CHAPTER XIILITERARY TOTEMSIlla tamen gravior, quae cum discumbere coepitlaudat Vergilium, periturae ignoscit Elissae,committat vates et comparat, inde Maronematque alia parte in trutina suspendit Homerum.cedunt grammatici, vincuntur rhetores, omnisturba tacet, nec causidicus nec praeco loquetur,altera nec mulier. Verborum tanta cadit vis,tot pariter pelves ac tintinnabula dicaspulsari. Jam nemo tubas, nemo aera fatiget;una laboranti poterit succerrere Lunae.imponit finem sapiens et rebus honestis;nam quae docta nimis cupit et facunda videri,crure tenus medio tunicas succingere debet,caedere Silvano porcum, quadrante lavari.non habeat matrona, tibi quae iuncta recumbit,dicendi genus, aut curvum sermone rotatotorqueat enthymema, nec historias sciat omnes,sed quaedam ex libris et non intellegat. Odihanc ego quae repetit volvitque Palaemonis artemservata semper lege et ratione loquendiignotosque mihi tenet antiquaria versusnec curanda viris opicae castigat amicaeverba: soloecismum liceat fecisse marito.Juvenal: Satire VI.IWhile there is excellent authority for the statement that the Holy Roman Empire was not holy nor Roman nor an empire, the reader of mediaeval history has, for a century and a half, been left without an equally trenchant definition of what that empire was. In like manner, while it is comparativelyeasy for the student of modern manners to assert that "literary London" is neither London nor literary, he might find it difficult to amplify this in positive terms unless he described it as "cultured Kensington." The first phrase, like its baffling brethren "a man-about-town" and "the Oxford manner," to which reference has already been made, is part of modern currency and is tendered by the press and accepted by the public without a thought on either side whether it represents any value as an idea. Is the literary London to which newspapers refer synonymous with the committee of the Authors' Society? Is it to be found, of a Sunday afternoon, at Mrs. Leo Hunter's house? Does it lurk, unrecognised and fiercely retiring, in that district which cabmen call Chelsea and more poetic spirits "the Latin Quarter of London"?Or is it but a flight of fancy, like "the upper ten" or "the middle classes"?Regret is sometimes expressed that there is no assembly in which all men-of-letters can gather and explain—in a phrase beloved of H. G. Wells—"what they are up to." Though the experiment had often been tried, it has always failed. There is, indeed, an abundance of literary societies which meet for dinner and damnable iteration in honour of one or other "immortal memory"; there is a plethora of the larger, looser associations which have been formed to entertain authors and, in sheer lust for culture, to submit to their lectures. There are houses from which no author is long secure; there are clubs, founded to aid their members in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, where authors meet in large numbers. But there is no one literary clearing-house, there is nothing that can be called "literary London."For this, the unreflecting world is not always sufficiently grateful.The first business of a poet, it may be submitted, is to write poetry rather than to talk about what he has written; the second, to write it by himself, as the pure, unaided expression of his genius, rather than to labour under the limitations and confusions of a school; the third, to let his poetry stand as its own explanation and apology to the critics and to the public. If, in the end, his readers persist in wishing to discuss it with him, he may not always be able to escape, though he may forestall disappointment by warning them that, because a man can express himself on paper, he need not be able to express himself in conversation and that the poet in hours of idleness is not necessarily better worth meeting than the dentist on holiday. Thiscaveatonce entered, he can offer no further resistance, short of a blunt refusal, to the hostesses who are still eager to secure "the distinguished author" of this or that: sooner or later his neck will be bent over their dinner-tables.There follows one of two inevitable results: the author, from modesty or self-consciousness, curvets and shies from the one subject which he has been summoned to discuss and takes refuge in the Russian ballet and Ascot;[50]or else he resigns himself to his apotheosis and gobbles more complimentary sugar-plums than are good for his soul's digestion; he is fated to spoil the party or to be spoiled by it.Next in the preparation of his spiritual downfall comes the bland assumption that the creator must alsobe a critic; when he has adequately descanted upon his own books, he will be required to give an opinion on the books of others. These, unless he loftily (but impressively) refuse to admit that there have been poets since Shelley, he never wholly condemns for fear of seeming vain or small-minded, though he may sometimes admit that he has not had time to read them; it is easier to disparage by flattery and to say that his rival has not yet done his best work or that he will never give rein to his genius until he is less influenced by the spell of Swinburne (within an hour this has been crystallised into the judgement that "X writes such dreadful Swinburne-and-water"); it is easier still to shake a regretful head and to hope that X is not sacrificing Art to Popularity. As a rule the creator-critic praises vehemently, thus gaining for himself a reputation for generosity and doing service to a friend who is doing him the same service at that moment in another part of London. Mutual admiration and log-rolling have not changed since Du Maurier satirised them in thePunchesof the eighties; and the gentle art of self-advertisement has at least not diminished in the resourcefulness of its technique during the last forty years. There are, however, so many opportunities of securing a wider publicity that the author who shews himself off in a drawing-room is wasting his time and energy: the columns of the press are already open to him, and, as his new book draws near to publication, he can always direct attention to himself by inaugurating a discussion on the pagan tendency of modern poetry or on the victimisation of young poets by unscrupulous editors; he can let himself be persuaded into speaking at public dinners and having his speeches reported; he can be affably at hand when professionalwriters of paragraphs are short of copy. If it be his ambition to keep his name before the public, he can without difficulty emulate the methods of one author who backed himself to be mentioned in the press on every day of the year—and won his wager. It may be doubted, nevertheless, whether public or private popularity-seeking is good for the fibre of a man's soul.If a writer should avoid the food and flattery of the professional lion-hunter, so, for a different reason, he should resist the temptation to closet himself with those who are plying the same trade. If it produce nothing else, the inevitable discussion of himself and of his work produces self-consciousness; and a man will commonly achieve less valuable results by harkening for the applause of a clique or by trying to follow lines and tendencies set by a committee. The great work of art is individual; and, though a painter may have his school, though the technique of painting is usually taught in a school, there is no ground for thinking that a man may be taught to write by those who are themselves learning.As an author should work by himself to produce what is in him, so, when he has produced it, he should neither explain nor complain. It is perhaps a counsel of perfection to say that authors and critics should never meet. Mr. Walkley has expounded this difficulty in dramatic criticism: is the critic to eschew the actor's company? Is he to rise from the same dinner-table and slay his friend in print? Should he disparage a friend for fear of partiality or praise an unknown playwright because he is unknown? The difficulties are not less great when the novelist and his critic are on terms of friendship; but literature and criticism both suffer when this personal relationship is used to influence the author or thecritic. As a rule the press, turning its back on the brutalities of the early nineteenth century, encourages the new writer and relieves its feelings at the expense of one who is considered to be "established"; in dramatic criticism it generally ignores the newcomer and atones later for its neglect by praising indiscriminately the man who has won his niche. Either practise may be considered as at least no more senseless than any other which criticises the writer rather than the book that he has written. No reasonable man will object so long as criticism is independent of personal obligations, advertisement-revenue, æsthetic prejudice and private predilections; so long, too, as the reviewer is neither a careless young man in a hurry to create on his own account, nor an embittered old man who has tried and failed; so long, finally, as the critic brings to his task as much experience, self-discipline and labour as the author has given to his.The danger which threatens the deliberate formation of a literary society is that authors and critics will both lose something of their independence. In other callings there is often a rigid etiquette to protect social intercourse from professional abuse: the barrister who dines too regularly with solicitors will expose himself to suspicion, and the surgeon is expected to shew by his demeanour that his guests are friends and not potential patients. Among writers there is no recognised etiquette and, though the man whose friendship with reviewers secures him a good press may be despised by some, he is envied by more. This is no new vice; and its ill effects are limited by the logic of facts, whereby a good press cannot for ever sell bad books. Vested interests in criticism only become formidable to literaturewhen the spheres of creation and criticism overlap and when critic-creators combine to organise a crusade. The complaint has of late been heard that literary criticism in London is being syndicated: six or eight papers are said to be inspired by four or five critic-creators who set their own standard of taste and value, praise one another's work and advance across literary no-man's-land in massed formation. It is easy to make too much of this. The amiable practise of mutual back-patting has always existed; the honest zealots of literature have always tried to define a formula for exclusive literary salvation; and those who stood outside the ring have always fumed and protested.