While I Remember
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Title: While I Remember
Author: Stephen McKenna
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHILE I REMEMBER ***
WHILE I REMEMBER
STEPHEN McKENNA
_By Stephen McKenna_
WHILE I REMEMBER
THE SENSATIONALISTS
PART ONE: LADY LILITH
PART TWO: THE EDUCATION OF ERIC LANE
PART THREE: THE SECRET VICTORY
SONIA MARRIED
SONIA
MIDAS AND SON
NINETY-SIX HOURS' LEAVE
THE SIXTH SENSE
SHEILA INTERVENES
_New York: George H. Doran Company_
WHILE I REMEMBER
BY
STEPHEN McKENNA
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
THOSE WHO MAY FORGET
"Two men I honour, and no third. First, the toil-worn Craftsman
that with earth-made Implement laboriously conquers the Earth, and
makes her man's. Venerable to me is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse;
wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal
as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable too is the rugged face,
all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it
is the face of a Man living manlike. O, but the more venerable
for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love
thee! Hardly-entreated Brother! For us was thy back so bent, for
us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed: thou wert our
Conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so
marred. For in thee too lay a god-created Form, but it was not to
be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and
defacements of Labour: and thy body, like thy soul, was not to know
freedom. Yet toil on, toil on: _thou_ art in thy duty, be out of it
who may; thou toilest for the altogether indispensable, for daily
bread.
"A second man I honour, and still more highly: Him who is seen
toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but
the bread of Life. Is not he too in his duty; endeavouring towards
inward Harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all
his outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when
his outward and his inward endeavour are one: when we can name
him Artist; not earthly Craftsman only, but inspired Thinker, who
with heaven-made Implement conquers Heaven for us! If the poor and
humble toil that we have Food, must not the high and glorious toil
for him in return, that he have Light, have Guidance, Freedom,
Immortality? These two, in all their degrees, I honour: all else is
chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth."
THOMAS CARLYLE: _Sartor Resartus_.
"People who are old enough to write memoirs," says my friend Shane
Leslie in _The End of a Chapter_, "have usually lost their memory."
They have always, he might have added, lost the enthusiasm which
once inspired and is alone able to explain their part in what they
are trying to remember. Going farther, he might have challenged in
words, as his book challenged by implication, the belief that there
is any day in a man's life on which--though not an hour before--he
is entitled to set down his reminiscences; yet one page from the
journal of Alcibiades at twenty might well be more instructive than
three volumes of the wisdom of Socrates at seventy.
My reason for writing the present book is that I wish to record
certain impressions of a vanished generation while I remember
them clearly and sympathetically; my excuse for publishing it
is that the opinions and recollections of middle life are so
seldom articulate. Reminiscences of childhood, where they survive
undimmed, find their place in fiction and in autobiography;
reminiscences of youth and manhood, collected and chastened from
the sober angle of old age, are compressed into one patronising
chapter of every standard life; but we are hardly ever allowed
to look through the spectacles of thirty at the world as it
appears to the eyes of thirty. Sometimes we are, indeed, admitted
to the intimacy of a diary; but, if it has been composed with a
view to publication, we may suspect that behind the pretext of
self-communing the author is striking an attitude; if it was never
intended for publication, we may wonder whether it should ever have
been published. Possibly there is still room for recollections
that have frankly been written for publication before age has too
greatly blurred the outline of memory or distance eliminated too
ruthlessly the unimportant.
As the art of the novelist demands of him that he should first
and foremost be a spectator of life, so the accident of race
makes of him an involuntary critic if his lot be cast amid alien
surroundings, however congenial; and the further accident of health
not always robust may remove him a yet greater distance from the
active life of his generation. In so far as this detachment gives
him a separate standard of comparison, it may be not without value
in the review of past manners and ideals.
It is with the life of that generation and not with gossip
about this or that member of it that I am concerned. A new and
inexcusable terror is added to social intercourse when the
confidence, the indiscretion or the malice of a dinner-table is
industriously recorded and published; and it is still believed
by some who were trained in a tradition of reticence that
intimate portraits and studies should be withheld so long as the
originals or their friends can be offended or hurt by unsought
publicity. While a man of even thirty-three, spending most of his
life in London, may have met more than a few of the statesmen
and financiers, the sailors and soldiers, the artists, authors
and actors who have now chief place in the interest of their
countrymen, I feel that it would be impudent for him publicly to
scatter his unsolicited opinion on those whom he has been invited
to meet privately. This book will therefore be free from what has
been called an "index of improper names."
It would be no less impudent for him to assume that anyone is
interested in the insignificances of his private life. I venture
to write of this epoch because I hope to present some aspects
of it which might elude the historian who ranges over a wider
field, preeminently the aspect from the standpoint of youth. Any
autobiographical matter deserves no more honourable place than a
footnote and is included only to explain how and why one super was
found at certain times on a certain stage.
The generation which ended with the Peace of Versailles in 1919 is
likely to be cut off from all that follows more completely than any
of which we have record: a higher proportion of its youth has been
destroyed, and of those who remain hardly one has been left in the
place that he filled before the war; the standard and distribution
of wealth have changed; and former lines of social demarcation have
been obliterated. Though the old forms continue, the life that
inspires them is new: the schools and universities, the learned
professions and public services, the government itself are manned
from a different class and actuated by different ideals. It may be
not altogether wasted labour to sketch a corner of that old world
as it was known to the men who were reared in time to be sacrificed
in the late war.
Impelled by a common interest in changing fashions, Professor
Sir Denison Ross, Mr. Hugo Rumbold and I once agreed to compile
an encyclopædia of the catch-words and cant phrases, the popular
songs and popular dances, the endearments and greetings of the
last twenty years; though the work has not yet been begun, I am
not without hope that there may be published in our lifetime
a social survey of England which shall contain some few of the
things commonly considered to be below the dignity of history,
for the change in manners during the last generation is worthy of
an exhaustive treatise; it is at once the effect and the cause
of a corresponding change in morals; and, whatever progress
the future have in store, those who first drew breath in Queen
Victoria's reign may congratulate themselves, if it be a matter
for congratulation, on having passed in thirty years from the
civilisation of the Stone Age to that of the Cities of the Plain.
This book is as deliberately incomplete as the sketch-book of a
traveller who records some few of the scenes that he most wishes to
conjure up again and none that he would prefer to forget. Whether
my reminiscences and reflections at thirty-three or at any other
age are of interest to anyone I must leave my readers to determine,
comforting myself with the thought that the years through which
I have lived are themselves of interest and reminding those who
regard memoir-writing as a prerogative of septuagenarians that in
the life of most men there is a time when they are unable to look
forward with confidence and must be deemed fortunate if they can
look back without regret.
I have striven to avoid inaccuracy, but I have been compelled to
write at a distance from all works of reference.
S. McK.
_Talcahuano,
31 January, 1921._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I WESTMINSTER 17
II A SETTING AND A DATE 40
III CHRIST CHURCH 59
IV LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 80
V THE FRINGE OF POLITICS 100
VI ON THE EVE 132
VII THE FRINGE OF WAR 154
VIII AT THE LIBERAL GRAVE-SIDE 183
IX ON THE ROAD TO WASHINGTON--AND AFTER 201
X LONDON AGAIN 226
XI DEMOBILISATION 244
XII LITERARY TOTEMS 268
XIII POLITICS IN A DISSOLVING VIEW 290
XIV A MEMORY RETOUCHED 314
WHILE I REMEMBER
WHILE I REMEMBER
CHAPTER I
WESTMINSTER
"A man, whom the fond imagination of his worshippers invested with
the attributes of a god, gave his life for the life of the world;
after infusing from his own body a fresh current of vital energy
into the stagnant veins of nature, he was cut off from among the
living before his failing strength should initiate a universal
decay, and his place was taken by another who played, like all his
predecessors, the ever-recurring drama of the divine resurrection
and death.... The sceptic ... will reduce Jesus of Nazareth to the
level of a multitude of other victims of a barbarous superstition,
and will see in him no more than a moral teacher, whom the
fortunate accident of his execution invested with the crown, not
merely of a martyr, but of a god...."
J. G. FRAZER: _The Golden Bough_.
I
On the last Sunday of July, in the year 1906, Little Dean's
Yard filled slowly with sixty or seventy boys in evening dress.
All but about ten wore the black gown, which is one mark of the
Westminster Scholar, and, over the gown, a white surplice open
or buttoned according to the seniority of the wearer. It was not
yet ten o'clock in the morning; but on Election Sunday all King's
Scholars and Major Candidates appear in evening clothes, the Major
Candidates distinguished by carnations of the prized Westminster
pink which has been worn since the day, nearly a hundred years
ago, when the school rowed against Eton and settled that colour
question by trial of strength: the victors were to have pink, the
vanquished blue; and the deeper pink of Leander derives from the
Westminster founders of the club.
These were the last few flying moments of the last scene. Six years
ago the seniors in the swelling group, escaping from the thunder
of traffic in Victoria Street and Broad Sanctuary, had entered
the silent backwater of Little Dean's Yard as Minor Candidates;
their parents or the masters of their preparatory schools led
them under the arch and past the fives' courts; they turned shyly
wondering eyes at Home Boarders, Rigaud's, Grant's, College and
Ashburnham, at the Bursary and the head master's house; then they
were shepherded through the Inigo Jones doorway and up the steps
into School. It was the first day of the Challenge, wherein the
candidates of other days met all-comers in a disputation--lasting a
week or more--on the elements of learning and those who outlasted
their opponents were elected to scholarships. Now, after six years,
they were competing for the close scholarships and exhibitions at
Christ Church and at Trinity, Cambridge. The written work was over;
on Election Monday would come the _viva voce_, then the annual
cricket match between the King's Scholars and the Town Boys on
Vincent Square, then Election dinner in College Hall enlivened by
the Greek, Latin and English epigrams which Westminster subsidises;
then on Election Tuesday, still in evening dress, they would attend
the school service in Abbey for the last time and for the last time
answer "_Adsum_" at roll-call; the results of Election would be
read out, the prizes distributed, the office-holders would divest
themselves of office and they would walk down School for the last
time, into their houses, out of them again and into the world.
The Captain of the King's Scholars came out of College; the Head
Town Boy joined him at the entrance to the cloisters; next to them
were the other two School Monitors. The involuntary began; and the
procession passed through the nave and under the organ loft: first
the choir, then the Abbey clergy and the Dean of Westminster; the
Dean of Christ Church and the Master of Trinity; the examiners from
Oxford and Cambridge; the Head Master of Westminster; the assistant
masters in gowns and hoods; the King's Scholars in surplices, gowns
and evening dress, those of them who were leaving chastened by the
thought that, after the Election Tuesday service two days later,
they would enter the Abbey as members of the public only.
Westminster is so much the embodiment and shrine of English history
that even the alien and the iconoclast cannot spend six years in
the shadow of the Abbey without becoming steeped in the spirit and
associations of the place. It is the influence of such foundations
that makes of English life its present compromise between the
rational and the traditional. From their places in the stalls
could be seen the arches of the triforium which are filled at
coronations by the Westminster Scholars: no king, they assert, can
be duly crowned unless he is acclaimed by their triple shout of
"_Vivat Rex_". It is their privilege to be present in Palace Yard
when the soveran opens Parliament; Scholars and Town Boys walk,
of unchallenged right, into the gallery of the House of Commons,
Scholars--in cap and gown--into the gallery of the House of Lords
and, on Sundays, on to the Terrace; when the Courts of Justice
were at Westminster, they could wander unchecked into Westminster
Hall. Their daily service takes place in the Poets' Corner; they
are present at State funerals, their confirmation is held in Henry
VII's chapel; and the whole Abbey is their heritage. Is not the
school descended lineally from that group of lay scholars whom the
monks of Westminster taught? Is not the monks' dormitory their
Great School? Among the documents discovered of late years in the
Abbey Muniment Room is a record, under the year 1284, of _expensæ_,
being provision for the teaching of scholars, and a further record,
under the year 1339, of payments for "Westminster School." Already
old when Winchester and Eton were founded, with its roots struck
deep in the Abbey's earliest history and with its life immemorially
intertwined with the life of the Abbey, the two have remained side
by side until Westminster is the last of the London schools to
resist the pressure which has already urged younger rivals from
their seats. Changing slowly with the slow unfolding of English
history, the school was refounded by Queen Elizabeth on a secular
footing; and the monitor of the week, kneeling with his back to
Busby's birch-table[1] and facing the school, returns thanks "_pro
fundatrice nostra Regina Elizabetha_" on the spot where Robert
South prayed "_pro rege Carolo_" on the 30th of January, 1649. It
retains, by the Act of Uniformity, its "almost unique privilege of
using Latin in religious offices", though--as a concession to the
Reformers--the monkish pronunciation was abandoned for that which
was the universal English form until misguided empiricists set
up confusion where none existed before by introducing a "modern"
method.
Since that new Tower of Babel was erected, Westminster has watched
other foundations arguing and striving to discover the correct
pronunciation of classical Latin. Despite the periodical rebukes
of its rivals, it has held stubbornly to its course, knowing
that there is no sure means of recreating the speech of Cicero
and that Westminster at least is too deeply bedded in the past
to bend before each new breeze of educational fashion. A hundred
customs are preserved to teach new generations that progress need
not be divorced from the historic sense: when the bell rings for
prayers at the end of afternoon school, a Second Election knocks
with his cap at the doors of the form-rooms adjoining school and
calls out, "_Instat quinta_", or, on "plays" (half-holidays),
"_Instat sesquiduodecima_", although the actual hour is now nearly
one o'clock; a Second Election has knocked thus since the time
was told from a single clock and shouted through the school by a
junior; before prayers begin, the doors are locked, and, when they
are opened, one of the School Monitors[2] mounts guard outside to
repel a chance raid by the "sci's"[3] of the neighbourhood who in
less orderly days carried on a town-and-gown warfare against the
school. At the lowest, such customs are a picturesque survival,
like the Latin play acted in College Dormitory, the Pancake Greeze
on Shrove Tuesday, the countless phrases and customs which only a
Westminster understands and which all Westminsters love; perhaps,
too, they foster, in the alien and the iconoclast, a sense of the
past. Abbey and School are a monument to continuity and ordered
progress; in 1906, they were a monument at which the leaving
seniors had been involuntarily staring for half a dozen years.
II
It is probable that few of them had much attention to spare for
the sermon on that Election Sunday. At eighteen they had spent a
third of their life at Westminster; it is a foundation in which
son succeeds father and brother follows brother, as witness the
carved and painted names of Madans and Waterfields, Goodenoughs and
Phillimores up School, and on a September night of 1900 tradition
had set them in the footsteps of their families and had sought a
place for them in the old houses, there to serve and perhaps to
suffer, to learn and, later, to rule.
"You will sometimes be punished when you do not deserve it", was
the wise parting advice of one preparatory-school headmaster;
"before giving vent to your indignation, reflect how much oftener
you have deserved punishment without receiving it."
It is but fair to say that this consoling philosophy was little
required at Westminster: provided that he incurred no suspicion
of "side", there was so general a disposition to help the strange
newcomer that he suffered little; and even his service was
made easy for him. The "shadow", in Westminster language, was
instructed at once in the rules and customs of the house by a
senior fag, his "substance", who shouldered his sins for the first
fortnight and was theoretically liable to suffer vicariously
for his shortcomings; after the days of grace a new boy could
be fagged, though this involved little more than fetching and
carrying, washing cups, filling saucepans and preparing call-over
lists; he could also be "tanned", with an instrument appropriately
designated a "pole"; but, though this was less agreeable, corporal
punishment was not employed with undue frequency. There was always
a right of appeal, too, with the menace of two extra strokes if the
appeal was dismissed; but, as it was a point of honour never to
appeal, the sufferer could only comfort himself with the thought
that a tanning was over more quickly than "lines" or "drill" and
with the hope that he might fall into weak or inexpert hands. Of
bullying there was little; of systematic oppression and torture
of the weak by the strong there was none at all, though the small
boys of that generation (as of every other) believed that, if a
companion was offensive, their right and duty impelled them to drum
the offensiveness out of him.
The war has caused the English people to examine searchingly its
scheme of education and especially that public-school system
which trains the sons of the well-to-do for future eminence in
government, the public services and the learned professions.
There have been many books and much discussion: the English love
of finding fault with cherished institutions while approving the
result has led to a hazy belief that the English public-schoolboy
is the finest raw material in the world, but that only his inborn
superiority has saved him from destruction by a burthen of useless
learning, devastating ignorance, insane athleticism and vicious
associations. It is more than time to suggest that his excellence
is a delicate bloom nurtured and saved by the public school from
the criminal neglect of his parents and that most critics, failing
to distinguish between the phases through which every boy passes,
have written down as chronic disease what was but temporary
green-sickness.
Few men can speak with knowledge of more than one school, but
there is little risk in the assertion that the natural history of
the public-schoolboy is broadly the same at all times and places.
Withdrawn at an early age from the dry-nursing of his natural
guardians, he is flung into a vast adolescent society and left to
struggle through as best he may: his parents commonly escape the
embarrassment of explaining to him the elements of physiology,
preferring that he should learn them from the gloating confidences
of other boys hardly less ignorant than himself. Native chastity
of soul keeps some unsmirched, but most go through an ugly period
of foul tongues, foul minds and sometimes foul propensities which
the school seeks to circumvent by vigilance and hard physical
discipline. During the middle phase, this blind, misunderstood
groping towards maturity comes to be gradually controlled; and, in
the last, the adult boy is seen as a clean-living, clean-speaking,
rather solemn blend of scholar, sportsman and despot, very
conscious of his responsibilities and zealous to repress the
primitive exuberance by which he himself was afflicted two or three
years earlier.
Before public schools are denounced for making boys licentious of
habit and obscene of tongue, parents might ask themselves what
preventive measures they themselves have taken. And, before any
one attacks the insistence on athletics in public schools, he
might ask himself what better physical discipline he can propose
and whether this derided love of sport is inculcated at school or
at home. If a boy were not compelled by fear of punishment to take
part in games, he would be coerced by the opinion of parents who
would not understand nor tolerate a son without the Englishman's
normal and natural preoccupation with sport; and, though compulsory
games are easy to ridicule, they do not kill the chivalry of good
sportsmanship: an early Westminster memory is of a football shield
passing, after long and honourable contest, from one house to
another; while the head and captain of the winning house fetched
away the trophy, the losing house lined up to cheer their victors
and, if possible, to drown the cheers of the winning house for the
one that had lost.
A defence of the public-school system would deserve at least as
much space as the critics have given to attacking it. This is
neither the place nor time to engage in the endless controversy;
it was not the place nor time, fifteen years ago, for any who sat
thinking of their own school and of the days that they had spent
there.
III
Many of those who were leaving must have wondered where the
outgoing draft would be in another six years' time. Westminster
contains about three hundred boys, drawn chiefly from the
professional classes, and in turn sends a steady stream of recruits
to the civil service and the learned professions. Barristers and
doctors abound; government servants are to be discovered richly
distributed through Whitehall, India and the colonies; the school
has its share of clergymen and more than its share of soldiers.
In less than six years all would have come down from Oxford
and Cambridge, unless any had had the good fortune to secure a
fellowship; and, while those who were destined for a profession had
already decided on their careers, those who dreamed of public life
and looked, perhaps, towards the north transept where, in white
marble and late-won peace, Beaconsfield and Gladstone stood side
by side, may have preferred to keep locked in their own hearts the
ideals which they had diffidently set before themselves.
