Crowds Part 38

I may not know G.o.d, but whatever else He is, I feel sure that He is not a precise stickler-G.o.d, that He is not pompous about spiritual manners, a huge, literal-minded, Proper Person, who cannot make allowances for human nature, who cannot hear what humble, rough men like these, hewing their vast desires for Him out of darkness, and out of little foolish words, are trying to say to Him.

And perhaps we, too, do not need to be literal-minded about a prayer that we may hear, or that we may overhear, roaring its way up past our smooth, beautiful lives rudely to Heaven.

What is the gist of the prayer to G.o.d, and to us?

What is it that the men are trying to say in this awful, flaming, blackening metaphor of wishing Lord Devonport dead?

The gist of it is that they mean to say, whether they are right or wrong (like us, as we would say, whether we were right or wrong), they mean to say that they have a right to live.

In other words, the gist of it is that we are like them, and that they are like us.

I, too, in my hour of deepest trial, with no silk hat, with no gloves, with no gilt prayer-book, as I should, have flashed out my will upon my G.o.d. I, too, have cried with Paul, with Job, across my sin--my sin that very moment heaped up upon my lips--have broken wildly in upon that still, white floor of Heaven!

And when the dockers break up through, fling themselves upon their G.o.d, what is it, after all, but another way of saying, "I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor princ.i.p.alities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of G.o.d...."

It may have been wicked in the dockers to address G.o.d in this way, but it would have been more wicked in them not to think He could understand.

I believe, for one, that when Jacob wrestled with the angel, G.o.d looked on and liked it.

The angel was a mere representative at best, and Jacob was really wrestling with G.o.d.

And G.o.d knew it and liked it.

Praying to strike Lord Devonport dead was the dockers' way of saying to G.o.d that there was something on their minds that simply could not be said.

I can imagine that this would interest a G.o.d, a prayer like the dockers'

prayer, so spent, so desperate, so unreasonable, breaking through to that still, white floor of Heaven!

And it does seem as if, in our more humble, homely, and useful capacity as fellow human beings, it might interest us.

It seems as if, possibly, we might stop criticising people who pray harder than we do, pointing out that wrestling with G.o.d is really rather rude--as if we might stop and see what it means to G.o.d and what it means to us, and what there is that we might do, you and I, oh, Gentle Reader, to make it possible for the dockers on Tower Hill to be more polite, perhaps, more polished, as it were, when they speak to G.o.d next time.

Perhaps nothing the dockers could do in the way of being violent could be more stupid and wicked than having all these sleek, beautiful, perfect people, twenty-six million of them, all expecting them not to be violent.

In my own quiet, gentle, implacable beauty of spirit, in my own ruthless wisdom on a full stomach, I do not deny that I do most sternly disapprove of the dockers and their violence.

But it is better than nothing, thank G.o.d!

They want something.

It gives me something to hope for, and to have courage for, about them--that they want something.

Possibly if we could get them started wanting something, even some little narrow and rather mean thing, like having enough to eat--possibly they will go on to art galleries, to peace societies, and cathedrals next, and to making very beautiful prayers (alas, Gentle Reader, how can I say it?) like you--Heaven help us!--and like me!

I would have but one objection to letting the dockers have their full way, and to letting the control of the situation be put into their hands.

They do not hunger enough.

They are merely hungering for themselves.

This may be a reason for not letting the world get entirely into their hands, but in the meantime we have every reason to be appreciative of the good the dockers are doing (so far as it goes) in hungering for themselves.

It would be strange indeed if one could not tolerate in dockers a little thing like this. Babies do it. It is the first decency in all of us. It is the first condition of our knowing enough, or amounting to enough, to ever hunger for any one else. Everybody has to make a beginning somewhere. Even a Saint Francis, the man who hungers and thirsts for righteousness, who rises to the heights of social-mindedness, who hungers and thirsts for everybody, begins all alone, at the breast.