[51]Is there anything new in Fleet Street? Or in those who accept Fleet Street at a pontifical valuation? When will authors learn how very little influence the press can exert over a book? The favourable review of a good book may hasten its recognition; the unfavourable review of a bad book may retard that measure of success which even the worst book achieves; but, after the first indeterminate months of life, favourable reviews will not sell a bad book, nor unfavourable kill a good.[52]If, then, an author shews to disadvantage at his apotheosis enforced and if he cannot be left alone withfellow-authors lest he preach that his doxy is orthodoxy and that every other doxy is heterodoxy, is there any virtue in a literary clearing-house where any one man of letters can be sure, sooner or later, of finding every other? Thesalonis not acclimatised to London; while it flourishes in Dublin and Paris, it languishes here for want of a hostess to inspire it. Daily and nightly throughout the year there are parties at which eminent men of letters are present in force, with a flanking claque of women who have expressed vague desire to meet them; the general judgement on them is as true now as the particular judgement which Oscar Wilde passed some thirty years ago on "Lady Brandon," who "tried to found asalon, and only succeeded in opening a restaurant."IIIf there is no literary London, most men of letters must have encountered a widespread belief that there should be, even that there is. The appropriate atmosphere is sedulously cultivated; undaunted explorers divide the map into private reservations.Left to themselves and in the absence of a general meeting-place, authors—who are at heart quite normally human, liking and disliking what other men like and dislike—assemble in ordinary clubs and ordinary houses. In the first they are still liable to be from time to time disturbed by an epidemic delusion that they are conversationalists of unusual power and charm: more than one club has suffered from the belief that, because A and B are authors, they must be conversationalists and that, because they are conversationalists, the club must beexceptionally well worth joining; when the premises are sound, more than one club has been ruined by the reputation of its conversationalists; the performers become occasionally despotic and tiresome; and, as in the long run even club bores die, their death leaves among their mute audiences no one to succeed them.Despite this recurrent danger, certain clubs stand apart from the rest in the love which they inspire among authors. For them the Athenæum ranks first, with its long list of members who have achieved distinction in literature; and the privilege of membership carries with it, by implication, the honour of having been weighed and found worthy of admission to a society which is without rival, among the clubs of the world, for the volume and variety of its learning. To the Reform Club and to its literary roll from Thackeray to Wells reference has already been made; the Garrick can on occasion mobilise an even braver army of authors; and the Savile list is not to be ignored. To men of more Bohemian intention, the Savage has long made a catholic appeal; and the Beefsteak, with its genius for securing a little of the best of everything, has not disdained the man of letters. The clubs in which a veneration for Dickens or Thackeray, Johnson or Omar Khayyám furnishes a pretext to the members for dining together are too numerous to be set out, but no club or group of clubs can constitute anything that may be called literary London; and, though each may foster friendships which might otherwise have been retarded, it remains true for normal men that the largest number of the pleasantest meetings takes place in private houses where the author is invited as a friend instead of being summoned as a purveyor of"literary" atmosphere. There is no law against mental vivisection; but authors might welcome one.It is not necessary to seek a more recondite explanation than that they are wonderfully like the rest of their fellow-creatures and should be treated no differently. They eat and sleep, they marry and beget children, they entertain and are entertained, they serve on juries and pay income-tax, for all the world as though they were bill-brokers and average-adjusters; if they know their own subject as well as a staff-officer and a cotton-spinner know theirs, it takes little longer to discern their limitations. "All mad—but wonderfully decent" was the verdict passed by Master Stubbs, the budding banker, on M. and Mde. Berthelini inProvidence and a Guitar; but the modern imaginative artist is almost distressingly sane and practical; of the leading English novelists several began as schoolmasters, one or two as barristers, one as a solicitor's clerk, another as a merchant-seaman. It is hard to believe that they enjoy being treated as a class apart. A few, indeed, may wear eccentric clothes, for reasons of health, comfort or eccentricity, but then so do a few cabinet ministers, peers of the realm, civil servants and masters of hounds; a few have pronounced mannerisms, but then so have certain bishops, bankers and family-solicitors. A sparse handful may segregate themselves in an artistic secret society, but this same boyish trait can be found in religion, politics and finance. When the conscientiously eccentric have been eliminated, such authors as are to be found in London incline to the same collective average as any other class: there are bores and prigs, rich and poor, puffed-up and humble, dandies and scarecrows, courtiers and hobbledehoys, fanatics and men of the world; andit is only when a man differentiates his species by frank advertisement or by less frank posturing about his art that the rest of humanity has to be careful.Of convincing any one but an author that this contention is true no hope need be entertained: the glamour and mystery of art are as indestructible as the appeal of the stage. An atmosphere is cultivated for the artist and imposed upon him. "With Rothenstein," says Max Beerbohm in his tender study of Enoch Soames, "I paid my first visit to the Bodley Head. By him I was inducted into another haunt of intellect and daring, the domino room of the Café Royal."There, on that October evening—there, in that exuberant vista of gilding and crimson velvet set amidst all those opposing mirrors and upholding caryatids, with fumes of tobacco ever rising to the painted and pagan ceiling, and with the hum of presumably cynical conversation broken into so sharply now and again by the clatter of dominoes shuffled on marble tables, I drew a deep breath, and 'This indeed,' said I to myself, 'is life!'"It was the hour before dinner. We drank vermouth. Those who knew Rothenstein were pointing him out to those who knew him only by name. Men were constantly coming in through the swing-doors and wandering slowly up and down in search of vacant tables, or of tables occupied by friends. One of these rovers interested me because I was sure he wanted to catch Rothenstein's eye. He had twice passed our table, with a hesitating look; but Rothenstein, in the thick of a disquisition on Puvis de Chavannes, had not seen him. He was a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair. He had a thin vague beard—or rather, he had a chin on which a large number ofhairs weakly curled and clustered to cover its retreat. He was an odd-looking person; but in the 'nineties odd apparitions were more frequent, I think, than they are now. The young writers of that era—and I was sure this man was a writer—strove earnestly to be distinct in aspect. This man had striven unsuccessfully. He wore a soft black hat of clerical kind but of Bohemian intention, and a grey waterproof cape which, perhaps because it was waterproof, failed to be romantic. I decided that 'dim' was themot justefor him. I had already essayed to write, and was immensely keen on themot juste, that Holy Grail of the period...."Max Beerbohm was writing of 1893; and, though it is presumption to criticise this sketch of the domino room, he has not explicitly described one aspect of the Café Royal which was observable in that year, which is observable still and which, no doubt, will endure as long as the building itself. Though the cape, perhaps because it was waterproof, failed to be romantic, it enclosed a spirit hungry for romance; the Café Royal is still full of souls no less hungry, though it has never yet succeeded in being romantic. Odd apparitions are frequent enough; some writers of this era try to be distinct in aspect; they have not outgrown their keenness for themot juste; and all their spirit's striving is of Bohemian intention. In the hour before dinner vermouth is still drunk; there is still a hum of presumably cynical conversation.The Café Royal, indeed, changes but little because it satisfies an unchanging need: a literary conception of Bohemian life has created a demand for its embodiment in a "haunt of intellect and daring," tentatively Parisianif a little self-conscious, very fearless if never