The changing and strengthening aspirations of a boy have won as
little space in all the crop of analytical school literature as
have the vagaries of his religious faith or the evolution of
his civic morals. The Victorians, indeed, in strict accordance
with formula, loaded their hero with vague disquiet which was
only relieved when he recalled that he had ceased to receive
the sacraments; a later generation arrested him in full flight
to perdition by intervening opportunely with a soul-steadying
preparation for confirmation; the Catholic propagandists habitually
threw a sympathetic priest across his path in the course of a
holiday ramble; and, if there be a school literature of dissent, I
doubt not but that some harassed hero found peace in the practice
of Congregationalism. It was recognised, therefore, that the
faith of childhood is not infrequently discarded at school; it
was assumed with less justification that boys undergo spiritual
distress at such a time; and, as the hero of a novel is not
expected to suffer as long or as acutely as any one in life, one
or other of the conventional escapes could always be chosen. It
is hard to remember a book in which the hero sheds his belief
in super-natural religion as lightheartedly as once he outgrew
his faith in Santa Claus; and, even if it be assumed from private
knowledge and experience that many schoolboy heroes have passed
through this spiritual transformation, it is harder to recall even
one who has been described as constructing a new system to take the
place of that which has been overthrown.
This reconstruction, nevertheless, was being attempted twenty
years ago, in the aftermath of the higher criticism, by all boys
with a speculative bent of mind; they were distinguished from
their predecessors by inherited scepticism; and their natural
history, to venture once more on a generalization from admittedly
incomplete data, was roughly the same everywhere in England.
Were it reasonable to fancy for a moment that modern boys were
distressed when their faith left them, severe blame would attach
to the timorous, indolent or dishonest parents who shirk the
burden of explaining and who teach as truth what they themselves
believe to be untrue, hoping that, when their children are older,
they will somehow have learned better at the hands of masters,
who are debarred from religious controversy, or of boys, who can
only contribute an equal ignorance. In fact, the boy who lost his
faith in revealed religion lost it more slowly, but no whit more
painfully than his belief in fairies; he no longer wrote to his
fellows, as Gladstone and Manning would write, to discuss the
state of his soul; he sought no spiritual director and asked no
one to pray for him, though he may have wondered why his parents
preserved a grotesque imposture for so long. In reading and in
discussion he had absorbed ideas of biological evolution, of
geological testimony and of religion studied comparatively; he
applied to historical Christianity the tests which he had been
taught to use on the history of Greece and Rome, accepting nothing
that could not be proved by evidence and rejecting the pretensions
of faith as he rejected the statements of a secular historian
that his history was literally inspired. Already he had heard
that the Old Testament was no longer accepted as heretofore; he
may even have learned that, for thousands of years before Christ,
countless gods were sacrificed annually by crucifixion or other
means and that a Barabbas was annually released to the people;
the distillation continued until he was left with the residuum
that a man named Jesus Christ, claiming or having claimed for him
a divine fatherhood, was crucified after a short life of healing
and teaching; there were, he found, no independent contemporary
documents, and the fullest accounts, written many years after
the events they described, were inspired by the devotion of his
followers, whose critical judgement, however, was on a level of
education to be expected in one harassed and turbulent corner of
the Roman Empire.
The concluding passage from _The Golden Bough_, of which a few
words have been quoted at the beginning of this chapter, defines,
in prose of rare beauty, the attitude of an agnostic towards
Christianity. "A man," wrote Sir James Frazer, "whom the fond
imagination of his worshippers invested with the attributes of a
god, gave his life for the life of the world; after infusing from
his own body a fresh current of vital energy into the stagnant
veins of nature, he was cut off from among the living before his
failing strength should initiate a universal decay, and his place
was taken by another who played, like all his predecessors, the
ever-recurring drama of the divine resurrection and death.... It
was played in Babylonia, and from Babylonia the returning captives
brought it to Judæa, where it was acted, rather as an historical
than a mythical piece, by players who, having to die in grim
earnest on a cross or gallows, were naturally drawn rather from
the gaol than the green-room. A chain of causes which, because we
cannot follow them, might in the loose language of daily life be
called an accident, determined that the part of the dying god in
this annual play should be thrust upon Jesus of Nazareth, whom the
enemies he had made in high places by his outspoken strictures
were resolved to put out of the way. They succeeded in ridding
themselves of the popular and troublesome preacher; but the very
step by which they fancied they had simultaneously stamped out his
revolutionary doctrines contributed more than anything else they
could have done to scatter them broadcast not only over Judæa but
over Asia; for it impressed upon what had been hitherto mainly an
ethical mission the character of a divine revelation culminating in
the passion and death of the incarnate Son of a heavenly Father.
In this form the story of the life and death of Jesus exerted an
influence which it could never have had if the great teacher had
died, as is commonly supposed, the death of a vulgar malefactor. It
shed round the cross on Calvary a halo of divinity which multitudes
saw and worshipped afar off; the blow struck on Golgotha set a
thousand expectant strings vibrating in unison wherever men had
heard the old, old story of the dying and risen god. Every year, as
another spring bloomed and another autumn faded across the earth,
the field had been ploughed and sown and borne fruit of a kind
till it received that seed which was destined to spring up and
overshadow the world. In the great army of martyrs who in many ages
and in many lands, not in Asia only, have died a cruel death in
the character of gods, the devout Christian will doubtless discern
types and forerunners of the coming Saviour--stars that heralded
in the morning sky the advent of the Sun of Righteousness--earthen
vessels wherein it pleased the divine wisdom to set before
hungering souls the bread of heaven. The sceptic, on the other
hand, with equal confidence, will reduce Jesus of Nazareth to the
level of a multitude of other victims of a barbarous superstition,
and will see in him no more than a moral teacher whom the fortunate
accident of his execution invested with the crown, not merely of a
martyr, but of a god. The divergence between these views is wide
and deep. Which of them is the truer and will in the end prevail?
Time will decide the question of prevalence, if not of truth. Yet
we would fain believe that in this and in all things the old maxim
will hold good--_Magna est veritas et prævalebit_."
The sceptics of the last Victorian decade left school as agnostics;
of their number, the more reflective set themselves to fill the
vacuum. As a boy, with a prospect of life too long to measure,
has an equal distaste for the sentimentality of heaven and for
the melodrama of hell, he probably concerned himself little with
the condition that he could only attain eternal life by believing
in the divinity of Christ. Scepticism may have forced him to
doubt whether eternity was intelligible and to be certain that it
was undesirable; but his knowledge of history and his taste for
speculative enquiry suggested that eternity in another existence
might be less important than the conditions on which his present
existence was carried on: the ethics of Christianity were more
valuable, in his eyes, than its dogma.
It is here that the reconstruction commonly began, with the
question: "If there be no God, no eternal life, no reward for
virtue, nor punishment for evil, why should any one strive after
godliness? The policeman, indeed, watches for a breach of the
civil law, but only a fool would clothe the naked or feed the
hungry without thought of reward. Hitherto this was said to be
'right', 'charitable', 'kind'; but why _should_ any one be kind or
charitable?"
The answer of history was that every member of every community
gained in security and comfort by the comfort and security of the
community and that none was tolerable in which fear and injustice,
want and cruelty were permitted; in his own interest every man must
strive to eradicate them, for the other members were his daily
neighbours. Side by side with the teaching of the biologists, who
destroyed with their theory of evolution the belief in a special
creation, there came into the common stock of ideas the teaching
of the utilitarians, who offered a new criterion for private and
public conduct. While Christian dogma might be an obsolete shortcut
to an eternity which few desired and fewer still could contemplate,
Christian ethics remained the noblest and gentlest counsel to
perfection. At length reconstruction found itself back at the
injunction that a man should love his neighbour as himself.
Each with his own formula, the young agnostics of the last
generation worked by discussion, reading and reflection to a new
imperative; and those who found satisfaction in Christian ethics
as a guide to conduct found also that the Christianity which they
had fashioned for themselves was a militant faith. Injustice and
fear, suffering and cruelty are not to be eradicated by private
renunciations and protests; those who care enough for beauty to
wish the world beautiful have to make the world beautiful. And the
machine in which the form of the world is changed seemed in those
days to be politics.[4]
Vast as had been the progress of recorded history, vaster progress
remained to be accomplished if civilisation was not to be judged an
hypocrisy or a failure; and, though the saddest limitation of youth
be its utter misunderstanding of the obstacles in the way of any
change, its most glorious endowment is surely its impulsive desire
to realise its ideals. Impatient of muddle, intolerant of laziness,
sensitive to beauty and fiercely sympathetic with suffering, youth
glances with disgust at the meanness and squalor that desecrate
every part of its world and offers the generous ardour of a
world-builder to set it right. Childhood with its wooden blocks and
sand-castles, boyhood with its tools and engines, youth with its
instruments and diagrams are the constructive times of life: there
is little that lusty youth will not make, nothing that impatient
youth is afraid to reform; its heroes are the great conquerors
and builders who tidied some corner of a dilapidated world, the
explorers who sought new worlds to tidy, even the prophets and
lawyers who tried to bring uniformity into religion and society.
In a thousand hours of meditation or wrangling the boys of that
generation hammered out each his own formula of political change.
The ethics of private property and communism, of war and peace,
of equal democracy and paternal despotism, of the national ideal
and the ideal of internationalism were argued at school from the
standpoint which had been taken up at home and at home from a
standpoint which had been startlingly occupied at school. Whatever
had been the inherited preconceptions, every political doctrine
was now required to justify itself: the party which had enjoyed
almost unbroken tenure of office for nearly a fifth of a century
fell from power in 1905, to be succeeded by one which brought up
for settlement or readjustment all the old problems of domestic
controversy and many that were new.
IV
It is easy to guess the political path chosen by an Irish boy
brought up in England and sent to a tory stronghold by a father
who had reared him on the pure milk of late-Victorian radicalism;
it is not difficult to imagine what lions beset that path. The
way of the minority politician in a public school is hard but
stimulating: while the Boer war continued, any doubts of British
wisdom or justice in South Africa were ill-received and answered by
violence; for two years more, since free trade had been abandoned
by Mr. Chamberlain, a solitary free-trader would be beaten to
his knees by phrases about dying industries, dumping and unfair
competition; and, all the while, there was little chance of
agreement between those who would have solved the Irish difficulty
by holding Ireland under the sea for five minutes and any one who
was never able to forget the sailing of crowded emigrant ships from
Queenstown and the keening which rose to Heaven in acknowledgment
of British rule.
Only in the dignified atmosphere of the Debating Society, when a
general election had sent hundreds of radicals to Parliament and
proved that radicals existed, in hundreds of thousands, outside
it, did radical policy get a hearing. Political interest revived
sharply in 1905 and 1906: more than ever did the rising politicians
use their privilege of attending debates in the House of Commons.
It has been said that politics are made tolerable in England by
the fact that hardly any one takes them seriously except the
politicians, who are for the most part not English; but they are
dangerous food for the young in the expectations that they arouse
and in the disillusionment that they entail. After nearly twenty
years of tory rule, the liberals in 1905 were healed of their long
domestic dissensions and assured of a majority; the ministry so
judiciously chosen by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was overwhelming
in its varied strength; with the pacification of South Africa
and the repatriation of the indentured Chinese labourers, the
dark infamy of the Boer war and of a calamitous plunge into Rand
politics were to be forgotten; social reform was sketched with a
bold hand; a message of peace and good-will was sent to the other
powers.
So vast was the ministerial majority after the election of 1906
that a liberal prime minister, for the first time since 1880,
seemed able to fulfil his promises without having to balance the
claims of ill-assorted groups or to consider the vague menace of
the House of Lords; the ambitions of the Liberal League had been
defeated, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had survived the efforts
of his more spirited colleagues to kick him upstairs. In 1906,
for those who cared to see the world beautiful and would spend
their ardour to make it beautiful, there was still a sufficient
part of the population illiterate, hungry and diseased, rendered
miserable by fear and savage by injustice to keep the social
reformers employed; Ireland, Egypt and India all demanded a change
of administrative system. Those were days in which it seemed good
to be a liberal.
V
It would have been a meagre tribute to the spell of Westminster
if some of those who, in passing out of Abbey on that last Sunday
of Election Term, passed also out of their pupilage, did not look
forward from the threshold of manhood in a spirit of dedication; it
would have been an admission of dubious gratitude if, in bidding
farewell that afternoon under the trees of College Garden, they
had not confessed their debt to the school. In six years some few
of them had developed into fair scholars along lines of education
which had not then been so bitterly attacked as they have been
since: no one, indeed, aimed to make them proficient in preparing a
manifest and detecting an escape of sewer gas; in their curriculum
the financial possibilities of Spanish and Russian were ignored,
like all other adjuncts to a sound commercial training; and, though
the art of Asia and the letters of Ethiopia have since been urged
as an alternative to Greek and Latin, they stuck insularly to the
literature and history of the civilisation from which all the great
modern civilisations of Europe derive. Those who cared to work
contrived to cover a wide field even in that English literature
which is popularly thought to be excluded from public-school study;
for the rest, it should be recognised that a point is quickly
reached at which those who do not wish to work can no longer be
compelled. At the lowest computation, all had received at least a
grounding in the humanities and an equipment for profounder study
of subjects that by pressure of time could not be exhausted at
school.
In addition, they were for five or six years disciplined to a
system, yielding obedience as unquestioningly as afterwards they
exacted it.
"This we learned from famous men,
Knowing not its uses,
When they showed, in daily work,
Man must finish off his work--
Right or wrong, his daily work--
And without excuses....
This we learned from famous men
Teaching in our borders,
Who declared it was best,
Safest, easiest, and best--
Expeditious, wise and best--
To obey your orders.
Some beneath the further stars
Bear the greater burden:
Set to serve the lands they rule,
(Save he serve no man may rule),
Serve and love the lands they rule;
Seeking praise nor guerdon...."
They learned initiative and responsibility; they were trained to
subordinate the individual to the community; and they acquired
a code which at its worst was limited and foolish, at its best
exalted and honourable. If the panorama of a public school has
its ugly patches, so has the panorama of life; if the prejudices
were many, they were fewer than the prejudices encountered on
leaving school; if the honour was circumscribed, its boundaries
were reached perhaps less quickly than the boundaries of honour
in later life. The convention that there is at best an armed
neutrality between boy and master leads the boy to a diplomatic
economy of truth not always distinguishable from disingenuousness;
in his dealings with seniors, contemporaries and juniors he is
honest, truthful and substantially just. As he is taught to accept
undeserved punishment without complaining, so he learns to avow the
undetected misdeeds by which a fellow might suffer; never to fail
the team, the house, the school or a single friend, always to hide
emotion and to be in hard physical condition may be crude social
ethics, but they are neither unworthy nor fruitless in their effect
on public life. Twenty years ago it would have been unnecessary
to put forward these claims, but the querulous aftermath of the
war has involved the public schools in ill-defined suspicion; yet
the leader of a crusade would find no more ardent, generous and
upright spirits than in old British public-schoolboys of seventeen
to twenty-two; and, before the worldling discharges his gibes at
their honour and their code, he might stay to reflect whether the
administration of empire, as carried out in two hemispheres by the
sons of these long-suffering schools, must yield pride of place,
for integrity and devotion, to the public services of Germany
and France, Italy and Spain, America and Japan, whether, too, the
scandals and treacheries which have broken the monotony of English
public life in the last ten years are due to excess of these
derided qualities or to want of them.
If, on the last Sunday, many lacked the detachment to set out in
detail their debt to Westminster, all could acknowledge their love
and treasure their last moments. Next morning the Major Candidates
were imprisoned in a form-room leading to School and summoned
one by one to stand before a long table for the _viva voce_
examination. There followed the match between the King's Scholars
and the Town Boys. Next morning those who were leaving rose and for
the last time put on dress clothes and a gown for their last day at
Westminster.
After the breaking-up service in the Abbey, they assembled in
School for call-over. The results of Election and the removes were
read out, the prizes distributed, the prize epigrams recited by
their authors and rewarded with one of the silver pennies that
come to Westminster in the distribution of the Maundy. Armed with
a birch ("rod"), one of the School Monitors was despatched down
the gangway between the lower forms to find and escort to the
head master's dais a young offender who paid for his too frequent
presence in penal drill by being publicly flicked across the back
of the hand. Then the Captain and three School Monitors stood up
and in turn were handed the birch which they reversed and gave back
to the head master; as soon as they had been discharged of their
dignity and duties, the new School Monitors were handed the birch
in token of office. At the "_Oremus_" the new Captain knelt facing
the school and read the Latin prayers; with the "_Ire licet_" was
born a new generation of Old Westminsters.
In an interview with the Dean of Christ Church, those who had been
elected to the House were told the day on which they had to present
themselves in Oxford.
CHAPTER II
A SETTING AND A DATE
"I am the captive of your bow and spear, sir. The position
has its obligations--on both sides.... Brainy men languishing
under an effete system which, when you take good holt of it, is
England--just all England.... If you want to realise your assets,
you should lease the whole proposition to America for ninety-nine
years."
RUDYARD KIPLING: _The Captive_.
I
The men who in 1914 were of military age, as that definition was
used on the outbreak of war, were born at earliest in the middle
of the eighties. Queen Victoria was to reign for half a generation
longer, Lord Beaconsfield was but lately dead, Mr. Gladstone had
ahead of him more than a dozen years of life and one more term as
prime minister, and Mr. Parnell was appearing for the first time as
the maker and breaker of ministries.
Abroad, Prince Bismarck was still chancellor to the Emperor
William I, and the third French Republic was young enough to be
still unsteady on its legs; but, since British fears of Russian
aggression had been for the most part interred with the bones of
Disraeli's spirited foreign policy, the chief imperial problems
related to the yet new British responsibility for Egypt and to
border wars and punitive expeditions on the fringe of empire.
At home, the conservatives, wagged by the tail of the "fourth
party," were coming to terms with the liberal-unionists who had
seceded from Mr. Gladstone in 1886; the liberal party, committed
to home rule as a first charge, unless the findings of the Parnell
commission should discredit its policy, was shelving the rest of
its programme and secretly waiting for its leader's death in order
to infuse a stronger radicalism than was palatable in the lifetime
of a man who had first held office under Sir Robert Peel.
On either side of either house, as on either side of the Irish Sea,
the dominant political problem from 1885 to 1895 was the problem
of Irish self-government: on this old parties were split and new
parties formed; from this proceeded the policies and controversies
which filled the life of Parliament to the exclusion of almost
everything else for the twenty years from 1895 to the great war.
In the first home rule bill and the liberal defeat of 1886, in the
Parnell commission and the second home rule bill, in the Parnell
divorce and the defeat of Mr. Gladstone's last administration, in
the constitutional struggle between Lords and Commons from 1893
to 1911, in the Wyndham land legislation, the devolution scheme
and the fall of Mr. Wyndham, in the Irish councils bill, the
third home rule bill, the threat of rebellion and the outbreak of
civil war, English political history lay under the sable shadow
of Ireland, English political interests and developments were
sacrificed to Irish demands, and English political parties, jointly
and severally, one after another, paid for their failure to give
Ireland an acceptable form of self-government.
