That the English Tommy is not altogether a delectable person, however, goes, I think, without saying. According to General Buller and other more or less competent authorities, the men in South Africa were splendid. I do not doubt it in the least. On the other hand, the "returns" from that country have not struck one as reaching a high standard of savouriness or manliness; and, however splendid he may have been as a campaigner, as an ex-campaigner the English Tommy has scarcely shone; so that in a sense the changed attitude of the English public mind towards him is not to be wondered at.
Elsewhere in this essay I have pointed out that the late war has not reflected any too much credit upon that chiefest of snobs—the English military officer. To go into the army has long been considered good form among the English Barbarians, and to be an officer in a swagger regiment may be reckonedone of the best passports to English society. It gives a man a tone, and puts him on a footing with the highest, because an officer is a gentleman in a very special sense. But it is well known that, during the past half-century or so, the English Barbarians have been too prone to put their sons into the army for social considerations only, and without regard to their qualification or call for the profession of arms. And in the long result it has come to pass that the English army is officered by men who know as little as possible and care a great deal less about their profession, and are compelled to leave the instruction, and as often as not the leadership, of their men to non-commissioned officers. Over and over again in the South African campaign it was the commissioned officer who blundered and brought about disaster, and the non-commissioned officers and the horse sense of the rank and file that saved whatever of the situation there might be left to save. Probably the true history of the British reverses, major and minor, inSouth Africa will never be made public. But I believe it can be shown that in almost every instance it was the incapacity or remissness of the English commissioned officer which lay at the root of the trouble. The fact is, that the monocled mountebank who is in the army, don't you know, seldom or never understands his job. He is too busy messing, and dancing, and flirting, and philandering, and racing, and gambling, and speeding the time merrily, ever to learn it. That the honour of Britain, and the lives of Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen, should be in his listless, damp hand for even as long as five minutes is an intolerable scandal. That he should haw and haw, and yaw and yaw, on the barrack-square, and take a salary out of the public purse for doing it, shows exactly how persistently stupid the English can be. Of course, the common reply to any attack upon these shallow-pated incompetents is that you must have gentlemen for the King's commissions, and that the pay the King's commissions carry is so inadequate that nogentleman unpossessed of private means can afford to take one. This is a very pretty argument and exceedingly English. The money will not run to capable men; therefore let us fling it away on fools. Army reform, sweeping changes at the War Office, new army regulations, an army on a business footing, and so on and so forth, are always being clamoured for by the English people, and always being promised by the English Government. But until the day when the granting of commissions and promotion are as little dependent upon social influence and the influence of money as advancement in the law or advancement in the arts, the English army will remain just where it is and just as rotten as it is.
For downright childishness the modern English soldier, whether he be officer or file-man, has perhaps no compeer. When the South African War broke out, Tommy and his officers were men of scarlet and pipe-clay and gold lace and magnificent head-dresses. Also all drill was in close order; you were toshove in your infantry first, supported by your artillery, and deliver your last brilliant stroke with your cavalry. The men should go into the fray with bands playing, flags flying, and dressed as for parade. You commenced operations with move No. 1; the enemy would assuredly reply with move No. 2; you would then rush in with move No. 3; there would be a famous victory, and the streets of London would be illuminated at great expense. In South Africa matters did not quite pan out that way; the enemy declined absolutely to play the stereotyped war-game, for the very simple reason that they did not know it, and that South Africa is not quite of the contour of a chess-board. And so the English had to change their cherished system, and to learn to ride, and to throw their pretty uniforms into the old-clothes baskets, and to get out of their old drill into a drill which was no drill at all, and to give up resting their last hope on the British square, and to get accustomed to deadly conflict with an enemy whom theynever saw and who never took the trouble to inform them whether they had beaten him or not. It was all very trying and all very bewildering, and it is to the credit of the English army that in the course of a year or two it did actually manage to understand the precise nature of the work cut out for it and made some show of dealing with it in a workman-like way.
Here was a lesson for us, and we learned it. An Englishman, you know, can learn anything when he makes up his mind to it. And he has learned this South African lesson thoroughly well; so well, indeed, that it looks like being the only lesson he will be able to repeat any time in the next half-century. For what has he done? Well, to judge by appearances, we must reason this way: "I was not prepared for this South African business. It was a new thing to me. It gave me a new notion of the whole art and practice of war. The old authorities were clean out of it. Therefore I solemnly abjure the old authorities. For the future I wearslouch-hats and khaki and puttees and a jacket full of pockets, and I drill for the express notion that I may some day meet a Boer farmer. The entire sartorial and general aspect of my army shall be remodelled on lines which might induce one to think that the sole enemy of mankind was Mr. Kruger, and the great military centre of the world was Pretoria." It does not seem to occur to the poor body that his next great trial is not in the least likely to overtake him in South Africa. He has had to fight on the Continent of Europe before to-day, and I shall not be surprised if he has to do it again before many years have passed over his head. Yet, wherever his next large fighting has to be done, you will find that he will sail into it in his good old infantile, stupid English way, armed cap-a-pie for the special destruction of Boers. It is just gross want of sense, and that is all that can be said for it.
CHAPTER VIII
THE NAVY
Since Trafalgar, the English navy has been the apple of the Englishman's eye. He holds that the English power is a sea-power; that these leviathans afloat, the King's ships, are his first line of defence; and that so long as he keeps the English navy up to the mark he can defy the world. His method of keeping it up to the mark is most singular. It consists of tinkering with old ships generation after generation, laying down new ones which seemingly never get finished, and of being chronically short of men. The naval critics of England may be divided sharply into two camps. In the one we have a number of gentlemen who are naval critics simply because they happen to be connectedwith newspapers. These young persons are naturally anxious to do the best that can be done for their papers and for themselves. They recognise that if they are to be in a position to obtain immediate and first-hand information—not to say exclusive information—as to naval doings, they must stand well with the Admiralty and the authorities. The Admiralty and the authorities are not in need of adverse critics. What they like and what they will have are smily, wily reporters, who will swear with the official word, see with the official eye, and take the rest for granted. In the other camp of naval critics you have a bright collection of book-compilers, naval architects, and patent-mongers, all of whom have some sort of fad to exploit or some private axe to grind. Hence the amiable English taxpayer knows just as much at the present moment about his navy as he knew three years ago about his army. In spite of the perfervid assurances of Mr. Kipling, and of the ill-written, anti-scare manifestoes of the morning papers,the English taxpayer knows in his heart that all is not so well as it might be with the English navy. What is wrong the English taxpayer cannot tell you; but there it is, and he has a sort of feeling that, when the big sea-tussle comes, the English navy, being tried, will be found wanting. Herein I think he shows great prescience. The superstition to the effect that the English rule the waves has of late begun to be known for what it is. There are nowadays other Richmonds in the field, all bent on doing a little wave-ruling on their own account. And after the first start of surprise and astonishment, the sleepy, slack, undiscerning Englishman has just let things go on as they were, and has just dilly-dallied what time the new wave-rulers were building and equipping the finest battle-ships that modern science can put afloat, and making arrangements for the acquisition of as much naval supremacy as they can lay their hands on. And whether the English navy be or be not as efficient as the Admiralty and the admirals would have us believe, it isquite certain that, in consequence of budding wave-rulers, the English navy is not, on the whole, so formidable a weapon or so impregnable a defence as it ought to be. The fact is, that in the matter of naval strength, offensive and defensive, the English are just a quarter of a century behind. They slept whilst their good friends the French, the Russians, and the Germans were climbing upward in the dark; and when they woke it was to perceive that another navy had sprung into existence by the side of the English navy, and that the task of catching up, of putting the old navy into a position of absolute supremacy over the new, was well-nigh an impossible one. You cannot build line-of-battle ships in an hour. Furthermore, the yards of England, though capable of extraordinary achievements, are not capable of a greater output than the yards of France, Russia, and Germany conjoined. Half a century ago the English had a distinct and preponderating start. When the other powers began to show increased activity in the matter of shipbuilding, the English said, "It is of no consequence; let 'em build." They threw their start clean away. The probabilities are that they will never be able to regain it.