quite at ease. Year after year, wide-eyed new generations say to themselves, "This indeed is life." The Café Royal is more than a literary institution, it is a social safety-valve: romance, after its little seething, disappears in steam; an hour's cynical conversation, a glass or two of vermouth, a display of the distinctive aspect enable many a young man to return home healed in spirit to tidy himself and to reappear next morning as a sober, laborious and punctual British subject.If chance or design closed this safety-valve, the pent passion for romance would be driven inwards until it exploded in the very heart of domesticity. Intellectual adolescence must play at Bohemianism as youth plays at soldiers; it is better to restrict the game to one lawful area than to allow it to rage unconfined, for the English home is not adapted to absinthe-drinking, and a general repudiation of morality shocks without elevating. Under the unsettling influence of war, which closed the Café Royal at night before the taste for literary romance had been satisfied, there was a severe outbreak of studio-parties at which every one shewed himself conscientiously unrestrained and fearless; poets and painters discussed the aims and methods of their art; strange food and drink appeared disconcertingly; conversation was carried on in shouts; there was more colour than line in the dresses; every one sat on the floor until the host gave the signal for dancing; only Virginian cigarettes were smoked; and, at the end, it was never possible to find a taxi. It is to be hoped that the artists worked the better for this breezy liberation of soul; it is to be wished that they had done more and talked less of what they were going to do; but it is to be realised that they were unwittingand perhaps unwilling victims of a conspiracy to make London literary.This craving finds its frankest expression in the meetings of certain more formal literary seminars. Here, though the dresses, the intellectual freedom and the insufficiency of chairs are the same, there is strict procedure: the guest of the evening is received with deference and heard with attention; there follows a grave debate in which conventional compliments usher in a set speech of destructive criticism; after a vote of thanks, the address is once more examined in the candid atmosphere of lemonade and sandwiches, and the guest is asked whether he really meant all that he said. Rash is the man who trifles with such earnest desire for improvement: he might well find himself not invited a second time.IIISo much for the atmosphere which is imposed upon an author. If he be more man than peacock, flattery will bring him less gratification than embarrassment; and he may ask in modesty and wrath why he should be subjected to treatment from which others are exempt. The barrister is not forced to expound the principles of pleading to a hushed dinner-table; no one collects a party to meet the chairman of an insurance-company. The answer, presumably, would be that, while there is a legal London and a financial London, no one has yet created a literary London and all are entitled to try.The initial procedure is commonly the same. Dotted over a wide expanse between Chelsea and St. John'sWood are scores of houses in which one determined woman has, in the first instance, caught and tamed a single author: he is as much a member of the family as the butler; and his employer would be justly incensed if any one tried to tempt him away with an offer of better wages. At first he is a prize in himself, and in his honour parties are given until his owner has established her reputation as a patron of literature; later he is a decoy for other prizes; and B., who might not come of his own accord, is invited to meet A. Here the artistic ambition is reinforced by the social: the Duchess of Stilton, who has hitherto ignored Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns, is lured by the bait of Mr. Cimabue Brown and Mr. Postlethwaite; and the churl who tosses all invitations unread into his waste-paper-basket may quite possibly do for the Duchess of Stilton what he has always refused to do for Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns.Noblesse obligehas been freely rendered: "One must be obliging to duchesses." From this point the game develops automatically; and the triumphant hostess realises her ambition as the acknowledged ruler of one or other postal district of London. If any one would meet this Bloomsbury impressionist or that Hampstead sculptor, he must meet him in her house; she has proclaimed her reservation, and henceforth, so long as she can maintain herself, Westminster or Pimlico, Chelsea or Golders Green, with all that they contain, are hers. Ceasing to court others, she is herself courted.Whether she is repaid in the result for her necessary first humiliations she alone can decide. Her pretensions are ridiculed by those who accept her hospitality; she is too busy adding to her acquaintances to spare time for making friends; and amid all the insincerity of her lifethe one thing brutally sincere is the ingratitude of those who treat her house as a free menagerie. So it has been since the days of Du Maurier; but, in spite of satire and ridicule, her breed continues. Perhaps her only alternative is to look after a husband and children; perhaps she is consoled by the magnitude of her achievement in founding asalonon the strength of a resident poet; perhaps she is unconscious of the figure which she cuts. Literary snobbishness is no more attractive than any other kind; and it is to be hoped that she sins of ignorance rather than of malice.If, no longer hoping, some continue to wish that her breed were less hardy, that is because all efforts to create a literary London inspire misgivings for the free development of literature. It is an author's own fault if he submits to being petted by otherwise sensible men and women who will lavish on novelists, actors, musicians and artists a flattery of which they cannot spare one thousandth part for scientists, philosophers, humanitarians and the great industrial rulers;[53]it is a fault for which he shares responsibility with his maker if he allows his head to be turned by it.The danger to author and reader from any organised or even stimulated literary discussion is one which he cannot control; and, realising that there is, indisputably, a "musical London" and that its existence has sent musical snobbishness to a premium and the freedom of musical development to a discount, he fears the same fate for literature. It is the common vice of thesalon, of thecritical syndicate (if such exist) and of any unofficial "academy" that they tend equally to pass premature judgements and to force uniformity upon the hangers-on. They hustle their heroes into the Pantheon or the pauper-grave before life is out of their bodies. Prizes are now awarded for the best imaginative work of the year. The critics are already trying to decide which of the younger men and women are qualified to succeed H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett. Macaulay himself could not have displayed a wilder passion for class-lists and labels.Side by side with the thoughtful articles which undertake to spot literary winners are articles no more thoughtful but perhaps playfully philosophical in which to-day's tipsters expose the folly of their predecessors. Who now reads Mrs. Humphry Ward? Yet it is less than forty years sinceRobert Elsmeremarked her out as the successor to George Eliot. Who now reads George Eliot? "Herbert Spencer," recalls Mr. Edmund Gosse, "... expressed a strong objection to the purchase of fiction, and wished that for the London library no novels should be bought 'except, of course, those of George Eliot.' While she lived, critics compared her with Goethe, but to the disadvantage of the sage of Weimar.... For Lord Acton at her death 'the sun had gone out'; and that exceedingly dogmatic historian observed,ex cathedra, that no writer had 'ever lived who had anything like her power of manifold but disinterested and impartial sympathy. If Sophocles or Cervantes had lived in the light of our culture, if Dante had prospered like Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival.' It is very dangerous," adds Mr. Gosse judiciously, "to write like that...."In fifty years' time will any one read Herbert Spencer? Or Lord Acton?