Though an Irishman brought up in England may lose the faith, the
speech and the nationality of the one country without acquiring
those of the other, he will inevitably be forced into an
alternating sympathy with both; and, while he may hesitate to
explain the English to the Irish or the Irish to the English, he is
bound, by any affection that he may feel for either, to disperse by
any means in his power the cloud of tragic misunderstanding which
has for so long poisoned the life of both. It was said, in seeming
paradox, at a time of diplomatic tension between Great Britain and
the United States, that both countries laboured equally under the
curse of a common language; and at all times, unless the same words
embody the same ideas to both disputants, they will encounter less
confusion by translating, however cumbrously, from one language to
another. When an American says "gotten", he means "gotten"; but an
Englishman is too ready to imagine that he meant to say "got", but
unhappily knew no better--until, perhaps, set right. Similarly, a
full half of the immemorial friction between Ireland and England
arises from the vulgar belief that, because the two peoples employ
roughly the same language, they must be one people; the other half
from the abysmal ignorance of Ireland exhibited by the English
and the no less abysmal ignorance of England exhibited by the
Irish. Apart from those who for reasons of sport or business are
taken regularly from the one country to the other, there is little
intercourse between them: a hundred Englishmen go to France or
Italy for one who goes to Ireland; and, without a steadying glimpse
of reality to check a too exuberant imagination on either side,
the Irishman deduces an England made up of commercial travellers
from Liverpool and of six-day trippers to Killarney or Portrush,
while the Englishman constructs a figure from the novels of Lever
and half persuades himself that Irishmen habitually brandish
shillelaghs and welcome bad government for its own sake and for
love of a grievance. The literary conception[5] has been somewhat
refined by the writings of Shaw and Synge, of Somerville and Ross,
but he would be little out of pocket who offered a reward to any
Englishman who could distinguish between the intonation of a Galway
fisherman and the accent of Sir Edward Carson.
Some progress towards understanding will be achieved when it is
realised that the Irish derive from an older and different wave
of westerly migration and were a civilised and proselytising
nation when the English were a pagan collection of barbarian
tributaries distracted by the withdrawal of the Roman legions
from Britain. Insulated from Europe by a second sea, Ireland
has retained a faith, a poetry and a mysticism which in England
could not withstand the materialising influence of commercial
development nor the imperial fruits of participation in European
politics; the Irish have never regarded industrial pre-eminence as
the goal of human energy and ambition, they never will; and they
are deaf to the lure of imperialism. Those who confound mysticism
with sentiment mistake the most mystical people in Europe for the
most sentimental; the Irish are without sentimentality, and their
cynicism, once realised, tempts the bewildered alien to doubt their
spiritual quality until he discovers that cynicism may be used as
protective colouring. In conflict with neighbours of sometimes
less generous soul the Irish forgive easily, perhaps they forgive
too easily; they never forget, and perhaps it would be for their
good if they learned to forget. They are more chivalrous than most
of the nations in Europe and more chaste than any. In common with
the rest of the world they believe that a man is worthless unless
he will die for his ideals; they believe also that an ideal is
worthless if men will not die for it. To the English, who in normal
times will do anything for an ideal but sacrifice themselves for
it and who will risk their necks for anything but an ideal, this
fanaticism is as inexplicable as it is exasperating.
In all political relations an Irishman interprets patriotism to
mean his love for Ireland; in all relations with the British
Government Ireland is offered, a year too late, what she would have
accepted thankfully a year earlier. When English political parties
are vying with one another to press upon Ireland a remedy for which
the time has passed, it is hard to recall the days when coercion
bill trod on the heels of coercion bill and "twenty years of
resolute government" was proposed as the blunt, common-sense method
of curing a nation that aspired to independence: Ireland turbulent,
it was said, was unfit for self-government, Ireland at peace no
longer wanted it. In two hundred and fifty years England had tried
every expedient, from the Cromwellian massacres to the Wyndham land
act, with the exception of just that political autonomy which she
blessed so fervently when it was won by Greece and Italy, Bulgaria,
Servia and Roumania. Still the Irish dreamed of a national destiny,
still the imperial genius of the English bled Ireland slowly to
death. More than a century after the act of union, a conservative
ministry discovered that perhaps the Irish really desired to
control their own fate; and the twenty years of resolute government
ended in an abortive scheme of devolution. It is true that Mr.
Wyndham, a great scholar, a greater gentleman and one of the
greatest friends that Ireland ever had, was denounced, betrayed and
left to die heartbroken; his work lived after him; and, when the
Liberal party returned to power in 1906, it was agreed, though not
admitted, by all that some concession must be made to the Irish
demand for home rule; all in turn now prescribe milk, when brandy
is required, and brandy, when oxygen alone will save the patient's
life.
Day after day and year after year, the political youth of any one
who was born after the first home rule bill has been overcast by
Ireland; for a moment the dream of O'Connell and Parnell seemed
likely to be realised by Redmond; but the shadow descended again in
the hour of his death to darken the youth of another generation,
as it descended in the hour of Mr. Gladstone's last defeat and
retirement.
II
If the party of reform in the last years of the nineteenth century
seemed to be waiting for the death of its leader, the whole
English world seems, in retrospect, to have been waiting for the
death of the older generation and for the passing of an era which
was arrested in its decay by the venerable presence and vigour
of the queen and Mr. Gladstone, of Cardinal Manning and Cardinal
Newman, of Dr. Spurgeon and Miss Nightingale. The great Victorian
age, solid and stable, rich in discovery and invention, richer
in literature and art, spanned the historical chasm between the
eighteenth century and the twentieth: the political unrest and
transition which perplexed the sons of George III had given
place to an order so settled that, in the last years of George
III's granddaughter, it seemed to defy change; the licence which
endured as a legacy of the Napoleonic wars and as a memory of
the Regency had been ended by the example and influence of the
queen; in material strength and in the bewildering splendour of
imperial pageantry, England stood higher than at any time since
the last years of Queen Elizabeth. There is a tendency among
the shallow-minded of the present day to see only the stiff
conventionality and smug complacency of Victorianism, to ridicule
its solemnity and to castigate its occasional tastelessness: in
the eyes of such critics, Victorianism is to be remembered only by
the Albert Memorial. Already in the Queen's last years there might
be heard murmurs of revolt against the bloodless rectitude of life
which she inspired; hopes were entertained that, when at length the
Prince of Wales came to the throne, cheerfulness might be allowed
to break in; the English had been on their best behaviour for too
long and were profoundly bored.
When those who opened their eyes on the second half of the eighties
were still young children, the first attack was made on the
outposts of Victorian "respectability": the "new woman" made her
appearance, defiantly smoking in public and--until threatened with
violence by an outraged and susceptible mob--bicycling about the
streets of London in "bloomers"; new ideas were spread, new rights
suggested and an alarming new freedom of discussion inaugurated
by the plays of Ibsen; a new wave of riches poured into England
from the Rand, their possessors resolute to enjoy them without
the restrictions of an outworn decorum. The epithet which has
become the historic description of these years is "roaring," and,
if it described something which by modern standards was mild and
blameless, the vigour of the word registers the public misgiving
and astonishment at the thing which it described. Nevertheless,
though this brawling exuberance gave an earnest of what would
come when the brawlers had discredited Victorianism, as yet
they misconducted themselves clandestinely or "under the eye of
perpetual disapprobation": the nod and frown of the court were
still potent; and the rulers of half-a-dozen great houses decided
effectively and subject only to the veto of the queen who should be
received in the small and envied world known as "society."
In the realm of literature, where the writ of social rulers did
not run, a steady movement towards intellectual freedom, more
permanent in its results and less open to criticism in its course,
made itself felt; and few more illuminating contrasts between the
mental range of late Victorianism and that of the present day
can be presented than by a study of the once forbidden problems
which may now be discussed in novels, on the stage and in the
press. The free lover and the unmarried mother have escaped from
the tribunal of the moralist into the consulting-room of the
pathologist and the workshop of the artist; diseases never before
mentioned have supplied the dramatist with a motive; vices still
unmentionable furnish a hinted explanation to the psychologist. And
between men and women of almost any age there is an unembarrassed
interchange of opinion, not always free from the gratification of
morbid curiosity, which exceeds the limits even of what may be
debated in print. The belief in safety through innocence has been
replaced by a belief in safety through knowledge; the war went far
towards completing the work begun by the early prophets of women's
rights; while the change in outlook must be recorded, there has
not yet been time to judge it in its effects on the well-being
of the nation or on the spiritual quality of the individual. The
revolutionaries of this, as of all other epochs, are too much
concerned in pursuing liberty as an end to regard it as a means.
To them the restrictions of Victorianism would be as intolerable as
its pleasures would be insipid. London, in the nineties, formal and
unvarying, was only in session from Easter until Goodwood; and the
slave of routine followed his appointed path from Sussex to Cowes,
from Cowes to a foreign watering-place or to Scotland and from
Scotland, by way of long visits in different parts of the country,
to the shires, returning to London in the spring after a taste of
cosmopolitanism in the south of France. Once more in England, he
attended a succession of parties as punctually and conscientiously
as he murmured the responses in church; if they grew irksome,
there was no alternative, and, if he absented himself, he incurred
the suspicion, in that intimate small world, of having been left
uninvited. So for seven days a week and for twelve weeks of seven
days: the week-end party, which now diverts a few and exhausts the
rest, only dates from the early nineties; Sunday was always passed
in London, with church and church parade, a luncheon party and
ceremonial calls to urge the lagging hours.
Though the young girl unchaperoned was the young girl abandoned,
it is probably the young bachelor who would have most reason to
dread the obligations entailed by a plunge back into the nineties.
Etiquette ordained that he must leave cards at any house where
he had dined or danced; and a call in those strict days, when no
one but a sloven would dare to be seen without a tall hat between
the months of May and July, postulated that the caller must array
himself in frock-coat and all its concomitants and, for a reason
still obscure, must carry his hat into the drawing-room. Later,
as a concession to human weakness and in imitation of the bar, a
morning-coat was permitted; serge suits and bowler hats, exhibiting
themselves tentatively at either end of the week, were excused by
a presumed sojourn in the country; and then, with the speed of an
avalanche, the reign of dandified dowdiness set in, tidying itself
slowly into comfort that was also presentable.
III
Politically, too, it was felt that the passing of the Victorian era
would be accompanied by upheaval and a transference of power.
The middle-class electorate which ultimately ruled England from
1832 to 1867 was extended by the reform bills of the latter
year and of 1884 to include the vast majority of the adult male
working-classes. At the time of this generous dilution Robert
Lowe caustically suggested that it would be well to "educate
our masters," and in the middle of his 1868 administration Mr.
Gladstone introduced universal elementary education into England.
The first children to benefit by this belated afterthought were
men and women who were in the early twenties by the time that the
generation which is now being described was able to read and to see
what others were reading; its members grew up side by side with
the numerous progeny of a popular, cheap press, and its future
rulers were in a state to digest and discuss political problems for
themselves and by themselves.
This is not to say that a knowledge of letters gave to democracy
political wisdom; it is probable that, while new classes were
enabled to spread and to receive political doctrines, later to
unite and organise themselves into political bodies, their instinct
for affairs became blunted and debased. "Some of us," wrote Lord
Bryce in _Modern Democracies_, "remember among the English rustics
of sixty years ago shrewd men unable to read, but with plenty of
mother wit, and by their strong sense and solid judgement quite as
well qualified to vote as are their grandchildren to-day who read
a newspaper and revel in the cinema. The first people who ever
worked popular government, working it by machinery more complicated
than ours, had no printed page to learn from.... These Greek
voters learnt their politics not from the printed, and few even
from any written page, but by listening to accomplished orators
and by talking to one another.... It is thinking that matters,
not reading.... In conversation there is a clash of wits, and to
that some mental exertion must go.... The man who reads only the
newspaper of his own party, and reads its political intelligence in
a medley of other stuff, narratives of crimes and descriptions of
football matches, need not know that there is more than one side
to a question.... The printed page, because it seems to represent
some unknown power, is believed more readily than what he hears in
talk.... A party organ, suppressing some facts, misrepresenting
others, is the worst of all guides.... That impulse to hasty and
ill-considered action which was the besetting danger of ruling
assemblies swayed by orators, will reappear in the impression
simultaneously produced through the press on masses of men all over
a large country."
It is possible that the last thirty years may come to be regarded,
in the development of democracy, as the history of the press rising
victorious over the political mass-meeting, even as the political
mass-meeting, since the days of Mr. Gladstone's electoral campaign
of 1880, had been gradually rising victorious over the House of
Commons. It is possible again that the present moment registers
the highest point which newspaper influence will reach and that,
during the next thirty years, the publicity of the cinematograph
and of the poster will rise victorious over the press. The
patriotism of the public during the war was kept alive by direct
and simple appeals to enlistment and economy; they issued their
message from every hoarding and competed for public interest with
advertisements for patent foods and soaps. Though its want of
dignity may have offended the fastidious, this method of propaganda
permitted neither argument nor contradiction; the government stated
its case and plastered the countryside with an exhortation or
declaration for which the public paid and which the press could not
overtake. Since the war, the government has employed this method of
propaganda in more than one industrial dispute: wages and profits,
nationalisation and private ownership are debated on convenient
walls; it is recognised that, in a democracy, knowledge must not be
denied to the people; and, as in the first French revolution, it is
believed that the information can be supplied most attractively by
the government itself. Robert Lowe, were he still alive, might feel
malicious satisfaction in seeing the use to which democracy had put
its long-deferred education and the manner in which the ultimate
masters of democracy are educated.
The immediate effect of diffused, cheap printing and of the power
of reading and expression was that democracy became articulate and
organised, ready to play in the business of government that part
to which it was entitled by its votes, but to which others were
by no means ready to admit it. In the conversation and literature
of these years may be traced a profound uneasiness at the onward
march of labour, and the opponents of democracy vented their fear
and hostility in outbursts of almost hysterical bitterness against
the ignorant, gullible, self-seeking and rapacious proletariat into
whose hands the welfare of the empire had been surrendered.
In 1833 Carlyle's Teufelsdröckh had written: "Two men I honour,
and no third. First, the toil-worn Craftsman that with earth-made
Implement laboriously conquers the Earth, and makes her man's.
Venerable to me is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse; wherein
notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of
the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable, too, is the rugged face,
all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it
is the face of a Man living manlike. O, but the more venerable
for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love
thee! Hardly-entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent, for
us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed: thou wert our
Conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so
marred." In 1850 the fear of Chartism had purged Carlyle's mind
of this veneration, pity and love for a man living manlike, a
hardly-entreated brother and a conscript who had been marred in
fighting the battles of others. "Consider, in fact," he exhorts
his readers, "a body of Six-hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneous
persons set to consult about 'business' with Twenty-seven millions
mostly fools assiduously listening to them, and checking and
criticising them--was there ever since the world began, will there
ever be till the world end, any 'business' accomplished in these
circumstances?"
For fifty years, from Carlyle to Kipling, this scorn for a
deliberative assembly and this contempt for an electorate which had
hitherto been sedulously denied all political education frustrated
all attempts to modify the old machine of government and to
assimilate the new rulers to the old. "Bigots," said Macaulay, "...
never fail to plead in justification of persecution the vices which
persecution has engendered. England has been to the Jews less than
half a country; and we revile them because they do not feel for
England more than a half patriotism. We treat them as slaves, and
wonder that they do not regard us as brethren...."
With little change of language, the disabilities of the Jews
could be paralleled by the disabilities of labour; and both were
defended by the same spirit of blatant intolerance which rose in a
self-satisfied _crescendo_ during the second half of the nineteenth
century, till a cynic might have said that, as there had been no
class-antagonism, it would become necessary to create one. Of
the present conflict between classes and of any conflict in the
immediate future the seeds were sown in the last years of Queen
Victoria's reign.
IV
The men of this epoch grew up half-way between the second harvest
of great nineteenth-century literature and the first crop of
the twentieth. In their early boyhood, Tennyson was still Poet
Laureate, Browning was still prolific and Swinburne's last song
was not yet sung; George Meredith and Thomas Hardy were still in
practise as novelists, and Robert Louis Stevenson was approaching
the climax of his powers; John Ruskin, though silent, was still
alive; the influence of Walter Pater was at its zenith; the
reputation of Herbert Spencer stood higher than at any time before
or since; and John Morley was in his prime. Among the younger men
who were winning fame--with the surge and thunder that heralded
the youth of the nineties--was Rudyard Kipling; the seething
brain of H. G. Wells was boiling over into scientific romance;
and old romance was brought to life by the charm of Anthony Hope.
Among those who were doing the work for which a belated fame was
reserved were Samuel Butler and Joseph Conrad. For experimenting,
adventurous youth the pages of _The Yellow Book_ lay open; "the men
of the nineties" flashed meteorically across the deafened heavens,
and, when they had passed with their falsity and clamour, there
was discovered in their train the more abiding genius of Whistler
and Beardsley, the precocious, detached perfection of Beerbohm,
the occasional beauty of Gray and Dowson, the alternate paste and
diamond of Oscar Wilde.
These were the last working years of Leighton and Watts, of Holman
Hunt and Morris, of Tenniel and Crane; the heyday of Ricketts and
Shannon; the morning of Phil May. They were the years, too, of the
first illustrated magazines and of those _Strands_, ever memorable
to the boys of that generation, in which _Sherlock Holmes_ appeared
month after month.
A new chapter in dramatic history was opened by Pinero with _The
Second Mrs. Tanqueray_; and, though Shaw and Barrie were not yet
come into their own, though Galsworthy and Barker were not yet
articulate, the last decade of the nineteenth century was the
summer time of the British stage for a hundred years. Irving ruled
still imperially, with Terriss, Forbes Robertson and Wyndham among
his marshals; Boucicault, Toole and Bancroft were still alive; it
was not yet impossible to find a theatre for serious drama, and
the seductions of burlesque and of musical comedy were confined to
Daly's and the old Gaiety.
The music-halls of that period did not come within the purview of
a boy: the humour was too broad, the air too much tainted, the
associations too squalid; but in those days the true "variety
entertainment"--exhibiting hardly less continuity than the modern
_revue_--was still to be seen, the old-fashioned chairman still sat
at his table surrounded by privileged friends, the prices were
half those of the theatre, it was exceptional for a man to appear
in evening dress and inconceivable for a woman of repute to appear
at all.
The memory of a child is pierced, deeply and without order, by
quarter-comprehended sights and sounds. Those were the days of
Lottie Collins and _Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay_, of _The Man Who Broke
the Bank at Monte Carlo_ and of _The Bicycle Made for Two_--this
last to commemorate the safety bicycle which took England by storm
and urged the citizens of London in endless, untiring circles
round Regent's Park on Sunday mornings. These were the days of
May Yohe and _Honey, ma Honey_, of Hayden Coffin and _Sunshine
Above_, of Albert Chevalier and his coster songs; of Dan Leno and
Herbert Campbell in immortal partnership at Drury Lane pantomimes,
of Corney Grain--and a piano; of Sims Reeves at the Queen's Hall,
old and inexpressibly sweet; of Maskelyne and Cook at the Egyptian
Hall, of Moore and Burgess at the St. James' Hall; they were the
days of "Niagara" and the old Aquarium.
It was in the middle nineties, when the "knife-board" omnibus
was still to be seen in the streets, that London was excited by
an exhibition of "horseless carriages," though for a few years
still a small boy might be driven to Berkeley Square on a summer
afternoon, there to draw up under the trees opposite Gunter's and
consume raspberry ices. In those days the cows and milk-stall
were not yet evicted from St. James' Park; Booksellers Row had
not been sacrificed to the improvement of London, which was then
more picturesque and less sanitary. Those were the days of the
long frost; the days of the Klondike gold-rush, the Jameson raid,
the Græco-Turkish war; days in which a boy heard dying rumours
of a "baccarat case," of the Parnell divorce, of Barnie Barnato's
death, rumours more active but less intelligible of vast financial
operations and vaster crashes.