Quite apart from the large general question, however, and granting that on paper England's sea-power is equal to that of any three powers combined, it cannot have escaped the attention of the interested that the foreign naval experts view our whole flotilla with a singular calm, and appear to be quite amused when we talk of naval efficiency and advancement. It is pretty certain that this calm and this amusement are not based entirely in either ignorance or arrogance. Ships built and fitted in Continental yards may lack the advantage of being English built, but they are fighting-ships nevertheless, and they have not much to lose by comparison with the best English fighting-ships, even when the comparison is made by English experts. Indeed, it is very much open to question whether some of theContinental ships are not a long way ahead of some of the best English ships in destructive power and possibilities for fight. Of course the common reply to this is, that it is no good having a fine machine unless you have the right man to handle it. And Jack, of course,—the honest English Jack,—is the only man in the world that really knows how to handle fighting-ships. Well, it may be so, or it may not be so. The Englishman will undoubtedly keep his engines going and stick to his guns till chaos engulfs him. It seems possible, too, that he has made himself thoroughly familiar with every detail of the machine he has got to work, and that he knows his business in a way which leaves precious little room for more intimate knowledge. In spite of all this, however, it cannot be denied that the Continental navy-man is slowly but surely creeping up to the English standard. That as a rule he is a man of better family than the English navy-man, that his conditions of service are more favourable, and that his food and accommodation are better, are all in his favour. He may lack the steadiness and the grit of the old original English hearts of oak. Still, he is coming on and making progress; whereas the old original English hearts of oak do not appear to be getting much "forrader." Besides, it is well known that the English do not possess anything like enough of them, and those whom they do possess have such a love for the service that they take particularly good care to warn would-be recruits off it.
From time immemorial the English have made a point of treating the saviours of their country meanly and shabbily. In the Crimea the English troops were half-starved and went about in rags, while a lot of broad-shouldered, genial Englishmen made fortunes out of army contracts. It was the same in the Transvaal, and it will be the same whenever England is at war. In peace-time she does manage to keep her soldiers and sailors decently dressed, but it is notorious that she nips them in the paunch, and that the roast beef and plum-pudding and flagons of October which are supposed to be the meat and drink of John Bull are not considered good for his brave defenders. A beef-fed army and a beef-fed navy are what Englishmen believe they get for their money. The rank and file of the army and navy are better informed. With a navy that is undersized, undermanned, underfed, and underpaid, the English chances of triumph, when her real strength is put to the test, are problematical. Meanwhile, we may comfort ourselves with Mr. Kipling and theDaily Telegraph.
CHAPTER IX
THE CHURCHES
The English have one sauce. But the number of their religions is as the sands of the sea. Roughly speaking, they divide themselves religiously into two classes—Anglicans and Nonconformists. The Anglicans, one may say, are reformed Catholics; the Nonconformists, reformed Anglicans. Apparently all English religions—with the exception, of course, of the Catholic religion, which is not counted—date from or since the Reformation. We know what the Reformation means in Scotland, though the English notion of it seems to be a trifle vague. We also know in Scotland what religion means. I doubt if the English have any such knowledge. One has only to visit an averageAnglican or Nonconformist church on the Sabbath to perceive that in England religion is under a cloud and has almost ceased to be a spiritual matter. In the first place, you will notice that the congregation is for the most part composed of women and children. Englishmen are too busy or too bored to go to church on the Sabbath. What little faith, what little religious fervour or feeling, they ever possessed has been knocked out of them, and they no longer go to church. And this change has been accomplished, not by the failure of dogmas, not by the spread of free-thought, not by secularists, anti-clericalists, or philosophers, but simply by an indolent clergy on the one hand and cheap railway fares on the other. The mediocre preacher and the new-fangled English week-end have emptied the churches of England's manhood. The women and children are left, a puling, bemused crowd, and to these the English shepherds and pastors blate their cheap ritual and read their ill-considered sermons.
It is curious to note how easily an Englishparson or Nonconformist minister can make a reputation for greatness as a preacher. Let him be just a little more competent than the average, and people flock to hear him. I doubt if there is a really great preacher alive in England to-day. Yet there are three or four who pass for great, and who are supposed to be in line with St. Paul, John Knox, and Wesley. To give instances would be invidious, but I have no hesitation in asserting that the preachments offered in London at the three or four great churches which are supposed to enshrine orators are, as a rule, exceedingly feeble efforts, tricked out with gauds and mannerisms, packed with trite sentiment, and utterly devoid of doctrine, inspiration, and value. There are not three bishops on the English bench that can furnish forth a sermon worth going fifty yards to hear. There is not a Nonconformist minister who has a soul above stodginess, convention, and a convenient if threadbare Scriptural tag. The Salvation Army, perhaps, have the fervour and the courage, butthey lack wisdom, and they have no art. The Congregationalists have some of the wisdom and a touch of the art, but they have no fervour. Indeed, wherever you turn you find that the recognised English religionists have given themselves up to a decadent, Hebraic emotion, and let the solid things of the spirit—the Hebraic culture, the Hebraic vision, the Hebraic passion—pass by them.
