Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1027
Let us sum up for a moment so that we may get this pattern well into our heads. In the first place was the Deluge: then the Sons of Noah prospered in a Golden Age that ran from Cathay to the Scillies; then, becoming afraid of a new cataclysm, they erected a fortification that should at once protect them and exalt them into a Heaven where they should live again their golden days; then the Lord struck them with the confusion of tongues. And so, being divided up into nations, you go on from Armageddon to Armageddon — from Deluge of blood to Deluge; from Wall to Wall. I should have thought that even a Technocrat would see that it did not pay and that to no Dreiser could it present even the shadow of a Problem.
The Deluge, then, may have been caused by the meltings of the last glaciers of the last Ice Age; or it may very well have been the symbol employed by the inspired Scriptural writer to imply a deluge of blood, a near wiping out of humanity. After that the remnants of mankind may well have learned — as slowly we are learning to-day — that slaughter as a means of enrichment does not pay.
That the Deluge or the Massacre were fairly universal and not a little local flood affecting merely the fortunes of the tribes of Israel or a little affair of spears between Jews or Amalekites, we may take fairly for granted. The echoes of floods and massacres that come down to us through the million-year corridors of Time are too widespread for this not to have been the case. You have legends of men escaping from floods amongst the ana of every race; from the canoes of the Malays and the Red Indians to the Chinese junk, that must singularly have resembled the Ark, and the water-stories of the Romanies.
The pre-Babel Age of the sons of Noah we may, for our own convenience, take to have been the era called Golden. The Sons — whom we may take as representing all humanity that survived — were shaken by the cataclysms of blood and water into a determination to live godly in the future under skies of the utmost possible amenity, on soil of the most fertile, beside rivers yielding the largest catches of fish or on the shores of the calmest seas. This you could do with ease and without friction in days when the population of this planet was reduced to a few handfuls.
VII. LAST INTERLUDE
The Great Trade Route, then, was staked out awaiting the Traders; along its course you had all the desiderata of easy and plenteous existence.
Then the Chinese Traders came to link settlement to settlement and civilization to civilization until the Great Route ran like a jewelled belt all across the middle of the world known to the Ancients... to the supremely ancient peoples who as long preceded Greeks and Romans as Greeks and Romans shall have preceded our descendants of fifty thousand years hence.... And, as far as I am concerned, you may include the lost Atlantis, joining up the New World to Madeira, and Africa prolonging itself to the Island of Porto Santo; so that between what is to-day called the Old World and what is called the New ran only the thirty-mile strip of sea that to-day is two miles deep. Such a strip of water — for the depth of it makes no odds to the seafarer — the Traders could cross, as they crossed the Channel on their way to the Cassiterides... in dug-outs and on rafts; for you are to understand that not yet had metals been used for making bolts for the timbers of ships. So, if you will, the Route ran all round the middle regions of the earth.
§
The Traders came, then, and the Great Will imposed peace on the earth.
The Great Will, as we have adumbrated, is an afflatus that runs over the world or regions of the earth, manifesting itself at rare intervals, for one or several reasons, influencing humanity for several lustres or for several centuries and slowly or swiftly exhausting itself on the extreme limits of the world.
The most prominent example of this afflatus is that, of course, of Christianity, which in its various manifestations, along with all the other great religions or rules of life of the world, is slowly dying under the attacks of contagious indifferentism even more than under those of Fascism, proselytizing Imperialism, or Communism. But there have, of course, been other waves. The cult of Mahomet arising in an obscure desert evolved a mighty and splendid civilization, spread its Empires over almost the complete circumference of the Inland sea and into untold miles of Europe, and so is ebbing away. For two hundred years the Crusades sent a counter-wind disturbing all Europe and beating on the shores of Asia Minor; the breath that went out from Geneva ran across all Christendom, shook the Pope upon his throne, evoked the most bloodthirsty of all internecine wars, split Christianity, and leaves us the spectacle of the two branches of that Faith sinking out of existence still locked in a death grapple. The rule of life of Confucianism directed the major portion of the civilized world and is dying under the attacks of Western egotism; the rule of life indoctrinated in the Morte d’Arthur... “and see my tomb and pray some prayer more or less for my soul... and so subscribed with part of my heart’s blood”... the rule of life indoctrinated at the Round Table ran through Christendom with the speed of the infection of the doctrine of the Wall to-day and died under the hilarious laughter of us materialists, Cervantes holding the knife.... And for centuries there was the rule of life of Plutarch which pertained in all the ruling classes of the world till my day. Indeed, the second gift-book that comes back to me as having been given me as a child was the Langhornes’ translation of the Lives.
§
I am not going at this date to enter into the controversy of Plutarchians versus anti-Plutarchians. It attracted public attention only a few years ago; at any rate it was not till about 1923 that I became aware of it as a political issue, though obviously the mass-movements of humanity in the late war with their complete apparent want of coherent direction prepared the soil for that plant and for the vanishing of the Great Man as director of the public conscience.