The first five years of life, perhaps the first seven, are the
hinterland of memory in which a trail is blazed by word or name
and, later, a road straightened and made durable by reading. After
seven, memory is in ordered cultivation: after 1895 public events
marshal themselves and stand out against the uneventful background
of the child's daily life. The fall of the Rosebery government
seemed less important than Mr. Gladstone's retirement the year
before and, to a boy, neither equalled in excitement the Diamond
Jubilee with its thanksgiving-service and procession, its songs and
marches, its bunting and illumination. A year later the news-bills
stopped every passer-by with the words: "DEATH OF GLADSTONE"; and
children who had never seen him cried in the streets of London as
they had cried in America or Italy at the passing of Lincoln or
Garibaldi.
A year later still came rumours of discord in South Africa; and
the patriot of the private school waited eagerly for a declaration
of war, less eagerly for news that President Kruger had yielded
to pressure; the memory of the Spithead review which had followed
the massing of an empire's troops at the Diamond Jubilee was still
vivid, and in a hundred thousand truculent hearts there lurked the
sinister thought that an army and navy were useless if they did not
fight and that small nations existed, in the scheme of creation,
to be taught sharp lessons. The handful of opponents who cried out
on an impious war of aggression were shouted down or manhandled as
"pro-Boers" until the cheers of the Irish and of a few radicals,
when a British reverse was announced in the House of Commons,
convinced the wondering militarists that opposition might be
prompted by a moral sense as well as by native factiousness. These
were the days of _The Absent-Minded Beggar_, of "Black Friday"
and the Fall of Ladysmith, of the aged queen's recruiting-tour in
Ireland, of the relief of Mafeking and "Mafeking Night" in London;
the days when Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener were sent out to cut
short the retribution which the arrogance of a swollen power had
called down upon its head, the days of concentration-camps and "the
methods of barbarism," of the "Khaki" election, of _The Islanders_
and the last despairing shriek of that vulgar ferocity which had
brought about this needless and iniquitous bloodshed; the days of
Queen Victoria's last illness and death, the approach of peace.
The chapter of imperialism which opened with Mr. Chamberlain's
ultimatum and ended with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's grant of
self-government to the Union of South Africa was only symptomatic
of a wider-spread arrogance and savagery. While the war was still
in progress, another chapter of history, shorter but not less
infamous, was being enacted in the suppression of the Boxer rising
and--incidentally--in the looting of the palace at Pekin. It was in
the middle of these two excursions that there began the six years'
sojourn at Westminster, to which reference was made in the last
chapter.
CHAPTER III
CHRIST CHURCH
"Come, doctor," said Euphranor, suddenly, "you, who find such
fault with others' education, shall tell me how _you_ would bring
up a young knight, till you turned him out of your hands a Man."
* * * * *
"I doubt I shall be content with him," said I, "if (at sixteen
say) he shows me outwardly ... a glowing cheek, an open brow,
copious locks, a clear eye, and looks me full in the face withal;
... the blood running warm and quick through his veins, and easily
discovering itself in his cheeks and forehead, at the mention of
what is noble or shameful.... Candid of soul I hope he is; for
I have always sought his confidence, and never used it against
himself.... He is still passionate perhaps, as in his first
septenniad, but easily reconciled; subdued easily by affection and
the appeal to old and kindly remembrance, but stubborn against
force; generous, forgiving: still liking to ride rather than to
read, and perhaps to settle a difference by the fist than by the
tongue; but submitting to those who do not task him above Nature's
due...."
"And this is your education," said Euphranor, "for all boys
indiscriminately, without regard to any particular genius they may
show."
"But without injury to it, I hope," said I; ... "if Sir Lancelot
not only _has_ a Genius, (as I suppose all men have some,)
but _is_ a Genius--big with Epic, Lyrical or Parliamentary
inspiration,--I do not meddle with him--he will take his own
course in spite of me. What I have to turn out is, not a Genius,
but a Young Gentleman, qualified at least for the common
professions, or trades, if you like it. Or if he have means and
inclination to live independently on his estate, may, _in spite_
of his genius, turn into a very good husband, father, neighbour,
and magistrate...."
EDWARD FITZGERALD: _Euphranor: A Dialogue on Youth_.
I
At noon on Friday of the second week in October, 1906, a slow
procession of cabs jingled down the slope from the Great Western
station at Oxford and turned under the bridge towards the middle
of the town. At Carfax they separated east, north and south,
bearing through the High, the Corn and Saint Aldates their burden
of expectant, fluttered freshmen, who had been summoned, on this
first day of the term, to present themselves early for admission
to their colleges and university. At Tom Gate the newcomers to the
House enquired for their rooms, paid their cabmen and left their
luggage to follow them. Over the doors in Peckwater or Canterbury,
Meadow Buildings, Old Library or Tom they found their names
painted in black on a white ground; they introduced themselves to
their scouts--who alone in all Oxford affected interest in their
existence,--ordered luncheon and sat down to recall the more
pressing advice on deportment which had been bestowed on them.
To a freshman, the etiquette and technique of Oxford abound in real
and, still more, in imaginary pitfalls. He may live for years on
the same staircase as a man one term his senior, but, unless they
have been introduced, he must never bow nor say "good-morning"
to him. The senior would, perhaps, leave a card on the freshman,
choosing a moment when he was not at home; the freshman must return
his call, but it was not enough to leave a card: he must go on
calling until he ran him to earth. In all things a freshman must
comport himself humbly, taking a distant seat in the junior common
room and leaving the arm-chairs in front of the fire to those
who better deserved them. There were rules of dress and rules of
conduct; there were clubs which a man would feel honoured to join
and clubs which he would prudently avoid; there were games worth
playing and games that were waste of time.
When the appointed day came, the ordeal was refreshingly light
and quickly forgotten in the joyous sense of possession which a
man's own rooms, with his shining, black name painted over the
door, gives him more fully, perhaps, than he ever knows later; the
sense of protection, too, at a time when he feels more solitary and
unwanted than ever before. Though the carpet were threadbare and
the curtains dingy, though sofa and chairs needed recovering and
the meagre blankets on one bed bore the name of "Arthur Bourchier"
and a date four years before the new owner was born, the rooms
belonged to him _de facto_, and within a few hours he would _de
jure_ belong to them; it was time to unpack books and pictures
and to study the regulations and hints embodied in the brochure
libellously known as "The Blue Liar."
After luncheon the freshmen were collected in Hall for presentation
to the Dean.[6] The Old Westminsters gathered together to discuss
their rooms and to exchange whispered confidences. From Hall
they were ushered to the Old Schools and admitted members of the
university by the vice-chancellor. Then they drew breath.
The bond of an identic school held them in small groups which
explored one another's rooms and perambulated Oxford to purchase
bedroom ware and such other necessaries of life as had not been
included in the equipment taken over, at a valuation, from the
previous tenants. They made a preliminary inspection of picture
shops and turned over the books in Blackwell's; they bought
tobacco--and refused to buy pipe-racks and tobacco-jars enriched
with the college arms, because these were "freshers' delights" and
a mark of juvenility to be avoided. Then they returned to college
and discovered that already a few of their senior friends had left
cards. And then it was time to discover which were the freshmen's
tables in hall.
If for an hour or two it had seemed that no one but their scouts
was interested in their existence, they were to find within their
first week a flattering competition for their company. First of
all, their tutors invited them to call and arrange what lectures
they were to attend; after that, the president and secretary of
innumerable clubs solicited their patronage. Then came the turn of
the literary and debating societies, in which the House abounded.
It was a matter of no little importance to have a club-meeting for
at least six nights in the week: only the more serious members
stayed for anything but the highly personal questions and motions
of "private business," but during that first stimulating half-hour
the visitors and their hosts could feast richly and variously on
the abundant dessert supplied by the club; at nine o'clock they
could leave, pleasantly sated, to work, talk or pay calls, while
the club stalwarts remained to read plays or, unwillingly and at
short notice, to deliver conscientious speeches on the political
problems of the day.[7]
Outside the college there was an almost unlimited choice of
university clubs: the Bullingdon, Vincent's and the Grid were
purely sporting or social, the O.U.D.S. was primarily theatrical,
while the Union--though it was not popular at the House at this
time--provided the biggest audiences and the most serious
debating. In addition, the Canning and Chatham, the Palmerston and
Russell, the Strafford and Gladstone, the St. Patrick's and a dozen
more offered a varied bill of fare to every political appetite and
entailed on their members the obligation of reading a solemn paper
once in every few terms and of listening to the solemn papers of
other members once a week. At their annual "wines" and dinners
the young politician met such of the leading liberals as could be
enticed to Oxford; after the arid detachment of politics at school,
one meeting with a single minister seemed to bring the pulsing
heart of government nearer; there followed cards for receptions in
London and invitations to join the Eighty Club.
Perhaps by reason of its size, the House escaped or defied any
effort to impose a uniform spirit or code. Its members were indeed
united in such practises as dressing for the theatre and in such
conventions as a general disinclination for the society of other
colleges; but this was largely because they were numerous enough
to provide every one with the friends, the clubs and the interests
that he required without seeking them abroad. Rival foundations
charged them with superiority and sectionalism; but, if they had
ever made a claim for themselves, it would only have been that
they allowed their neighbours to live unmolested. There was no
Sunday-evening "After," at which the whole college met; no concert;
no "Freshmen's Wine." All were left free to choose their friends
and to pass their time as they liked, provided that they did not
offend against public taste or make a nuisance of themselves to
their neighbours.
New friendships came rapidly in those first few weeks. At the
freshmen's tables in hall, the freshmen's pews in the cathedral, on
the football-ground, in the common room and clubs and at a score of
breakfast-parties given for their benefit, the men in their first
year came to know one another. There followed testing, sifting and
an occasional change of value; the bond of the identic school was
gradually relaxed; and small groups broke away from the general
tables in hall and established messes of their own.
II
Oxford is a loose confederation of jealously independent states;
and a man must have considerable personality or prowess to be known
outside his own college. There are always one or two men[8] with a
reputation extending beyond their own walls and promising a later
distinction; but there are seldom more than a handful of exceptions
in any undergraduate generation. Of the House this is especially
true, as it is almost a university in itself, and no one need go
outside it. The patriotism and hero-worship of a public school had
made it inconceivable that a new boy should pass one week without
knowing who was the Captain of Cricket; at Oxford in every year
there must have been hundreds unaware who was President of the Boat
Club. The greatest emancipation that came to all on leaving school
was just this freedom to be interested in what they liked. The
tyranny of games was broken; the snobbism of pretended enthusiasms
sank into abeyance; and many who had been despised and rejected at
school began suddenly to shine as unexpected social lights.
The choice of friends marched step by step with the tentative first
efforts in hospitality. Entertaining is made easy in a college
where a man orders breakfast or luncheon for as many guests as
his rooms will contain, where the epicure descends to the college
kitchen and chooses an apolaustic repast, where wine and cup
are as easily had from the buttery and where the junior common
room supplies the coffee and dessert. His scout and scout's boy,
prepare the table and attend to the waiting (how they do it when
several parties take place simultaneously on the same staircase
is a craft-secret which is handed down from one generation to
another); when his own cutlery, glass and china run short, his
scout borrows from the abundance of a neighbour. And, when the
feast is done, the host is not disturbed by the frugal housewife's
concern for the broken meats, for they have been decently packed
and discreetly removed by his scout. The imagination of the curious
may sometimes exercise itself to picture the internal chaos of a
scout's digestion: for six days he subsists chiefly on superfluous
butter and remainder loaves; the seventh day is one on which every
undergraduate seeks to give a luncheon-party or to attend the
board of a friend. On that day the scout must fare bewilderingly
on undetected treasures of dressed crab, unwanted drum-sticks of
chicken, trembling ruins of fruit-jelly and the unmortised halves
of meringues; yet longevity is the reward of their imprudence.
There is, furthermore, a guest-table in Hall;[9] there are
dining-clubs; and, when a man is grown weary of monotony, the Grid,
the O.U.D.S. and Vincent's supply relief to their members. For the
first weeks, indeed, the hospitality comes all from the seniors;
then it is time for a freshman to repay it and to strike out for
himself in entertaining the new friends of his own year. It is a
delicate and embarrassing enterprise, for all the mechanical aid of
kitchen and scout: the inexpert host fears that he has not ordered
enough, he never knows how long to wait for a fourth-year man who
lives out of college and has perhaps forgotten the invitation, he
fails to realise--until he has himself ceased to be a freshman--the
devastating horror of a three-or four-course breakfast at half-past
eight with obligatory conversation. And, not content with one
venture, he repeats it in cold blood.
The emancipation in being allowed to choose friends and amusements
is hardly greater than the latitude in arranging the work of three
or four years. A mathematical scholar is, indeed, not expected to
read the Modern Language School; but for the commoner there is
almost unlimited range of optional subjects to take and varied
lectures to attend. Here is a further step in emancipation and
responsibility: when a man has satisfied the bare minimum demanded
by authority, he must work out his own salvation; there is a point
at which, if he will not read for himself, it is not worth any
one's while to compel him. Many of those who kept a political goal
ahead of them elected to study Modern History, for which it may
be asserted that in scope and variety, in the volume of reading,
the mental discipline and the practical benefit of knowledge and
perspective it excels even the final school of _Literæ Humaniores_
which has been for so long the peculiar glory of Oxford. Touching
the ancient world at one end and modern politics at the other,
interlaced with geography, economics, political science, law and
modern languages, it does indeed exclude natural science and
Asiatic languages, but it excludes little else.[10]
III
Some of the most common English phrases are also those which most
obstinately defy exact definition. It is related of an obscure
enquirer that he gave his life to elucidating the significance of
"a man-about-town," having met the phrase but not the type to which
it is applied. For years he wandered moodily about London in search
of a specimen, growing ever more abstracted and becoming in time a
familiar figure in the streets, until his researches were cut short
on the day when he was knocked down by a motor-bus and fatally
injured. Though carried promptly to the nearest hospital, he
survived only a few hours; as the end approached, one of the nurses
sought to strengthen his resistance by shewing him an account of
the mishap in an early edition of an evening paper; the last words
that he ever read were: "ACCIDENT TO WELL-KNOWN MAN-ABOUT-TOWN."
* * * * *
A fate as disappointing, if not so tragic, awaits him who seeks to
find a definition of "the Oxford manner." It is seemingly a blazon
borne by every man who has been at Oxford and quickly recognised by
every one who has not. When Herrick in _The Ebb Tide_ anchored in
the lagoon of an uncharted Pacific pearl-fishery, something in his
speech or bearing caused Attwater to ask: '"University man?" ...
"Yes, Merton," said Herrick, and the next moment blushed scarlet at
his indiscretion. "I am of the other lot," said Attwater: "Trinity
Hall, Cambridge. I call my schooner after the old shop...."'
Without delay Attwater then made himself insolently rude to the two
men who had been neither at Oxford nor at Cambridge. The fact that
Stevenson was himself an Edinburgh man may explain his creature's
ability to detect the Oxford manner; for Oxford men the task is
less easy and is but made the harder by the involved analysis which
explains it as "the expression of a superiority which every Oxford
man is too superior to shew."
So little sense of superiority clouds the brain of most Oxford
men that they are humbly grateful, their whole life through,
for their good fortune in spending three happy years, howsoever
little distinguished, in the most beautiful of all kingdoms of
youth. No city in the world has been so decreed, constructed,
endowed and ordered for the benefit and enjoyment of the boys
who there reach a privileged manhood. The university returns
its own members to parliament and preserves order among the
undergraduates by means of the proctors and their satellites; the
vice-chancellor's court stands between debtor and creditor; and a
member of the _corps diplomatique_ in a foreign capital is hardly
more "extra-territorial" than the undergraduate at Oxford. This is
partly the law and partly the custom of the constitution; but to
the visitor it is less impressive than that the entire economic
and social dispensation should have for object the comfort and
happiness of three thousand men between the ages of eighteen and
twenty-two. The colleges, their gardens and pleasances; the river
and its barges; the theatre and clubs; the shops and streets; all
have been designed on the presumption that Oxford contains no women
and that the men are of an age that never changes.[11] In their
midst there are, indeed, "townees," but even the shops at which
they buy their meat are not suffered to desecrate the beauty of the
High; there are straggling acres of houses in North Oxford, but
they exist in the undergraduate scheme as unwelcome destinations
for a duty call on Sunday afternoons in winter; the undergraduate
horizon is bounded by Christ Church Meadows and the Broad, by
Magdalen Bridge and Carfax; their world consists of those who live
within these limits.
Of the three thousand who for three or four years gloried in that
kingdom, a few did no work at all and, when their days of grace
expired, went down for good or until they had passed the necessary
examinations; those who hoped for a high class in an honour school
perforce worked hard during term and harder in vacation; the
average man of average intelligence, reading a pass school, could
be content with four or six hours' work a day and an untroubled
vacation.
More than six hours is not easy to maintain, for, though the
term is but eight weeks long, a man is living at high pressure
in a low-lying city. Those who had their schools at heart would
get up at half-past seven and keep a chapel at eight, read the
morning paper, breakfast with friends or by themselves and begin
work at nine or ten; on most days they would have lectures or a
"private hour" with their tutors and for the rest of the morning
they worked in their rooms or in the library. At one o'clock the
quadrangle woke to sudden life with men returning from lectures,
men on their way out to luncheon, men in stocks and breeches
assembling at Canterbury Gate to drive in brakes to a meet of the
House beagles. They exchanged the news and badinage of the day,
from the middle of Peck to an attic window, and from one window to
another; the quadrangle emptied and sank again to silence, as they
repaired to the common-room for a light repast of bananas and milk
or toast and honey. And in turn the common room, which had filled
suddenly, as suddenly emptied; within a quarter of an hour all had
dispersed to the football ground or the House barge, a private
gravel tennis-court or the hockey ground; one or two went sailing
on the Upper River, one or two more hacked slowly out of Oxford
for a gallop on Port Meadow or Shotover; and, as every generation
discovered for itself the beauty of the surrounding country and
fell anew under its spell at the whisper of the old unforgettable
names, the pedestrians struck north-west or south-west to "the
warm, green-muffled Cumner Hills", "the stripling Thames at
Bablock-hithe", "Godstow Bridge, when hay-time's here in June",
"the skirts of Bagley Wood" or "Hinksey and its wintry ridge".
Convention and climate ordain that no one in Oxford shall work in
the early afternoon; when the sacred exercise has been taken and
all are refreshed by tea in common room or at home, there is time
for two hours' reading before Hall. After that, a man may go to
the theatre, where he will find a tolerable selection of companies
and of "London successes";[12] he may look in at a club or retire
to finish a belated essay in his rooms; he may dawdle over coffee
in the common room and stroll back with a friend for one of those
endless disputations which clear the head and suggest a new point
of view--raw, paradoxical stuff, it may be, but earnestly argued
and perhaps making up in idealism what it lacked in experience.
Whatever is "universal" in university education comes chiefly
from the men of one's own age and from the distillation of three
thousand minds seething with youth and a new encouragement to
self-expression which had been rigorously withheld at school.[13]
If the scope of reading is limited there, the limitations are
broken down to some extent by the sum of all the reading in all the
public schools. It was in the intimate late hours when some club
had dispersed that one man would talk of Browning's Jewish blood
and reproduce the savage indignation of _Holy Cross Day_; another
would give forth the magic music of Synge's plays; and a generation
which had hitherto escaped the theological preoccupation of the
Victorian era argued Renan and discussed _The Golden Bough_ in
comfort of mind.
IV
If in the pooling of their enthusiasms the men of this vanished
generation advanced even one step towards the universality of
spirit which is the intellectual vision of a university, they
advanced many steps nearer to a social universality than had been
possible at school. Eton, by virtue of its size and repute, is
fed, within the limits of one plane, by the greatest number of
tributaries; but Westminster and Harrow, Winchester, Rugby and
Charterhouse are filled each from its own well-defined source.
