THE MOVIE INTERPRETING THE PAST
WHETHER the first antidote the race has discovered against polyglot poison can save civilization before it is blown to pieces by high explosive shells is a problem that assumes new significance daily, as diplomacy continues to commit, in its blind and fatuous egotism, its historic blunders. The head-lines in the newspapers furnish a sad commentary upon the present status of the collective wisdom of mankind. The average intelligence of the race as it is manifested in international affairs is below the standard set by a day-nursery, where a singed child, it is confidently assumed, will avoid the fire. The high cost of war in life and treasure has been demonstrated to the race in recent years by a world-wide conflict that threatened the very foundations of civilization with destruction. Did mankind learn the lesson taught by this titanic struggle? If it did not, if it continues to provide itself with new and deadlier weapons for the waging of unimaginably awful combats, what can be done at the last moment, as this may prove to be, to save civilization from ruin as it totters upon the very edge of a fatal precipice?
The tragic importance of this query may seem, at first sight, to throw into comparative insignificance the topic we have under discussion, namely, the teaching of history in our schools and colleges through visual instruction. But our pointed question and our general theme are, as will presently appear, closely related to one another.
Philip Kerr, for five years confidential adviser and secretary to Lloyd George, is among those who hold that we who indulge the hope that the screen may eventually act as a poultice to heal the blows delivered by diplomacy against the peace of the world are but chasing another rainbow that has at its end not a pot of ointment but a gigantic pile of dynamite. At Williamstown, Mass., last summer, Mr. Kerr said, to an audience of scholars and statesmen of international prominence:
If we look back through history we shall see that what has happened in the last eight years is not a unique nor isolated phenomenon. For example, there was a world war for the first fifteen years of the last century, ending with the battle of Waterloo. We can trace back through the ages an ever-recurring procession of devastating wars engulfing the whole of the civilized world, followed by peaces of exhaustion, which in turn gave way to new eras of war. The question I have been asking myself for the last two or three years has been this: Have we as the result of the terrible experiences of the late war, and of the victory of the Allies, any real security against a repetition of a world war. To this question I have to answer, No.
To this deplorable and hopeless conclusion Mr. Kerr comes because he finds that mankind does its thinking not in terms of humanity, but of states; that the world, in so far as international problems are concerned, is as parochial as it was a generation or a century ago. “Life,” remarked a flippant pessimist, “is just one damned thing after another.” To Mr. Kerr’s despondent eyes history seems to be just one devastating war after another, with no end to the infernal succession now in sight. But is it not barely possible that history, gaining from the screen a new method of exposition, a new way of approach to the soul of Man, may eventually convince the human race that there is a more sensible solution to international problems than through bloodshed?
It is through the study of history alone that Man can, in the opinion of H. G. Wells, find his way toward higher planes of existence out of the mire in which he is now stuck. In his book “The Undying Fire,” Wells, speaking through the hero of his story, says, in explanation of his plan for the improvement of society:
I want this world better taught, so that wherever the flame of God can be lit it may be lit. Let us suppose everyone to be educated. By educated, to be explicit, I mean possessing a knowledge and understanding of history. Salvation can be attained by history. Suppose that instead of a myriad of tongues and dialects all men could read the same books and talk together in the same speech—think what a difference there would be in such a world from the conditions prevailing to-day.... This is a world where folly and hate can bawl sanity out of hearing. Only the determination of schoolmasters and teachers offers hope for a change in all this.
Philip Kerr and H. G. Wells examining, as they do, the same historical data, shocked, as they both are, by mankind’s constant repetition of ancient and easily avoidable errors, reach, from the same premises, diametrically opposite conclusions. Kerr denies that our race can obtain from a study of its past any hope for its future. Wells, on the other hand, holds that history can be made the handmaiden of progress and that those who teach it can become, if they are worthy of their sacred mission, the saviors of an imperilled race.
