to her elongated ears.” Juvenal even faced the educated woman: “She lays down definitions, and discourses on morals, like a philosopher. . .The grammarians make way before her; the rhe¬ toricians give in; the whole crowd is silenced.’’ I do not quote these things to show what is the matter,with wo¬ man, but simply to show that our unsolved problem of the relations of the sexes, that fundamental warfare between the sexes which faces us everywhere beneath the surface of life today, is a very old affair. (2) My next author I shall not name. He lived in the eighteenth century and was something of an anomaly in that comfortable upper class century; he was a tragic figure. So tender was his spirit and so 1am- bently and brilliantly sane was the vision of his mind that we still de¬ fend ourselves and the vested interests of our comfortable insanities against him by calling him mad. A single quotation from him will also suggest the perennial story of the world. “But when a creature pretending to reason could be capable of such enormities, he dreaded lest the corruption of that faculty might be worse than brutality itself. He seemed, therefore, confident that instead of reason we were only possessed of some quality fitted to increase our natural vices.” G. G. Ramsay’s translation.

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14 VOX believe that the account of horrors such as I could give or such as are revealed in Journey’s End and All Quiet on the Western Front, will deter the peoples of the world from war. Those who would fight like the chance of self sacrifice; those who would not fight like to hear of horrors. Where, then, is hope of peace? It might possibly be found in the apalling scale of “the next war,” when whole populations will be exterminated by poison gas, and all kings, rulers, and clergy will be included in the universal holacaust. That will silence their at¬ tempts to hound the people on to international hatred. In my own case, I have found that the more I came to know the members of a foreign nation, the better I came to like them, and the less inclined I felt to cut their heads off with a sword or to shatter their limbs with shells, or to stop their breathing with gas.” This, then, is your world. Both potentially and actually it is a tragic world if waste, potential and actual, be a constituent of the tragic idea; a world full of evil designs, stupid activity, irresponsible powers. And leaving aside the thought of modern warfare with its peculiar potentialities for widespread waste and horror, your world at peace is really not good enough. There is injustice in the courts of justice, law¬ less precedure in and about the legislative halls, self seeking and aggrand¬ isement in the Church, highly organized lying under the name of na¬ tional diplomacy, ruthless exploitation under the name of commercial expansion, all known and condoned, all part of our “present system.” •This, then, is your world. Of course we do not usually think of it in these terms. We live or try to live in the peripheral areas round about this central tragic fact. We use misbegotten religious conceptions as opiates, our second and third rate art and literature as anodynes, work and the pursuit of time as a resource (“I’ve saved ten minutes,” said the Occidental. “What do you want it for?” asked the Oriental.”) and, generally, the pleasures of satisfying the darker passions or our gentler and subtler lusts, drunken¬ nesses of various sorts, as modes of escape. We circle about, hither and thither, occupied with what we call our interests. And all the while the central fact remains, though few there be that find it. So is our world perpetuated. I suppose my second topic is in my scheme in order to deflate the rhetoric and reduce the excitement. After all, it’s a pretty old world. The story of the world is a far longer story than Lord Chesterfield thought it was when in 1739 he wrote to his son, “in Europe the two principal eras or epochs by which we reckon are from the creation of the world to the birth of Christ, which was 4000 years; and from the birth of Christ to this time, which is 1739 years.” I am not going to give you chronol¬ ogy, however. I shall not go back into geological time. I am merely go¬ ing to quote a few things to show that the story of the world is a very old, and indeed, a rather repetitious story, that our “prematurely afflicted century” is really but a pulse in the centuries’ flux. One need not go farther than Anno Domini to demonstrate that, leaving out of account War or Peace? Henry W. Nevinson, The Clarion, March, 1931, page 71.

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16 VOX (3) From the nineteenth century I should invoke Ruskin or C arlyle or Arnold: ( Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery”), a flash from a letter of Huxley’s, a bit from poor Clough. But instead I name and quote Wordsworth; Wordsworth in a particularly pontifical and petulant mood if you like, but Wordsworth telling the story of the world. A multitude of causes,” he says, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident. . . .When I think upon this degrading thirst after out¬ rageous stimulation, . . But I need not read on. You see my point. This “prematurely afflicted century” is just what all the centuries have been to the sensitive. And hence I may pass to my next topic, The Challenge of the Tragic, without too much worry over a definition. The word tragedy is admit¬ tedly difficult to define. It is like socialism or culture or the state of being drunk; you have the most amazing and unforseen complications on your hands the moment you desire precise finality of definition. Yet we pos¬ sess working meanings for these terms. I think the idea of waste seems persistent in our thought concerning the nature of the tragic fact; waste implying misdirection, confusion; disorder rather than order; if you go deeper, waste, seeming to imply lack of direction of any sort, an absence of that witting and loving control by a Providence, a Scheme of Things, or a God, by the assumption of which we normally comfort ourselves. However we may define the nature of the tragic element in human life, whether Aeschylus or Shakespeare or Ibsen or the New Testament may help us most in definition, the thing is there. I think in taking up its challenge we come upon sure steps towards the achievement of cul¬ ture. “Commonplace people,” says Masefield, “dislike tragedy because they dare not suffer and cannot exult.” Culture, as applie d to humanity, if we rescue the word from its sillier uses and even perhaps from Mr. Arnold, means the achievement of the highest quality possible in terms of the human element on the earth. To face the tragic—I mean by the tragic now, the total weight and implications of the anomalies, the in¬ scrutable black accidents, on the one hand, and the “moral offensive¬ ness” of the established order of our world on the other—to face the brutality, the absurdity, the waste of it all—I mean by facing it, really seeing it, accepting it—to face the tragic thus, and to go on facing it, is to learn the profoundest things that may be learned about the essential nature of the best in man. “Pour on. I will endure.” cries Lear, and for