Which is there of us who, if we had not begun our own hungering and thirsting for righteousness, our tugging on G.o.d, in this old, lonely, preoccupied, selfish-looking way, would ever have grown up, would ever have wanted enough things to belong to a Church of England, for instance, or to a Congregational Home Missionary Society?

It is true that the dockers are, for the moment (alas, fifty or sixty years or so!), merely wanting things for themselves, or wanting things for their own cla.s.s. And so would we if we had been born, brought up, and embedded in a society which allowed us so little for ourselves that not growing up morally--keeping on over and over again, year after year, just wanting things for ourselves, and not really being weaned yet--was all that was left to us.

There is really considerable spiritual truth in having enough to eat.

Sometimes I have thought it would be not unhelpful, would make a little ring of gentle-heartedness around us, some of us--those of us who live protected lives and pray such rich, versatile prayers, if we would stop and think what a docker would have to do, what arrangements a docker would have to make before he could enjoy praying with us--falling back into our beautiful, soft, luxurious wanting things for others.

Possibly these arrangements, such as they are, are the ones the dockers are trying to make with Lord Devonport now.

The docker is trying to get through hungering for something to eat, to arrange gradually to have his hungers move on.

CHAPTER XIII

MEN WHO GET THINGS

All the virtues are hungers. A vice is the failure of desire. A vice is a man's failure to have enough big hungers at hand, sternly within reach, to control his little ones.

A man who is doing wrong is essentially bored. He has let himself drop into doing rows of half-things, or things which he can only half do. He forgets, for the moment, what it really is that he wants, or possibly that he wants anything. Then it is that the one little, mean Lonely Hunger--a gla.s.s of liquor, a second piece of pie, another man's wife, or a million dollars, runs away with him.

When a man sins it is because his appet.i.tes fail him. Self-control lies in maintaining checks and balances of desire, centripetals, and centrifugals of desire. The worst thing that could happen to the world would be to have it placed in the hands of men who only have a gift of hungering for certain sorts of things, or hungering for certain cla.s.ses of people, or hungering for themselves.

We do not want the man who is merely hungering for himself to rule the world--not because we feel superior to him, but because a man who is merely hungering for himself cannot be taken seriously as an authority on worlds. People can take him seriously as an authority on his own hunger. But what he thinks about everything beyond that point cannot be taken seriously. What he thinks about how the world should be run, about what other people want, what labour and capital want, cannot be taken seriously.

I will not yield place to any one in my sympathy with the dockers.

I like to think that I too, given the same grandfathers, the same sleeping rooms and neighbours, the same milk, the same tincture of religion, would dare to do what they have done.

But I cannot be content, as I take my stand by the dockers, with sympathizing in general. I want to sympathize to the point.

And on the practical side of what to do next in behalf of the dockers, or of what to let them do, I find myself facing two facts:

First, the dockers are desperate. I take their desperation as conclusive and imperative. It must be obeyed.

Second, I do not care what they think.

What they think must not be obeyed. Men who are in the act of being scared or hateful, whether it be for five minutes, jive months, or sixty years, who have given up their courage for others, or for their enemies, are not practical. What a man who despairs of everybody except himself thinks, does not work and cannot be made to work. The fact that the dockers have no courage about their employers may be largely the employers' fault. It is largely the fault of society, of the churches, the schools, the daily press. But the fact remains, and whichever side in the contest has, or is able to have, first, the most courage for the other side, whichever side wants the most for the other side, will be the side that will get the most control.

If Labour, in the form of syndicalism, wants to grasp the raw materials, machinery, and management of modern industry out of the hands of the capitalists and run the world, the one shrewd, invincible way for Labour to do it is going to be to want more things for more people than capitalists can want.

The only people, to-day, who are going to be competent to run a world, or who can get hold of even one end of it to try to run it, are going to be the people who want a world, who have a habit, who may be said to be almost in a rut, of wanting things all day, every day, for a world--men who cannot keep narrowed down very long at a time to wanting things for themselves.