Gradually the churches of this remarkable country are ceasing to have anything to do with religion at all. "Religion be hanged!" say those that run them. "Religion no longer appeals to the wayward, stony-hearted, over-driven, half-educated English populace. What is wanted is social brightness and warmth, the religion of brotherhood and the full belly; so that we will give magic-lantern entertainments in our churches on the Lord's Day, we will go in 'bald-headed' for pleasant Sunday afternoons, hot coffee and veal-and-ham pies, and screws of tobacco given away at the doors, wrapped up in a tract, which you are at liberty either to reador to light your pipe with." As for the English priests that had the authority of God, they are no longer sure whether they have that authority or not. Of course, they believe they have it in a sacerdotal, canonical, and private way; but not one of them dare stand up and swear by his powers publicly. The bishops are all for peace and quietness. "If you please, we are your friends, and not your masters," say they to their clergy; and their clergy, to use an English vulgarism, "wink the other eye." And the clergy, too, in turn are the friends and not the masters of common men; they are so much your friends, indeed, that, providing you mount a silk hat on Sunday and put a penny on the plate, you can depend upon a friendly shake of the hand and a kindly grin of recognition six days in the week, even though you happen to be a bookmaker or the keeper of a bucket-shop. For the Nonconformist clergy, if clergy they may be called, they speak humorously at tea-parties, they enter into hat-trimming competitions at bazaars, andthey play principal guest at the tables of over-fed tradesmen. There is not a man amongst them who can say boo to a goose. There is not a man amongst them who as a social unit is worth the £150 a year and a manse, with £10 per annum for each child, that a glozing, unintellectual English congregation hands over to him. Out of the ease and security and respectability anddolce far nientewhich the Church of England provides for a considerable proportion of her priests, she has managed to evolve a few scholars, a few men of letters, perhaps an odd saint or two, and an odd man of temperament and mark. But what have the English Nonconformists produced? Dr. Horton and Dr. Parker, and that G.R. Sims of religionists, the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes. To this distinguished triumvirate—though the English Nonconformists will hold up pious hands of horror at the notion—one may add that valiant thumper of the pulpit drum, General Booth, who is doing a work in religious decadence and bathoticism which itwill take centuries to undo. Want of heart and want of mind, coupled with the blessed spirit of tolerance, have indeed played havoc with the English Churches.
The loosening of the grip of the Church on English society has, of course, not been without its results on English morals and on English society at large. There is a general feeling abroad that religion is played out, that the system of Hebrew ethics which has been drilled into the English blood by generations of the faithful was all very well for the faithful, but is altogether impracticable and out of harmony with the present intelligent times. You will find Englishmen nowadays complaining that the taint of spiritualism, asceticism, and ethical faith which they have inherited from their people is a source of hindrance to them in the matter of their commercial or social progress, and their lives are spent in an endeavour to eradicate or to triumph over that taint. The Archbishop of Canterbury could not run a tea-shop by the rules laid down in the Sermon on the Mount,they will tell you; and, what is worse, the Archbishop of Canterbury agrees with them. "Take all thou hast, and give it to the poor" is out of the question even for Dr. Horton. Since those blessed words were said, we are told, the Poor Law has sprung up; we give all that is necessary for pauperism in the poor-rate; and, thanks to the excellence of our social system, it is now impossible for man, woman, or child to die of starvation, provided only that they will work. I have heard it stated by an English Nonconformist minister that his chief complaint against the Roman Catholic community in his district was their habit of being over-liberal to the poor. "No man is refused," observed my Nonconformist friend, "no matter how dissolute or idle or irreligious he may be."
Then in the large question of the employment of human flesh and blood to make money for you, the modern Englishman finds that he must either tear the effects of his religious bringing-up out of his heart, or forego the possibility of becoming really rich,don't you know. It is all a matter of supply and demand; and if the mass of humanity live starved lives and die daily in order that I may be fat and warm and cultured and possessed of surpluses at banks, it is not my fault. You must really blame supply and demand. With this fine phrase on his lips, the English capitalist confutes all the philosophies and sets his foot on the majority of the decencies of life. Of course, I shall be told that the prince and chief of all hide-bound industrial capitalists is Mr. Andrew Carnegie, who happens to be a Scot. And I cheerfully admit that Mr. Carnegie is a very serious case in point. But for our one Mr. Carnegie, the English have fifty Mr. Carnegies. They may not be so rich or so famous; but there they are, and the blood and spirit of the English people suffer accordingly. The religion of the wealthy does not prevent them from grinding the face of the poor; and the religion of the middle classes is of pretty much the same order. It is at the hands of the English middle classes that the English poorsuffer a further and a bitterer depredation. For when you have earned money hardly, you want good goods for it; and the English middle classes, who are nearly all shopkeepers, either directly or indirectly, make a point of palming off on you the very worst goods the law will allow them to sell.
And, in spite of all, the churches continue to open their doors, new churches continue to be built, million-pound funds are raised, the missionary speeds over the blue wave to the succour of the 'eathen, and English women and children have their pleasant Sunday afternoons, and bishops keep high-stepping horses; Church and State are grappled together with hooks of steel, and England is a Christian country. Till the churches get out of their slippers and their sloth and their tea-bibbing and their tolerance, matters will go on in the same old futile, scandalous way. If they are to have charge and direction of the soul of man, they must remember that the soul of man is a greater thing than ease, and a greater thing than the Church; theymust not play with the immortal part of humanity, and they must not trifle with the things which they believe to be of God. In no other country save England would such churches and such priests as the English now possess be tolerated or supported; it is the English decadence which has rendered Englishmen blind to the stupidity and banality of their pastors and spiritual guides, and it is the English easy-heartedness which permits the game of cant and cadge and sham to go on unchecked.
CHAPTER X
THE POLITICIAN
The flower and exemplar of well-nigh everything that is choicely and brutally English may be summed up in the English politician. Such a tub-thumper, such a master of claptrap and the arts and feints and fetches of oratory, has never been known before since the world began. He is English, and therefore he knows his business. He has made a study of it as a business, and without regard to its more serious issues. His position is, that, if he would do himself well, he must tie himself hand and foot to some party, and serve that party through thick and thin. Then in the end, and with good luck, will come reward. You may be born in a chandler's shop. By birth, therefore, you belong to the very lower English middle class. Through the practice of a number of commercial virtues, and with the help of considerable speculation outside your own business, you become wealthy. Now, wealth without honour is nothing to an Englishman. He cannot brook that his wealth, his shining, glorious superfluity, should be hidden under a bushel. Therefore he seeks municipal honours; he becomes a town councillor, an alderman, a mayor even.
