"Where are we going?" One looks at the stars: "WHERE ARE WE GOING?"
That night, when I was thrust up out of the ground and stood dazed in the Square, I was told in a minute that this London where I was was a besieged and conquered city. Some men had risen up in a day and said to London: "No one shall go in. No one shall go out."
I was in the great proud city at last, the capital of the world, her big, new, self-assured inventions all about her, all around her, and soldiers camping out with her locomotives!
With her long trains for endless belts of people going in and coming out, with her air-brakes, electric lights, and motor-cars and aerial mails, it seemed passing strange to be told that her great stations were all choked up with a queer, funny, old, gone-by, clanky piece of machinery, an invention for making people good, like soldiers!
And I stood in the middle of the roar of Trafalgar Square and asked, as all England was asking that night: "Where are we going?"
And I looked in the faces of the people hurrying past.
And nobody knew.
And the next day I went through the silenter streets of the city, the great crowded dailies where all the world troops through, and then the more quiet weeklies, then the monthlies, more dignified and like private parks; and the quarterlies, too, thoughtful, high-minded, a little absent, now and then a footfall passing through.
And I found them all full of the same strange questioning: "Where are we going?"
And nobody knew.
It was the same questioning I had just left in New York, going up all about me, out of the skyscrapers.
New York did not know.
Now London did not know.
And after I had tried the journals and the magazines, I thought of books.
I could not but look about—how could I do otherwise than look about?—a lonely American walking at last past all these nobly haunted doorways and windows—for your idealists or interpreters, your men who bring in the sea upon your streets and the mountains on your roof-tops; who still see the wide, still reaches of the souls of men beyond the faint and tiny roar of London.
I could not but look for your men of imagination, your poets; for the men who build the dreams and shape the destinies of nations because they mould their thoughts.
I do not like to say it. How shall an American, coming to you out of his long, flat, literary desert, dare to say it? … Here, where Shakespeare played mightily, and like a great boy with the world; where Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, Browning, Shelley, and even Dickens flooded the lives and refreshed the hearts of the people; here, in these selfsame streets, going past these same old, gentle, smoky temples where Charles Lamb walked and loved a world, and laughed at a world, and even made one—lifted over his London forever into the hearts of men. …
I can only say what I saw those first few fresh days: John Galsworthy out with his camera—his beautiful, sad, foggy camera; Arnold Bennett stitching and stitching faithfully twenty-four hours a day—big, curious tapestries of little things; H.G. Wells, with his retorts, his experiments about him, his pots and kettles of humanity in a great stew of steam, half-hopeful, half-dismayed, mixing up his great, new, queer messes of human nature; and (when I could look up again) G.K. Chesterton, divinely swearing, chanting, gloriously contradicting, rolled lustily through the wide, sunny spaces of His Own Mind; and Bernard Shaw (all civilization trooping by), the eternal boy, on the eternal curbstone of the world, threw stones; and the Bishop of Birmingham preached a fine, helpless sermon. …
When a new American, coming from his own big, hurried, formless, speechless country, finds himself in what he had always supposed to be this trim, arranged, grown-up, articulate England, and when, thrust up out of the ground in Trafalgar Square, he finds himself looking at that vast yellow mist of people, that vast bewilderment of faces, of the poor, of the rich, coming and going they cannot say where—he naturally thinks at first it must be because they cannot speak; and when he looks to those who speak for them, to their writers or interpreters, and when he finds that they are bewildered, that they are asking the same question over and over that we in America are asking too, "Where are we going?" he is brought abruptly up, front to front with the great broadside of modern life. London, his last resort, is as bewildered as New York; and so, at last, here it is. It has to be faced now and here, as if it were some great scare-head or billboard on the world, "WHERE ARE WE GOING?"
The most stupendous feat for the artist or man of imagination in modern times is to conceive a picture or vision for our Society—our present machine-civilization—a common expectation for people which will make them want to live.
If Leonardo were living now, he would probably slight for the time being his building bridges, and skimp his work on Mona Lisa, and write a book—an exultant book about common people. He would focus and express democracy as only the great and true aristocrat or genius or artist will ever do it. A great society must be expressed as a vision or expectation before men can see it together, and go to work on it together, and make it a fact. What makes a society great is that it is full of people who have something to live for and who know what it is. It is because nobody knows, now, that our present society is not great. The different kinds of people in it have not made up their minds what they are for, and some kinds have particularly failed to make up their minds what the other kinds are for.
We are all making our particular contribution to the common vision, and some of us are able to say in one way and some in another what this vision is; but it is going to take a supreme catholic, summing-up individualist, a great man or artist—a man who is all of us in one—to express for Crowds, and for all of us together, where we want to go, what we think we are for, and what kind of a world we want.
This will have to be done first in a book. The modern world is collecting its thoughts. It is trying to write its bible.
The Bible of the Hebrews (which had to be borrowed by the rest of the world if they were to have one) is the one great outstanding fact and result of the Hebrew genius. They did not produce a civilization, but they produced a book for the rest of the world to make civilizations out of, a book which has made all other nations the moral passengers of the Hebrews for two thousand years.
And the whole spirit and aim of this book, the thing about it that made it great, was that it was the sublimest, most persistent, most colossal, masterful attempt ever made by men to look forth upon the earth, to see all the men in it, like spirits hurrying past, and to answer the question, "WHERE ARE WE GOING?"
I would not have any one suppose that in these present tracings and outlines of thought I am making an attempt to look upon the world and say where the people are going, and where they think they are going, and where they want to go. I have attempted to find out, and put down what might seem at first sight (at least it did to me) the answer to a very small and unimportant question—"Where is it that I really want to go myself?" "What kind of a world is it, all the facts about me being duly considered, I really want to be in?"
No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he can help it. If Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Chesterton or Mr. Wells had been so good as to write a book for me in which they had given the answer to my question, in which they had said more or less authoritatively for me what kind of a world it is that I want to be in, this book would never have been written. The book is not put forward as an attempt to arrange a world, or as a system or a chart, or as a nation-machine, or even as an argument. The one thing that any one can fairly claim for this book is that one man's life has been saved with it. It is the record of one man fighting up
