[December, 1921]
AS THE Christmas season approaches, it sits heavily upon our mind that there are some to whom we should like to say a word of respectful admiration. First of these is Woodrow Wilson. This, you may think, is a gesture both irrelevant and impertinent on our part. We cannot help it. We feel, as the Friends say, a “concern.” The conjunction of the Christmas month, the Conference on Limitation of Armaments, the hopes and memories of all honest men, Mr. Wilson’s coming birthday, makes the occasion irresistible. There are some things that must be said.
Woodrow Wilson has found the peace he sought. Never before, perhaps, did a public man enjoy such posthumous privilege in his own lifetime. He has joined (in Melville’s noble phrase) “the choice hidden handful of the divine inert.” This phrase requires scrutiny. The divinity is not ascribed to Mr. Wilson, but to inertia. Silence, thought, withdrawal from the maddening struggles of mankind—these are divine; these are godlike. If there were ever any doubt as to his having qualities of true greatness, consider the patience and decency of his present silence. It is a silence, one feels, not of bitterness but of honourable dignity.
Sometimes, tucked away in the papers, one finds a single line or so that gives us more to ponder than all the rest of the day’s news. Such an item was the following, quoted lately by Mr. Tumulty as having been said by Mr. Wilson to one of his advisers at the Paris Conference:
“M. Clemenceau called me a pro-German and abruptly left the room.”
They said this man was impatient and stubborn. Yet he endured insult calmly in the pursuit of his strangely hoped-for peace.
The post-Armistice career of Mr. Wilson has been called a tragedy. We do not see it so. The Paris Conference—it is easy to see it now—was foredoomed to a certain measure of failure. On sand one puts up a tent, not a house. Moreover, in so far as that Conference is concerned, Mr. Wilson has suffered a double fatality. He has never spoken candidly for himself; he has been unfortunate in those who have spoken for him. It has been the habit of those naïf and loyally affectionate souls who have been closest to him to assure us of his subtlety and quicksilver craft. We cannot see it. He has seemed to us, always, a man of genuine simplicity—what would have been called, at one time, a righteous man.
It is an odd thing that when you say a character is rooted in simplicity and piety some will conclude that you are sneering. His character is a great character. Those influences which shake and unsettle men’s fibre more than anything else it has endured in full measure—adulation and hatred. The anger and mockery which were lavished upon Wilson are interesting to contemplate. But, so far as one can see, they did not trouble that stubborn zeal. There was a Cromwellian grimness and singleness of heart in his battle with Europe. You remember what Cromwell said (if Carlyle can be trusted as a reporter)—
“Would we have Peace without a Worm, lay we Foundations of Justice and Righteousness.”
For that he struggled, burdening himself beyond human strength. For that he compromised, as all men do. For that he incurred the malice of all aspirants—both the pure and the impure.
It is amazing to remember the power and depth of that malice. In a perverse way, it is almost encouraging to remember it: it proves so excellently that this earth is still the fallen star, the cindered Eden, in which merely human failings incur more than human angers. What a gruesome life that of politics must be! And yet when, in our recent history, were more positive virtues and high-minded hopes brought into the muddled ferment of national politics? Do you remember how this man lay at death’s door for many silent months, and how ill suppressed were the satisfaction and the sneer? What was his crime? We used to wonder. Only that he had believed the world was ripe for some strokes of simplicity and unselfishness.
Little by little the minds of fair-hearted men are returning to realization and gratitude. There is nothing now accomplished, or even accomplishable, in matters of international dealing, that Woodrow Wilson was not fighting for three years ago. The granolithic minds of the old stand-patters and the luxurious sniffs of young, hot doctrinaires formed for a while a quaint partnership of scorn. Nor would we ourself deny that there were many things to lament. But the world still waits for a competent, understanding, and judicial expression of Woodrow Wilson’s service to men. It was not a perfect service, for it was marred by necessary mortal blunders and qualms. For that perhaps we reverence it the more. And when the just tribute comes, perhaps it will come from the hand of some great writer to whom the puerilities of partisan squabble fade into their deserved shadow; to whom the humour and the pathos will be evident; and most evident of all, the dignity and austerity of a great human hope, frustrated and postponed, but an addition to the honour of the race. Perhaps it will come from the hand of some great dramatist, with the dramatist’s art that can revive great figures, great moments; can purge the occasion of what was merely peevish and fortuitous, and remind us of truths and visions we lost in the hurly-burly of the time.
It is sheer selfishness on our part to hope that some such expression may come soon. We are jealous for the credit of this generation. We are proud to have lived in days when men suffered so hideously and yet did and said and wrote great things. We would like it to be said of this generation that it recognized greatness in its own time. That would be an honourable thing to be able to say. Have we erected, from our imagination, a figure that is not really there? We think not. And so, with humility and hesitation, but impelled by a motive we cannot resist, we would like to say to Woodrow Wilson that there are many who gratefully wish him Merry Christmas.