But these, after all, are not the summits; they lead at best only to a common knighthood, and any fool can get knighted if he wants to. So you determine to seek Parliamentary honours. You subscribe liberally to the funds of your party, and by-and-by a constituency is found for you to contest. You lose the fight and subscribe again; another constituency is found for you, and you win by the skin of your teeth or with a plumping majority, as the case may be. You are now a full-blown member of Parliament; it is worth the money andmuch better than being a mayor. Up to this time you have been an orator of sorts. You have held forth from schoolroom platforms and the tops of waggons what time the assembled populace shouted and threw up its sweaty nightcaps. You have been carried shoulder high behind brass bands renderingSee, the Conquering Hero Comes. Now however, you are really in Parliament; and for the nonce—for several years, in fact—you must give up talking. There is plenty for you to do; you may put questions on the paper, you may get a look in at committee work, you may show electors round the Houses, and you may go on subscribing liberally to the party funds. When you have subscribed enough, it is just within the bounds of possibility that the heads of the party—the Front Bench people, as it were—will begin to discover that there is virtue in you. You will be encouraged to make a speech or two at the slackest part of debates, and some fine day you may be entrusted with the fortunes of a little Bill which yourparty wishes to rush through. All the while you are subscribing liberally to the party funds. After many years, when you are least expecting it, the bottom seems to fall out of the universe—that is to say, there is a General Election. You have to fight your seat; you win; you come nobly back; behold, your party is in power. Then comes the grand moment of your life. You are shovelled into the Cabinet on account of services rendered. From this point, if you possess any ability at all, you can have things pretty much your own way; and if your ambition has been to hear yourself called "My lord" before you die, and to see your wife in the Peeresses' Gallery on great occasions, and your sons swanking about town with "Hon." before their names, you can manage it. It is a slow job, and it involves many years of hard work and lavish expenditure; but it is politically possible in England for a man to be born on the flags and to die properly set forth in Burke and Debrett.
I do not say for a moment that the endand aim of every English politician is the peerage; but I do say that, as a rule, his labours are directed towards some end of honour or emolument, and seldom or never to the good of the State. It is ambition, and not patriotism, that fires his bosom; it is self-aggrandisement, and not a desire for the welfare of the English people, that keeps him going; and it is party, and not principle, that guides and rules his legislative actions. Of course, the great art of being a politician is to hide these facts from the public. If you went down to your constituency like an honest man and said, "Gentlemen, I wish you to return me to Parliament in order that I may make a high position for myself, in order that I may become a man of rank and the founder of a family," your constituency would hurl dead cats at you. Therefore you go down with an altogether different tale: "I am going to the House of Commons, gentlemen, in your interests and not in mine. It will cost me large sums of money; besides which, as your member, I shall be expectedto subscribe to all the local cricket clubs. But I have the best interests of Muckington at heart; and, if you honour me by making me your representative, money is no object."
It is a wonderful business, and a great and a glorious. One stands in astonishment before the bright English intelligence which takes so much on promise and gets so little performed. An English party never goes into power with the intention of doing more than half of what it has promised to do. At election times its great business is to capture votes: these must be had at any price short of rank bribery. And, once landed with the blest, the party immediately settles down, not to the work of carrying out its promises, but to the far more serious business of keeping itself in power. From the point of view of the careless lay-observer, the House of Commons is an assemblage for the discussion of Imperial affairs, with a view to their being managed in the best possible way. To the politician it is just an arena in which twosets of greedy men meet to annoy, thwart, ridicule, and bring about the downfall of each other.
The amount of interest the Englishman is supposed to take in this amazing assemblage and its doings makes it plain that the Englishman himself is well-nigh as foolish and well-nigh as oblique as the person whom he elects to represent him. Next to royalty itself there is nobody in England who can command so much attention and such a prominent place in the picture as the politician. If he be a Cabinet Minister of any standing, it is impossible for him to walk through the streets either of London or of any of the English provincial towns without being immediately recognised and "respectfully saluted"; whereas, if he happens to have come to any metropolitan district or provincial town on political business bent, he may depend upon being received at the proper point by the local authorities, supported by a guard of honour of the local Volunteers, and he may also depend uponmore or less of an ovation on his way to and from the place of meeting.
Year in and year out, too, the illustrated papers of every degree blossom with his latest photograph. Mr. So-and-so in his new motorcar; Mr. So-and-so playing golf; Mr. So-and-so and the King; Mr. So-and-so addressing the mob from the railway train,—these are pictures in which every Englishman has delighted from his youth up, and in which he will always find great artistic and moral satisfaction. As for the journals which live out of the personal paragraph, they must give—or imagine they must give—pride of place to the politician, or perish. Little anecdotes of the sayings and doings of the politically great are always marketable. It is not necessary that they should have the slightest foundation in truth; but they must be neat, reasonably amusing, and flattering to the personage involved.
It is when one turns to the English daily papers, however, that one begins to understand what an extraordinary hold the political interest has upon the English publicmind. It is well known that, in the main, the debates in the House of Commons are quite dull, colourless, and somnolent functions. Half of them take place in the presence only of the Speaker and a quorum. That is to say, nine nights out of ten, members spend the greater portion of their time in the smoke-rooms, dining-rooms, and lobbies, and not in the House itself, the simple reason being that, as a rule, the debates are not interesting. When some reputable champion of either party gets on his legs, or when some wag is up, members manage to attend in force; but it is only at these moments that they do so. Yet, if you pick up an English morning newspaper, you will find six columns of that sheet devoted to a report of the proceedings in Parliament; another three columns of descriptive matter bearing on the same proceedings; and, out of four or five leaders, three at least deal with the political question of the moment. Even when Parliament is not sitting, the first leader is never by any chance other thanpolitical. From the point of view of the dull English mind, nothing more important than a political happening can happen in this world. Mr. Somebody has called Mr. Somebody else a liar across the floor of the House of Commons. It is essential for the well-being of the country at large that the episode should be reported with a separate subhead and great circumstance in the Parliamentary report; that the scene should be described by the lively and picturesque pen of the writer of the Parliamentary sketch; that the appearance of the gentleman who called the other gentleman a liar should be dwelt upon in the notes; that instances of other gentlemen having called gentlemen liars across the floor of the House should also be given in the notes; and, finally, that a rotund and windy leader should be written, wherein is discussed gravely the general advisability of gentlemen calling other gentlemen liars across the floor of the House; wherein one is assured that, in spite of occasional regrettable instances of the kind, theEnglish Parliament is the most decorous and dignified assemblage under the sun; and wherein we cannot refrain from paying our tribute of respectful admiration to the Right Honourable the Speaker, whose tact, good sense, and gentleman-like spirit, coupled with the firmness, resolution, and knowledge of the procedure of the House becoming to his high position, invariably enable him to still the storm and to repress the angry passions of our heated legislators before any great harm has been done. So that a gentleman who calls another gentleman a liar across the floor of the House of Commons really renders a great service to Englishmen, inasmuch as he provides them with a gratuitous entertainment, about which they may read, talk, and argue for at least twenty-four hours.