At Oxford, in greater or lesser degree, hitherto unfamiliar
types mingled for the first time and, in social and political
debate, encountered the embodiment of what had hitherto been
malevolent abstractions: an Orange land-owner lived over the head
of a rebellious home ruler; the hereditary legislator sat in
Hall beside the radical who expended his eloquence in trying to
abolish the House of Lords. There were Catholics, Presbyterians
and an occasional Jew; rich men, poor men; scholars, dunces;
sceptics and fanatics; prigs and worldlings; incipient swindlers,
congenital debauchees and a vast representation of the vast average
English class which is between rich and poor, which is shrewd
without being subtile, tenacious but practical, self-satisfied
but self-depreciatory, with conservative instincts and radical
initiative.
To all and to each, Oxford smilingly proferred her inexhaustible
tray of _cotillon_ favours. There was and is and, seemingly, always
must be a class debarred by poverty from entering this kingdom;
but, once inside, there is an unmatched equality of opportunity
for rich and poor, exalted and humble, an unprecedented freedom
for each to express his individuality in the choice of his work
and recreation, his friends and life. Though there, as elsewhere,
the deepest pocket commanded the greatest material comfort,
narrow means were no obstacle to the enjoyment and profit which
every man could extract from four years of the most democratic
life that England provided outside the House of Commons; nowhere
was a man taken more ungrudgingly on his merits, nowhere did the
eccentric--were he poser, experimenter or monomaniac--obtain a
better run for his money.
In these days of fifteen years ago, came the first batch of Rhodes
scholars. Nothing but a war will drive the average Englishman
to look at a map; and nothing less than the late war would have
stirred the imagination of the English to concern for the size
and cohesion of the British Empire. Cecil Rhodes had been dead
nearly half a generation before South Africans and Australians,
New Zealanders and Canadians--to name but a few--met together on a
single battle-front; but his vision embraced what the war of 1914
made actual, and he, who confessedly owed more to Oxford than to
any other phase of his career, made Oxford the trial-ground for
the greatest historical experiment in imperial education. With the
effect of Oxford on the Rhodes scholars only a Rhodes scholar is
competent to deal; the influence of the Rhodes scholars on Oxford
was marked. They were the picked men from the universities of the
world; not only from the dominions and colonies of the British
Empire, but from Germany as well, for Rhodes felt that conflict
between the two countries could most surely be avoided by making
their peoples better acquainted. Chosen for general prowess--in
sport, in work, in the popularity and position which they had
attained in their own universities,--they came somewhat older than
the generality in years and much older in experience; they brought
new intellectual standpoints and a deliberate wisdom to leaven the
facile cleverness and omniscience of British Oxford.[14]
Those three or four years resolve themselves into a collection
of exquisite memories in miniature; but, day after day and term
after term, nothing ever happened to shake a man's soul from its
seating. There were glorious parties in college and on the river;
there were great rides and walks; there were splendid disputations.
During Eights Week a man invited his sisters and friends to lunch
with him; shy and self-conscious, he met them at the station and
piloted them informatively through the cathedral and hall, the
cloisters and library and kitchen until it was time to stroll
back to his rooms, where through the flower-boxes and open
windows could be seen cold salmon and roast chicken, meringues,
strawberries-and-cream and cider-cup spread out in monotonous
invitation, where, too, the prudent host had enlisted his most
socially gifted friends to ease the burden of hospitality. Replete
and a trifle weary of so much good behaviour, he and his friends
threaded their way through the crowded Meadows and took up their
position on the barge, returning between second and first division
for tea. Utterly exhausted, he at last drove his patient guests to
the station and returned for dinner and uninterrupted celibacy.[15]
Hardly had he recovered from the social exigencies of Eights Week
than Commemoration was upon him with sterner demands, longer
drawn out. For anxious weeks he debated which balls he would
attend and who should be invited to go with him; parties were
arranged, rooms engaged; and for one, two or three nights he
danced indefatigably from nine till five or six, then shivered in
a wind-swept quadrangle or on the pavement outside the Town Hall
while he surrendered to the undergraduate herd-instinct of being
commemoratively photographed. Then, perhaps, he would go to bed
for a few hours, rising wearily to take part in a picnic on the
Cher and returning in time to dress for the next ball, and the more
conscientious sort--hosts and guests alike--would insist on being
present at the Encænia.[16]
Before Commemoration is over, many were laying their plans for
Henley. After that, the pleasure-lovers went to London for the last
weeks of the season; and, for the serious workers, the coming of
August marked the beginning of a long ten weeks of uninterrupted
reading.
So from term to term and year to year. Every summer carried away
the older friends, every autumn brought a new draft to take their
place. With time came better rooms and perhaps greater dignity of
position; a man worked through the lower offices of various clubs
and succeeded in time to the chair; he woke to find himself a
senior member of the college, setting to freshmen the tone which
had been set to him in his own first year. With abrupt suddenness
he discovered that he must begin looking for digs. out of college;
if he had idled or overspent his allowance, he would perhaps retire
to a distant monastic cell to retrench or work; otherwise he looked
for good rooms near the House and a friend to share them with him.
Life out of college diminishes the sense that a man is a living,
breathing part of a community which wakes to life in hall, common
room and cathedral, if indeed it is not always awake in the
quadrangle. So long as he is back in digs... by midnight, there are
few restrictions on his liberty; he can entertain, he can get up
and go to bed when he likes, he can see as much or as little of the
college as he chooses. And, with comfortable digs.., an excellent
cook and work which swells like a banking cloud as his schools
approach, there are many temptations to stay at home and only
to visit the college for Sunday evening chapel, hall and a club
meeting.
The last year, for those who find time to think, is depressing,
for they are watching the O.U.D.S. or the House Grind for the last
time, and the menace of their final schools throws a gloom over
everything. Some of the subjects are being read for the first time;
others, that seemed to have been mastered two years before, are
now almost wholly forgotten; losing confidence, a man speaks of
himself as "lucky to scrape a fourth," he grows fatalistic and
says that he does not care; and his tutor wisely sends him away for
a few days' holiday and reestablishes his confidence with a word of
praise.
Then for a week he faces his examiners, two papers a day, three
hours for each paper; and at the end, when they have laid him bare,
he cares very little indeed for any other result than that he will
probably never again be compelled to study English political or
constitutional history, political economy and economic history,
political science and European history, a special subject or even a
modern language. The taut nerves become of a sudden very slack.
And then it has to be realised that within a week all will be over.
One last Commemoration. A day or two of unbearable farewells.
Instructions for the packing of books and pictures which he had
unpacked so very lately, yet at the distant other end of his Oxford
career. And then that overwhelming day when a man drives to the
station and, as the train gathers speed, looks for the last time
on Tom Tower. He will come back again, no doubt, but no longer as
a resident undergraduate; the Kingdom of the Young has passed to
another dynasty. In three or four years he has progressed, in age,
from boy to man; but the development has been chiefly intellectual,
and, for all his greater knowledge and experience, he has changed
little in character or essential instincts. The rigour of school
discipline has been relaxed, because it is no longer needed; but
the simple school ideals of honour and loyalty, restraint and
self-control, clean living and hard condition remain unaltered. Had
he chosen to defy opinion and to disdain the protection with which
Oxford surrounds him, the opportunity was at hand for drinking
too much and for getting into debt, for idling and for discarding
the fastidiousness which impels English boys to keep women at
a distance. There are men in every generation who will collect
experience at all costs, but at Oxford they are not regarded with
admiration: the undergraduate who drinks or boasts of his exploits
with women is voted noxious or boring or both.
A month or six weeks after the end of term comes the viva; then the
class lists. In the following October the curtain is rung down for
most, when they meet again--and, perhaps, for the last time--to
receive the grace of their college and to proceed to the degree of
Bachelor of Arts.
CHAPTER IV
LONDON AND ELSEWHERE
"... These homes, this valley spread below me here,
The rooks, the tilted stacks, the beasts in pen,
Have been the heartfelt things, past-speaking dear
To unknown generations of dead men,
Who, century after century, held these farms,
And, looking out to watch the changing sky,
Heard, as we heard, the rumours and alarms
Of war at hand and danger pressing nigh.
And knew, as we know, that the message meant
The breaking off of ties, the loss of friends,
Death, like a miser getting in his rent,
And no new stones laid where the trackway ends.
The harvest not yet won, the empty bin,
The friendly horses taken from the stalls,
The fallow on the hill not yet brought in,
The cracks unplastered in the leaking walls.
Yet heard the news, and went discouraged home,
And brooded by the fire with heavy mind,
With such dumb loving of the Berkshire loam
As breaks the dumb hearts of the English kind,
Then sadly rose and left the well-loved Downs,
And so by ship to sea, and knew no more
The fields of home, the byres, the market towns,
Nor the dear outline of the English shore,
But knew the misery of the soaking trench,
The freezing in the rigging, the despair
In the revolting second of the wrench
When the blind soul is flung upon the air,
And died (uncouthly, most) in foreign lands
For some idea but dimly understood
Of an English city never built by hands
Which love of England prompted and made good...."
JOHN MASEFIELD: _August_, 1914.
I
Whatever the success of English public schools and universities
in training the sons of the wealthier classes for their part in
the professional and public life of the country, one result of an
educational system which takes charge of a boy at seven or eight
and releases him only at twenty-one or twenty-two is that he
enters upon his adult life and work later than the young men of
other countries, including those which impose a term of military
service. As all but a negligible few in England have to earn their
own livings and as several years of preparation are required before
the barristers, doctors or solicitors are qualified to practise
and before artists, politicians or men of business are of any use
in their calling, the English also make their entry into public
affairs later than other nations; they also marry later, but, as
the climate of England does not necessitate early marriage for men,
this influences the lives of the women more deeply and goes some
way towards explaining the social and psychological position of
girls who remain unmarried for some years after they are ripe for
marriage.
While the value of general experience, gained in other parts of
the world, may outweigh that of the technique, the atmosphere and
the moods of parliament, gained from within, it is indisputable
that most young men cannot enter the House of Commons even if
they wish.[17] On leaving Oxford, those who had not to earn their
living entered the army or returned to manage their estates; the
politicians dispersed for the most part to the Temple, to Fleet
Street and to the City, there to forget that they were politicians
until they had mastered the business of making themselves
independent. And a few spent the whole or a part of the next years
in acting as _aides-de-camp_ to colonial governors or in travelling
privately for the study of imperial and foreign conditions.
Those who remained in London and those who periodically returned
thither in the five years before the war alike discovered that they
were in a new imperial Rome in a new silver age. All who had waited
for the passing of Victorianism were rewarded for their patience
by finding a vacuum which they were free to fill in what way
soever they chose; and to the task they brought unbounded energy,
almost unbounded wealth, a vigorous dislike of restraint and an
ingenuous ignorance of tradition. Never, in the recorded history
of England, has the social power of money been greater; never has
the pursuit of pleasure been more widespread and successful; never
has the daily round of the educated and reflective, of the wealthy
and influential, of the stolid and slow been brought nearer to
the feverishness, the superficiality and the recklessness which
characterized one section--but one only--of the French in the years
immediately before the first revolution.
Until his receptivity and taste for mild excitement became blunted,
a young bachelor, who found in London at this time an indefinite
prolongation of his most careless and gregarious undergraduate
mood, could contrive to divert himself with enviably little effort:
one dance was, indeed, very like another, the only difference
between two _débutantes_ was that of name, and--like Disraeli's
young exquisite--he might come to relish bad wine as a relief from
the monotony of excellence; but, before he grew jaded, there was
nothing, save a substitute for his own attendance, with which his
hostesses refused to provide him. Morning after morning, in those
spacious years, brought to his bedside a thick pile of invitations;
as he breakfasted and dressed, his telephone was only released by
one anxious friend in order that another might use it; luncheons
and dinners, theatres and operas, balls and week-end parties poured
down upon him in promiscuous welcome. The enervating suspicion
that he was achieving a personal triumph by being passed from
house to house and from list to list was quickly dissipated when
he recognised himself as one of six men whom his dinner hostess
had pledged herself to bring; but his self-respect could always be
restored by the reflection that, if his entertainers were solely
concerned to collect so many male heads, he himself only wanted a
place where he could smoke, dance and sup between the moment of
leaving the theatre and the moment of going to bed. Every one was
the gainer by his presence.
While the excess of demand over supply set a premium on young
bachelors, it forced down the value of those who entertained them
and drove entertaining to a lasting discount. In 1910, a few of the
Victorians still left cards at the houses where they had dined; by
1914, the custom was suspect as a weak admission of thankfulness;
and, when the gracious days of the great small courtesies were
voted obsolete, an uncaring telephone invitation from the lips of a
butler was inevitably met by an acceptance or a refusal as careless
of even formal obligation. The despised prim decorum of Victorian
social intercourse was replaced by head-hunting on the one side
and by moss-trooping on the other; and, as, in three years, there
was more entertaining and less hospitality in London than in any
other part of the world, so there was also less gratitude and more
greed. The young girl with social gifts, and the young man without,
were not only enabled but encouraged to live from Tuesday until
Friday at the expense of those whom they would have disdained to
call their friends; and the parasite had by no means exhausted
the flow of hospitality when he bade farewell to his party in the
early hours of Saturday morning. If he played golf, lawn-tennis
and bridge, if he played any one of them, if--playing no games of
any kind--he could satisfy his hostess that he would be content to
slumber in the country for two nights and a day, he would receive
more invitations than he could use.
II
In the engaging or tragic folly of the æsthetes, in the literary
and artistic adventures of the nineties, in the blatancy and
arrogance of the new imperialism, the death-knell of the Victorian
age was sounded before the death of Queen Victoria. Between the
end of the South African war and the outbreak of hostilities with
Germany, there was time for the whole face of English social life
to be changed.
There was time, and there was a will. English society, so defiant
of definition, had hitherto been founded on an aggregate of
families deriving their influence from landed estates and made
sensible of their obligations by their territorial position. The
original nucleus was gradually increased by recruits from among
those who made fortunes in commerce or rose to a commanding
position in politics or the public services; but the new blood
filtered in so sparingly that it was absorbed and transmuted by the
old. The existing order was not threatened until the personality
and power of those who clamoured without the gate exceeded the
resistance of those who wilted within.
The balance of strength began to be reversed when one of the
periodical waves of new riches coincided with a sharp depreciation
in the old media of wealth: the industrial millionaire, the Rand
magnate, the American heiress and the cosmopolitan Jew, hitherto
suspect and shy, made a simultaneous appearance at a time when to
the afflictions of agricultural depression was added the capital
taxation of the Harcourt death duties. Welcomed by the most august
and forced upon the most repellent, new and alien faces appeared
at Cowes, on the turf and at Covent Garden; new names among the
birthday honours and in the list of those who rented grouse-moors.
Faced with the choice of marrying money or of economising and doing
without it, the old aristocracy of land crossed its blood with the
new aristocracy of commerce, hoping no doubt that the system by
which isolated newcomers had been tamed would prevail to convert
the barbarian host in companies and to baptise it in platoons. On
either side lessons were given and received; but, while interest
urged the stranger to acquire ready-made an air of breeding, the
fading memory of a waning prestige could not preserve to the older
society the arbitrament in manners which it had held unchallenged
before this surrender to wealth.
A few families resisted the lure and kept their doors straitly
barred; but, as Dane-gelt, instead of buying security for English
soil, only tempted more Danes in search of more gold, so the first,
partial capitulation brought more invaders with ever more and more
gold to offer in exchange for a slice of England. As influence
and importance were focussed on money and no longer on land,
power shifted from the landed estates to London; the steadying
responsibilities of a territorial position, which was already
threatened by subversive democratic ideals, were allowed to dwindle.
By the end of the South African war London had become a
cosmopolitan place of entertainment with more money, a greater
zest for pleasure, a larger proportion of sycophants and a weaker
control by any recognized group of social leaders than any other
European capital. The first flood of Rand, Jewish, American
and native commercial wealth, which had been at least in part
unobtrusively absorbed, was followed by a second flood which
English society was still too much saturated to take in; and for a
dozen years the tottering sea-wall of society was buffeted by angry
and uncontrolled waves of wealth. As the new rich of those days had
abandoned one social sphere without establishing their position
in another, their first task was to surround themselves with men
and women who would accept their hospitality and mitigate their
solitude; a few impoverished promoters furnished lists of eligible
names; money and the amenities of the big hotels, which were then
springing up in London, accomplished the rest. During those years
there was on one side a steady stream of rich newcomers who asked
only that their parties should be well attended; on the other, a
stream no less steady of those who saw in this opportunity the
finger of God.
A temporary check was imposed in 1910, when the sudden death
of King Edward plunged the country into mourning, but in 1911
London crowded two seasons into one. Perhaps there was a fear that
the new reign would usher in simpler manners and a more austere
way of life, perhaps the pleasure-loving, who had lived for a
twelve-month, murmuring in undertones behind shuttered windows,
grudged their days of abstinence. The coronation gave legitimate
excuse for carnival; and in 1912 the fear of reaction merged into a
resolve to postpone the reaction until carnival had spent itself:
the resources of the new rich, not yet exhausted, began to seem
inexhaustible; and every day, by unfitting the parasites for any
other life, multiplied their number. By 1913 the lust for amusement
had become constant and was whipped by a neurotic dread of
anticlimax; by 1914 there was a panic feeling that this old order
could not last. Already war had rumbled distantly since Agadir;
twice in the Balkans the rumblings had given place to storms which
suggested how the suffering and ruthlessness of twentieth-century
fighting would transcend all that had been known before and had
demonstrated how strong were the meshes which held all European
diplomacy involved, how weak the paper safeguard of peace. The
labour world had half risen in the great railway strike of 1911 and
might any day rise in its full strength; Ireland was at the mercy
of two lawless armies; and the government was powerless even to
prevent a determined body of women, already opposed by overwhelming
public opinion, from breaking windows and burning churches.
"How long, O Lord?" asked one.
"Après moi, le deluge; mais après le deluge ...?" asked another.
And in the first week of August, 1914, the cynics who had been
watching the growth of hostility between classes agreed that, if
there had been no war, it would have been necessary to create one.
These were the mad, neurotic years of private horseplay and public
lawlessness, when no hoax was too gigantic, no folly too laborious
to be undertaken for a wager and when ill-conditioned defiance led
every class in the land to proclaim that, if it disliked a law,
it would disobey it. They were days of great costume-balls, of
freak dinners and of nascent night-clubs. Perhaps they are best
regarded as the years which, of all in recent times, the ingrained
puritanism of the English would most gladly forget.
Under the shock of war it became fashionable to look upon this
wanton life as an offence to God, which the scourge of God was
being used to end; and from an audience whose heart is not yet
healed the satirist of those years can always be sure of applause.
It is easy to paint too glittering a picture and to foster a new
sense of superiority which is not justified. For a dozen years
before the war there was much ostentation and polite mendicancy,
much frivolity of head and vulgarity of soul among a world of
merrymakers who had been born without a feeling for responsibility
or who had shaken off the restraints of tradition. Was their crime
more grave than that?
Every vulgarian must be vulgar in his own way; so long as the
institution of private property continues, rich and poor are
equally free to misspend their money; and, though they differed
in their means and in their tastes, rich and poor were equally
guilty of waste, display, lawlessness and sloth; a just sumptuary
law would have borne as hardly on one as on the other. In the
absence of a civic conscience, all struggled to obtain the maximum
of personal enjoyment with the minimum of exertion, protesting
self-righteously the while against the idleness and improvidence
of their neighbours; and, if the poor murmured at the misuse
of surplus wealth, the rich were sometimes amazed at their own
moderation in not resenting the sight of so much leisure with so
little taxation among the working classes.