(I remember being asked in 1923 what Great Man remained in the world, or rather, the name of what public director of Conscience was most widely known throughout the world of that day. I replied, after racking my brains for a little, that the only person who at all filled that bill was Mr. H. G. Wells, whose voice was at that date upraised every day either in the White House or the Kremlin and the reverberations of whose lively, exhortatory conversations filled the columns of the entire popular press from the one of those extremities to the other. As a figure he faded a little before the Prince of Wales, whose dictatorship of night-shirts and four-in-hand ties monopolized most of the attention of the world’s youth; and then came Mr. Lindbergh, who has paled before the group movements of Fascism and Communism....
The most salient instance that I know of the immense hold that Plutarch had is to be found in the account of the death of Braccio la Montone, despot of Perugia and one of the most unscrupulous and brilliant condottiere of his day. He was held for death in 1432; and desperately seeking to make his peace with God, cried out in agony that he could not hope for absolution, so much he was continually thinking of the example of Brutus.)
In that era of disappearance of conscious public direction from the consciousness of the world it was easy to declare — or rather it was difficult any longer to believe and maintain — that Napoleon was with his ambitions the real causa caucans of the spread of French Republican arms throughout Western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century or that Cæsar was really the motive power for the subsequent conversion of the Roman Republic into an Empire.
The matter seems indeed to have been disposed of by St. Augustine when he wrote: “That which is called the Christian Religion existed amongst the ancients and never did not exist from the beginnings of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion already existed and began to be called Christianity,” and that was obviously a progression of about two hundred years, since the City of God was written in the early years of the fifth century, whereas Tertullian who wrote at the beginning of the third said: “Christ styled himself the Truth; He never called himself Tradition.”
The subject has excited controversy of singular violence — my grandfather once nearly knocked me down when I said that Brutus was not the Founder of Democracy; whereas Mr. Galsworthy, with whom I had many violent arguments, never came so near physical violence as when I happened to say, rather carelessly, that Don Quixote put an end to the chivalric spirit. — But the most convenient way to arrange the matter with oneself is to say that the Word supplies the afflatus that sets a spirit traversing the world, but the aspirations of innumerable humanity are needed to supply the mobility of the Word. Koung-Fou-Tseu or his nearly contemporary Buddha, or his predecessor Christ or, if you will, Marx, gathered the wisdom of the world that preceded them, put the compilation with more or less of inspiration into literary form, and sent polyglot disciples and missionaries out into the highways between the hedgerows. The doctrine then spread swiftly or slowly according as it was expressed well or indifferently.
The process was always exactly similar whether the method was Platonic or Aristotelian — for waves of Platonism and Aristotelianism have gone over the world with results almost as lasting as those of any other cults. So practically all religions have bases either empirical or anthropomorphic; and for private consumption one may as well have such a pattern at the back of the brain, though if one wishes to lead a quiet life it is as well to conceal that belief. Thus the early Fathers, Plotinus, the eremites of the Libyan desert, St. Simeon Stylites, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Wells, and the followers of Karl Marx in general, will deny with vigour — and take steps as disagreeable as possible to affirm the denial that literary form is of any assistance to the spreading of belief. They declare — and in that they are imitated by the orthodox amongst the Jews — that the essentials of a faith should be wrapped up in a jargon of theology. The reasons for that are twofold: If the person of whoever the Redeemer happens to be should be lucid, attractive, or heroic, the doctrine of Plutarchism will be strengthened and the impression conveyed to the world that Great Men of remarkable talents, either æsthetic or inspirational, are desirable world features. And then, as was held by the Church of Rome and as is held by the apostles of Marx to-day, it is considered that if the impact of a New Faith on the commonalty be too vivid, the commonalty or the proletariat may go or be led astray. Thus if your Holy Writ, whatever it is, is too attractive, too simple, or too exciting, it must only be read in the light of the notes of the Church, whatever the Church happens to be. They are perhaps right... from their point of view. Perhaps if Christians had read the Gospels — as we are engaged in reading history — without any of the notes of any Church we might have had already the Kingdom of God on earth instead of having thus difficultly to set about its reconstitution... as you might say, by trial and error. That phrase has for me at the moment a great fascination.
§
We return, then, to our Cathay merchants.
They set out, at first with pack beasts; then when the Great Route was smoothed down and set with small polished cobblestones, with sleds. Then with caravans on wheels — a whole city of Cathay moving down a swathe of the earth’s middle.
They set out to impose the Great Will on that tract before post-diluvian mischief could be worked.
Let us postulate that they were Chinese, in robes of silk and mandarins’ hats with the little green, yellow, or scarlet buttons on the top and all. If you prefer to apply the half learning of encyclopaedias to the question of their origins and races you may say that they were the people one of whom left the Cros-Magnon skull for our edification; or that they started from Piltdown or the Pamirs. I don’t much care; though it would be preferable to consider that they did not come from the Pamirs, because that 15,000-foot high plateau boasts one of the worst climates of the world and that would rather throw out of gear the geographic side of the history of the Route.
They were, then, Cathayans and spread across the world the rule of life of the tabu. That is to say, that those things essential and necessary to the preservation of the peace and innocence of the Route were protected, until released for common use, by the Great Will. And they themselves....