Recognising their own love of politics and political strife, and knowing in their hearts that the talk in the House of Commons—not to mention the House of Lords—is, generally speaking, of the flattest and flabbiest, one would imagine that the wise Englishwould be at some pains to take measures calculated to brighten up the Parliamentary debates and render them of real interest. But no such precautions are taken. When a would-be member of Parliament is heckled, he is never by any chance asked if he is prepared, at the psychological moment, to pull the nose of one of the right honourable gentlemen opposite. Any member of Parliament who, in the middle of a dull debate, would walk across the floor and box the ears of, say, Mr. Balfour, or Lord Hugh Cecil, would thereby earn for himself the distinction of being the best-discussed and best-described man in England for quite half a week. Considering the small amount of exertion required for such a proceeding, and the very large amount of notoriety which would accrue to the person who ventured on it, one wonders that it has never been done.
In spite of the abnormal share of publicity and applause which is extended to the English politician, however, the solemn fact remains that he is seldom a person of anyreal force, capacity, understanding, or character. Commonplace, mediocre, insincere, inept, are the epithets which best describe him. He passes through the legislative chamber or chambers, says his say in undistinguished speeches, casts his vote, earns his place, his pension, or his peerage, and passes beyond our echo and our hail. The daily papers manufacture for him an obituary notice varying in length from five lines to a couple of columns, and nobody wants to hear anything more about him. As a matter of fact, he has left the world neither wiser nor wittier nor happier than he found it. If he has made one phrase or uttered one sentiment that sticks in men's minds, he is fortunate. Neither history nor posterity will have anything to say about him, though in his day he kicked up some fuss and took up a lot of room. In short, politics as a career in England is not a career for solid, serious men. It merely serves the turn of the specious, the shallow, the incompetent, and the vainglorious.
CHAPTER XI
POETS
It may be set down as an axiom that a nation which is in the proper enjoyment of all its faculties, which is healthy, wealthy, wise, and properly conditioned, must be producing a certain amount of poetry. From the beginning this has been so; it will be so to the end. When England was at her highest, when the best in her was having full play, she produced poets. Right down into the Victorian Era she went on producing them. Then she took to the Stock Exchange and an ostentatious way of life, and the supply of poets fell off. If we except Mr. Swinburne, who does not belong rightfully to this present time, there is not a poet of any parts exercising his function in England to-day.Furthermore, any bookseller will tell you that the demand for poetry-books by new writers has practically ceased to exist.
These statements will be called sweeping by a certain school of critics, and I shall be asked to cast my eye round the English nest of singing-birds, and to answer and say whether Mr. So-and-so be not a poet, and Mr. So-and-so, and Mr. So-and-so, and Mr. So-and-so. I shall also be asked to say if I am prepared to deny that of Mr. So-and-so's last volume of verse three hundred copies were actually sold to the booksellers. For the propounders of such questions I have one answer—namely, it may be so.
In the meantime let us do our best to find an English poet who is worth the name, and who is prescriptively entitled to be mentioned in the category which begins with Chaucer and ends with Mr. Swinburne. Shall we try Mr. Rudyard Kipling? Tested by sales and the amount of dust he has managed to kick up, Mr. Kipling should be a poet of parts. He is still young, and, happily, among the living; but it cannot be denied that as a poet he has already outlived his reputation. Two years ago he could set the English-speaking nations humming or reciting whatever he chose to put into metre. Some of his little things looked like lasting. Already the majority of them are forgotten. To the next generation, if he be known at all, he will be known as the author of three pieces—Recessional, theL'Envoiappended toLife's Handicap, andMandalay. What is to become of such verses as the following?
'Ave you 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor,With a hairy gold crown on 'er 'ead?She 'as ships on the foam—she 'as millions at 'ome,An' she pays us poor beggars in red.('Ow poor beggars in red!)There's 'er nick on the cavalry 'orses,There's 'er mark on the medical stores—An' 'er troopers you'll find with a fair wind be'indThat takes us to various wars.(Poor beggars! barbarious wars!)Then 'ere's to the Widow at Windsor,An' 'ere's to the stores and the guns,The men an' the 'orses what makes up the forcesO' Missis Victorier's sons.(Poor beggars! Victorier's sons!)
At the time of their appearance these lines and the like of them were vastly admired; everybody read them, most people praised them. They were supposed to stir the English blood like a blast of martial trumpets. Here at length was the poet England had been waiting for. There could be no mistake about him; he had the authentic voice, the incommunicable fire, the master-touch. He had come to stay. At the present moment the bulk of his metrical work is just about as dead and forgotten as the coster-songs of yesteryear. He has not even made a cult; nobody quotes him, nobody believes in him as a poetical master, nobody wants to hear any more of him. His imitators have all gone back to the imitation of better men. If a copy of verses have a flavour of Kipling about it nowadays, editors drop it as they would drop a hot coal. So much for the poet of empire, the poet of the people, the metrical patron of Thomas Atkins, Esq.
Another poet of empire—Mr. W.E. Henley—has fared very little better. "Whatcan I do for England?" is, I believe, still in request among the makers of a certain class of anthology; but English poetry in the bulk is just the same as if Mr. Henley had never been. Even the balderdash about "my indomitable soul" has fallen out of theusus loquendiof young men's Christian associations and young men's debating societies.The Song of the Swordis sung no longer;For England's Sakehas gone the way of all truculent war-poetry; and out ofHawthorn and Lavenderperhaps a couple of lyrics remain. Mr. Henley attacked Burns when Burns had been a century dead. Who will consider it worth while to attack Mr. Henley in, say, the year 2002?
Possibly the real, true English poet who will in due course put on the laurel of Mr. Austin is Mr. Stephen Phillips. Yet Mr. Stephen Phillips is a purveyor of metrical notions for the stage, and in his last great work—Ulysses—I find him writing as follows:
Athene.Father, whose oath in hollow hell is heard,Whose act is lightning after thunder-word,A boon! a boon! that I compassion findFor one, the most unhappy of mankind.Zeus.How is he named?Athene.Ulysses. He who plannedTo take the towered city of Troy-land—A mighty spearsman, and a seaman wise,A hunter, and at need a lord of lies.With woven wiles he stole the Trojan townWhich ten years' battle could not batter down:Oft hath he made sweet sacrifice to thee.Zeus(nodding benevolently). I mind me of the savoury smell.Athene.Yet he,When all the other captains had won home,Was whirled about the wilderness of foam:For the wind and the wave have driven him evermore,Mocked by the green of some receding shore.Yet over wind and wave he had his will,Blistered and buffeted, unbaffled still.Ever the snare was set, ever in vain—The Lotus Island and the Siren strain;Through Scylla and Charybdis hath he run,Sleeplessly plunging to the setting sun.Who hath so suffered, or so far hath sailed,So much encountered, and so little quailed?
Which is exactly the kind of poetry one requires for the cavern scene of a New Year's pantomime.