[54]It was stated at the time of George Meredith's death that his executors refused for him the honour of burial in Westminster Abbey because one of them believed that in a hundred years' time he would be unread; his admirers are even now divided over the question whether he was a great novelist who wrote less great poetry or a great poet who wrote less great novels. The same fate lies ahead of Thomas Hardy. Battle has already been joined over the body of Henry James: to one school he is the great analytical psychologist who revolutionised novel-writing, the perfect artist, the subtile craftsman with the inimitably personal style; to another he is the pretentious, untidy amateur, the man who never learned to select or to compress, the pompous pet of a Chelsea group, the windy impostor with thumbs for fingers who partially buried under involution his lack of style and his ignorance of punctuation. One school swears by "the novels of the middle period"; another harks back toRoderick Hudson; a third praysThe Turn of the Screwin aid and proclaims him less a novelist than a master of the short story; one of the three most highly esteemed living English novelists likens him to an elephant trying to pick up peas with its trunk; and he was decorated with the Order of Merit.What hardly any one will do is to suspend judgement; and the first business of literary society is to ensure that judgement shall not be suspended. Not only has a labelto be fixed, but the humblest amateur feels obliged to say whether it was rightly fixed: praise and proscription are bandied among those who have hardly learned to read and those who have never been trained to think. When the Henry James cult became fashionable, he received equally rapt devotion from those who disliked him, from those who did not understand him and from those who had not read him. James was elevated into a literary standard; he collected a following of disciples; those who flattered him by imitation were flattered in turn by his frank approval. The bellow of the herd drowned the voice of the individual. In all the calendar of critical crime there is no more soul-destroying dishonesty than a second-hand opinion.IVThe same premature labelling may be seen in "musical London" with the appearance of every new composer and the exhumation of every old score. While Verdi is tolerated and Gounod deplored, Ravel is—at the moment—a safe winner, and a liking for Delius commands respect, Debussy holds his own; Richard Strauss is still a bone of friendly contention; de Lara and Ethel Smyth are encouraged as British composers by a perplexed audience which has been taught to distrust British compositions; but "musical London" has decided that it is time for a reaction against Puccini.Does "musical London" ever turn an introspective eye to watch the manufacture of musical opinion? The spectator who wanders from box to box on the first night of a new opera, may see the gentle herd-hypnotism at work.The Honest Ignoramus, who goes to Covent Garden to see his friends between the acts."Well, what d'you think of it?"The Languid Woman who will not give herself away."I heard it in Monte Carlo, you know, this winter."A Voice.It's a pure crib fromThe Barber.Another.Rossini and water.Another.It's quite too deliciously old-fashioned.The Honest Ignoramus strays into the next box, shedding some of his honesty by the way."Rather Rossini and water, don't you think? I don't know anything about it, of course, but it seemed tomea mere up-to-dateBarber."A Voice.It's very modern certainly. I confess I'm rather old-fashioned....He moves on. "D'you like all this modern stuff? If weareto have Rossini——"A Voice (impressively).He gets no value from his orchestra ... Rossini? Who's talking about Rossini?...He beats a retreat and recuperates in the corridor.A Voice.I was lunching with George to-day. He'd been to one of the rehearsals and he said that no one since Wagner had understood the wood-wind like this man. A pure genius. I'm giving you his actual words. Whether it'llpayI can't tell. It's rather modern for Covent Garden....The Honest Ignoramus returns to the first box."Only one more act? I'm rather enjoying this. I suppose some people would call it a bit modern, but it's rather a relief to find a man who's not afraid to use his orchestra. The, er, wood-wind...."All (gratefully)."Too wonderful!... Were you here on Thursday?..."The press-notices next day will add a few more technical terms, but regular attendants at the opera can say whether this is a caricature of the manner in which contemporary musical opinion is formed.[55]None will wait to think; few will shew the courage to express their own unsupported feelings; every one will pass a criticism of some kind. And, when the aggregate judgement has been launched, all will be half converted to it. Perhaps only financial good or harm is done to a contemporary work, but "musical London" will not so circumscribe its criticism: there must be an opinion on everything, a label for every one; and against the verdict of the hour there is, in all eternity, no appeal.Here, indeed, is the weakness of all artistic criticism: the critic is as greatly influenced by atmosphere, fashion and the æsthetic limitations of a period as the creator; sometimes it is the same atmosphere, and each new novel by George Eliot was acclaimed a classic because her critics believed as strongly in her formula as she did; sometimes the atmosphere is different, and readers in this generation may praise Wordsworth and belittle Byron as vehemently as another generation praised Byron and belittled Wordsworth. Will it never be understood that in æsthetic taste there can be no finality?There is little harm in awarding a Nobel or a Hawthornden prize if we remember that the judges are breathing the same atmosphere as the candidates and that their verdict concerns an author of their own generation;in forty years' time their taste may seem as grotesquely perverted as that of the mid-Victorians who exhausted their superlatives on George Eliot or of the assassin who struck down Keats. That is the price exacted of the critic by posterity for the infallibility which he enjoys in his lifetime. The harm is done when these verdicts are accepted at second-hand by a public which has not read the evidence nor heard the trial. It is neither practicable nor desirable that the work of to-day should be pusillanimously referred to the judgement of to-morrow; but an artistic assessment, to have any value, must be the sum of individual and independent opinions. That independence would disappear with the birth of a literary London. The propaganda of a coterie, the direction of critics, the explanations of authors and the herd-voice of literary society narrow artistic sympathy and stunt artistic originality. Long may England be spared the unofficial Academy.
LITERARY TOTEMS
Illa tamen gravior, quae cum discumbere coepitlaudat Vergilium, periturae ignoscit Elissae,committat vates et comparat, inde Maronematque alia parte in trutina suspendit Homerum.cedunt grammatici, vincuntur rhetores, omnisturba tacet, nec causidicus nec praeco loquetur,altera nec mulier. Verborum tanta cadit vis,tot pariter pelves ac tintinnabula dicaspulsari. Jam nemo tubas, nemo aera fatiget;una laboranti poterit succerrere Lunae.imponit finem sapiens et rebus honestis;nam quae docta nimis cupit et facunda videri,crure tenus medio tunicas succingere debet,caedere Silvano porcum, quadrante lavari.non habeat matrona, tibi quae iuncta recumbit,dicendi genus, aut curvum sermone rotatotorqueat enthymema, nec historias sciat omnes,sed quaedam ex libris et non intellegat. Odihanc ego quae repetit volvitque Palaemonis artemservata semper lege et ratione loquendiignotosque mihi tenet antiquaria versusnec curanda viris opicae castigat amicaeverba: soloecismum liceat fecisse marito.
Juvenal: Satire VI.
While there is excellent authority for the statement that the Holy Roman Empire was not holy nor Roman nor an empire, the reader of mediaeval history has, for a century and a half, been left without an equally trenchant definition of what that empire was. In like manner, while it is comparativelyeasy for the student of modern manners to assert that "literary London" is neither London nor literary, he might find it difficult to amplify this in positive terms unless he described it as "cultured Kensington." The first phrase, like its baffling brethren "a man-about-town" and "the Oxford manner," to which reference has already been made, is part of modern currency and is tendered by the press and accepted by the public without a thought on either side whether it represents any value as an idea. Is the literary London to which newspapers refer synonymous with the committee of the Authors' Society? Is it to be found, of a Sunday afternoon, at Mrs. Leo Hunter's house? Does it lurk, unrecognised and fiercely retiring, in that district which cabmen call Chelsea and more poetic spirits "the Latin Quarter of London"?
Or is it but a flight of fancy, like "the upper ten" or "the middle classes"?
Regret is sometimes expressed that there is no assembly in which all men-of-letters can gather and explain—in a phrase beloved of H. G. Wells—"what they are up to." Though the experiment had often been tried, it has always failed. There is, indeed, an abundance of literary societies which meet for dinner and damnable iteration in honour of one or other "immortal memory"; there is a plethora of the larger, looser associations which have been formed to entertain authors and, in sheer lust for culture, to submit to their lectures. There are houses from which no author is long secure; there are clubs, founded to aid their members in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, where authors meet in large numbers. But there is no one literary clearing-house, there is nothing that can be called "literary London."For this, the unreflecting world is not always sufficiently grateful.
The first business of a poet, it may be submitted, is to write poetry rather than to talk about what he has written; the second, to write it by himself, as the pure, unaided expression of his genius, rather than to labour under the limitations and confusions of a school; the third, to let his poetry stand as its own explanation and apology to the critics and to the public. If, in the end, his readers persist in wishing to discuss it with him, he may not always be able to escape, though he may forestall disappointment by warning them that, because a man can express himself on paper, he need not be able to express himself in conversation and that the poet in hours of idleness is not necessarily better worth meeting than the dentist on holiday. Thiscaveatonce entered, he can offer no further resistance, short of a blunt refusal, to the hostesses who are still eager to secure "the distinguished author" of this or that: sooner or later his neck will be bent over their dinner-tables.
There follows one of two inevitable results: the author, from modesty or self-consciousness, curvets and shies from the one subject which he has been summoned to discuss and takes refuge in the Russian ballet and Ascot;[50]or else he resigns himself to his apotheosis and gobbles more complimentary sugar-plums than are good for his soul's digestion; he is fated to spoil the party or to be spoiled by it.
