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“No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the better… A tendency to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain ‘grows’ to their use. Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed. Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers of France, by his eloquence, to follow Nature and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends his own children to the foundling hospital, is the classical example of what I mean. But every one of us in his measure, whenever, after glowing for an abstractly formulated Good, he practically ignores some actual case, among the squalid ‘other particulars’ of which that same Good lurks disguised, treads straight on Rousseau’s path. All Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day world; but woe to him who can only recognize them when he thinks them in their pure and abstract form! The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither performers themselves nor musically gifted enough to take it in a purely intellectual way, has probably a relaxing effect upon the character. One becomes filled with emotions which habitually pass without prompting to any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is kept up. The remedy would be, never to suffer one’s self to have an emotion at a concert, without expressing it afterward in some active way. Let the expression be the least thing in the world — speaking genially to one’s aunt, or giving up one’s seat in a horse-car, if nothing more heroic offers — but let it not fail to take place.” (William James, 1890, The Principles of Psychology).

“To let the sick part of our soul just be still and recover; to make our alcoholized tissues just do their work long enough on plain water — that, if we can but do it, is all the sweeping and garnishing needed to make us possible dwelling-places again for the vitalizing spirit of sane delight in whatever adventure befalls us. How, then, to do it? Not, I fancy, by any kind of pow-wow or palaver of congress, conference, general committee, sub-committee, or other expedient for talking in company instead of working alone. This is an individual’s job, and a somewhat lonely one, though a nation has to be saved by it. To get down to work, whoever else idles; to tell no lies, whoever else may thrive on their uses; to keep fit, and the beast in you down; to help any who need it; to take less from your world than you give it; to go without the old drams to the nerves — the hero stunt, the sob story, all the darling liqueurs of war emotionalism, war vanity, war spite, war rant and cant of every kind; and to do it all, not in a sentimental mood of self-pity like some actor mounting in an empty theatre and thinking what treasures the absent audience has lost, but like a man on a sheep-farm in the mountains, as much alone and at peace with his work of maintaining the world as God was when he made it.

“You remember the little French towns which the pestle and mortar of war had so ground into dust, red and white, that each separate brick went back at last, dust to dust, to mix with the earth from which it had come. The very clay of them has to be put into moulds and fired again. To some such remaking of bricks, some shaping and hardening anew of the most elementary, plainest units of rightness in action, we have to get back. Humdrum decencies, patiently practised through millions of undistinguished lives, were the myriad bricks out of which all the advanced architecture of conduct was built — the solemn temples of creeds, gorgeous palaces of romantic heroism, cloud-capped towers of patriotic exaltation. And now, just when there seems to be such a babble as never before about these grandiose structures, bricks have run short.” (C. E. Montague, 1925, Disenchantment).

“Neither was anything evidence now that was said by a politician. A great many plain men had really drawn a distinction, all their lives, between the solemn public assurances of statesmen and the solemn public assurances of men who draw teeth outside dock-gates and take off their caps and call upon God to blast the health of their own darling children if a certain pill they have for sale does not cure colds, measles, ring-worm, and the gripes within twenty-four hours of taking. A Swift might say there never was any difference, but the plain man had always firmly believed that there was. Now, after the war, he is shaken. Every disease which victory was to cure he sees raging worse than before: more poverty, less liberty, more likelihood of other wars, more spite between master and man, less national comradeship. And then the crucial test case, the solemn vow of the statesmen, all with their hands on their sleek bosoms, that if only the common man would save them just that once they would turn to and think of nothing else, do nothing else, but build him a house, assure him of work, settle him on land, make all England a paradise for him — a ‘land fit for heroes to live in.’ And then the sequel: the cold fit; the feint at house-building and its abandonment; all the bankruptcy of promise; the ultimate bilking, done by way of reluctant surrender to ‘anti-waste’ stunts got up by the same cheap-jacks of the Press who in the first year of the war would have had the statesmen promise yet more wildly than they did. Colds, measles, ring-worm, and gripes all flourishing, much more than twenty-four hours after, and new ailments added unto them.