While those who mocked at the primness and overthrew the decorum of
the Victorian era constructed a social system which to Irish eyes
seemed intolerably vulgar and mercenary, it may be pleaded that the
new and alien arbiters of taste, lacking any tradition of breeding,
could hardly be expected to know any better and that Providence
would surely have made allowances for this before unloosing the
scourge.
III
The breach between Victorianism and that which succeeded it was not
more complete in manners than in art and literature. By the time
that King George V ascended the throne, the great lights of the
preceding century were, almost without exception, flickering out
or already extinguished; those who survived the transition in time
were none the less influenced so deeply by the change in atmosphere
that their later work differs from the earlier as much as one man's
from another's. This is so much more than the normal advance from
youth to maturity that it suggests a revaluation, a new point of
view and a reaction to changed psychological conditions without.
While Kipling's art as a supreme story-teller attained by natural
development to a rarer perfection, his change of standpoint may
be measured by the distance from any one of the _Plain Tales_ to
_They_ or _The Brushwood Boy_; with Conrad the change is from
_Nostromo_ to _Chance_; with James from _The Wings of a Dove_ to
_The Awkward Age_.
The younger men, untrammelled by memories of what they had tried to
express in a previous incarnation, worked with a freedom of which
they only became conscious when they paused to compare it with
the restrictions under which their predecessors laboured. It has
been said that, in the early nineties, _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_
opened a new chapter in dramatic history; when it was reproduced a
dozen years later, it hardly seemed, for all its skill and power,
so daring as before; and, if it were reproduced again to-day after
another dozen years, the younger critics would doubtless continue
to praise its technique, but they might be unable to realise its
psychology. In 1920 it is felt to be surprising that any one
should bother when a man marries his mistress; that she should
commit suicide when another old lover comes back into her life is
inconceivable: to the modern playwright that is not a dramatic
theme worthy of his mettle, to the modern English world that is not
a problem to cause more than passing embarrassment to any one.
Whether England has become morally more lax or merely less reticent
about its laxity is a problem which no one can solve; but the
greatest change that has overtaken literature and art in the last
twenty years is in the new freedom to choose any theme and to
treat it by any method. The plays of Shaw and the novels of Wells
had embraced every subject from brothels and baldness to God and
gunpowder-factories, from patent medicine and politics to love and
linen-drapery. The form of the medium has changed as profoundly
as the content; the play and the novel have been made an avowed
platform for the dramatic or narrative discussion of any thesis
that interests the author at any given moment.
This new emancipation has been accompanied by a new receptivity,
welcome at first and only dangerous when criticism seeks to
navigate without a compass; a new willingness to explore unfamiliar
spaces and to experiment with new instruments. The twenty years
which have passed since Queen Victoria's death have seen the
literary birth, development or at least general recognition of a
company so varied as Synge and Barker, Housman and Yeats, De Morgan
and Galsworthy, Masefield and Rabindranath Tagore, to take but a
few; it has seen translations of Russian novels and Chinese lyrics,
of Belgian mystical essays and Scandinavian realistic plays; there
is no form of literature, whatever its atmosphere and language, to
which a hearing has been refused.
Nor is this merely an Athenian craving for something new. All--and
perhaps more than all--that was worth rescuing of Oscar Wilde's
perverse wit was restored to circulation as soon as the English had
satisfied their love for a legal separation between art and morals;
Samuel Butler was one of several to enjoy a posthumous vogue; and,
if the other heroes were rearranged in the national pantheon, many
were brought into prominence who had long languished in obscurity.
This period saw an immense flood of cheap reprints issuing from a
dozen different publishers; more experiments were tried on more
Shakespearean plays than ever before; and theatrical societies
produced Elizabethan and Restoration dramas which had been left
long unplayed.
These years were enriched by two repertory seasons at the Court and
Duke of York's Theatres, in which some of the maturest work of Shaw
and Barker, Galsworthy and Barrie was seen; and the Abbey Theatre
company came annually from Dublin to delight new audiences with
some of the greatest comedies, the greatest tragedy and the finest
teamwork in acting that had been seen in London for a generation.
As a rule, however, the stage was more fortunate in what it
revived than in what it presented for the first time; dramatic
literature has lagged so far behind other forms that playwrights
would compose and managers produce what no conscientious novelist
or self-respecting publisher dared to expose for sale. The level
of acting, too, was no higher than might be expected in a country
where actors and actresses "starred" on the strength of a single
part and continued in one groove, with plays written down to them,
because they had not endured the discipline of a diversified early
training. To suggest that the English get the drama that they
deserve would be unfair to a nation which, on the whole and with
startling exceptions, enjoys and supports the rare good plays
offered to it; yet there rests unexplained the mystery that,
although the dramatic is the most lucrative form of writing,
although managers and public were clamouring for plays, although
the theatres were filled with erotic comedies, brain-saving revues,
emasculated French farces, clattering American melodramas and
perverse, senile sentimentalities, there were not in these years
more than three British playwrights who could be trusted to give a
recognisable representation of life.
The mystery is deepened by the fact that, during the same period,
the English, who accept with resignation if not with pride the
stigma of being unmusical, crowded a lifetime of musical progress
into a few years. Covent Garden has always been a battleground
between those who wish to hear the greatest number of the most
interesting operas in their best rendering and those who find a box
and the second half of a tuneful banality the best place and time
for meeting again the friends whom they have not seen since dinner.
For a generation the two armies existed amicably side by side on
a compromise by which the music-lovers secured that, whatever the
opera, it should be competently given and the others conceded
that it might be competently given so long as no experiments or
innovations were made. Year after year the hackneyed _Rigolettos_
and _Lohengrins_, the _Traviatas_ and _Tannhaüsers_ soothed the
conservative hearing of any one whose musical education had been
arrested in childhood; from time to time the _Ring_ was given, but
the inordinate length of each part provided a plausible excuse
for those who stayed at home, and a martyr's crown or at least a
victor's laurel for those who attended.
Then, without warning, the new artistic receptivity spread to
music, and a trial was offered to new men and to new works. _Der
Rosenkavalier_ and _Elektra_ were given in those years; _Parsifal_
was played for the first time in England; and all whose knowledge
of ballet was limited to the Empire and Adeline Genée found
themselves led to a mountain-top and invited to regard the new
world wherein Pavlova and Mordken, Karsavina and Nijinski lorded
it. With the Russian ballet and under the shadow of war came the
Russian opera; and, while the old repertory was played at Covent
Garden, a new ecstacy was offered at Drury Lane by _Prince Igor_,
_Boris Godounov_ and _Ivan le terrible_. With the Russian opera
came an artist whose admirers have not yet determined whether he
is greater as a singer or as an actor, though they agree that as a
combination of the two he is the greatest figure on any operatic
stage in the world. The incomparable voice and superb presence of
Chaliapin blew a new vigour of youth and a new conception of beauty
into the stale dust of the London theatre.
Though the spirit of the emancipation breathed also on the
graphic and the plastic arts, as yet its breath has produced only
intoxication. For ten years one experiment has succeeded another,
one school has hustled another out of the way; and the artists
whom the public is enjoined to admire of a morning are devoured
by their own children in the afternoon. Beyond a contempt for the
academic and a revolt from the traditional--not always supported by
technical proficiency in the method rejected--the impressionists
and post-impressionists, the cubists, vorticists and dadaists have
not made plain the goal of their exploration and as yet, though
they have formulated new theories of art, they have not achieved a
new beauty. As, in the reaction from Victorian stiffness, social
emancipation led to a gilded hooliganism, so, in graphic art,
the reaction from the strictness of the pre-Raphaelites led to
chaotic lawlessness. If all England went mad for five years before
the war, her madness is registered, though--it may be hoped--not
immortalised, in the painting of the period.
IV
It was in these years of change and upheaval that the men of the
vanished generation served their apprenticeship and came to first
grips with life. Their fathers and grandfathers, seeing England
riven by a new political dispensation, had acquiesced grudgingly
in the transference of power without seeking to understand the
aspirations of the newly emancipated millions and without striving
to create a new and united community. The fact of social, economic
and racial antagonism, impressed upon them as the legacy of
the French revolution by a hundred years of riots, strikes and
wars, came to be buttressed in the middle of the century by a
biological doctrine which taught that antagonism of beast to beast
and of man to man, of class to class and of creed to creed, of
nation to nation and of hunger, cold and pestilence to all was an
eternal and ineluctable decree of nature. It was easier to repeat
half-comprehended phrases about a struggle for existence and the
survival of the fittest than to attack the disorder which is the
ineluctable and eternal result of antagonism.
After a hundred years of ill-will and dissension, a new generation
arose to protest against the confusion of this endless antagonism.
Impatience with disorder, hatred of ugliness and preoccupation
with the government of man by man--a normal part of youth's mental
equipment--were stimulated in the dawn of the twentieth century by
the literary challenge of each year: in play after play Bernard
Shaw was attacking some social abuse with the penetration of an
old controversialist, the ferocity of a fanatic and the wit of
an Irishman; in novel after novel H. G. Wells cried out on the
slovenly thinking and spiritual laziness which barred beauty and
order from life; and in play after play and novel after novel John
Galsworthy pleaded for gentleness and explored with unanswerable
questions the place where a civic conscience should have been. At
no time since the days of the _philosophes_ has literature been so
much engrossed with the shortcomings of civilisation; at no time
has it appealed so fervently nor experimented so widely. The waking
dream of beauty was reinforced more than ever before by a sense
of personal responsibility; and a higher proportion of the young
men from twenty-two to twenty-seven were waiting only until they
were equipped to undertake it. With a background of new ethical
standards and of new political ideals, in an atmosphere of artistic
experiment and of social revolt, amid a shifting social population
and an unceasing redistribution of wealth, under the menace of
war abroad and of revolution at home, they first measured their
strength against the difficulties of the career that each had
chosen.
Between 1909 and 1914 a few married; but, as the necessity for
earning a living was their first concern in those days, the
majority were for the present as much debarred from matrimony as
from public life. A few went utterly to pieces, ranging in their
downfall from the squalor of touting among their friends for
insignificant loans to the supreme waste of suicide. One or two
flashed meteorically to the highest plane of their professions.
The rest followed an average course and in diplomacy or in the
civil service, in the army or in holy orders, in commerce or at the
bar, in medicine or in journalism worked with what patience they
could muster through the unproductive years of early plodding. By
1914 the original fortunate three or four who had entered public
life as soon as they came down from Oxford were reinforced by a
dozen more who had made enough progress in five years to fight an
election or at least to nurse a constituency; and five years were
long enough to enable the rest to decide whether they had made
wise choice of a career. Some of those who had been called to the
bar now abandoned their wearisome inactivity in order to make a
livelihood in the City; the young soldiers who had been sent into
the army to be kept out of mischief now assumed that they had
reached years of discretion and resigned their commissions; and any
one who had obstinately cherished the ambition of a literary life
might well, after five years, be deemed incurable.
It was the fate characteristic of nearly all that generation that,
as their training neared completion, they were called away for
ever from the work for which they had been trained and lost to the
peaceful service of mankind. By 1914 their seniors had completed
their apprenticeship and made their transition; though their
uprooting was greater, they had at least found for a moment their
place in the uncaring void. The apprenticeship of their juniors
had not yet begun: they passed from school or university to their
war-service, and the survivors postponed until the end of the war
their practical preparation for civic life. This is not to say that
one is to be envied more than another; in every country at the
outbreak of every war, one generation is more violently dislocated
than the rest; when all loss of life is waste of a nation's
resources, it may be felt that the most grievous waste is among
those who have completed their scholastic education and prepared
themselves for work which they can never fulfil. "Childhood makes
the instrument, youth tunes the strings, and early manhood
plays the melody." The vanished generation never played upon the
instrument; it was hardly tuned before it was struck to the ground,
and music of another kind was heard.
It is useless to speculate how much the loss has cost humanity; to
the men in the middle twenties at least as much as to the men of
any age it was left to pay for the madness of the world and the
crimes of its rulers. They were at the summit of their physical
condition; their spirit and training carried them unfalteringly
into the war; and, enrolling themselves in the first days, they
supported the chief burden of a game in which the odds lengthened
against them with every hour of immunity. A strange marching-song
sent them to their death: strident and shrill cries of impatience
with everything, revolt against everything; catches of crooning
waltz and clattering rag-time to bring back memories and to twist
hearts; the craving for excitement and the whimper of fretfulness;
the sigh of a world in despair heard in the silent pause of mankind
bewildered; all blended their notes to a thunder of confusion,
banishing thought. The onlookers cried in rival tumult that this,
at all events, would be the last war in history; and an echo of
their consoling philosophy carried to the departing troops and, in
the belief that this was a war to end war, furnished them at last
with a ready explanation of their going.
A few perhaps wondered why war could only be ended by war and
whether this was indeed the last war; hardly any one risked the
odium of penetrating official propaganda in order to enquire why
war had been made possible, though some liberals searched their
hearts to discover how the historic peace-party of Great Britain,
elected on other issues and periodically fed on professions of
good-will, had been persuaded in a day to honour, by payment in
flesh and blood, international obligations whose existence the
government had more than once denied.
CHAPTER V
THE FRINGE OF POLITICS
"It makes all the difference in the world whether we put Truth in
the first place or in the second place."
WHATELEY (quoted by Lord Morley in _Compromise_).
I
Though by the outbreak of war, their progress towards the House
of Commons had brought but few of the younger politicians to a
constituency and fewer still to a contested election, a great
part of the years from 1909 until 1914 was inevitably taken up by
political studies in a highly-charged atmosphere. The controversies
of that time were waged with a bitterness of which the straitest
recluse could not remain unaware; and the unsated passions of
Westminster were carried to Pall Mall and fed to new inspiration in
the adjoining, ever-open temples of the two great parties.
The Reform Club, own sister to Bridgewater House, standing between
the Travellers' and the Carlton, is the home constructed by Sir
Charles Barry for the supporters of the reform act of 1832 and
for their successors. A necessary qualification for membership is
that the candidate shall be a "reformer", though the rules do not
indicate whether it is sufficient for him to support the reform of
the divorce law or of the tariff; and until 1886 a reformer and a
liberal were synonymous. After the home rule split of that year,
the Gladstonians in this as in every liberal club blackballed
a Hartingtonite candidate, the Hartingtonites blackballed a
Gladstonian candidate, and both combined to blackball an uncertain
candidate till a truce had to be declared if the club was to
survive. In the headquarters of the liberal party, so loveless a
union was doomed to a short life; when incompatibility of temper
passed beyond patience and hope, judgement was given for the home
rulers; and, though a few of the unionists kept their names on
the books, the majority of the seceders drew daily closer to the
conservative party, and the club once more became the headquarters
of liberalism.
So it has remained to this day; and the chief party meetings,
such as that in December 1916 when Mr. Asquith announced to his
followers the resignation of the first coalition, take place within
its walls; though mercifully free from the control of the party
whips, it is still to liberalism very much what the Carlton is to
conservatism; a liberal member of Parliament takes precedence of
other candidates in the order of election; and the only problem
that can now perplex the club is the old question, "What is a
liberal?" and the new rider, "Who is leader of the liberal party?"
It was not to be expected that the conditions of life in even the
oldest and most famous clubs could escape the social revolution
which was observable before the war and which the war accelerated.
For several years before 1914 the peculiar glory of club life
in London was coming to be regarded as one of London's departed
glories: the parsimonious father no longer automatically entered
his infant son's name for five or six clubs, the impatient
candidate was no longer content to linger indefinitely in the upper
reaches of a waiting-list, and the growing absence of restraint
in all social relationships broke out into intolerance of the
crusted conservatism to which young members of other days had
submitted uncomplainingly. The war, in checking the normal flow of
fresh blood, caused some clubs to waste and die, others to turn a
more anæmic scrutiny on the qualifications of their candidates;
and, with the coming of peace, the cry has again been heard that
even the most historic institutions must modernize themselves or
forfeit the allegiance of those who require a place where they can
play squash racquets and invite women to meals. It is so doubtful
whether club life will ever regain its Victorian popularity and
prestige that a student of changing manners may perhaps be forgiven
for halting to uncover at the sound of one more passing bell.
As the nebulous quality of being a reformer is the sole positive
requirement of a candidate for the Reform Club, the membership is
more varied than in most. Naturally, liberal politicians abound;
the bar and civil service are well represented, but probably no
association which is primarily political contains also quite so
many non-political elements. From the days of Thackeray and James
Payn to those of H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett it has always bound
a spell on men of letters: Henry James had a bedroom there in his
later years; and novelists, whether or no they can boast the honour
of membership, alike seem unable to keep it out of their novels.
Jules Verne laid the first and last scenes of _Round the World in
Eighty Days_ in the card-room of the club, and it is chastening for
a vegetarian to reflect that in those virile days your reformer
breakfasted succulently off steaks and chops; it is impossible not
to suspect more than one sly description in some of H. G. Wells'
later novels, while in _Marriage_--beyond doubt or cavil--one
character leaves the ice and idealism of Labrador, if not for
the flesh-pots of the Reform Club, at least with the knowledge
that "pressed beef, such as they'll give you at the Reform, too,
that's good eating for a man. With chutnee, and then old cheese to
follow...."
From a corner of the Reform Club young political aspirants had an
unrivalled opportunity of watching for ten years the history of
liberalism in the making. With hardly an exception the ministers
were all members; and most of them used the club regularly.
The great liberal triumph of 1906 had brought everything but
homogeneity: there was enthusiasm, authority and numbers, but there
was also suspicion and a memory of old feuds. The Liberal Leaguers,
it was generally believed, would have liked to banish Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman to the House of Lords; but both he and his
backing of nonconformist radicals were too strong for them. On his
resignation the liberal party presented the anomalous spectacle
of a radical, peace-loving, nonconformist body with a Liberal
League head; and the first election of 1910 was required to unify
the party. In the cabinet and in the House of Commons there is a
difference, almost incomprehensible to those outside, between the
position of a prime minister who has succeeded to the heritage won
by another and the position of a prime minister who has gone into
action at the head of his army and has been invoked and acclaimed
in five hundred single combats. Though he had squandered the vast
majority which Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman bequeathed to him, Mr.
Asquith returned in 1910 with enhanced prestige as the leader of a
party which had gone to the polls in his name.
The years from 1906 until 1910--the "Mad Parliament"[18]--had been
primarily a time of political education or disillusion for the
liberals who entered the House of Commons with unlimited idealism,
limited experience and unbounded ignorance of parliamentary
forms. In the first flush of victory they cleared the Rand of its
indentured Chinese labour and carried out the settlement of South
Africa by a grant of self-government: to such an avalanche of power
the opposition could offer no resistance, and, so long as the
government effected its reforms by executive action, the reserve
of the old guard could not be brought up. It was when, with a
curiously negative passion for reversal, ministers tried to upset
the Taff Vale judgement and the Balfour education and licensing
acts that new legislation was needed; and to new legislation the
conservatives could offer an opposition to overcome the most
bloated of majorities. The Birrell education bill and the new
licensing bill were destroyed by the House of Lords; the trades
disputes bill, after hanging by the neck, was cut down before it
was dead. Of the three, this was the one most open to attack in
that it placed trades unions, in some respects, above the law; it
was allowed to pass, amid salvos of abuse, because the House of
Lords would not then risk a direct challenge to organized labour;
and this cynical opportunism discredited the Lords far more than
had their partial and reactionary assault on all bills submitted by
a liberal government.
Either of these rebuffs constituted, in the eyes of the party
stalwarts, an occasion for war; and those who remembered the
dismal policy of "filling up the cup" in the Gladstone-Rosebery
administration yearned for a short, sharp contest in which the
malevolence of the House of Lords should be fettered for all time.
