But when full allowance has been made for this harmless element of poetry and pretty human perversity9 in the thing, I shall not hesitate to maintain here that this cult1 of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice10 of the age. It is the peculiar11 evil of this epoch12 that even its pugnacity13 is fundamentally frightened; and the Jingo is contemptible14 not because he is impudent15, but because he is timid. The reason why modern armaments do not inflame16 the imagination like the arms and emblazonments of the Crusades is a reason quite apart from optical ugliness or beauty. Some battleships are as beautiful as the sea; and many Norman nosepieces were as ugly as Norman noses. The atmospheric17 ugliness that surrounds our scientific war is an emanation from that evil panic which is at the heart of it. The charge of the Crusades was a charge; it was charging towards God, the wild consolation18 of the braver. The charge of the modern armaments is not a charge at all. It is a rout19, a retreat, a flight from the devil, who will catch the hindmost. It is impossible to imagine a mediaeval knight20 talking of longer and longer French lances, with precisely21 the quivering employed about larger and larger German ships The man who called the Blue Water School the “Blue Funk School” uttered a psychological truth which that school itself would scarcely essentially22 deny. Even the two-power standard, if it be a necessity, is in a sense a degrading necessity. Nothing has more alienated23 many magnanimous minds from Imperial enterprises than the fact that they are always exhibited as stealthy or sudden defenses against a world of cold rapacity24 and fear. The Boer War, for instance, was colored not so much by the creed25 that we were doing something right, as by the creed that Boers and Germans were probably doing something wrong; driving us (as it was said) to the sea. Mr. Chamberlain, I think, said that the war was a feather in his cap and so it was: a white feather.
Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic26 armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society. The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue27, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad28 which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable30 virtue31 of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime32 and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers33. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible35 scribbles36, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
Now in history there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration. Among the many things that leave me doubtful about the modern habit of fixing eyes on the future, none is stronger than this: that all the men in history who have really done anything with the future have had their eyes fixed37 upon the past. I need not mention the Renaissance38, the very word proves my case. The originality39 of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare began with the digging up of old vases and manuscripts. The mildness of poets absolutely arose out of the mildness of antiquaries. So the great mediaeval revival40 was a memory of the Roman Empire. So the Reformation looked back to the Bible and Bible times. So the modern Catholic movement has looked back to patristic times. But that modern movement which many would count the most anarchic of all is in this sense the most conservative of all. Never was the past more venerated41 by men than it was by the French Revolutionists. They invoked42 the little republics of antiquity43 with the complete confidence of one who invokes44 the gods. The Sans-culottes believed (as their name might imply) in a return to simplicity45. They believed most piously46 in a remote past; some might call it a mythical47 past. For some strange reason man must always thus plant his fruit trees in a graveyard48. Man can only find life among the dead. Man is a misshapen monster, with his feet set forward and his face turned back. He can make the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long as he is thinking about the past. When he tries to think about the future itself, his mind diminishes to a pin point with imbecility, which some call Nirvana. To-morrow is the Gorgon49; a man must only see it mirrored in the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly he is turned to stone. This has been the fate of all those who have really seen fate and futurity as clear and inevitable50. The Calvinists, with their perfect creed of predestination, were turned to stone. The modern sociological scientists (with their excruciating Eugenics) are turned to stone. The only difference is that the Puritans make dignified51, and the Eugenists somewhat amusing, statues.