Possibly, again, the real, true English poet is Mr. William Watson, with his tiresome mimicry of Wordsworth and his high-and-dry style of lyrical architecture. Mr. Watson is believed to have done great things, but his rôle now appears to be one of austere silence; he is what the old writers would have termed a costive poet. And if hisCollected Poemsare to be the end of him, his end will not be long deferred. Or, possibly, the one and only poet our England of to-day would wish to boast is Mr. Arthur Symons. Mr. Symons writes just the kind of poetry one might expect of a versifier who, in early youth, had loved a cigarette-smoking ballet-girl, and could never bring himself to repress his passion. Here is a sample of Mr. Arthur Symons at his choicest:
The feverish room and that white bed,The tumbled skirts upon a chair,The novel flung half open whereHat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints are spread.
And you, half dressed and half awake,Your slant eyes strangely watching me;And I, who watch you drowsily,With eyes that, having slept not, ache:This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?)Will rise, a ghost of memory, ifEver again my handkerchiefIs scented with White Heliotrope.
No doubt, if the English continue to descend the moral Avernus at their present rate of speed, Mr. Symons will become, by sheer process of time, the representative poet of the nation. It is part of a poet's duty to look into the future, and Mr. Symons appears to have taken the next two or three generations of Englishmen by the forelock. May he have the reward which is his due!
For the rest, they all mean well, and they all aim high; but one is afraid that nothing will come of them. There are Francis Thompson, and Laurence Housman, and Henry Newbolt, and Laurence Binyon, and F.B. Money-Coutts, and Arthur Christopher Benson, and Victor Plarr—amiable performers all, but each a standing example of poetical shortcoming. Perhaps one ought not to mention Mr. John Davidson and Mr. W.B. Yeats, because Mr. Davidson is a Scot, and Mr. Yeats, putatively, at any rate, an Irishman. In some respects these twain may be considered the pick of the basket. I am constrained to admit, however, that neither of them has as yet fulfilled his earlier promise.
So that, on the whole, England is practically without poets of marked or extraordinary attainments. The reason is not far to seek. She is losing the breed of noble bloods; her greed, her luxuriousness, her excesses, her contempt for all but the material, are beginning to find her out. Her youths, who should be fired by the brightest emotions, are bidden not to be fools, and taught that the whole duty of man is to be washed and combed and financially successful. Consequently that section of English adolescence which, in the nature of things, begins with poetry and gladness very speedily throws up the sponge. Consecration to the muse is no longer thought of among Englishmen. They cannot be content to be published and take their chance. The dismal shibboleth, "Poetry does not pay," wears them all down. What is the good ofwriting verses which bring you neither reputation nor emolument? One must live, and to live like a gentleman by honest toil, and devote one's leisure instead of one's life to poetry, is the better part. Meanwhile, England jogs along quite comfortably. She can get Keats for a shilling, and Shakespeare for sixpence. Why should she worry herself for a moment with the new men?
CHAPTER XII
FICTION
After much patient thinking, the English have come to the conclusion that there is but one branch of literary art, and that its name is Fiction. And by fiction the English really mean the six-shilling novel. I do not think it is too much to say, that since the six-shilling novel was first thrust upon our delighted attention it has never brought within its covers six shillings' worth of reading. The high priest and the high priestess who serve to the right and left of the altar of six-shillingism are, as every one knows, Mr. Hall Caine and Miss Marie Corelli. Each of them wears a golden ephod, with a breastplate of jewels arranged to spell out the magic figures, One HundredThousand. All the other priests of the Tabernacle look with awe and envy upon these two, because the other priests' breastplates have hard work to spell out fifty thousand, and some of them do not even achieve one thousand five hundred. Burnt-offerings of Caine and Corelli therefore fill the place with savour. A pair of sorrier writers never was on sea or land. Everybody knows it, nobody denies it, and nobody seems sad about it. The six-shilling novel is an established English institution. Caine and Corelli are its prop and stay, and the rest do their best to keep in the running and pick up the minor money-bags.
The perusal of six-shilling fiction is practically a sort of mania. It has seized in its grip the fairest England has to show, particularly matrons, the younger women, and stockbrokers. For the Englishwoman the daily round would lose its saltness did she not have handy the newest six-shilling novel by Mr. Caine, Miss Corelli, or the next literary bawler in the market-place. There are shopscalled "libraries," to which the Englishwoman repairs for her supplies of literary pabulum. Here the six-shilling novel has a great time. Strapped together in sixes, or packed in boxes of dozens, it is handed forth to the carriages of its fair devourers, and taken right away to its repose in the cultured homes of Bayswater and Kensington. From morning till night many Englishwomen do little but read this precious stuff. What they get out of it amounts in the long run to hysteria and anæmia. It brings about a general deadening of the mind and a general jaggedness of the emotions, coupled with an utter incapacity to take any save an exaggerated view of the facts of life. Discontent, disillusionment, ennui, boredom, ill-temper, a sharp tongue, and a cynical spirit are other symptoms which the six-shilling novel is prone to evoke. The habit is worse than opium or haschisch or tea cigarettes. It is just the devil, and that is all you need say about it. The persons employed in the opium traffic are supposed tobe very wicked. To my mind, the persons employed in the fiction traffic are as wicked as wicked can be. When the foul disease began first to make its ravages obvious, there were not wanting persons who would have checked it and provided remedies for it. These persons squeaked somewhat, and nothing more has been heard of them. So the thing goes on unrestrained, and even applauded by press and pulpit alike; and the Englishwoman has become a confirmed, inveterate, and incurable fiction-reader. If a man have an enemy to whom he would do an abiding injury, let him persuade that enemy to obtain the six more popular six-shilling novels of the moment, and read them through. If the man's enemy sticks to his bargain—at which, however, he will probably shy in the middle of the second volume—the chances are that he gets up from that reading a broken and spiritless man. His brain will be as saggy as a sponge full of treacle, and his vision as unreliable as that of the alcoholist who always saw twocabs, and invariably got into the one that was not there.
Seriously, however, what is there about this English fiction—or, for that matter, about Scottish fiction—that men and women should buy it and devour it to the exclusion of all other literary fare? It is ill-written, it is not original, it is not like life, it is not beautiful, it is not inspiring, it does not touch the profound emotions, it means nothing, and it ends nowhere. The reason of its popularity is, that it appeals to an indolent habit of mind, and, as a general rule, is calculated to excite the passions, and particularly to open up questions which experience has shown to be best left alone. In nine cases out of ten, where a popular work of fiction is concerned, it is always possible to put one's finger on the chapter or passages on which its popularity is based; and in nine cases out of ten that chapter or those passages have to do with sexual matters. The questions which arise out of the relation of man and woman are no doubt vitally important and mostinteresting; but that they should be discussed in an unscientific, irresponsible, and catch-penny way by everybody who can trail a pen is something of a scandal. If an author can succeed in inventing a sexual situation which could not by any possible chance exist for a moment in real life, or if he can put a glow and a gloss on the tritenesses of love and lust, his success as a fictionist is to all intents and purposes assured. What is sometimes spoken of as wholesome fiction scarcely exists—anyway, nobody reads it. It is the carefully constructed book about sex that sells and is read. Such a book need not be flagrant, as was once thought to be the case; it can be "a work of art"—a thing of veiled suggestion, delicate, unobjectionable, and seemingly meet to be read.