Nevertheless, the memory of even a successful election is so
little alluring that the liberal majority of those days did not
wish to engage in a second: the politician of detached judgement
surmised that, when the Nationalists had secured special favours
for Catholics and when all parties had united to concede them to
the Jews, it was invidious to refuse similar treatment to the
Church of England. In rejecting the education bill, the House of
Lords aroused little practical hostility, however much its action
may have offended doctrinaire democrats; and so artificial was the
tattered passion aroused by the Balfour education act of 1902 that,
when it ceased to furnish platform capital, it was left to function
unmolested and is still operative after nearly twenty years.
Similarly, when the licensing bill was thrown out, the House of
Lords was so far from being reprobated by any but prohibitionists
and professional partisans that it even won the sympathy of the
average man by preventing an intolerable interference with his
personal habits and by securing to the threatened license-holder
his means of living. Some such reflections, occurring even to the
less detached politicians, disposed them to wait for a more certain
triumph than was promised by the half-hearted support accorded to
their rejected bills; an opportunity was provided by the budget of
1909; and Mr. Asquith's first general election of 1910 was fought
to reaffirm the hitherto long unquestioned control of finance by
the House of Commons.
If the new liberal majority was smaller and now dependent on the
nationalist vote, it was at least inspired by an unanalytical
admiration for its chief such as no prime minister had enjoyed
since the fanatical personality of Mr. Gladstone drew an equally
fanatical devotion from his followers. Personal shyness and
intellectual aloofness deprived Mr. Asquith of the love felt for
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman by all who came in contact with
him; he never pretended passionate enthusiasms nor roused in
others the passionate enthusiasm which caused Mr. Lloyd George
to be cheered through a division-lobby; he was never the sole
hero of a great bill as Mr. Lloyd George was the sole hero of
the 1909 budget; outside the House he never won the adoration
of the proletariat as Mr. Lloyd George won--and to some extent
kept--it by his Limehouse campaign; and, when fire was needed in
debate, Mr. Lloyd George or Mr. Churchill was left to supply it.
Nevertheless, lack of temperament and limitation of heart were
compensated, in Mr. Asquith, by the unlimited ascendancy of his
head. Eloquent, emphatic, and unruffled, patient, experienced and
resourceful, the intellectual and dialectical superior of the
oldest parliamentarian in the House and the wisest tactician on
either side, a survivor from Mr. Gladstone's last cabinet and Mr.
Gladstone's most brilliant discovery, Mr. Asquith exacted, even
from those who resisted him in the Liberal League days, a blind
loyalty which carried him through four years of the hottest and
most unintermittent domestic fighting in English political history;
it carried him, with closed ranks, into the war and through nearly
two and a half years of the war, though many felt in their hearts
that, by the policy which made war possible, he had betrayed
liberalism and that, by the unheralded formation and dissolution
of the first coalition, he had betrayed the liberal party. After
the December crisis of 1916 the loyalty of his followers, with
their English love for an old, popular favourite, insisted that he
should still remain at their head; and, when he lost his seat in
1918, he retained his leadership. The general election in that year
extinguished his party; it was characteristic of the men he led and
of the leader they followed that, when all was lost but faith, they
set loyalty to their old chief above private and public interest.
II
From the budget crisis of 1909 until the party crisis of 1916
Mr. Asquith, as the Nestor first of his party and then of his
coalition, was by so much the most commanding figure in public
life that posterity seemed likely, in reading the history of those
years, to concentrate upon his name as exclusively as this age
concentrates on that of Mr. Pitt, while forgetting the names of his
lieutenants as completely as the casual reader in these days has
forgotten the names of Mr. Pitt's. Had he remained in office till
the armistice to enjoy the fruits of this early war-administration,
his fame would probably have transcended Mr. Pitt's, as the late
war transcended in magnitude the war against Napoleon; had he
resigned voluntarily, with every honour that could be bestowed
upon him, three months before the December downfall, he would have
shared with his successor whatever credit history may accord to
the political leaders in the war. The time and the manner of his
resignation dwarf his personality and his achievements before
those of Mr. Lloyd George as the achievements and personality
of Lord Aberdeen were dwarfed before those of Lord Palmerston.
"Nothing in Mr. Asquith's career is more striking than his fall
from power," writes the anonymous author of _The Mirrors of Downing
Street_; "it was as if a pin had dropped."
Seven years earlier he seemed to his supporters, inside the
House and out, a leader who could wrest a party victory from
the jaws of political death. Whoever unloosed the winds, it was
always Mr. Asquith who harnessed and rode them. Thus, Mr. Lloyd
George, confident that the House of Lords had, by constitutional
convention, no power to tamper with a money-bill, departed so
far from the traditional conception of the budget as a means of
balancing expenditure and revenue that the House of Lords was
threatened with loss of control over any measure which could be
shielded by a financial clause. It was a bold challenge, boldly
accepted; the House of Lords threw out the budget. No general
election could paralyse their powers more completely than the
device which the chancellor of the exchequer was seeking to
introduce. With equal boldness the prime minister followed up his
challenge by advising a dissolution.
Mr. Asquith's ministry was returned to power with authority to
piece together and carry its mutilated programme, though the
authority was by now so much diminished that the opposition
regarded itself and the country as lying at the mercy of a
small and tyrannous junto: had they voted by inclination, the
nationalists would have assailed the budget, but they gave their
support as a consideration for the later help of British liberals
who indeed called themselves home rulers, but were more interested
in other issues. From 1910 onwards log-rolling by groups became the
first condition of the government's existence; and, before ever the
House met, the whips' office was conscious of the change. Political
history from 1910 to 1914 is the record of the government's
attempts to meet its liabilities. The great bills were introduced:
home rule, Welsh disestablishment and electoral reform; they were
rejected, and the parliament bill was drafted to secure that these
and other bills, when passed by the House of Commons without change
in three consecutive sessions, automatically became law. There
was another election, keenly resented by those who regarded it as
unnecessary and complained that they had been misled by the prime
minister's Albert Hall speech; and Mr. Asquith was empowered to say
that, if the House of Lords rejected the parliament bill, new peers
would be created until the government had a majority; the bill
passed.
After less than ten years, many are forgetting the political
passions of those days. To a radical this contest was far the
greatest democratic victory since the first reform bill, and Mr.
Asquith, after nearly twenty years, seemed to be buckling on the
sword which Mr. Gladstone laid down when, in the last speech
delivered by him in the House of Commons, he warned his party of
the conflict which had been forced upon them: to an Irishman, it
was the promise of freedom and self-government. Nowhere could there
be found room for compromise, though the opposition saw only the
coming of mob-rule and confiscation, the betrayal of Ulster and the
spoliation of the church. It is small wonder if war was carried to
the knife and fork, if old friendships broke, as in the days of
the first home rule bill, and if stern, unbending tories stalked
disgustedly from drawing-rooms when ministers and their families
entered.
Many, too, are forgetting how closely fought was the contest.
Blood, it was boasted, would flow under Westminster Bridge before
the "backwoodsmen" gave way; the whips' office was reported to
have its lists ready, and new peers were to be created in batches
until their opponents abandoned the futile opposition; while the
final debate was taking place in the House of Lords, the first
commissioner was at work on the plans for converting Westminster
Hall into a chamber capable of seating the new creations. No one,
even as the last division took place, could predict confidently how
the votes would be cast.
The victory of the government brought to an end the greatest
constitutional struggle of a century. Henceforward the will of the
majority, expressed through its representatives in the House of
Commons and thrice affirmed, could no longer be withstood by the
House of Lords in its existing or in any reformed state; for the
second time in twenty years Ireland looked through an open door
at the vision of freedom. It may be that the war, in overturning
all political conditions, has caused the parliament act to be no
longer needed: the days of conflict between the two houses may
have passed away in 1914, and from the present disorder and sorrow
of Ireland may emerge a settlement not less enduring than was
foreshadowed in the third home rule bill; but, whether or not there
be one to mourn its death, all must recognise that the parliament
act is dead, and, unless its fruits are to be secured by other
means, it were better that it had never been born with its promise
of hope and its fulfilment of despair. If war with Germany was
inevitable--an hypothesis which increasing numbers find themselves
unable to accept--democracy and nationalism would have fared better
by its coming in 1911; if the act of God had displaced the liberal
ministers on the morrow of their victory, it would have been better
for their reputation and for the principles which they professed.
For a moment they and their redoubtable leader loomed big as any
of the greatest parliamentary figures in history; neither Canning
nor Grey, neither Palmerston nor Gladstone could shew a fairer
record of achievement in the long battle for democracy and the
untrammelled development of small nations.
It was only for a moment. Political history from the passing of
the parliament act is the history of liberalism in its decline
and fall. Were ministers exhausted by their effort? Were they
men who could only do a piece of work when it was forced upon
them? Among his great qualities it is doubtful whether the prime
minister could include enthusiasm, though he worked in office with
the mechanical efficiency and speed of a hard-pressed barrister;
it is certain that he could not be credited with imagination: the
Irish ideal and the Ulster ideal floated at an equal distance
above the practical head of a man who had been taught and trained
to distrust enthusiasm and to reject idealism. His biographer may
search through his speeches and writings for one hint of vision
or a single glimmer of sympathy with anything but material logic;
he might as profitably search through the sole published speech
of Gallio and the comment of his chronicler. Want of vision was
temporarily compensated by adroitness in escaping the consequences
of this defect. For the next five years, friends and enemies agreed
that there was no one to equal Mr. Asquith in his tactical retreat
from a crisis; the enemies added that, until a crisis arose,
he never exerted himself; the friends began to wonder whether
the highest statesmanship consisted in overcoming one crisis by
creating another, by exchanging an Irish crisis for a European
crisis until, in the final crisis of December 1916, when for the
last time he bade his followers choose between Nicias and Cleon, a
majority voted for any change from the long and precarious policy
of brilliant improvisations.
As an instrument of government, the liberal ministry declined
in power as its prestige declined; and its prestige suffered a
severe blow on the day when the public was informed that Mr. Lloyd
George, the chancellor of the exchequer, Sir Rufus Isaacs, the
attorney-general, and the Master of Elibank, chief liberal whip,
had been buying American Marconi shares. The attorney-general's
brother was associated with the English company; and the more
credulous section of the public, never reluctant to learn or to
invent a scandal among the highly-placed, jumped to the conclusion
that ministers with access to information withheld from the public
had been speculating in stocks which their official position
enabled them to influence in their own favour. A widespread outcry
arose, a commission of enquiry was set up, ministers were examined
and the findings of the commissioners were published. As a cynic
observed at the time:
"The tories don't care a damn, but they have to pretend to be
shocked; the liberals are shocked, but they have to pretend not to
care a damn."
After weeks of excited recrimination, public interest gradually
cooled; the hostile press had to admit that there had been no
corruption, however injudiciously the ministers had behaved. The
episode might have been forgotten, the prestige of the government
might have recovered if a concession had been made to the virtuous
indignation of those who were shocked by the "scandal" and of those
who persuaded themselves that they were shocked; no prime minister
is strong enough to despise with impunity the suspicion that,
because he cannot afford to lose them, or because he is indifferent
to their offence, he is retaining colleagues for whose resignation
he should have asked. Too lofty of soul to regard the prejudices
of the vulgar and perhaps reluctant to present Mr. Lloyd George to
the labour party or to the radical wing of the ministerialists, the
government listened only to the dictates of logic and loyalty: if
the three ministers were innocent of dishonest purpose or practice,
they must not be persecuted; indiscretion was not a hanging
offence. The Master of Elibank soon afterwards abandoned political
life to take up, as Lord Murray of Elibank, a responsible position
with a firm of contractors; Sir Rufus Isaacs left the House of
Commons to become lord chief justice; Mr. Lloyd George remained
guardian of the public purse; and the less punctilious governments
of the world from Mexico to France warmed to a feeling of cordial
fellowship with methods which they seemed to recognise and with men
whom they seemed to understand.
This obedience to the findings of the commission was strictly
logical; and in refusing to be swayed by ignorant prejudice the
prime minister gave one more instance of his unfailing loyalty
to colleagues who, it cannot be said too often, were innocent of
all dishonesty. Nevertheless, in the mouths of weaker men there
lingered an unpleasant taste; and, if no one was seriously
surprised or hurt by the conduct of the principals, even the most
cynical member of parliament was offended by the unprotesting
tolerance of such men as Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey, of whom
a more inflexible standard was expected. It was felt that, when a
speculating chancellor of the exchequer continued in office, it
must be because his chief was insensible to the undesirability of
such practises, or because he was too sensible of his lieutenant's
value as a vote-catcher; it was regretfully surmised that the prime
minister would throw a protecting mantle over his colleagues,
whatever they did, and that his colleagues could do what they liked
because the head of the government would never call for their
resignation.
The sense that the prime minister would only stir himself to use
his authority in a crisis encouraged a spirit of lawlessness which
in the years following led to active disorder and the threat of
civil war; secure in the belief that they were too valuable to
be dismissed and free from fear that the head of the government
would call them to order, his less temperate colleagues were
stimulated to a license of speech and to an independence of action
that threatened the solidity of cabinet rule and prepared the rift
which ultimately broke the party. These were the days when the
blood of Marlborough, warming in Mr. Winston Churchill's veins,
urged him to take personal part in a military campaign against
a couple of hooligans in the east end of London; they were the
days of Mr. Lloyd George's more finished Limehouse manner. And,
while it is fair to assume that the prime minister's intellectual
fastidiousness recoiled from this exuberance of action and speech,
he did nothing to dissociate himself from it publicly.
The same lethargy brooded over the beginning of every new crisis.
In addition to a long succession of labour troubles, occasionally
composed at the eleventh hour, but usually flourishing to the
general discomfort of the community at the thirteenth, ministers,
in their lofty refusal to be stampeded, allowed two incipient
rebellions against public order to reach a point of success and
determination at which one could put a pistol to the head of the
government and the other could demonstrate that the executive
lacked power to quell unruliness. During these years the agitation
in favour of female suffrage is only of interest in so far as
it encouraged the enemies of England in their belief that the
strength of the government was paralysed. The parliamentary vote
has now been conceded to women; Mr. Asquith, its most stalwart
antagonist, has seen that he mistook a prejudice for a principle
and has repaired his mistake. In the three years before the war,
however, he was not yet so well convinced of women's fitness to
govern that he would allow female suffrage to become a line of
party division. The suffragettes spoke and stormed, burnt and
broke; their adherents in the House of Commons were not numerous
enough to force a bill through; and the government was amply
justified in not lending support to a cause which had no certain
popular backing in the country.[19] But, if the time was not yet
ripe for a parliamentary contest, the executive had at least a duty
in maintaining public order. The weakness displayed by ministers
in handling this series of sporadic rebellions suggested to other
discontented parties in England, Ireland and Germany that ministers
were powerless to govern; a critic with any detachment wondered, in
spite of himself, why the English fancied that they had any genius
for self-government.
III
Salvation by violence, never a healthy doctrine to inculcate, was
peculiarly dangerous teaching for a section of the Irish who had
been told for almost thirty years that they would be justified in
offering forcible resistance to any attempt on the part of the
imperial parliament to press home rule upon them. When ministers
honoured their obligation to the nationalist party by whose votes
they had been kept in office since 1910, the Orangemen announced
that they would resist by force. Cynics in England may have been
amused, seekers after truth outside England must have been shocked
to find the Irish "loyalists"[20] threatening armed resistance to
an act which could only come into force on the authority of the
king of Great Britain and Ireland and of the imperial parliament;
if not shocked, even the avowed anarchist must have been surprised
to find the experiment in constructive treason blessed and headed
by the Right Honourable Sir Edward Carson, K.C., M.P., one time
a law-officer of the crown and a man committed by his privy
councillor's oath to loyalty towards his soveran. But these were
restless and unbalanced times, in which constitutionalism came to
be regarded as an outworn shibboleth: the bitter struggle over the
1909 budget, the two general elections within a single year and
the more bitter struggle over the parliament bill had familiarized
the people of Great Britain with a new violence of language,
of boast and of threat. The Ulster covenant and the Ulster
volunteers, appealing to the twin boyish love--in such men as Mr.
F. E. Smith, K.C., M.P.--of a secret society and of playing at
soldiers, afforded a new thrill to jaded spirits who were perhaps
disappointed that, though the parliament bill had passed, no blood
had flowed under Westminster Bridge.
Behind Sir Edward Carson stood a young Englishman in a hurry and a
Canadian, no longer young, who had been entrusted with the delicate
task of teaching the conservative party a newer and better style
of parliamentary opposition than Mr. Balfour had been able to
inculcate; the Irish problem united the three indissolubly, and for
present violence and later responsibility there is little to choose
between them.
"I could contribute," said Mr. F. E. Smith on 18.6.12, "very little
to the military efficiency of those who were resisting the Regular
Forces or the still more formidable invasion from the South,
_but_...."
"I can imagine," said Mr. Bonar Law, on 27.7.12, "no length of
resistance to which Ulster will go which I shall not be ready to
support."
"We will shortly challenge the Government," said Sir Edward Carson
on the same day. "They may tell us if they like that this is
treason. We are prepared to take the consequences."
"I do not care tuppence whether it is treason or not," proclaimed
Sir Edward Carson on 21.9.12.
"Supposing," Mr. F. E. Smith suggested on 25.9.12, "the Government
gave such an order, the consequences can only be described in the
words of Mr. Bonar Law, when he said, 'if they did so it would not
be a matter of argument, but the population of London would lynch
you on the lamp-posts.'"
"The Attorney-General," boasted Sir Edward Carson, himself an old
solicitor-general and a future attorney-general, on 11.10.12, "says
that my doctrines and the course I am taking lead to anarchy. Does
he not think I know that?"
"If you attempt to enforce this Bill ...," threatened Mr. Bonar Law
on 1.1.13, "I shall assist them in resisting it."
"We will set up a Government," announced Sir Edward Carson on
7.9.13. "I am told it will be illegal. Of course it will. Drilling
is illegal ... the Government dare not interfere."
"Ulster will do well to resist, and we will support her in her
resistance to the end," promised Mr. Bonar Law on 28.11.13.
"The red blood will flow," prophesied Sir Edward Carson on 17.1.14.
"To coerce Ulster ... no right to ask army to undertake," decided
Mr. Bonar Law. "Any officer who refuses is only doing his duty."
"The day I shall like best," said Sir Edward Carson on 20.6.14,
less than six weeks before the beginning of war with Germany, "is
the day upon which I am compelled, if I am compelled, to tell my
men, 'You must mobilize.'"
"If the occasion arises," Mr. Bonar Law undertook on 28.9.14, eight
weeks after war had broken out, "we shall support you to the last
in any steps which Sir Edward Carson and your leaders think it
necessary for you to take."[21]
While the leader of the unionist party, a former solicitor-general
and the rising hope of the spent and broken tories were restrained
from using language that could be borrowed by malcontents less
highly placed, their followers imposed less check on the unaffected
poetry of their natures.
"There is a spirit spreading abroad," declared Captain Craig
(_Morning Post_, 9.1.11[22]), "which I can testify to from my
personal knowledge that Germany and the German Emperor would be
preferred to the rule of John Redmond, Patrick Ford and the Molly
Maguires."
"If they were put out of the Union ...," proclaimed Major F.
Crawford, a Larne gun-runner, on 29.4.12, "he would infinitely
prefer to change his allegiance right over to the Emperor of
Germany or any one else who had got a proper and stable government."