“No relief, either, by running from one medicine-man to the next. Few of our disenchanted men doubt that the lightning cure of the Communist is only just another version of the lightning cure of the Tory, the authoritarian, the peremptory regimentalist. ‘Give me a free hand and all will be well with you.’ Both say exactly the same thing in the end. One of them may call it the rule of the fittest, the other the rule of the proletariat; each means exactly the same thing — the rule of himself, the enforcement on everyone else of his own darling theory of what is best for them, whether they know it or not. Small choice in rotten apples; one bellyful of east wind is a diet as poor as another. Not in the yells and counter-yells of this and that vendor of patent hot-air is the heart of the average ex-soldier engaged. Rather ‘Away with all gas-projectors alike’ is his present feeling towards eloquent men, Left or Right. For the moment he knows them too well, and is tired of hearing of plans which might work if he were either a babe in arms or a Michael of super-angelic wisdom and power.” (C. E. Montague, 1925, Disenchantment).

“A soldier might have had the Athanasian ecstasy all right till he reached the firing line. Every individual German had sunk the Lusitania; there was none righteous, none. And yet at a front the holy passion began to ooze out at the ends of his fingers. The bottom trouble is that you cannot fight a man in the physical way without somehow touching him. The relation of actual combatants is a personal one — no doubt, a rude, primitive one, but still quite advanced as compared with that between a learned man at Berlin who keeps on saying Delenda est Britannia! at the top of his voice and a learned man in London who keeps on saying that every German must have a black heart because Cæsar did not conquer Germany as he did Gaul and Britain. Just let the round head of a German appear for a passing second, at long intervals, above a hummock of clay in the middle distance. Before you had made half a dozen sincere efforts to shoot him the fatal germ of human relationship had begun to find a nidus again: he had acquired in your mind the rudiments of a personal individuality. You would go on trying to shoot him with zest — indeed, with a diminished likelihood of missing, for mere hatred is a flustering emotion. And yet the hatred business had started crumbling. There had begun the insidious change that was to send you home, on your first leave, talking unguardedly of ‘old Fritz’ or of ‘the good old Boche’ to the pain of your friends, as if he were a stout dog fox or a real stag of a hare.” (C. E. Montague, 1925, Disenchantment).

“It used at one time to be a great joke — and a source of gain sometimes — among little boys to take it as a benign moral law that so long as you said a thing ‘over the left,’ it did not matter whether it was true or not. If, to gain your private ends, or to make a fool of somebody else, you wanted to utter a fib, all that you had to do was to append to it these three incantatory words, under your breath, or indeed without any sound or move of your lips at all, but just to yourself in the session of sweet silent thought. Then you were blameless. You had cut yourself free, under the rules, from the vulgar morality. War confers on those who wage it much the same self-dispensing power. They can absolve themselves of a good many sins. Persuade yourself that you are at war with somebody else and you find your moral liberty expanding almost faster than you can use it. An Irishman in a fury with England says to himself ‘State of war — that’s what it is,’ and then finds he can go out and shoot a passing policeman from behind a hedge without the discomfort of feeling base. The policeman’s comrades say to themselves ‘State of war — that’s what it has come to,’ and go out and burn some other Irishman’s shop without a sense of doing anything wrong, either. They all do it ‘over the left.’ They have stolen the key of the magical garden wherein you may do things that are elsewhere most wicked and yet enjoy the mental peace of the soldier which passeth all understanding.

“To kill and to burn may be sore temptations at times, but not so besetting to most men as the temptation to lie is to public speakers and writers. Another frequent temptation of theirs is to live in a world of stale figures of speech, of flags nailed to the mast, of standing to one’s guns, of deaths in last ditches, of quarter neither asked nor given. It is their hobby to figure their own secure, squabblesome lives in images taken from war. And their little excesses, their breaches of manners, and even, sometimes, of actual law, are excused, as a rule, in terms of virile disdain for anything less drastic and stern than the morals of the real warfare which they know so little. We have to think in what state we might leave these weak brethren after a long war in which we had practised them hard in lying for the public good and also in telling themselves it was all right because of the existence of a state of war. State of war! Why, that is what every excitable politician or journalist declares to exist all the time. To the wild party man the party which he hates is always ‘more deadly than any foreign enemy.’ All of us could mention a few politicians, at least, to whom the Great War was merely a passing incident or momentary interruption of the more burningly authentic wars of Irish Orange and Green, or of English Labour and Capital.” (C. E. Montague, 1925, Disenchantment).