One has hesitation in asserting that such books ought not to be written or ought not to be circulated. It is difficult to justify any attitude of intolerance in such a matter; yet the fact remains that the maids and matrons of England, together with the menwho have the leisure and sufficient lack of brains to read fiction, are being stuffed season by season and year by year with about the most undesirable kind of sexual philosophy that could well be placed before them. Of any Englishwoman of the leisured class above the age of sixteen years it may be said, as was said of the late Professor Jowett in a different sense, "What I don't know isn't knowledge." And the instructor in all cases is a fictionist. If a man took his notion of business, or politics, or art, out of six-shilling novels, he would be set down for a fool. Yet most Englishwomen get their view of love and the married relation from these extraordinary works, and it is taken for granted that nobody is a penny the worse. For my own part, I should incline to the opinion that the only persons who are a penny, not to say six shillings, the worse, are the English middle and upper classes as a body.
Much has been said in derision of what the English call the Kailyard school of fiction—Kailyard fiction being, I need scarcely say, a brand of fiction written by Scotsmen usually in Scotland, and sold in the English and the American markets. Everybody of taste and judgment cheerfully admits that Kailyarders are not persons of genius. For the delectation of the Southerner they have made a Scotland of their own, the which, however, is not Scotland. They have made a Scottish sentiment, a Scottish point of view, a Scottish humour, a Scottish pathos, and even a Scottish dialect, which may be reckoned quite doubtful. At the same time, one looks in vain to the Kailyarders for anything that is worse than slobber—anything really noxious and dreadful, that is to say. One might read Kailyard for ever and a day without coming to great moral grief. Indeed, I would point out that, on the whole, the Kailyard system of ethics partakes somewhat of the character of the system of ethics which used to be unfolded in the melodrama of our grandfathers' days. Virtue rewarded, vice punished, is the moral upshot of it.And in any case, and let it be as bad and as meretricious and as greatly to be deprecated as one will, we must always remember that the Kailyard book is a work invented and manufactured, not for Scotsmen, but for the Anglo-Saxon—the Englishman and his offshoots.
Some months back a considerable hubbub arose in English literary circles because M. Jules Verne had been saying to an interviewer, at Amiens of all places in the world! that the novel as a form of literary expression was doomed, and would gradually die out of popular favour. It is safe to say that, in the eyes of sundry critics of pretty well every nationality, the novel has been doomed any time this last fifty years. Yet the novel comes up smiling every time. Since it was reduced in price to six shillings in England it has undoubtedly deteriorated, not only as a piece of writing, but also in the matter of ethical intention. So long as it remains the prey of some of its latter-day exploiters, so long will it continue to deteriorate. So longas the English mind continues to be feeble and unwholesome, and to yearn for artificial thrills and undesirable emotions, so long will English fiction continue to be of its present decadent quality. As the capitalist says, it is all a question of supply and demand. The great aim of writers of fiction, or at any rate of ninety-nine per cent. of them, is to produce an article that will sell. You must turn out what the public want, and they will assuredly buy it. The knack of hitting the public taste looks easy to acquire, and the fictionist strives after it with all his might. Many are called to make fortunes out of novel-writing: few are chosen. But nobody can examine the work of those few without perceiving that for weal or woe—principally for woe—they know their business.
Of course, it goes without saying that a very considerable amount of fiction is published in England which is just as mild and just as innocuous as tinned milk. To this puling variety of fiction, however, the English do not appear to be very greatly drawn.It crops up with great regularity every publishing season, it is solemnly reviewed in the critical journals, and it even stands shoulder by shoulder with stronger meat in the bookshops. But the fact remains that it does not sell; to see "Second Edition" on it is the rarest occurrence. In fine, the English will have their fiction spiced, and highly spiced, or not at all. Mealy mouthed writers, over-reticent, over-blushful, over-austere writers, they do not want; neither have they any admiration for a writer who is plagued with a feeling for style, and who may be reckoned an artist in the collocation of words. Their much-vaunted Meredith has never had the sale of a Crockett or a Barrie or a Hocking, or, for that matter, of a J.K. Jerome. The English have little or no literary taste, little or no literary acumen, and they expect their fictionists to give them anything and everything save what is edifying.
CHAPTER XIII
SUBURBANISM
Of old—that is to say, twenty years ago—the great majority of the English people suffered from a mental and general disability which was termed "provincialism." If you hailed from Manchester, or Liverpool, or Birmingham, or Edinburgh, or Glasgow, the kind gentlemen in London who size people up and put them in their places assured you that you were a provincial, and that you would have to rub shoulders a great deal with the world—by which they meant London—before you could rightly consider yourself qualified to exist. Against the epithet "provincial," however, not a few persons rebelled, when it was applied flatly to themselves. Most men of feeling felt hurt when you calledthem provincial. In the world of letters and journalism to call a man provincial was the last and unkindest cut of all, and it usually settled him, just as to say that he has no sense of humour settles him to-day. Then up rose Thomas Carlyle and Robert Buchanan and a few lesser lights, who said, "You call us provincials: provincials we undoubtedly are, and we glory in the character." This rather baffled, not to say amazed, the lily-fingered London assessors, and gradually the term "provincial," as a term of opprobrium, passed out of use.
It is admitted now on all hands that the provincial is a very useful kind of fellow; and when the metropolis feels itself running short of talent and energy, the provincial is invariably invited to look in. Latterly, however, the Londoner and the dweller in English provincial cities have begun to exhibit a distinctly modern disorder, which may be called, for want of a better term, "suburbanism." In London, which may be taken as the type of all English cities, suburbanism ispretty well rampant. It has its origin in what the Americans would call "location." A man's daily work lies, say, in the City or in the central quarters of London. For various reasons—such, for example, as considerations of health, expenditure, and custom—it is practically impossible for him to live near his work. He must live somewhere; so he goes to Balham, or Tooting, or Clapham, or Brondesbury, or Highgate, or Willesden, or Finchley, or Crouch End, or Hampstead, or some other suburban retreat. London is ringed round with these residential quarters, these little towns outside the walls. A visitor to any one of them is at once struck with its striking and painful similarity to all the others. There is a railway station belonging to one of the metropolitan lines; there is a High Street, fronted with lofty and rather gaudy shops; there is a reasonable sprinkling of churches and chapels; there is a brand-new red-brick theatre; and the rest is row on row and row on row of villa residences, each with its dreary palisading and attenuated grass-plot in front, and its curious annex of kitchen, or scullery, behind. Miles and miles of these villas exist in every metropolitan suburb worth the name; and though the rents and sizes of them may vary, they are all built to one architectural formula, and all pinchbeck, ostentatious, and unlovely. No person of judgment, nobody possessed of a ray of the philosophic spirit, can gaze upon them without concluding at once that the English do not know how to live. Take a street of these villas, big or little, and what do you find? You note, first, that nearly every house, be it occupied by clerk, Jew financier, or professional man, has got a highfalutin name of its own. The County Council or local authority has already bestowed upon it a number. But this is not enough for your suburbanist, who must needs appropriate for his house a name which will look swagger on his letter-paper. Hence No. 2, Sandringham Road, Tooting, is not No. 2, Sandringham Road, Tooting, at all; but The Laurels, ifyou please. No. 4—not to be outdone—is Holmwood; No. 6 is Hazledene; No. 8, The Pines; No. 10, Sutherland House; and so forth. Then, again, if you walk down a street and keep your eye on the front windows of this thoroughfare of mansions, you will note that every one of those windows has cheap lace curtains to it, and that immediately behind the centre of the window there is a little table, upon which loving hands have placed a green high-art vase, containing a plant of sorts. And right back in the dimness of the parlour there is a sideboard with a high mirrored back.
