ITHE CRITICS
Coming into London from Paris or New York, or even from Madrid, is like alighting from a brilliant panoramic railway onto solid, unpretentious mother earth. The massive bulk of bridges, the serene stateliness of ancient towers and spires, the restful green sweep of park—unbroken by flower-beds or too many trees; the quiet leisure of the Mall, and the sedate brown palace overlooking it: all is tranquil, dignified, soothing. One leans against the cushions of one’s beautifully luxurious taxi, and sighs profound contentment. Here is order, well-being, peace!
And yonder, typical of it all, as themidinetteis typical of Paris and thetoreroof Spain, stands the imperturbable London “bobby.” Already you have met his Southampton or Dover cousin on the pier; where the latter’s calm, competent orders made the usual flurried transfer from boat to train a simple matter. Too, you have made acquaintance with that policeman-in-embryo, the English porter. His brisk, capable answers: “Yes, sir. This way, please sir. Seven-twenty at Victoria, right, sir!”: and his deft piloting of you and your luggage into the havenof an empty carriage—in these days of frenzied democracy, whence can one derive such exotic comfort as from a servant who acknowledges himself a servant, and performs his servant’s duties to perfection?
I used to wonder why travelling in England is so much more agreeable than travelling in America, with all the conveniences the latter boasts. I think it is because, where America gives you things to make you comfortable, England gives you people—a host of them, well trained and intent only on serving you. The personal contact makes all the difference, with one’s flattered vanity. The policeman, the porter, the guard who finds one a seat, the boy who brings one a tea-basket, finally the chauffeur who drives one to an hotel and the doorman who grasps one’s bag: each and all tacitly insinuate that they exist to look out for oneself in particular, for all men in general. What wonder that Englishmen are snobs? Their universe revolves round them, is made for as well as by them; and what they want, when they want it, is always within arm’s reach. They are the inventors and perfectors of the Groove.
But no one can accuse them of being sybarites. Comfort, luxury, the elaborate service with which they insist on being surrounded are only accessory to a root-idea which may even be called a passion: the producing of great men. To this, as to all great creation, routine is necessary; and the careful systematizing of life into classes and sub-classes, each with its special duties. English people actually love their duties, they are taught from childhood to love them;and to attend to them before everything. As reward, when work is finished, they have the manifold pleasures of home. This is odd indeed, to the American or European—to whom duty is a dreary thing, to be avoided whenever possible; and home a place to leave, in search of pleasure, not to come back to. In consequence, the general summary of England is: “dull.”
English people are called dull—“heavy” is the more popular word—because they do not gather on street-corners or in cafés, arguing and gesticulating, but go methodically about their business; leaving the stranger to do the same. Of course, if the latter has no business, this is depressing. Here he is in an unknown country, with nothing to do but sight-see, which bores him infinitely. There is no one with whom to talk, no pleasant congregating-spot where he could at least look on at, if not share in, the life of the people. He is thrown dismally back upon himself for diversion. So what does he do? He goes and sees the sights, which was his duty from the beginning. Just as he goes to bed at midnight because every place except bed is closed against him; and to church on Sundays because every building except church is shut. England not only expects every man to do his duty, she makes it practically impossible for him to do anything else; by which she shrewdly gains his maximum efficiency when and where she needs it.
In return, or rather in preparation, she gives him a remarkably fine groundwork, both mental and physical, to start with. No foreigner can fail to be impressed with the minute care and thought bestowedupon English children, and the sacrifices gladly made to secure their health and best development. In comparison with French and American and Spanish parents, the English mother and father may seem undemonstrative, even cold; they do not gush over their children in public, nor take them out to restaurants, or permit them to share their own meals at home. Neither, however, do they give them the least comfortable rooms in the house, and decree that their wants and needs shall be second to those of the adult members of the family. The children have a routine of their own, constructed carefully for them, and studied to fit their changing requirements. They have their own rooms—as large and light and sunny as the parents can contrive—their own meals, of wholesome food served at sensible hours; their fixed time for exercise and study alike: everything is planned to give them the best possible start for mind and body.
“But,” the French or American mother objects, when one extols this system, “it takes so much money; so many rooms, so many servants—two distinct households, in fact.” It takes a different distribution of money, that is all. As the children are never on show, their clothes are simple; the clothes of the parents are apt to be simple too. Amusement is not sought outside the home in England, as it is in other countries; both interest and money are centred within the house and garden that is each man’s castle. This makes possible many comforts which people of other countries look upon as luxuries, but which to the Englishman and woman are the first necessities. And primaryamong these is a healthful, cheerful place to rear their children.