“Most of the men had, all their lives, been accepting ‘what it says ‘ere in the paper’ as being presumptively true. They had taken the Press at its word without checking. Bets had been settled by reference to a paper. Now, in the biggest event of their lives, hundreds of thousands of men were able to check for themselves the truth of that workaday Bible. They fought in a battle or raid, and two days after they read, with jeers on their lips, the account of ‘the show’ in the papers. They felt they had found the Press out. The most bloody defeat in the history of Britain, a very world’s wonder of valour frustrated by feckless misuse, of regimental glory and Staff shame, might occur on the Ancre on July 1, 1916, and our Press come out bland and copious and graphic, with nothing to show that we had not had quite a good day — a victory really. Men who had lived through the massacre read the stuff open-mouthed. Anything, then, could figure as anything else in the Press — as its own opposite even. Black was only an aspect of white. With a grin at the way he must have been taken in up to now, the fighting soldier gave the Press up. So it comes that each of several million ex-soldiers now reads every solemn appeal of a Government, each beautiful speech of a Premier or earnest assurance of a body of employers with that maxim on guard in his mind — ‘You can’t believe a word you read.’” (C. E. Montague, 1925, Disenchantment).

“When a man enlisted during the war he found himself living the life of the common man in a Communist State. Once inside he had no more choices to make than a Russian under the Soviet. His work, his pay, his food, his place and mode of living were fixed from on high. He might not even decide whether he should remain a soldier or be turned, say, into a miner. If the wisdom that sat up aloft put him down for a draft to a tunnelling company, to earth he went. He had ceased to be Economic Man, the being whom we were brought up to regard as causing the world to go round by making a bee-line to the best pay available. Now he was ex-Economic Man, or Economic Man popped off all the hooks that had fastened him into a place in the system called capitalistic by those who least admire it. No one was left to say of a job any longer that you might ‘take it or leave it,’ for leaving was barred. You could not be called a wage-slave, for you got no wages to speak of. You had become a true ‘proletarian’ under a pretty big-fisted dictatorship. It might not be a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a dictatorship smells about as sweet by one name as another when it levers you out of bed before dawn or ties you up to the wheel of a gun for cutting a job that irks you. Dr. Johnson declined to attempt to settle degrees of precedence between a flea and a louse. It is as hard to decide between the charms of a ‘sanitary fatigue’ when done for our War Office and when done for Mr. Lenin.

“In a sense, no doubt, the average man liked it all — the sense in which men like to break the ice in the Serpentine for a swim. He had willed it. He felt that when it was over it would be a good thing to have done. But he also saw, perhaps with surprise, that there were many men who liked it wholly, without any juggling with future and pluperfect tenses. They liked to have their hours of rising and going to bed settled by colonel or Soviet rather than face for themselves this distracting problem in self-government. They liked meals which they did not choose, and which might not be good, but which came up of themselves, in their season, like grass. They liked quarters which they might perhaps have to share with brethren too weak to carry their liquor and not too wise to essay great feats of the kind, but which, anyhow, did not have to be sought for, rented, furnished, and, on every Monday, paid for with a separate pang. They liked, at any rate as the lesser evil, work which was no subject of either collective or individual bargain, but came out of the sky, like the weather, usually open to objection, but sometimes not.