If you made acquaintance with half a dozen of the occupiers of these houses, and were invited into the half dozen front rooms, you would find in each, in addition to the sideboard before mentioned, a piano of questionable manufacture, a brass music-stool with a red velvet cushion, an over-mantel with mirrored panels, a "saddle-bag suite," consisting of lady's and gent's and six ordinary chairs and a couch; a centre-table with a velvet-pile cloth upon it, a bamboo bookcase containing a Corelli and a Hall Caine or so, together with some sixpenny Dickenses picked up at drapers' bargain-sales, Nuttall'sDictionary,Mrs. Beeton's House Book, a Bible, a Prayer Book, some hymn-books, a work-basketful of socks waiting to be darned, and a little pile of music, chiefly pirated. At night, when Spriggs comes home to The Laurels, he has an apology for late dinner, gets into his slippers, and retires with Mrs. Spriggs, and perhaps his elder daughter, into that parlour. There he reads a halfpenny newspaper till there is nothing left in it to read; then he talks to Mrs. Spriggs about that beast So-and-so, his employer; and Mrs. Spriggs tells him not to grumble so much, and asks the elder daughter why she doesn't play a chune to 'liven us up a bit. "Yes," says Spriggs, "what is the good of having a piano, and me buying you music every Saturday, if you never play?" Whereupon the elder daughter rattles throughDolly Gray,The Honeysuckle and the Bee, andEverybody's Loved by Some One; and Spriggs beats time with his foot till he grows weary, and thinks we had better have supper and get off to bed.
This kind of thing is going on right down both sides of Sandringham Road—at Holmwood, at Hazledene, at The Pines, and at Sutherland House, as well as at The Laurels—every week-day evening between the hours of eight and midnight. In point of fact, it is going on all over Tooting. It is the suburban notion of an 'appy evening at home; and, hallowed as it is by wont and custom, everybody in Tooting takes it to be the best that life can offer after business hours. Perhaps it is. Just before supper, or haply a little afterwards, however, Spriggs says that he believes he will take a little stroll "round the houses." He puts on a straw hat in summer and a tweed cap in winter, and proceeds gravely down the Sandringham Road until he reaches a break in the long array of villas, and is aware of a rather flaring public-house. Into the saloon bar of this hostelryhe walks staidly, nods to the company, and asks the barmaid for a drop of the usual. "Let me see," says that sweet lady; "Johnny Walker, is n't it?" "Well, you know it is," says Spriggs, as he hands over threepence. With the glass of whisky in his hand he retires to the nearest red plush settee, and looks listlessly at the illustrated papers on the little table in front of him, drinks somewhat slowly, smokes a pipe, exchanges a word about the weather with the landlord of the establishment, says there's time for another before closing time, has another, and at twelve-thirty trots off home.
The seven or eight other men in the saloon bar being respectively the occupiers of Holmwood, Hazledene, The Pines, Sutherland House, etc., have done almost exactly as Spriggs has done in the way of drinks and nods and illustrated papers and having a final at twenty minutes past twelve. But during the whole evening they have not exchanged a rational word with one another. They have nothing to talk about; thereforethey have not talked. They are neighbours, and they know it; but they all hold themselves to be so much superior to one another that they have scorned to speak to each other, except in the most cursory and casual way. Next morning, at a few minutes to nine o'clock, they will all be scooting anxiously along the Sandringham Road with set faces, damp brows, and a fear at their hearts that they are going to miss their train. They will travel in packed carriages, half of them standing up, while the other half growls, to Ludgate Hill or Moorgate Street, as the case may be, and then rush off again to their respective offices, in fear and trembling this time lest they should be three minutes late and the "governor" might notice it.
This is the life of the males in the Sandringham Road year in and year out. Through living in the same houses, in the midst of the same furniture, listening to the same pianos, drinking at the same public-houses, going to business in the same trains, they become aslike one another as peas. They are all anxious, all dull, all short of sleep, all short of money. In brief, they have become suburbanized. The monotony and snobbery and listlessness of their home life are reflected in their conduct of the working-day's affairs. There is not a man amongst them who has a soul above his job. Each of them sticks at business, not because he loves it or likes it, but simply because he knows that, if he were discovered in a remissness, he would get what he calls "the sack." Each of them "lunches"—oh, this English lunch!—at the bar of a public-house on a glass of bitter beer and a penny Welsh rare-bit. Each of them feels a bit chippy and not a little sleepy of an afternoon, and each of them races for his train in the evening, chock-full of worry and bad-temper. You must live in the suburbs if you are to live in London at all, and there is no escape from it.
The lines of the female suburbians are cast in more or less pleasant places. They do not need to go to town every day. Thereare shops galore, filled with just the goods they want, round the corner; and there is always the next female on both sides to gossip with. For, unlike the male suburbian, the female suburbian will talk to her neighbours. Her conversation is of babes, and butchers' meat, and the piece at the theatre, and the bargains at the stores in the High Road, and "him." He, or "him," means the good lady's husband. She never by any chance refers to him either by his Christian name, or his surname, or as "my husband." It is always, "He said to me this morning," or, "As I was saying to him before he went to business,"—which, I take it, is a peculiarly English habit. The female suburbian goes out to tea sometimes, usually at the house of some suburban relative. Her dress is a curious blend of ostentation and economy. She will be in the fashion; and, being an Englishwoman, "expense is no object," providing she can get the money. She has no notion of thrift; she is perennially in arrears with the milk and the insurance man; andwhen money gets very tight indeed, she lectures her husband on his wicked inability to make more than he is getting. The whole life, whether for male or female, is dreary, harried, unrelieved, and destructive of everything that tends to make life affable and tolerable.