Not only the wealthy, but people in very modest circumstances insist upon this; and in houses of but six or seven rooms one finds the largest and airiest given over to the day and night nurseries for the children. Fresh chintz and white paint and simple furniture make these the most attractive as well as most sensible surroundings for the small people. Nurses, teachers, school-fellows, the whole chain of influence linking the development of the English child, emphasize the idea of physical fitness as a first essential. And this idea is so early instilled, and so constantly and emphatically fostered, that it becomes the kernel of the grown man’s activity. The stern creed that only the fit survive rules England almost as it ruled old Sparta: a creed terrible for the weak, but splendid for the strong; and that has produced such men as Gordon, Rhodes, Kitchener, Curzon and Roberts—and hundreds of others, the fruit of this rigorous policy.
First the home, then the public schools teach it. At school, a boy must establish himself by his proven prowess in one direction or another. To gain a footing, and then to hold it, he must do something—row, or play cricket or football; but play, and play hard, he must. The other boys force him to it, whether he will or no; hardness is their religion, and those who do not conform to it are practically finished before they begin. The reputation won at school lays or permanently fails to lay the foundation of after success.“Hm ... yes, I remember him at Eton,” has summarized many a man’s chances for promotion or failure. Rarely does he prove himself to be worth later more than he was worth then.
It is interesting to follow the primitive ideal, of bodily perfection, throughout this old and perhaps most finely developed civilization of the present. In the hurry-scurry of modern affairs, when other men pay little or no heed to preserving their bodily strength, never does this cease to be the first consideration of the Englishman. He wants money and position and power quite as keenly as other men want them; but he has been born and reared in the knowledge that to gain these things, then to enjoy them, sound nerves are necessary. His impulse is to store up energy faster than he spends it, and not to waste himself on a series of trifles someone else can do as well if not better than he.
Hence the carefully ordered routine he follows from childhood; the systematic exercise, the frequent holidays his strenuous American cousin scoffs at. All are designed to keep him hard and fit, and ready for emergencies that may demand surplus strength. Middle-aged men play the game and follow the hobbies of young men; the elderly vie with the middle-aged. In England, the fast and fixed lines that divide youth from maturity are blurred by the hearty good comradeship of sport; in which all ages and classes share alike. Sport is not a hobby with the Englishman; it is the backbone of his existence. Therefore, I think, it is so hard for the foreigner toenter into the real sports spirit of England: he never quite appreciates the vital motive behind it. With the Frenchman and the American and the Spaniard—even with the Austrian—sport is recreation; they take it apart from the business of life, where the Englishman takes it as essential to life itself. By it he establishes and maintains his working efficiency, and without it he would have lost his chief tool, and his perennial remedy for whatever ills befall him.
Obviously, it is this demand for physical perfection that underlies and engenders the national worship of race; and that is responsible, in the last analysis, for the renowned snobbishness of the English. Someone has said that English Society revolves round the King and the horse—or, as he might have added, round the supreme symbols of human and animal development. That towards which everyone is striving—to breed finer and stronger creatures—is crystallized in these two superlative types. While from the King down, on the human side, the scale is divided into the most minute shades of gradation.
As government in England tends to become more and more democratic, society tends to become more aristocratic—as far as magnifying ancient names and privileges is concerned. “A title is always a title,” said a practical American lady, “but an English title is just a bit better.” It is, because English people think so, and have thought it so long and so emphatically that they have brought everyone else to that opinion. The same is true of many English institutions,admirable in themselves but which actually are admired because the English admire them. Every nation is more or less egoist, but none is so sincerely and consistently egoist as the English. They travel the earth, but they travel to observe and criticize; not to assimilate foreign things.
The American is a chameleon, taking on the habits and ideas of each place as he lives in it; Latins have not a little of this character too. But the Briton, wherever he goes, remains the Briton: you never mistake him, in Palestine or Alaska or the South Sea Islands: no matter where he is, he has brought his tea and his tub and his point of view with him. And, though he may be one among thousands of another nationality, somehow these others become impressed with his traditions rather than he with theirs. Perhaps because away from home, he calmly pursues the home routine, adjusting the life of his temporary habitation to himself, rather than himself to it. If he is accustomed to dress for dinner, he dresses; though the rest of the company may appear in corduroys and neckerchiefs. And continues to dress, imperturbably, no matter how mercilessly he may be ridiculed or even despised. If he is accustomed to take tea at a certain hour, he takes it—in Brazil or Thibet, it makes no difference. And the same is true of his religious observance, his beloved exercise, his hobbies and his study: of all these things he is too firmly convinced to change them by one jot. Such an attitude is bound to have its effect on these persistently confronted with it; resentment, then curiosity, finally acertain grudging respect is born in the minds of the people on whom the Englishman serenely forces his superiority. They wonder about his country—he never sounds its praises or urges them to visit it. He simply speaks with complete contentment of “going home.”