Next in the preparation of his spiritual downfall comes the bland assumption that the creator must alsobe a critic; when he has adequately descanted upon his own books, he will be required to give an opinion on the books of others. These, unless he loftily (but impressively) refuse to admit that there have been poets since Shelley, he never wholly condemns for fear of seeming vain or small-minded, though he may sometimes admit that he has not had time to read them; it is easier to disparage by flattery and to say that his rival has not yet done his best work or that he will never give rein to his genius until he is less influenced by the spell of Swinburne (within an hour this has been crystallised into the judgement that "X writes such dreadful Swinburne-and-water"); it is easier still to shake a regretful head and to hope that X is not sacrificing Art to Popularity. As a rule the creator-critic praises vehemently, thus gaining for himself a reputation for generosity and doing service to a friend who is doing him the same service at that moment in another part of London. Mutual admiration and log-rolling have not changed since Du Maurier satirised them in thePunchesof the eighties; and the gentle art of self-advertisement has at least not diminished in the resourcefulness of its technique during the last forty years. There are, however, so many opportunities of securing a wider publicity that the author who shews himself off in a drawing-room is wasting his time and energy: the columns of the press are already open to him, and, as his new book draws near to publication, he can always direct attention to himself by inaugurating a discussion on the pagan tendency of modern poetry or on the victimisation of young poets by unscrupulous editors; he can let himself be persuaded into speaking at public dinners and having his speeches reported; he can be affably at hand when professionalwriters of paragraphs are short of copy. If it be his ambition to keep his name before the public, he can without difficulty emulate the methods of one author who backed himself to be mentioned in the press on every day of the year—and won his wager. It may be doubted, nevertheless, whether public or private popularity-seeking is good for the fibre of a man's soul.
If a writer should avoid the food and flattery of the professional lion-hunter, so, for a different reason, he should resist the temptation to closet himself with those who are plying the same trade. If it produce nothing else, the inevitable discussion of himself and of his work produces self-consciousness; and a man will commonly achieve less valuable results by harkening for the applause of a clique or by trying to follow lines and tendencies set by a committee. The great work of art is individual; and, though a painter may have his school, though the technique of painting is usually taught in a school, there is no ground for thinking that a man may be taught to write by those who are themselves learning.
As an author should work by himself to produce what is in him, so, when he has produced it, he should neither explain nor complain. It is perhaps a counsel of perfection to say that authors and critics should never meet. Mr. Walkley has expounded this difficulty in dramatic criticism: is the critic to eschew the actor's company? Is he to rise from the same dinner-table and slay his friend in print? Should he disparage a friend for fear of partiality or praise an unknown playwright because he is unknown? The difficulties are not less great when the novelist and his critic are on terms of friendship; but literature and criticism both suffer when this personal relationship is used to influence the author or thecritic. As a rule the press, turning its back on the brutalities of the early nineteenth century, encourages the new writer and relieves its feelings at the expense of one who is considered to be "established"; in dramatic criticism it generally ignores the newcomer and atones later for its neglect by praising indiscriminately the man who has won his niche. Either practise may be considered as at least no more senseless than any other which criticises the writer rather than the book that he has written. No reasonable man will object so long as criticism is independent of personal obligations, advertisement-revenue, æsthetic prejudice and private predilections; so long, too, as the reviewer is neither a careless young man in a hurry to create on his own account, nor an embittered old man who has tried and failed; so long, finally, as the critic brings to his task as much experience, self-discipline and labour as the author has given to his.
The danger which threatens the deliberate formation of a literary society is that authors and critics will both lose something of their independence. In other callings there is often a rigid etiquette to protect social intercourse from professional abuse: the barrister who dines too regularly with solicitors will expose himself to suspicion, and the surgeon is expected to shew by his demeanour that his guests are friends and not potential patients. Among writers there is no recognised etiquette and, though the man whose friendship with reviewers secures him a good press may be despised by some, he is envied by more. This is no new vice; and its ill effects are limited by the logic of facts, whereby a good press cannot for ever sell bad books. Vested interests in criticism only become formidable to literaturewhen the spheres of creation and criticism overlap and when critic-creators combine to organise a crusade. The complaint has of late been heard that literary criticism in London is being syndicated: six or eight papers are said to be inspired by four or five critic-creators who set their own standard of taste and value, praise one another's work and advance across literary no-man's-land in massed formation. It is easy to make too much of this. The amiable practise of mutual back-patting has always existed; the honest zealots of literature have always tried to define a formula for exclusive literary salvation; and those who stood outside the ring have always fumed and protested.[51]Is there anything new in Fleet Street? Or in those who accept Fleet Street at a pontifical valuation? When will authors learn how very little influence the press can exert over a book? The favourable review of a good book may hasten its recognition; the unfavourable review of a bad book may retard that measure of success which even the worst book achieves; but, after the first indeterminate months of life, favourable reviews will not sell a bad book, nor unfavourable kill a good.[52]
If, then, an author shews to disadvantage at his apotheosis enforced and if he cannot be left alone withfellow-authors lest he preach that his doxy is orthodoxy and that every other doxy is heterodoxy, is there any virtue in a literary clearing-house where any one man of letters can be sure, sooner or later, of finding every other? Thesalonis not acclimatised to London; while it flourishes in Dublin and Paris, it languishes here for want of a hostess to inspire it. Daily and nightly throughout the year there are parties at which eminent men of letters are present in force, with a flanking claque of women who have expressed vague desire to meet them; the general judgement on them is as true now as the particular judgement which Oscar Wilde passed some thirty years ago on "Lady Brandon," who "tried to found asalon, and only succeeded in opening a restaurant."
If there is no literary London, most men of letters must have encountered a widespread belief that there should be, even that there is. The appropriate atmosphere is sedulously cultivated; undaunted explorers divide the map into private reservations.
Left to themselves and in the absence of a general meeting-place, authors—who are at heart quite normally human, liking and disliking what other men like and dislike—assemble in ordinary clubs and ordinary houses. In the first they are still liable to be from time to time disturbed by an epidemic delusion that they are conversationalists of unusual power and charm: more than one club has suffered from the belief that, because A and B are authors, they must be conversationalists and that, because they are conversationalists, the club must beexceptionally well worth joining; when the premises are sound, more than one club has been ruined by the reputation of its conversationalists; the performers become occasionally despotic and tiresome; and, as in the long run even club bores die, their death leaves among their mute audiences no one to succeed them.
Despite this recurrent danger, certain clubs stand apart from the rest in the love which they inspire among authors. For them the Athenæum ranks first, with its long list of members who have achieved distinction in literature; and the privilege of membership carries with it, by implication, the honour of having been weighed and found worthy of admission to a society which is without rival, among the clubs of the world, for the volume and variety of its learning. To the Reform Club and to its literary roll from Thackeray to Wells reference has already been made; the Garrick can on occasion mobilise an even braver army of authors; and the Savile list is not to be ignored. To men of more Bohemian intention, the Savage has long made a catholic appeal; and the Beefsteak, with its genius for securing a little of the best of everything, has not disdained the man of letters. The clubs in which a veneration for Dickens or Thackeray, Johnson or Omar Khayyám furnishes a pretext to the members for dining together are too numerous to be set out, but no club or group of clubs can constitute anything that may be called literary London; and, though each may foster friendships which might otherwise have been retarded, it remains true for normal men that the largest number of the pleasantest meetings takes place in private houses where the author is invited as a friend instead of being summoned as a purveyor of"literary" atmosphere. There is no law against mental vivisection; but authors might welcome one.