And even Mr. Bonar Law ventured to state, even in the House of
Commons, on 1.1.13:
"It is a fact which I do not think any one who knows anything about
Ireland will deny, that these people in the North-East of Ireland,
from old prejudices perhaps more than from anything else, from the
whole of their past history, would prefer, I believe, to accept the
government of a foreign country rather than submit to be governed
by hon. gentlemen below the gangway."
"It may not be known to the rank and file of Unionists," announced
_The Irish Churchman_ on 14.11.13, "that we have the offer of aid
from a powerful continental monarch who, if Home Rule is forced on
the Protestants of Ireland, is prepared to send an army sufficient
to release England of any further trouble in Ireland by attaching
it to his dominion, believing, as he does, that if our king breaks
his coronation oath by signing the Home Rule Bill he will, by so
doing, have forfeited his claim to rule Ireland. And should our
king sign the Home Rule Bill, the Protestants of Ireland will
welcome this continental deliverer as their forefathers, under
similar circumstances, did once before."
Since the consequences of their menace have been observed in
the desolation of a hundred million homes throughout the world,
Orangemen have not dwelt with pride on this aspect of their
campaign; and, even at the time when the last threat was uttered,
the more temperate souls felt that the controversy was being
pushed beyond the limit of fair government-baiting. Weapons of an
older type were brought into play: Ulstermen, who of all dour,
independent races can best look after themselves, were depicted as
the future spiritual and financial victims of "Rome rule"; and of
the plea that Ulster only wished to remain a part of Great Britain
and Ireland much was made by controversialists who would not
consent to be governed for a day, had the tables been turned, by an
insignificant minority of Ulster nationalists, backed by political
sympathizers in another country.
With the thunder of opposing oratory mingled the rattle of
grounding arms and the tramp of marching feet; but, though the
Orangemen warned the government that the Ulster rebels were too
much in earnest to be disregarded, ministers were by now grown
indifferent to the bluff of their enemies, the counsel of the
disinterested and the public insults which highly-placed ladies
showered upon them with impunity at court and in private houses.
Whether the anarchy and treason, preached and admitted by Sir
Edward Carson, would ever have flamed into civil war is a matter of
guess-work. The nationalist leaders, rightly or wrongly, thought
that it would not; the prime minister who afterwards discounted
the strength of nationalist idealism from August, 1914, until the
Easter rising was unlikely to give its true value, whatever that
might be, to the strength of unionist idealism two years before;
by now, moreover, he was too well used to actual crises to be
alarmed by a crisis which had not yet arisen. Mr. Birrell, the
chief secretary, was too busily engaged in concealing his defects
as an administrator under his brilliance as an epigrammatist to
supply the imagination that his leader lacked. No attempt was made
to scotch the rebellion or bring the ringleaders to book; enrolment
increased, drilling continued, arms were purchased and imported. In
the spring of 1914 some uneasiness made itself felt in the bosom of
Colonel Seely, the secretary of state for war, and a confidential
question directed to the loyalty of the troops stationed at the
Curragh elicited that a number of officers, holding the king's
commission, would refuse to obey orders if commanded to proceed
against the Ulster rebels.
Though it was still a matter of guess-work whether the Orangemen
would rise, no one could doubt that, in the event of a rising,
there would be difficulty in making the army obey its orders. No
less a person than the leader of the opposition had said that the
officer who refused would only be doing his duty. For a few hours
the House of Commons tried heatedly to assert itself against this
attempt to establish a military ascendancy over parliament; the
tail wagged and came near to lashing the dog; but the creation of
a crisis created with it an opportunity for the prime minister
to shew his adroitness in overcoming crises; Colonel Seely
resigned, and Mr. Asquith undertook the administration of the War
Office, thereby surprising the Curragh and the House of Commons
so completely that the revolts in both places flickered out. The
government, however, had only escaped from one difficulty by
plunging into a greater; ministers, at last realising that Ulster
must be coerced or conciliated and that Sir Edward Carson, relying
on his volunteers, was pressing them harder than Mr. Redmond, who
could only rely on a government's honour, decided to conciliate.
It was announced that the home rule scheme must be amended; a
conference was summoned; the Orangemen were comforted by a promise
that the home rule act would not be enforced without an amending
act; and ministers committed themselves to a formula which has
become an accession-oath to succeeding administrations: Ulster must
not be coerced. To a liberal, the idea of coercion is so hateful
that he welcomes any declaration which undertakes to circumscribe
its tyranny; if it has to be applied, he would sooner see one man
in bonds and three at large than one at large and three in bonds;
but the liberal loathing of oppression, as expressed by Mr. Asquith
and Mr. Lloyd George, seems to have been confined to onehalf of one
province of Ireland. To the tortured and distracted other three
provinces their process of thought has never been satisfactorily
explained.
In the venerable story of an international gathering which was set
to write an essay on the elephant, it will be remembered that,
while the Englishman wrote on "Elephant-Hunting" and the Frenchman
on "The Love-Affairs of the Elephant", it was a German who evolved
an elephant out of his inner consciousness and a Pole who devoted
himself to "The Elephant in Relation to the Polish Question." For
a subject-nation to be obsessed by concern for its nationality is
perhaps tiresome to others; not to be so obsessed is despicable;
and the Irishman and the Pole have at least escaped the degradation
of a deracialised Jew. None the less, though nationality be the
first, it is not the only concern; and even an Irishman may have
felt, during these years, that Irish independence was being
purchased at the cost of a liberalism that was not confined by
national bounds. Political science has changed so little in two
thousand years that, whatever the origin of the state, it now
exists primarily, as it existed in the days of Aristotle, to
make life possible: the personal safety of the individual must
be assured and he must be guaranteed the essentials of living.
On this foundation there rises now, as in the days of Aristotle,
the second law, which alone separates an assembly of men from a
pack of wolves, that the state exists to make possible a life of
excellence; the individual must be afforded a chance of living a
nobler life. Despite sporadic crime and external war, the first
condition of safety was satisfied in England; and, though death by
starvation was not unknown, the existence of work-houses testified
that none need starve. Because the second condition is still so far
from being fulfilled and because the chance of living a noble life
is confined to an infinitesimal handful of the population, a party
pledged to social reform came into existence and will justify its
existence so long as oppression or fear of oppression, injustice,
insecurity, disease, ignorance, poverty and squalor remain to
be removed. It was the business of liberalism to remove these
handicaps.
How far did it succeed? The violence of political controversy
in those days hid from most observers how little was being done
to improve the lot of man, woman or child in England. After the
passion for reversing the legislation of their predecessors had
run its course, ministers did indeed carry a courageous measure of
old-age pensions; their insurance act was generous in intention
even if it was unneeded and ineffectual in practise; and the
parliament act created a procedure for expediting social reform in
the future. But how much else did they find time to achieve in the
intervals of the constitutional crisis and of the unending clash
over Ireland?
While they wrangled, the possibility of a noble life was brought
no nearer. Hundreds of thousands were insufficiently fed, ill-clad
and verminous, with insufficient air, light and warmth; millions
were corrupt with phthisis, cancer or venereal disease. On these
physical wrecks and starvelings education left little mark; and a
century of labour combination and industrial legislation had not
laid that spectre of unemployment which stunts the soul and turns
cold the heart of even the healthiest and most independent when
they live within sight of the margin of subsistence. Day after day
the opportunity of noble living was withdrawn from the thousands
of women who through moral weakness, poverty, indolence or greed
were pressed as recruits to prostitution; it was withdrawn from the
homes that were ruined by drink and gambling. The shadow cast by
the cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of modern civilisation
was so dense that there still existed in England, in the twentieth
century, private societies to preserve animals and children from
being tortured.
From time to time a sudden attack was made on the trade in
human bodies and souls known by timid English euphemism as "the
white-slave traffic"; the criminal law was amended and made more
vigorous; the defencelessness of children was recognised and
safeguarded. For what they were worth, let all credit be given to
these gingerly attempts to heal unsightly sores, provided that no
one mistake part cure for complete prevention. A prison flogging
may deter the pander from dealing in human flesh, but it does not
dispose him to noble living for its own sake; this is begotten of
a sense of beauty by education. During these years a cartoon by
Max Beerbohm depicted Lord Lansdowne trying, with all the amenity
of his kind, to understand just what Mr. H. G. Wells meant by the
barrenness of official politics; the successive education bills
of the liberal administration sacrificed the elementals of good
citizenship to an ingenious game of protecting church of England
children from the perils of religious instruction in the tenets of
dissent; and whether in after life a man starved his children or
lived on the hire of his wife's body mattered less than that for
the first twelve years of existence a unitarian should be secured
from believing or even understanding that God was Three-in-One and
One-in-Three.
While only those who are equally ignorant of politics and of
history imagine that the party system can be ended without a change
in all the practises of English representative government, it is
unquestionable that the sometimes artificial antagonism of two
parties set eternally in opposition to each other causes undue
importance to be attached to politics on their tactical side; the
content is sacrificed to the form. If man's hope of noble living
went unstrengthened in the years from 1906 to 1914, this was
because the trustees of the nation were too busy squabbling for
possession of the machine.
IV
Throughout July, 1914, all parties were working industriously
to amend the home rule bill in such a way as to compensate the
"ascendancy" party for the loss of its ascendancy. That solution
had not been discovered when war broke out. To present a united
front in face of the enemy, Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Bonar Law
patriotically promised the prime minister their support in this
latest crisis; the prime minister, not to be outdone in patriotism,
undertook to postpone controversial legislation for the duration
of the war. The contentious bills were left to hibernate in the
statute-book; the constitutionalists in Ireland were left to
compare the failure of constitutionalism with the success of
treason; and the political historian observed that, once more, the
major crisis had saved the government from the consequences of the
minor.
Unhappily, as controversial legislation was only postponed, so the
consequences of this surrender to rebellion were only postponed;
more unhappily still, they were not postponed for so long. Certain
lessons were learned in the years from 1911 to 1914; and they have
not been forgotten.
First, the government, as the suffragettes and Orangemen had
shewn, could be bullied; it either would not or could not keep
order. And for more than two years it was bullied by strikers,
conscriptionists, "war groups", newspaper proprietors and those
who wished for a coalition; it was bullied in open session and in
secret session by private members, ex-ministers and commissions of
enquiry.
Secondly, officers of the British army could refuse to obey orders
if commanded to suppress a political agitation with which they
might sympathise; it was not made clear by the army council that
privates had the same freedom if commanded to suppress a labour
agitation with which they might sympathise.
Thirdly, a privy councillor might, with impunity, preach armed
resistance to a law, though the result of his preaching were local
bloodshed or a general war; Sir Roger Casement might not practice
armed resistance in protest against the suspension of that law.
Fourthly, the word of a British minister could no longer be
accepted. A political bargain is as binding as any other; and since
1910 the government had depended on nationalist support of which
the price was the home rule bill. When pressure was applied, the
government refused to honour its bargain; payment was to be made
on new conditions and in debased coinage. It is instructive to
read the list of those who acquiesced in this surrender, for the
dishonour of the prime minister was shared by all of his colleagues
and supporters who consented to the act of betrayal: they are
English, Irish, Scotch, Welsh, Jewish and hybrid, so that the
disgrace is not confined to a single nationality; they are men who
probably pay their tradesmen, certainly their opponents at bridge.
And many of them made eloquent speeches of righteous indignation
when the Imperial German government abrogated the Belgian and
Luxemburg treaties. In Ireland to this day and for many years to
come there is not a man, woman or child who will take the British
government seriously. For defence it is urged that, if the home
rule act had been enforced in 1914, there would have been civil
war in Ulster; temporary peace was bought at the price of civil
war throughout the rest of Ireland from the Easter rising onwards,
as the rest of Ireland learned from British ministers and from
Sir Edward Carson that "the great questions of the time are to
be decided not by speeches and votes of majorities but by blood
and iron." Faced with this choice of evils, it was unfortunate
that ministers selected the alternative which carried with it the
repudiation of their own bond.
As the unconstructive critic is no less irritating and no more
helpful than a howling child, the Irish policy of the liberal
government may only be attacked by those who are prepared to
suggest an alternative. The present first essential is that the
imperial parliament should reestablish in Ireland a belief in
its own good-faith; the second, that, as nationalist history has
advanced rapidly since 1914, the Irish should be given a measure
of independence relatively as great as that promised to them in
the third home rule act; the third, that they should determine its
form for themselves. All Ireland should be divided into electoral
areas to choose a constituent assembly which would contain Ulster
Protestants, Ulster Catholics, Southern Protestants, Southern
Catholics and Sinn Feiners (who can enter no conference so long
as there is a price on their heads). When a two-thirds majority
of this constituent assembly has agreed upon a constitution, the
imperial parliament should undertake to enforce it, if necessary by
arms, whatever its form and without favour for any recalcitrants;
and every section of parliament should pledge itself, jointly and
severally, to this. The minds of those who are disturbed by talk
of an Irish republic may be soothed if the word "commonwealth,"
sufficiently honoured in other parts of the world, be substituted.
Those who see in Ireland a base of attack on England in a future
war are not entitled to be heard until they have stated (1) what
war they anticipate; (2) where Ireland is to find the money to
build a fleet or to equip an army, and (3) how, in any war, Ireland
is more immune from the supervision of the British navy than are
France, Belgium and Holland.
Until Ireland has been pacified, the reciprocal murdering and
incendiarism of this new Thirty Years' War will continue, at
the lowest, to hinder succeeding governments in their task of
reconstruction after the war, as the unsettled Irish problem
hindered the task of social amelioration which had been entrusted
to the liberal government in 1906. Month by month, as the shadow
of Ireland advanced farther into British politics, the authority
and usefulness of a great reforming party receded; and, at the
end, the bruised, the broken-hearted and the disillusionised
agreed that, if the liberal ministry which the genius of Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman had contrived and which the biggest liberal
majority in history supported so long and faithfully could have
been caught up to heaven on the morrow of the parliament act, every
liberal would have said: "_Felix opportunitate mortis_."
The outbreak of war marked the death of liberalism. Freedom of
speech was curtailed and suppressed until one scrupulous patriot
asked in the House of Commons whether the Sermon on the Mount
should not be regarded as subversive of military discipline;
freedom of action was drowned by a wave of collective hysteria
in which governors and governed vied with one another to impose
new burdens and to bend submissive and welcoming necks to receive
them. The theory of representative government, shaken to its
foundations when a House of Commons which had been elected to
carry the parliament bill engaged--as a parergon--in a European
war, was finally destroyed when conscription was imposed without
election or referendum. The lusty growth of autocracy soon choked
such sickly flowers of liberalism as a care for the rights of
minorities and a concern for the pleadings of conscience; though
a moment's reflection would have shewn that, if Christianity is
persistently thrust down the throats of all English children, a few
will almost certainly accept it literally, those who looked for
no qualifications to the injunction that a man must not kill were
quickly taught that Christianity was not a practicable creed for
times of war; and a country which prided itself on a traditional
love of fair play first reviled and then persecuted conscientious
objectors with so little discrimination that, when one Quaker
who had acted as a stretcher-bearer received the Mons medal, he
could only wear it in the prison to which he had been confined for
refusing to undertake military service.
Whenever, in the first two years of the war, an article of liberal
faith came in conflict with the heterogeneous policy of a coalition
government, the article of faith was thrust aside. The resolutions
of the Paris economic conference committed Great Britain to a
tariff war with her enemies; the treaty of London converted a
war which had been undertaken to satisfy British obligations to
Belgium into an imperialist war in which the present and future
allies of Great Britain were invited to help themselves at the
expense of their neighbours; gradually there was heard less talk
of a crusade on behalf of small nationalities, and the liberal
party committed itself to a "knock-out blow". So committed, it
could neither utter nor listen to proposals which involved less
than unconditional surrender; and, though Belgian neutrality might
perhaps have been vindicated and reparation secured before the war
had run half its ultimate course, the imperialist policy in which
liberalism acquiesced allowed of no check to hostilities until
Europe was exhausted and revolution had been unloosed in Russia, to
spread no man knows whither. The peace party in English politics
finally assented to a settlement of which any militarist in France
or Prussia would have been proud to acknowledge the authorship.
It was not to be expected that any set of political principles
could remain unchanged by war, though liberalism would have been
less violently mutilated if it had appealed to the heart rather
than to the head of liberal leaders. How far their foreign policy
contributed to the war which destroyed liberalism must be discussed
later.
CHAPTER VI
ON THE EVE
_Τῶνδε δὲ ὄυτε πλούτον tis τις τὴν ἒτι ἀπόλαυσιν προτιμήσας
ἐμαλακίσθη οῦτε πενίας ἐλπίδι, ὡς κᾶν ἒτι διαφογὼν αοτὴν
πλουτήσειεν, ἀναβολὴν τοῦ δεινοῦ ἐποιήσατο. Τὴν δὲ τῶν ἐναντίων
timôτιμωρίαν ποθεινοτέραμ αὐτῶν λαβὀντες καὶ κινδύνωυ ἀμα
τὂνδε κάλλιστον νομίσαντες ἑβουλήθησαν μετ, αύτοῦ τοὺς μὲν
τιμωρεῖσθαι, τὼν δε ἐφιεσθαι, ἐλπίδι μὲν τὸ ἀφανὲς τοῦ κατορθώσειν
επιτρέψαντες, ἕργῳ δὲ περὶ τοῦ ἤδη ὁρομόνου σφίσιν αυτοῖς
ἀξιοῦντες πεποιθέναι, καὶ ἑν αὐτῷ τῶ ἀμύνεσθαι καὶ παθεῖν μᾶλλον
ἡγησάμενοι ἢ [τὸ] ἐνδόντες σώζεσθαι, τὸ μὲν αἲσχρὸν τοῧ λὀγου
ἔφυγον, τὸ δ' ἔργον τῷ σόματι ὑπέμειναν καὶ δι, ἐλαχιστου καιροῦ
τύχης ἃμα ἀκμῆ τῆς δόξης μᾶλλον ἢ τοῧ δέος ἀπηλλάγησαν_
_Thucydides_, II. 42.
I
In choosing the late summer of 1914 for the "inevitable war",
which, to the eyes of Bernhardi and of his school, was to lead
ultimately either to "world-power" or "downfall", the German great
general staff chose the moment when its own organisation was most
efficient and when its adversaries were jointly and severally less
well able or inclined to accept the challenge than at any time
since the Anglo-French _entente_. At home, the Kiel Canal had been
reconstructed and the western strategic railways completed; abroad,
Russia, with her slow, cumbrous mobilisation, could be left out of
account for three weeks; and three weeks was thought sufficient
to crumple up an army which the French, true till death to their
policy of giving everything to their country but the money in
their pockets, had neglected to equip. Politically, too, France was
distracted by one of her periodical Caillaux scandals.
There remained Great Britain; and, if the French were uncertain
of armed support until the first units of the expeditionary force
landed, the German general staff may be excused for thinking that
the expeditionary force would never embark. For months it was
believed at the German Embassy in London that England was faced
with volcanic labour disturbances; Sir Edward Carson and Lady
Londonderry on one side, Mr. Asquith and Mr. Birrell on the other
had brought Ireland to the brink of civil war; and a government
which could not restrain unruly women from breaking windows and
burning churches was not an efficient machine for waging a war
in which the last ounce of ability and determination would tip
the balance. Never, since the day when the triple _entente_ first
loomed in the delirium of German statecraft as an aggressive
encircling movement in diplomacy, had it seemed flimsier and more
vulnerable to the first shock of the "inevitable" war.
This, as will be seen later, is not to hold the German government
solely responsible for the war nor to admit that war was
inevitable. The ancestral voices of the Chauvinists who in 1914
took most credit for their prescience in prophesying war might have
been stilled by the reflection that from t
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