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CHAPTER THE FIFTH. THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN
Section 5
'And yet it may be I am unjust to Bismarck,' said Karenin, following his own thoughts. 'You see, men belong totheir own age; we stand upon a common stock of thought and we fancy we stand upon the ground. I met apleasant man the other day, a Maori, whose great−grandfather was a cannibal. It chanced he had a daguerreotypeof the old sinner, and the two were marvellously alike. One felt that a little juggling with time and either mighthave been the other. People are cruel and stupid in a stupid age who might be gentle and splendid in a graciousone. The world also has its moods. Think of the mental food of Bismarck's childhood; the humiliations ofNapoleon's victories, the crowded, crowning victory of the Battle of the Nations.... Everybody in those days, wiseor foolish, believed that the division of the world under a multitude of governments was inevitable, and that it wasgoing on for thousands of years more. It WAS inevitable until it was impossible. Any one who had denied thatinevitability publicly would have been counted−−oh! a SILLY fellow. Old Bismarck was only just alittle−−forcible, on the lines of the accepted ideas. That is all. He thought that since there had to be nationalgovernments he would make one that was strong at home and invincible abroad. Because he had fed with a kindof rough appetite upon what we can see now were very stupid ideas, that does not make him a stupid man. We'vehad advantages; we've had unity and collectivism blasted into our brains. Where should we be now but for thegrace of science? I should have been an embittered, spiteful, downtrodden member of the Russian Intelligenza, aconspirator, a prisoner, or an assassin. You, my dear, would have been breaking dingy windows as a suffragette.' 'NEVER,' said Edith stoutly.... For a time the talk broke into humorous personalities, and the young people gibed at each other across the smilingold administrator, and then presently one of the young scientific men gave things a new turn. He spoke like onewho was full to the brim. 'You know, sir, I've a fancy−−it is hard to prove such things−−that civilisation was very near disaster when theatomic bombs came banging into it, that if there had been no Holsten and no induced radio−activity, the worldwould have−−smashed−−much as it did. Only instead of its being a smash that opened a way to better things, itmight have been a smash without a recovery. It is part of my business to understand economics, and from thatpoint of view the century before Holsten was just a hundred years' crescendo of waste. Only the extremeindividualism of that period, only its utter want of any collective understanding or purpose can explain that waste.Mankind used up material−−insanely. They had got through three−quarters of all the coal in the planet, they hadused up most of the oil, they had swept away their forests, and they were running short of tin and copper. Theirwheat areas were getting weary and populous, and many of the big towns had so lowered the water level of theiravailable hills that they suffered a drought every summer. The whole system was rushing towards bankruptcy.And they were spending every year vaster and vaster amounts of power and energy upon military preparations,and continually expanding the debt of industry to capital. The system was already staggering when Holsten beganhis researches. So far as the world in general went there was no sense of danger and no desire for inquiry. Theyhad no belief that science could save them, nor any idea that there was a need to be saved. They could not, theywould not, see the gulf beneath their feet. It was pure good luck for mankind at large that any research at all wasin progress. And as I say, sir, if that line of escape hadn't opened, before now there might have been a crash,revolution, panic, social disintegration, famine, and−−it is conceivable−−complete disorder. . . . The rails mighthave rusted on the disused railways by now, the telephone poles have rotted and fallen, the big liners dropped intosheet−iron in the ports; the burnt, deserted cities become the ruinous hiding−places of gangs of robbers. We mighthave been brigands in a shattered and attenuated world. Ah, you may smile, but that had happened before inhuman history. The world is still studded with the ruins of broken−down civilisations. Barbaric bands made theirfastness upon the Acropolis, and the tomb of Hadrian became a fortress that warred across the ruins of Romeagainst the Colosseum.... Had all that possibility of reaction ended so certainly in 1940? Is it all so very far awayeven now?'
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'It seems far enough away now,' said Edith Haydon. 'But forty years ago?' 'No,' said Karenin with his eyes upon the mountains, 'I think you underrate the available intelligence in those earlydecades of the twentieth century. Officially, I know, politically, that intelligence didn't tell−−but it was there. AndI question your hypothesis. I doubt if that discovery could have been delayed. There is a kind of inevitable logicnow in the progress of research. For a hundred years and more thought and science have been going their ownway regardless of the common events of life. You see−−they have got loose. If there had been no Holsten therewould have been some similar man. If atomic energy had not come in one year it would have come in another. Indecadent Rome the march of science had scarcely begun.... Nineveh, Babylon, Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria,these were the first rough experiments in association that made a security, a breathing−space, in which inquirywas born. Man had to experiment before he found out the way to begin. But already two hundred years ago he hadfairly begun.... The politics and dignities and wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were only the lastphoenix blaze of the former civilisation flaring up about the beginnings of the new. Which we serve.... 'Man livesin the dawn for ever,' said Karenin. 'Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning. It begins everlastingly. Eachstep seems vaster than the last, and does but gather us together for the nest. This Modern State of ours, whichwould have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago, is already the commonplace of life. But as I sit here anddream of the possibilities in the mind of man that now gather to a head beneath the shelter of its peace, these greatmountains here seem but little things....'