It is not necessary to seek a more recondite explanation than that they are wonderfully like the rest of their fellow-creatures and should be treated no differently. They eat and sleep, they marry and beget children, they entertain and are entertained, they serve on juries and pay income-tax, for all the world as though they were bill-brokers and average-adjusters; if they know their own subject as well as a staff-officer and a cotton-spinner know theirs, it takes little longer to discern their limitations. "All mad—but wonderfully decent" was the verdict passed by Master Stubbs, the budding banker, on M. and Mde. Berthelini inProvidence and a Guitar; but the modern imaginative artist is almost distressingly sane and practical; of the leading English novelists several began as schoolmasters, one or two as barristers, one as a solicitor's clerk, another as a merchant-seaman. It is hard to believe that they enjoy being treated as a class apart. A few, indeed, may wear eccentric clothes, for reasons of health, comfort or eccentricity, but then so do a few cabinet ministers, peers of the realm, civil servants and masters of hounds; a few have pronounced mannerisms, but then so have certain bishops, bankers and family-solicitors. A sparse handful may segregate themselves in an artistic secret society, but this same boyish trait can be found in religion, politics and finance. When the conscientiously eccentric have been eliminated, such authors as are to be found in London incline to the same collective average as any other class: there are bores and prigs, rich and poor, puffed-up and humble, dandies and scarecrows, courtiers and hobbledehoys, fanatics and men of the world; andit is only when a man differentiates his species by frank advertisement or by less frank posturing about his art that the rest of humanity has to be careful.
Of convincing any one but an author that this contention is true no hope need be entertained: the glamour and mystery of art are as indestructible as the appeal of the stage. An atmosphere is cultivated for the artist and imposed upon him. "With Rothenstein," says Max Beerbohm in his tender study of Enoch Soames, "I paid my first visit to the Bodley Head. By him I was inducted into another haunt of intellect and daring, the domino room of the Café Royal.
"There, on that October evening—there, in that exuberant vista of gilding and crimson velvet set amidst all those opposing mirrors and upholding caryatids, with fumes of tobacco ever rising to the painted and pagan ceiling, and with the hum of presumably cynical conversation broken into so sharply now and again by the clatter of dominoes shuffled on marble tables, I drew a deep breath, and 'This indeed,' said I to myself, 'is life!'
"It was the hour before dinner. We drank vermouth. Those who knew Rothenstein were pointing him out to those who knew him only by name. Men were constantly coming in through the swing-doors and wandering slowly up and down in search of vacant tables, or of tables occupied by friends. One of these rovers interested me because I was sure he wanted to catch Rothenstein's eye. He had twice passed our table, with a hesitating look; but Rothenstein, in the thick of a disquisition on Puvis de Chavannes, had not seen him. He was a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair. He had a thin vague beard—or rather, he had a chin on which a large number ofhairs weakly curled and clustered to cover its retreat. He was an odd-looking person; but in the 'nineties odd apparitions were more frequent, I think, than they are now. The young writers of that era—and I was sure this man was a writer—strove earnestly to be distinct in aspect. This man had striven unsuccessfully. He wore a soft black hat of clerical kind but of Bohemian intention, and a grey waterproof cape which, perhaps because it was waterproof, failed to be romantic. I decided that 'dim' was themot justefor him. I had already essayed to write, and was immensely keen on themot juste, that Holy Grail of the period...."
Max Beerbohm was writing of 1893; and, though it is presumption to criticise this sketch of the domino room, he has not explicitly described one aspect of the Café Royal which was observable in that year, which is observable still and which, no doubt, will endure as long as the building itself. Though the cape, perhaps because it was waterproof, failed to be romantic, it enclosed a spirit hungry for romance; the Café Royal is still full of souls no less hungry, though it has never yet succeeded in being romantic. Odd apparitions are frequent enough; some writers of this era try to be distinct in aspect; they have not outgrown their keenness for themot juste; and all their spirit's striving is of Bohemian intention. In the hour before dinner vermouth is still drunk; there is still a hum of presumably cynical conversation.
The Café Royal, indeed, changes but little because it satisfies an unchanging need: a literary conception of Bohemian life has created a demand for its embodiment in a "haunt of intellect and daring," tentatively Parisianif a little self-conscious, very fearless if never quite at ease. Year after year, wide-eyed new generations say to themselves, "This indeed is life." The Café Royal is more than a literary institution, it is a social safety-valve: romance, after its little seething, disappears in steam; an hour's cynical conversation, a glass or two of vermouth, a display of the distinctive aspect enable many a young man to return home healed in spirit to tidy himself and to reappear next morning as a sober, laborious and punctual British subject.
If chance or design closed this safety-valve, the pent passion for romance would be driven inwards until it exploded in the very heart of domesticity. Intellectual adolescence must play at Bohemianism as youth plays at soldiers; it is better to restrict the game to one lawful area than to allow it to rage unconfined, for the English home is not adapted to absinthe-drinking, and a general repudiation of morality shocks without elevating. Under the unsettling influence of war, which closed the Café Royal at night before the taste for literary romance had been satisfied, there was a severe outbreak of studio-parties at which every one shewed himself conscientiously unrestrained and fearless; poets and painters discussed the aims and methods of their art; strange food and drink appeared disconcertingly; conversation was carried on in shouts; there was more colour than line in the dresses; every one sat on the floor until the host gave the signal for dancing; only Virginian cigarettes were smoked; and, at the end, it was never possible to find a taxi. It is to be hoped that the artists worked the better for this breezy liberation of soul; it is to be wished that they had done more and talked less of what they were going to do; but it is to be realised that they were unwittingand perhaps unwilling victims of a conspiracy to make London literary.
This craving finds its frankest expression in the meetings of certain more formal literary seminars. Here, though the dresses, the intellectual freedom and the insufficiency of chairs are the same, there is strict procedure: the guest of the evening is received with deference and heard with attention; there follows a grave debate in which conventional compliments usher in a set speech of destructive criticism; after a vote of thanks, the address is once more examined in the candid atmosphere of lemonade and sandwiches, and the guest is asked whether he really meant all that he said. Rash is the man who trifles with such earnest desire for improvement: he might well find himself not invited a second time.
So much for the atmosphere which is imposed upon an author. If he be more man than peacock, flattery will bring him less gratification than embarrassment; and he may ask in modesty and wrath why he should be subjected to treatment from which others are exempt. The barrister is not forced to expound the principles of pleading to a hushed dinner-table; no one collects a party to meet the chairman of an insurance-company. The answer, presumably, would be that, while there is a legal London and a financial London, no one has yet created a literary London and all are entitled to try.
The initial procedure is commonly the same. Dotted over a wide expanse between Chelsea and St. John'sWood are scores of houses in which one determined woman has, in the first instance, caught and tamed a single author: he is as much a member of the family as the butler; and his employer would be justly incensed if any one tried to tempt him away with an offer of better wages. At first he is a prize in himself, and in his honour parties are given until his owner has established her reputation as a patron of literature; later he is a decoy for other prizes; and B., who might not come of his own accord, is invited to meet A. Here the artistic ambition is reinforced by the social: the Duchess of Stilton, who has hitherto ignored Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns, is lured by the bait of Mr. Cimabue Brown and Mr. Postlethwaite; and the churl who tosses all invitations unread into his waste-paper-basket may quite possibly do for the Duchess of Stilton what he has always refused to do for Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns.Noblesse obligehas been freely rendered: "One must be obliging to duchesses." From this point the game develops automatically; and the triumphant hostess realises her ambition as the acknowledged ruler of one or other postal district of London. If any one would meet this Bloomsbury impressionist or that Hampstead sculptor, he must meet him in her house; she has proclaimed her reservation, and henceforth, so long as she can maintain herself, Westminster or Pimlico, Chelsea or Golders Green, with all that they contain, are hers. Ceasing to court others, she is herself courted.
