close up - Monoskop

136 CLOSE UP
Russians and Germans during the last month, with great minds of both these nations.
The Germans (those, needless to say, of the great generous-beyond-pettiness variety)
said 'we as a defeated nation feel more and more the power and greatness of England.
England before the war was first in Europe. To-day England is first.' We spoke,
possibly not as the average Englishman, not as the average American when we sought
to meet that humility-in-greatness half way. Our answer was final, prophetic and
unassailable. It was: 'you are not a defeated nation.' Germany with its future before it
grubs down, down to the root of things, says 'we failed here, we failed there.' England
says 'we have never failed, look at Trafalgar, we will never fail.' It is the worm in the
wood that eats away the mast head, not the mighty tempest. England in its greatness
preparing for the tempest, is in danger of neglecting (we must say it) the very root and
fibre of its greatness.
For England whose great pride is rightly its sense of fair play in sport and politics
and war is apt sometimes to play unfair to itself. Is not this fear of Russian films really
a fear of itself? Why should the Labour parties rise and threaten the dignity and
modesty of Buckingham Palace because they see the down-trodden and age-long
degraded illiterate peasants of the great Russian steppes and sordid St Petersburg
slums rising and storming the over-ornate Byzantine porches of the ex-Czar's cruelly
remote and indifferent Winter Palace? There is no reason for the English working
classes to rise and break and tear and rend. Would it not be a stimulus to the very
pride of these salt-of-the-earth English working classes to see that these Russians
were a different stock and root and yet behaved heroically? Heroism is without
nationality and should be without prejudice. We should not think David was a Jew,
Leonidas a Greek. These are epic characters, and as long as we are citizens or subjects
of the world, the vibration set up by the heroism of a David or the beauty and restraint
of a Leonidas belongs to us, to each one of us individually. We grow in pride, and
self-respect and divinity when we see acts of heroism, of beauty, of unqualified valour.
David's courage is my courage and Leonidas' death, my death. So in facing 'mother'
with her red flag, I am 'mother', a mother to these people whose martyrdom is our
martyrdom and whose crown is our crown.
We are no longer nations. We are or should be a nation. We all know everything
about the so-called Great War, that A was base, that B was good, that C was heroic,
that D lost some diplomatic papers, that E was really to blame, that it was all caused
really by F shooting G. We know that. We have witnessed it, died for it. Well, then let
us shuffle the cards, get down and back to values. Say I am my brother's keeper, and if
A suffers, B suffers. If C has smallpox, no doubt D will catch it and hand it on to E,
and maybe F even. In succouring CI am not being charitable (that is the joke of it), I
am really being selfish. For if one suffers, eventually the other must, and if one nation
to-day befouls its own integrity and strikes blindly at a lesser nation, the whole world,
willy (as they say) nilly must be sooner or later dragged into the fray. Men must fight,
it is true, just as women must have children. But don't let's fight if we must fight,
blindly, let us know what it is all about, nations must understand each other, then if C
is fighting D, there is much more fun to be got out of it altogether. We must know,
know, KNOW. One of the most distinguished women of the political non-militant
suffragette period said to me (in 1914) 'I have studied the problem from every angle,