But there is one feature in the past which more than all the rest defies and depresses the moderns and drives them towards this featureless future. I mean the presence in the past of huge ideals, unfulfilled and sometimes abandoned. The sight of these splendid failures is melancholy52 to a restless and rather morbid53 generation; and they maintain a strange silence about them—sometimes amounting to an unscrupulous silence. They keep them entirely54 out of their newspapers and almost entirely out of their history books. For example, they will often tell you (in their praises of the coming age) that we are moving on towards a United States of Europe. But they carefully omit to tell you that we are moving away from a United States of Europe, that such a thing existed literally55 in Roman and essentially in mediaeval times. They never admit that the international hatreds56 (which they call barbaric) are really very recent, the mere29 breakdown57 of the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire. Or again, they will tell you that there is going to be a social revolution, a great rising of the poor against the rich; but they never rub it in that France made that magnificent attempt, unaided, and that we and all the world allowed it to be trampled58 out and forgotten. I say decisively that nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past. Anyone can test this for himself. Read any thirty or forty pages of pamphlets advocating peace in Europe and see how many of them praise the old Popes or Emperors for keeping the peace in Europe. Read any armful of essays and poems in praise of social democracy, and see how many of them praise the old Jacobins who created democracy and died for it. These colossal59 ruins are to the modern only enormous eyesores. He looks back along the valley of the past and sees a perspective of splendid but unfinished cities. They are unfinished, not always through enmity or accident, but often through fickleness60, mental fatigue, and the lust61 for alien philosophies. We have not only left undone62 those things that we ought to have done, but we have even left undone those things that we wanted to do
It is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of all the ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human experiments. I know not what to say in answer to this, except to ask the reader to look at the modern man, as I have just looked at the modern man—in the looking-glass. Is it really true that you and I are two starry63 towers built up of all the most towering visions of the past? Have we really fulfilled all the great historic ideals one after the other, from our naked ancestor who was brave enough to kill a mammoth64 with a stone knife, through the Greek citizen and the Christian65 saint to our own grandfather or great-grandfather, who may have been sabred by the Manchester Yeomanry or shot in the ‘48? Are we still strong enough to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to spare them? Does the cosmos66 contain any mammoth that we have either speared or spared? When we decline (in a marked manner) to fly the red flag and fire across a barricade67 like our grandfathers, are we really declining in deference68 to sociologists—or to soldiers? Have we indeed outstripped70 the warrior71 and passed the ascetical saint? I fear we only outstrip69 the warrior in the sense that we should probably run away from him. And if we have passed the saint, I fear we have passed him without bowing.
This is, first and foremost, what I mean by the narrowness of the new ideas, the limiting effect of the future. Our modern prophetic idealism is narrow because it has undergone a persistent72 process of elimination73. We must ask for new things because we are not allowed to ask for old things. The whole position is based on this idea that we have got all the good that can be got out of the ideas of the past. But we have not got all the good out of them, perhaps at this moment not any of the good out of them. And the need here is a need of complete freedom for restoration as well as revolution.
We often read nowadays of the valor74 or audacity75 with which some rebel attacks a hoary76 tyranny or an antiquated77 superstition78. There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous79 man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions80 fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially34 insist on this abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor81 of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.
There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again. We could restore the Heptarchy or the stage coaches if we chose. It might take some time to do, and it might be very inadvisable to do it; but certainly it is not impossible as bringing back last Friday is impossible. This is, as I say, the first freedom that I claim: the freedom to restore. I claim a right to propose as a solution the old patriarchal system of a Highland82 clan83, if that should seem to eliminate the largest number of evils. It certainly would eliminate some evils; for instance, the unnatural84 sense of obeying cold and harsh strangers, mere bureaucrats85 and policemen. I claim the right to propose the complete independence of the small Greek or Italian towns, a sovereign city of Brixton or Brompton, if that seems the best way out of our troubles. It would be a way out of some of our troubles; we could not have in a small state, for instance, those enormous illusions about men or measures which are nourished by the great national or international newspapers. You could not persuade a city state that Mr. Beit was an Englishman, or Mr. Dillon a desperado, any more than you could persuade a Hampshire Village that the village drunkard was a teetotaller or the village idiot a statesman. Nevertheless, I do not as a fact propose that the Browns and the Smiths should be collected under separate tartans. Nor do I even propose that Clapham should declare its independence. I merely declare my independence. I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the universe; and I shall not admit that any of them are blunted merely because they have been used.