Whether she is repaid in the result for her necessary first humiliations she alone can decide. Her pretensions are ridiculed by those who accept her hospitality; she is too busy adding to her acquaintances to spare time for making friends; and amid all the insincerity of her lifethe one thing brutally sincere is the ingratitude of those who treat her house as a free menagerie. So it has been since the days of Du Maurier; but, in spite of satire and ridicule, her breed continues. Perhaps her only alternative is to look after a husband and children; perhaps she is consoled by the magnitude of her achievement in founding asalonon the strength of a resident poet; perhaps she is unconscious of the figure which she cuts. Literary snobbishness is no more attractive than any other kind; and it is to be hoped that she sins of ignorance rather than of malice.
If, no longer hoping, some continue to wish that her breed were less hardy, that is because all efforts to create a literary London inspire misgivings for the free development of literature. It is an author's own fault if he submits to being petted by otherwise sensible men and women who will lavish on novelists, actors, musicians and artists a flattery of which they cannot spare one thousandth part for scientists, philosophers, humanitarians and the great industrial rulers;[53]it is a fault for which he shares responsibility with his maker if he allows his head to be turned by it.
The danger to author and reader from any organised or even stimulated literary discussion is one which he cannot control; and, realising that there is, indisputably, a "musical London" and that its existence has sent musical snobbishness to a premium and the freedom of musical development to a discount, he fears the same fate for literature. It is the common vice of thesalon, of thecritical syndicate (if such exist) and of any unofficial "academy" that they tend equally to pass premature judgements and to force uniformity upon the hangers-on. They hustle their heroes into the Pantheon or the pauper-grave before life is out of their bodies. Prizes are now awarded for the best imaginative work of the year. The critics are already trying to decide which of the younger men and women are qualified to succeed H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett. Macaulay himself could not have displayed a wilder passion for class-lists and labels.
Side by side with the thoughtful articles which undertake to spot literary winners are articles no more thoughtful but perhaps playfully philosophical in which to-day's tipsters expose the folly of their predecessors. Who now reads Mrs. Humphry Ward? Yet it is less than forty years sinceRobert Elsmeremarked her out as the successor to George Eliot. Who now reads George Eliot? "Herbert Spencer," recalls Mr. Edmund Gosse, "... expressed a strong objection to the purchase of fiction, and wished that for the London library no novels should be bought 'except, of course, those of George Eliot.' While she lived, critics compared her with Goethe, but to the disadvantage of the sage of Weimar.... For Lord Acton at her death 'the sun had gone out'; and that exceedingly dogmatic historian observed,ex cathedra, that no writer had 'ever lived who had anything like her power of manifold but disinterested and impartial sympathy. If Sophocles or Cervantes had lived in the light of our culture, if Dante had prospered like Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival.' It is very dangerous," adds Mr. Gosse judiciously, "to write like that...."
In fifty years' time will any one read Herbert Spencer? Or Lord Acton?[54]It was stated at the time of George Meredith's death that his executors refused for him the honour of burial in Westminster Abbey because one of them believed that in a hundred years' time he would be unread; his admirers are even now divided over the question whether he was a great novelist who wrote less great poetry or a great poet who wrote less great novels. The same fate lies ahead of Thomas Hardy. Battle has already been joined over the body of Henry James: to one school he is the great analytical psychologist who revolutionised novel-writing, the perfect artist, the subtile craftsman with the inimitably personal style; to another he is the pretentious, untidy amateur, the man who never learned to select or to compress, the pompous pet of a Chelsea group, the windy impostor with thumbs for fingers who partially buried under involution his lack of style and his ignorance of punctuation. One school swears by "the novels of the middle period"; another harks back toRoderick Hudson; a third praysThe Turn of the Screwin aid and proclaims him less a novelist than a master of the short story; one of the three most highly esteemed living English novelists likens him to an elephant trying to pick up peas with its trunk; and he was decorated with the Order of Merit.
What hardly any one will do is to suspend judgement; and the first business of literary society is to ensure that judgement shall not be suspended. Not only has a labelto be fixed, but the humblest amateur feels obliged to say whether it was rightly fixed: praise and proscription are bandied among those who have hardly learned to read and those who have never been trained to think. When the Henry James cult became fashionable, he received equally rapt devotion from those who disliked him, from those who did not understand him and from those who had not read him. James was elevated into a literary standard; he collected a following of disciples; those who flattered him by imitation were flattered in turn by his frank approval. The bellow of the herd drowned the voice of the individual. In all the calendar of critical crime there is no more soul-destroying dishonesty than a second-hand opinion.
The same premature labelling may be seen in "musical London" with the appearance of every new composer and the exhumation of every old score. While Verdi is tolerated and Gounod deplored, Ravel is—at the moment—a safe winner, and a liking for Delius commands respect, Debussy holds his own; Richard Strauss is still a bone of friendly contention; de Lara and Ethel Smyth are encouraged as British composers by a perplexed audience which has been taught to distrust British compositions; but "musical London" has decided that it is time for a reaction against Puccini.
Does "musical London" ever turn an introspective eye to watch the manufacture of musical opinion? The spectator who wanders from box to box on the first night of a new opera, may see the gentle herd-hypnotism at work.
The Honest Ignoramus, who goes to Covent Garden to see his friends between the acts."Well, what d'you think of it?"
The Languid Woman who will not give herself away."I heard it in Monte Carlo, you know, this winter."
A Voice.It's a pure crib fromThe Barber.
Another.Rossini and water.
Another.It's quite too deliciously old-fashioned.
The Honest Ignoramus strays into the next box, shedding some of his honesty by the way."Rather Rossini and water, don't you think? I don't know anything about it, of course, but it seemed tomea mere up-to-dateBarber."
A Voice.It's very modern certainly. I confess I'm rather old-fashioned....
He moves on. "D'you like all this modern stuff? If weareto have Rossini——"
A Voice (impressively).He gets no value from his orchestra ... Rossini? Who's talking about Rossini?...
He beats a retreat and recuperates in the corridor.
A Voice.I was lunching with George to-day. He'd been to one of the rehearsals and he said that no one since Wagner had understood the wood-wind like this man. A pure genius. I'm giving you his actual words. Whether it'llpayI can't tell. It's rather modern for Covent Garden....
The Honest Ignoramus returns to the first box."Only one more act? I'm rather enjoying this. I suppose some people would call it a bit modern, but it's rather a relief to find a man who's not afraid to use his orchestra. The, er, wood-wind...."
All (gratefully)."Too wonderful!... Were you here on Thursday?..."
The press-notices next day will add a few more technical terms, but regular attendants at the opera can say whether this is a caricature of the manner in which contemporary musical opinion is formed.[55]None will wait to think; few will shew the courage to express their own unsupported feelings; every one will pass a criticism of some kind. And, when the aggregate judgement has been launched, all will be half converted to it. Perhaps only financial good or harm is done to a contemporary work, but "musical London" will not so circumscribe its criticism: there must be an opinion on everything, a label for every one; and against the verdict of the hour there is, in all eternity, no appeal.
Here, indeed, is the weakness of all artistic criticism: the critic is as greatly influenced by atmosphere, fashion and the æsthetic limitations of a period as the creator; sometimes it is the same atmosphere, and each new novel by George Eliot was acclaimed a classic because her critics believed as strongly in her formula as she did; sometimes the atmosphere is different, and readers in this generation may praise Wordsworth and belittle Byron as vehemently as another generation praised Byron and belittled Wordsworth. Will it never be understood that in æsthetic taste there can be no finality?