They came amongst sparse peoples, uncrowded and at peace, in the most clement weathers of the known world. They were few in number, those inhabitants, because they were the descendants of the handful of sons of Noah who had escaped the Deluge; they had the whole earth to choose from for their scattered settlements, so they naturally chose those regions where life would be easiest and where from their white clay vessels they could serve out the cream of the world’s food on platters of perfumed wood.... Yes, that. It was the last remains of the Golden Age that Raleigh’s cut-throats happened upon in the island off what is now South Carolina.
It is not natural for human beings to cut each other’s throats over their food when it is in plenty — or even to enslave the one or the other in order to ensure its production. Hunting, fishing, herding, the turning over of an easy soil in lovely climates are the favourite pursuits of men. Even the brute creation does not seriously fight over its food when it is in plenty; only the ant makes captives and robs them. And the ant is a special and disagreeable case. Thus warfare and the sack of cities were unthought of.
The traders of Cathay had their wisdoms gathered from ancient records; they had the pre-diluvian chronicles of how humanity had behaved in the old days before their fathers. They knew that men increase and multiply. When that multiplication reaches a point when nourishment, goods, and gear cannot any more be produced by easy, by non-oppressive toil, it will occur to some Columbus to snatch the food from his neighbour’s mouth. He will slay him if he resist and eventually get together his neighbours to take food by force from foreign cities and to capture the inhabitants and keep them in chains, working to provide them with food, beds, aumbries... what you will.
The Traders knew that. They had it perhaps by word of mouth or in the written advice of a Great Man or perhaps as a mass of commentaries on a Great Man’s skilled pronouncements. And knowing that, they set about the temporarily practicable enterprise of ensuring that peace should be interminable and crime still unknown in the habitable world. They had supernatural airs to those simple people, even as Cortes had, or the English, for a short moment in Virginia. And nothing was easier than to endow with a sense of the awfulness the tabu-grounds, the Route itself, their own persons, and, finally, all mankind. The goods that they brought remained tabu even when they had passed into the possession or employment of the indigenous inhabitants of the communities they passed. The goods that they brought were the most desirable possessions of a simple people drawing from the earth an easy means of subsistence; so everything that by its rarity or beauty might awaken an undue covetousness in men with some of the nature of Columbus was put, as it were, supernaturally under divine protection. Food, drink, the light raiment in the shape of skins which was all that their climates called for, the elementary tools and weapons of the chase that were all that they needed... those things came to the natives almost as easily as air and light from the heavens and water from the brooks. And, by the exhortations of the merchants, the rarer commodities were put beyond the reach of covetousness, so that the idea of personal property was hardly to be conceived.
The motive of the merchants was of course two-fold. They knew from their pre-diluvian lore that before that catastrophe had reduced the earth’s populations to reasonable proportions it had been the habit of whole villages or hordes from many villages united to set out with spear and torch and perpetrate all that, in a subsequent age, was to be perpetrated by the Conquistadores in the territory of the Incas and by our own ancestry in regions more septentrional and less favoured. They therefore wished to protect their own territories in case, as was probable, increasing populations along the Route should have the idea of imitating their pre-diluvian ancestors. And their protection did not manifest itself by hoarding in arsenals untold millions of bows, arrows, javelins, clubs, slingstones, and slings, and apparatus for making and casting Greek fire. Havingwisdom they knew that, as between prisoner and jailer, the prisoner will always in the end escape, since he has nothing else to do but plan escapes, whilst the jailer must have sleep and recreation whilst this watchfulness fails; so the smallest of states bent on the destruction of another larger Empire will, most times, have its will. England may oppress Ireland for hundreds of years or the North plunder the South for a quarter of a century, but in the end their wills fail; Austria may for three hundred years oppress and extinguish all national aspirations in Italy, but the day comes when Italy, a nation, will take most of Austria that is worth having and on its inhabitants practice the oppression that Austria practised aforetime. These things are inevitable.
The Traders knew that, too. In addition there is a quality universal to all great congeries of men. Quite apart from the danger of having barbarous hordes at the gates of your Empire, it will seem unfitting to you that barbarous hordes should exist at all. Their existence is out of tune with the Universe, a note of discord in the Cosmos. You will feel an unceasing itch to convert them to better ways.
If you happen to be ourselves of to-day or of the spirit of Cristoforo you will set about these conversions with fire and sword. With the Big Stick you will take up the White Man’s Burden. You will send out punitive expeditions; you will slay; you will root out villages. Then when you have enslaved a population you will force on it a cult as unsuitable to its climate as will be the clothes that you will force it to wear in the name of morality. You will export to that land your roughest and most barbarous citizens; your penniless younger sons; your dipsomaniacs and criminals. It is ten to one that that last habit alone will tend towards the dismemberment of your Empire. Either they will cut loose from you or, in order to retain them, you must keep your mentality and your civilization for ever at the level of those semi-barbarians of your breed. And, in the end, as in the case of Africa, a tortured continent whose protecting Destiny has always at last sent flails and pestilence to its oppressors, you will find your ruin coming from the lands you have taken.