At the present moment, of course, it is impossible to determine whether the pessimism of Kerr or the optimism of Wells is entitled to the verdict of the court. The evidence is not all in, and, from present appearances, the case seems destined to a long and tedious life, going down on appeal, as it must, from one generation to another. But would it not be a hopelessly mad world which, on the issue involved in this contention, backed Kerr against Wells? Imagine the race abandoning itself to despair, admitting that it can find within itself no safeguard against its impending doom of hari-kari, turning heart-sick and hopeless from futile peace-conferences and gazing in sullen silence at the mobilization of new armies under old catch-words in various parts of a blood-soaked planet! Even if Wells shall prove to be in the end a dreamer of dreams and chaser of rainbows, defeated in his effort to put salt on the tail of the millennium, is it not more reasonable to take a gambling chance on his possible victory as an idealist than to give abject surrender with Kerr to the evil influences that for countless ages have made of our planet a recurrent shambles?
Common-sense, then, forces us to the conclusion that, in the perturbed world in which we at present find ourselves there is no feature of our complicated modern life more entitled to earnest consideration than the screen as historian. In schools, colleges and movie theatres, with films depicting significant episodes in Man’s past or illuminating events of to-day, a mirror is vouchsafed to this generation in which it can see both itself and its progenitors in a light that now for the first time clarifies our sight. The regeneration of the individual through religious influences is effected in large part by means of a self-revelation that begets repentance and reform. To employ a bit of slang to illustrate the point, all sinners come from Missouri and refuse to be rescued blindly. They must be shown. The wicked, war-soiled, wantonly selfish nations of the world have never had, so far as the masses of the people are concerned, the truths of history visualized to their startled eyes. Is it not possible that when the errors, the tragedies, the cumulative horrors of the past are revealed to them, when the majority of men and women turn to the evidence of their senses rather than to gossip, rumor and hearsay for historical enlightenment, Mankind, horrified at his scowling face and bloody hands, as he sees them for the first time in a mirror, will take an oath to remove the brand of Cain from his brow, the blush from his cheeks as the screen shows him what man’s inhumanity to man really means?
The late Viscount Bryce, just before his regrettable death, delivered eight lectures in the United States on “the large subject covered by the term International Relations.” “It is History,” says Bryce, “which, recording the events and explaining the influences that have moulded the minds of men, shows us how the world of international politics has come to be what it is. History is the best—indeed the only—guide to a comprehension of the facts as they stand, and to a sound judgment of the various means that have been suggested for replacing suspicions and enmities by the co-operation of States in many things and by their good will in all.” But Bryce, than whom no publicist of our times has held higher place as a seer and prophet, speaks not in an optimistic vein in his last published utterances.
The great lesson of the war, that the ambitions and hatreds which cause war must be removed, has not been learned, and if this war has failed to impress the lesson upon most of the peoples, what else can teach them? This is why thoughtful men are despondent, and why some comfort must now be sought for, some remedy devised at once against a recurrence of the calamities we have suffered.
Bryce is in agreement with the leading minds of to-day striving for a solution of international problems. They see no way out of the difficulties and perils confronting the race unless some new and hitherto unknown method be found to prevent mankind from repeating the scarlet sins that have disgraced and incarnadined the past. Arbitration, conciliation, alliances, treaties, congresses, leagues, peace palaces and palaver—what have they accomplished that can be cited to confute the pessimism of Philip Kerr or to suggest the remedy the necessity for which James Bryce, with the clairvoyance of a dying man, acutely realized? What the race needs at this critical hour is both a message and a medium, a warning and a way, a revelation and a road, with a light from the past shining on the pathway just ahead.
And Man has at his command this way, this medium, this road, upon which gleams a radiance that might easily save the race from destruction, if he had sufficient sense to learn from his past just a few elementary lessons in common-sense, just a few basic truths that, once grasped, would change history from a record of recurrent crimes to an epic tale of Man’s triumph over himself.
History as told by the screen in the class-room—is it not possible that the destiny of mankind is thus to be decided? The plastic minds of the young intrigued by the story of Man’s rise from protoplasm to poet, from amœba to aeronaut, from cave-man to lord of creation may be so impressed, within the next few generations, by the tragic absurdity of civilized man’s periodical reversions to savagery that some divine day the enlightened youth of the world will go out on a universal strike against old idiocies and cruelties, and to the screen that taught history will be given the glory of bringing mankind at one bound within striking distance of the millennium.