“Perhaps you concluded, after a time, that there must be some temperaments communistic or socialistic by nature, like the ‘souls Christian by nature’ of the theologians. You might even have suspected that in all this wide field of dispute the most fundamental difference is not between the intrinsic and absolute merits of the individualistic and of the communistic State, but between two contrasted human types — the type which is actually happiest in communal messes and dormitories and playgrounds and forced labour and State-fixed pay in a State-chosen career, and the type which exults in even the smallest separate cottage and garden, as a lion rejoices in his own den; the type which cooks its mutton with a special rapture in an exclusive oven, however imperfect, and sallies forth rejoicing, as the bridegroom goeth out from his chamber, to angle for the dearest market for the labour of its hands and the cheapest for its victuals. So that the only ideal solution might be to cut up the world, or each of its States, into two hemispheres, as trains are divided into ‘non-smoking’ and ‘smoking.’ A little difficult, perhaps; but then it is difficult to make either breed be happy in the other’s paradise.” (C. E. Montague, 1925, Disenchantment).

“Moulding the pet recreations of civilized men you find their craving to have something simple to do for a change, to be given an easy one after so many twisters. People whose work is the making of calculations or the manipulation of thoughts have been known to find a curiously restful pleasure in chopping firewood or painting tool-sheds till their backs ache. It soothes them with a flattering sense of getting something useful done straight off. So much of their ‘real’ work is a taking of some minute or indirect means to some end remote, dimly and doubtfully visible, possibly — for the dread thought will intrude — not worth attaining. The pile of chopped wood is at least a spice of the ultimate good: visible, palpable, it is success; and the advanced and complex man, the statesman or sociologist who has chopped it, escapes for the moment from all his own advancement and complication, and savours in quiet ecstasy one of the sane primeval satisfactions.

 A country fellow at the pleugh,
 His acre’s tilled, he’s right eneugh;
 A country girl at her wheel,
 Her dizzen’s done, she’s unco weel.

The climber of mountains seeks a similar rapture by going to places where he is, in full exertion, the sum of his physical faculties, little more. Here all his hopes are for things close at hand: ambition lives along one arm stretched out to grasp a rock eighteen inches away; his sole aim in life may be simply the top of a thirty-foot cleft in a steep face of stone. At home, in the thick of his work, he had seemed to be everlastingly threading mazes that no one could thread right to the end; here, on the crags, it is all divinely simplified; who would trouble his head with subtle questionings about what human life will, might, or ought to be when every muscle and nerve are tautly engaged in the primal job of sticking to life as it is?” (C. E. Montague, 1925, Disenchantment).

“…some may hastily infer that I am ‘against science.’ And indeed this charge was occasionally made by readers of The House of Intellect, despite the fact that it contained a parallel discussion of art, which led other readers to say that I was ‘attacking art.’ Such notions of attacking and being against are perhaps native to the age; they are foreign to me. I do not understand what is meant by being against, or for, wholes — art, science, education, medicine, the state. I can as readily imagine being against sunsets and for the tides. Criticism as I understand it differs entirely from attack or complaint. Its difference from complaint is especially important here, for I am persuaded that complaints against the machinations of culture today have become as poisonous as the things complained of. This is not surprising. Resentment and indignation are feelings dangerous to the possessor and to be sparingly used. They give comfort too cheaply; they rot judgment, and by encouraging passivity they come to require that evil continue for the sake of the grievance to be enjoyed.

“Criticism, on the contrary, aims at action. True, not all objects can be acted on at once, and many will not be reshaped according to desire; but thought is plastic and within our control, and thought is a form of action. To come to see, in the light of criticism, a situation as different from what it seemed to be, is to have accomplished an important act. The contemporary world, cluttered with leagues and lobbies and overawed by the zero-weighted look of large numbers, has forgotten that to redirect fundamental opinion — including one’s own — is also to do something. It can give solace or mastery, or at the very least replace a plaintive passivity with a stoic impassivity.

“That is why, in the present work, which is primarily, descriptive, and which, like its predecessors, often uses for illustration not what is merely typical, but what is especially worthy of regard, I sometimes employ the rhetoric of argument — the form that most naturally incites the internal action called thought. To the reader it should not greatly matter whether or not he agrees with the conclusions I reach. The point of offering them is to reduce confusion and provide a spur to reasoning. For the aim of a critic, beyond that of saying what he thinks, is to make two thoughts grow where only one grew before.” (Jacques Barzun, 1964, Science: The Glorious Entertainment).