When the foreigner, often out of verypique, follows him thither, he is met with the same indifference shown him in his own land. Visiting strangers may come or go: while they are in England, they are treated with civility; when they choose to depart, they are not pressed to remain. This tranquil self-sufficiency is galling to the majority, who go away to sulk, and to denounce the English as a race of “dull snobs.” Yet they come back again—and again; and continue to hammer at the door labelled “British Reserve,” and to be snubbed, and to swallow their pride and begin anew, until finally they pry their way in by sheer obstinacy—and because no one cares very much, after all, whether they are in or not. London is so vast and so diverse, in its social ramifications, it can admit thousands of aliens a year and remain quite unconscious of them.
Americans in particular are quick to realize this, and, out of their natural arrogance, bitterly to resent it. At home they explain rather piteously, they are “someone”; here, their money is accepted, but they themselves are despised—or, at best, barely tolerated. They who are used to carry all before them find themselves patronized, smiled at indulgently—or, worst of all, ignored. In short, the inexperienced young actorscome before an audience of seasoned critics, whom they cannot persuade to take them seriously. For they soon discover that there is no “bluffing” these calmly judicial people, but that merit alone—of one sort or another—succeeds with them.
They are not to be “impressed” by tales of reckless expenditure or intimate allusions to grand dukes and princesses seen on the promenades of Continental “cures.” On the contrary, they are won over in no time by something the American would never think of using as a wedge—unaffected simplicity. But why should one want to win them—whether one be American or French, Spanish, German, or any other self-respecting egoist-on-one’s-own? Why does one always want to win the critical?
Because they set a standard. The English have set standards since ever they were at all: wise standards, foolish standards, some broad and finely tolerant, others absurdly narrow and short-sighted. But always they live by strict established rule, to which they demand of themselves exacting conformity. Each class has its individual ten commandments—as is possible where classes are so definitely graded and set apart; each man is born to obey the decalogue of his class—or to be destroyed. Practically limitless personal liberty is his, within the laws of his particular section of society; but let him once overstep these, and he soon finds himself in gaol of one kind or another.
Foreigners feel all this, and respond to it; just as they respond to the French criterion of beauty, theAmerican criterion of wealth. England for centuries has stood for theprécieuxof society, in the large significance of the term; before her unwavering ideal of race, other people voluntarily come to be judged for distinction, as they go to Paris to be judged for their artistic quality, to New York for their powers of accomplishment. Today more than ever, London confers the social diploma of the world which makes it, of course, the world’s Mecca and chief meeting-place.
This has completely changed the character of the conservative old city, from a provincial insular capital into a great cosmopolitan centre. Necessarily it has leavened the traditional British self-satisfaction, while that colossus slept, by the introduction of new principles, new problems, new points of view. The critic remains the critic, but he must march with the times—or lose his station. And conservatism is a dotard nowadays. Each new republic, as it comes along, shoves the old man a foot further towards his grave. Expansion is the battle-cry of the present, and critics and actors alike must look alive, and modulate their voices to the chorus.
A bewildering babel of tunes is the natural result in this transition period, but many of them are fine and all are interesting. England lifts her voice to announce that she is not an island but an Empire; and it is the fashion in London now to treat Colonials with civility, even actually to fête them.Autre temps, autre mœurs!We have heard Mr. Bernard Shaw’s charwoman ask her famous daughter of theHalls: “But what’ll his duchess mother be thinkin’ if the dook marries a ballyrina, with me for a mother-in-law!” And the answer: “Indeed, she says she’s glad he’ll have somebody to pay his income tax, when it goes to twenty shillings in the pound!”
The outcry against American peeresses and musical comedy marchionesses has long since died into a murmur, and a feeble murmur at that. Since another astute playwright suggested that the race of Vere de Vere might be distinctly improved by the infusion of some healthy vulgar blood, and a chin or two amongst them, the aristocratic gates have opened almost eagerly to receive these alien beauties. In politics, too, new blood is welcomed; as it is in the Church, in the universities, and even in that haughtiest of citadels, the county. The egoism of England is becoming a more practical egoism: she is beginning to see where she can use the things she has hitherto disdained, and is almost pathetically anxious to make up for lost time. But, for ballast, she has always her uncompromising standards, by which both things and people must be weighed and found good, before being accepted.
In short, while the bugaboo of invasion and the more serious menace of Socialism have grown up to lead pessimists to predict ruin for the country, subtler influences have been at work to make her greater than ever before. The signs of conflict are almost always hopeful signs; only stagnation spells ruin. And where once the English delighted to stagnate—or at least to sit within their insular shell and admire themselveswithout qualification—now they are looking keenly about, to acquire useful men and methods from every possible source. Finding, a bit to their own surprise, that, rather than diminishing their prestige in the process, they are strengthening it.
The routine is being amplified, made to fit the spirit of the time, which is a spirit of progress above all things. John Bull has evolved from a hard-riding, hard-drinking, provincial squire into a keen-thinking tactician with cosmopolitan tendencies and breadth of view. From London as his reviewing-stand, he scrutinizes the nations as they pass; and his judgment—but that is for another chapter.