It is a mere superstition, Maeterlinck tells us in one of his beautiful essays, that there is anything irrevocable about the past. On the contrary, we are constantly rearranging it, revising it, remaking it. For it is only in our memory that it exists, and our conception of it changes as the loose fringes of past events are gathered up into a new meaning, or when a sudden fortune lights up a whole series in our lives, and shows us, stretching back in orderly array and beautiful significance, what we had supposed in our blindness to be a sad and chaotic welter. It is no less a superstition to suppose that we have a hand in making the present. The present, like the past, is always still to be made; indeed, must wait its turn, so to speak, to be seen in its full meaning until after the past itself has been remoulded and reconstituted. It is depressing to think that we do not know our own time, that the events we look upon have a permanent value far different from the petty one that we endow them with, that they fit into a larger whole of which we see only a dim fraction—and that the least important because the seed of something that shall come much later into full fruition. Must our short life pass away without knowledge or vision of the majestic processes which are unfolding themselves under our very eyes, while we have wasted our admiration and distorted our purpose by striving to interpret the ephemeral, that is gone as soon as we? Even the wisest among us can see with but a dim eye into the future, and make rather a lucky guess at its potentialities than a true prophecy based on a realization of the real tendencies of the time. It is only the Past that we really make. And this may account for our love of it. This fragile thing of tradition that we have so carefully constructed and so lovingly beautified, this artistic creation of a whole people or race, becomes most naturally the object of our tenderest solicitude. Any attack upon it that suggests a marring of its golden beauty, any new proposal that threatens to render it superfluous, elicits the outraged cry of anger, the passionate defense, of the mother protecting her child. For the Past is really the child of the Present. We are the authors of its being, and upon it we lavish all our thoughts, our interest and our delight. And even our hopes are centred in the Past, for the most enthusiastic among us can do no more than hope that something worth while will come out of the Past to nourish us in the approaching Present. Concern for the Future is so new a thing in human history that we are hardly yet at home with the feeling. Perhaps, if we thought more about what was before us, we should come to know more about it. Meanwhile our only consolation is that if we cannot see, neither did the generations that were before us. And we have the advantage of knowing that we do not see, while they did not care about their ignorance at all.
We have constantly to check ourselves in reading history with the remembrance that, to the actors in the drama, events appeared very differently from the way they appear to us. We know what they were doing far better than they knew themselves. We are in the position of the novel reader who looks, before he begins to read, to see how the plot turns out. This orderly and dramatic chronicle of history that thrills us as we read has only been orderly and dramatic to readers of the present time, who can see the dénouement of the story. History is peculiarly the creation of the present. Even the great men of the past are largely the agglomerations of centuries of hero-worship. Genius is as much a slow accretion of the ages as an endowment of man. Few great poets were seen in the full glory of their superhuman capacity by their fellows. Contemporary opinion of the great has been complimentary but seldom excessively laudatory, and there are sad instances of the decay and deflation of a supernatural personality through the smooth, gentle, imperceptibly creeping oblivion of the centuries.
We rarely see what is distinctive in our own time. The city builders of the West are quite unconscious of the fact that they are leaving behind them imperishable and mighty memorials of themselves. Few of the things that we admire now will be considered by posterity as noteworthy and distinctive of our age. All depends on the vitality of our customs and social habits, and some show as high a mortality as others do a stubborn tenacity of life. What we are witnessing is a gigantic struggle of customs and ideas to survive and propagate their kind. The means of subsistence is limited; it is impossible that all should be able to live. The fascinating problem for the social philosopher is which of these beliefs and tendencies will prove strong enough to overcome their rivals and make their stock a permanent type. How many of the fads and brilliant theories and new habits of thought and taste will be able to maintain their place in the world? If we could discern them, we should know the distinction of our age. Definite epochs of the past we distinguish and celebrate because they contained the germs of ideas or the roots of institutions that still survive among us, or customs and habits of thought that flourished in them with great brilliancy but have now utterly passed away. Now these beginnings are quite too subtle for us to see in our contemporary life, and there are so many brilliancies that it is impossible to pick out with any definiteness the things which have power to project themselves into the future, and cast a broad trail of light back to our age. Most of those very things that seem to us imperishable will be the ones to fade,—fade, indeed, so gradually that they will not even be missed. It is this gradual disappearance that gives the most thorough oblivion. History remembers only the brilliant failures and the brilliant successes.
We are fond of calling this an age of transition, but if we trace history back we find that practically every age—at least for many centuries—has been an age of transition. If we must set a starting-point from which we have been moving, the social philosopher will be inclined to place it about the beginning of the sixteenth century. If we have been in transition for four hundred years, it seems almost time to settle down from this wild ferment of beliefs and discoveries that has kept the world’s mind in constant turmoil since the time of the Renaissance. There are signs that such a crystallization is taking place. We are weeding out our culture, and casting aside the classical literature that was the breeding-ground for the old ideas. We have achieved as yet little to take its place. Most of the modern literature is rather a restless groping about in the dark for new modes of thinking and new principles of life, and thus far it hardly seems to have grasped the robust and vital in the new to any appreciable extent. One can hardly believe that this morbid virus that is still working with undiminished vigor and deadly effect will succeed in making itself the dominant note in European literature for the next five hundred years. One hates to think that our posterity is to be doomed to torture itself into appreciating our feverish modern art and music, and learn to rank the wild complexities of Strauss with the sublimities of Beethoven. Shall we be sure that the conquest of the air is finally achieved and a third dimension added to man’s traveling, or is it all simply another daring and brilliant stab at the impossible, another of those blasphemies against nature which impious man is constantly striving to commit? There are few signs of the Socialistic State, but who knows what births of new institutions, of which we are now quite unaware, future ages will see to have been developing in our very midst? Is religion doomed, or is it merely being transformed, so that we shall be seen to have been creating amid all our indifference a new type and a new ideal? Will our age actually be distinctive as the era of the Dawn of Peace, or will the baby institution of arbitration disappear before a crude and terrible reality? Are we progressing, or shall we seem to have sown the seeds of world decay in this age of ours, and at a great crisis in history let slip another opportunity to carry mankind to a higher social level? It is maddening to the philosopher to think how long he will have to live to find an answer to these questions. He wants to know, but in the present all he can do is to guess at random. Not immortality, but an opportunity to wake up every hundred years or so to see how the world is progressing, may well be his desire and his dream. Such an immortality may be incredible, but it is the only form which has ever proved satisfactory, or ever will, to the rational man.