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1
cult
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| n.异教，邪教；时尚，狂热的崇拜 | |
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cultivation
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| n.耕作，培养，栽培（法），养成 | |
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memoirs
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| n.回忆录；回忆录传( mem,自oir的名词复数) | |
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detailed
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| adj.详细的，详尽的，极注意细节的，完全的 | |
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authoritative
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| adj.有权威的，可相信的；命令式的；官方的 | |
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shudder
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| v.战粟，震动，剧烈地摇晃；n.战粟，抖动 | |
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abjectly
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| 凄惨地； 绝望地； 糟透地； 悲惨地 | |
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aviators
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| 飞机驾驶员，飞行员( aviator的名词复数 ) | |
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perversity
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| n.任性；刚愎自用 | |
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cowardice
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| n.胆小，怯懦 | |
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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epoch
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| n.(新)时代；历元 | |
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pugnacity
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| n.好斗，好战 | |
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contemptible
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| adj.可鄙的，可轻视的，卑劣的 | |
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impudent
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| adj.鲁莽的，卑鄙的，厚颜无耻的 | |
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inflame
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| v.使燃烧；使极度激动；使发炎 | |
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atmospheric
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| adj.大气的，空气的；大气层的；大气所引起的 | |
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consolation
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| n.安慰，慰问 | |
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rout
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| n.溃退，溃败；v.击溃，打垮 | |
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knight
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| n.骑士，武士；爵士 | |
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precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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alienated
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| adj.感到孤独的，不合群的v.使疏远( alienate的过去式和过去分词 )；使不友好；转让；让渡（财产等） | |
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rapacity
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| n.贪婪，贪心，劫掠的欲望 | |
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creed
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| n.信条；信念，纲领 | |
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patriotic
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| adj.爱国的，有爱国心的 | |
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fatigue
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| n.疲劳，劳累 | |
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goad
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| n.刺棒，刺痛物；激励；vt.激励，刺激 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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unbearable
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| adj.不能容忍的；忍受不住的 | |
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virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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sublime
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| adj.崇高的，伟大的；极度的，不顾后果的 | |
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forefathers
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| n.祖先，先人；祖先，祖宗( forefather的名词复数 )；列祖列宗；前人 | |
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specially
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| adv.特定地；特殊地；明确地 | |
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illegible
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| adj.难以辨认的，字迹模糊的 | |
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scribbles
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| n.潦草的书写( scribble的名词复数 )；乱画；草草地写；匆匆记下v.潦草的书写( scribble的第三人称单数 )；乱画；草草地写；匆匆记下 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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renaissance
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| n.复活，复兴，文艺复兴 | |
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originality
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| n.创造力，独创性；新颖 | |
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revival
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| n.复兴，复苏，（精力、活力等的）重振 | |
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venerated
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| 敬重（某人或某事物），崇敬( venerate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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invoked
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| v.援引( invoke的过去式和过去分词 )；行使（权利等）；祈求救助；恳求 | |
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antiquity
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| n.古老；高龄；古物，古迹 | |
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invokes
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| v.援引( invoke的第三人称单数 )；行使（权利等）；祈求救助；恳求 | |
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45
simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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piously
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| adv.虔诚地 | |
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mythical
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| adj.神话的；虚构的；想像的 | |
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graveyard
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| n.坟场 | |
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gorgon
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| n.丑陋女人，蛇发女怪 | |
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50
inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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51
dignified
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| a.可敬的，高贵的 | |
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52
melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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morbid
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| adj.病的；致病的；病态的；可怕的 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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hatreds
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| n.仇恨，憎恶( hatred的名词复数 )；厌恶的事 | |
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breakdown
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| n.垮，衰竭；损坏，故障，倒塌 | |
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trampled
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| 踩( trample的过去式和过去分词 )； 践踏； 无视； 侵犯 | |
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colossal
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| adj.异常的，庞大的 | |
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fickleness
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| n.易变；无常；浮躁；变化无常 | |
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lust
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| n.性(淫)欲；渴(欲)望；vi.对…有强烈的欲望 | |
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undone
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| a.未做完的，未完成的 | |
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starry
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| adj.星光照耀的, 闪亮的 | |
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mammoth
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| n.长毛象；adj.长毛象似的，巨大的 | |
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Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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cosmos
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| n.宇宙；秩序，和谐 | |
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barricade
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| n.路障，栅栏，障碍；vt.设路障挡住 | |
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deference
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| n.尊重，顺从；敬意 | |
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outstrip
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| v.超过，跑过 | |
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outstripped
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| v.做得比…更好，（在赛跑等中）超过( outstrip的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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warrior
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| n.勇士，武士，斗士 | |
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persistent
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| adj.坚持不懈的，执意的；持续的 | |
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elimination
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| n.排除，消除，消灭 | |
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valor
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| n.勇气，英勇 | |
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audacity
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| n.大胆，卤莽，无礼 | |
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hoary
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| adj.古老的；鬓发斑白的 | |
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antiquated
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| adj.陈旧的，过时的 | |
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superstition
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| n.迷信，迷信行为 | |
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courageous
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| adj.勇敢的，有胆量的 | |
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superstitions
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| 迷信，迷信行为( superstition的名词复数 ) | |
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metaphor
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| n.隐喻，暗喻 | |
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highland
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| n.(pl.)高地，山地 | |
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clan
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| n.氏族，部落，宗族，家族，宗派 | |
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unnatural
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| adj.不自然的；反常的 | |
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bureaucrats
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| n.官僚( bureaucrat的名词复数 )；官僚主义；官僚主义者；官僚语言 | |
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