There is little harm in awarding a Nobel or a Hawthornden prize if we remember that the judges are breathing the same atmosphere as the candidates and that their verdict concerns an author of their own generation;in forty years' time their taste may seem as grotesquely perverted as that of the mid-Victorians who exhausted their superlatives on George Eliot or of the assassin who struck down Keats. That is the price exacted of the critic by posterity for the infallibility which he enjoys in his lifetime. The harm is done when these verdicts are accepted at second-hand by a public which has not read the evidence nor heard the trial. It is neither practicable nor desirable that the work of to-day should be pusillanimously referred to the judgement of to-morrow; but an artistic assessment, to have any value, must be the sum of individual and independent opinions. That independence would disappear with the birth of a literary London. The propaganda of a coterie, the direction of critics, the explanations of authors and the herd-voice of literary society narrow artistic sympathy and stunt artistic originality. Long may England be spared the unofficial Academy.
CHAPTER XIIIPOLITICS IN A DISSOLVING VIEWOften when warring for he wist not what,An enemy-soldier, passing by one weak,Has tendered water, wiped the burning cheek,And cooled the lips so black and clammed and hot;Then gone his way, and maybe quite forgotThe deed of grace amid the roar and reek;Yet larger vision than the tongue can speakHe there has reached, although he has known it notFor natural mindsight, triumphing in the actOver the throes of artificial rage,Has thuswise muffled victory's peal of pride,Rended to ribands policy's specious pageThat deals but with evasion, code, and pact,And war's apology wholly stultified.1915.———————Thomas Hardy: "Often When Warring."IIn the life of the English generation which found its climax and catastrophe in the war, the last chapter opened on armistice day and closed with the signature of the German peace treaty on July 19th, 1919. As with the armistice terms, so with the treaty: no one doubted that it would be signed, but, until it had been signed, all efforts at reconstruction, all attempts to resume a normal life of peace were tentative and provisional. The House of Commons in effect declared a legislative moratorium and, in the absence of the primeminister, marked time to the command of Mr. Bonar Law with the disciplined noise and the calculated absence of progress inseparable from that part of infantry drill.As the general election of the previous December had been won on the cry that a coalition was necessary to the conclusion of a lasting peace, it might have been expected that the supporters of the coalition would have influenced the course of the peace negotiations. Beyond an occasional question, however, which seldom brought enlightenment to the questioner, and an occasional telegram of protest which can never have brought satisfaction to the protester, coalition members gave the government a free hand. In part, there were comparatively few with any parliamentary experience; in part, there was none who could draft a desirable alternative ministry, if his dissatisfaction with the present prime minister stimulated him to effective revolt; and, in part, there has probably never, since 1832, been a House of Commons so bankrupt in public spirit, courage, independence or conscience. Since the end of 1918 the government has triumphantly carried its supporters against their inclinations through a dozen crises of which any single one would have seen any other ministry disowned and broken by a less servile house: the peace treaty with Germany, as mischievous as it was dishonourable, was flung at parliament with an air of "Take it—or leave it and take the consequences"; the treaty with Turkey established the Ottoman government in Constantinople with licence to misgovern and to massacre as freely as in the past; the Russian policy began with invective and threats of war against the bloody-handed soviet and ended with the cordial grip of a hand which had only become more bloody in the interval; Ireland driftedthrough pats of conciliation and dabs of coercion to a state of anarchy which ministers hoped to end by means of a new home rule bill abhorred by every section of Irishmen; and, while financiers protested that the country had reached its taxable capacity, the government continued to live beyond its means and the chancellor of the exchequer complained that it was not in his power to retrench effectively.For a similar display of cynical incompetence and reckless disorder the historian must go back to the days of a great autocracy in dissolution. The government of Louis XVI or of the last Roman emperor, would perhaps shew an equal record of vacillations, lethargy and light-hearted misrule; but in both instances anarchy ended in downfall; and, if history be past politics, present politics are future history. It is hardly straining the parallel to suggest that such misgovernment is always attributable to one cause, the lack of an efficient opposition; a composite government unchecked by fear of overthrow and uninspired by any loftier ideal than a groping instinct of self-preservation, is no less tyrannical and prone to abuse than a single ruler."These various Cæsars and their successors and their women-kind," says H. G. Wells, "were probably no worse essentially than most weak and passionate human beings, but they had no real religion, being themselves gods; they had no wide knowledge on which to build high ambitions, their women were fierce and almost illiterate, and they were under no restraints of law or custom. They were surrounded by creatures ready to stimulate their slightest wishes and to translate their vaguest impulses into action. What are mere passing blackthoughts and angry impulses with most of us became therefore deeds with them. Before a man condemns Nero as a different species of being from himself, he should examine his own secret thoughts very carefully."It is less profitable to condemn the present government than to enquire why there has been no effective opposition to hold it in check. The political revolution which placed Mr. Lloyd George in power was described by Mr. Asquith as a "conspiracy"; it was generally regarded as a discreditable piece of trickery, and even the stalwarts of the new order were for the most part reduced to mumbling that the end must justify the means and that, without a change, the war would have dragged on for ever. It is possible to see now that a psychological crisis was reached in December 1916 and that after more than two years of unending and unended fighting the herd-instinct demanded that someone should be made responsible. To the bulk of the liberal party who stood by Mr. Asquith, forgiving his high-handed behaviour in resigning without an adverse vote and without consultation of his supporters, the December crisis seemed a trial of strength between two men; it was believed first that no alternative ministry could be formed and then that it could not endure; the opposition liberals would have been more than human if they had cherished no hope of revenge; and they could claim disinterestedly and honestly that the new prime minister was at least not superior to the old in scruple and was certainly inferior in ability.However great their resentment, however, the new management had to be given a trial; any show of factiousness would have been doubtful patriotism anddisastrous tactics; and the chief subject of discussion among the wire-pullers was how long the trial should continue. Much noise and dust accompanied Mr. Lloyd George's triumphal progress to No. 10 Downing Street; at last a "business government" had taken office, and Whitehall became filled with the unfamiliar forms of shipping-men and railway-men, newspaper-men and mining-men, all disciplined by practical experience at the head of great commercial enterprises, though unschooled to the teamwork of administration in which the pace and independence of each are regulated by his fellows. For a moment the political crisis seemed a successfulbourgeoisprotest against the spirit and methods of Balliol: neither Mr. Lloyd George nor Lord Beaverbrook, neither Lord Northcliffe nor Lord Rothermere, neither Sir Eric Geddes nor Sir Joseph Maclay, neither Lord Rhondda nor Mr. Neville Chamberlain was a Balliol man; and in his strength and in his weakness, in his mechanical efficiency and blank want of imagination, in his intellectual aloofness and touching belief that others too observed an Oxford standard of honour, Mr. Asquith was a typical product of Balliol.[56]Nevertheless, when the dust and noise of removal had abated, there were found to be at least as many defects of administration as before; the wizard's wand failed to charm food from air or to conjure up men from the vasty deep in place of those who were being sent to rot in Salonica; the German front remained impregnable in the west; the new war-cabinet, for all its dash and fire, was "too late" to prevent the Russian revolution; andGerman submarine-commanders, perhaps in ignorance of the change that had taken place, continued to sink allied and neutral shipping. No improvement was observable until the United States entered the war; and the warmest panegyrist of the new government has never suggested that the credit for this decision should be given to the new prime minister. Those who look for a single principle or detail in which the second coalition varied the policy of the first are rewarded with an encomium on the blessings of a unified command; but official rhetoric did not conceal that the French were being given, with much advertising display, what was waiting for them whenever they chose to ask for it; and, if this be Mr. Lloyd George's sole innovation, the assertion that he won the war stands in need of revision, the more so since the publication of the memorandum in which Lord Milner, who was sent to "report," is shewn to have carried out the unification of command on his own responsibility and without reference to the prime minister.[57]Liberals of the rank and file, growing wearyof phrases about "instant daily decisions" and the advantage of "doing it now," over "waiting and seeing," found so little improvement abroad and so much calamitous disorder at home that within six months the new management seemed to have had a long enough trial: in that time cabinet rule had been abolished, nothing had been put in its place and the empire was at the mercy of half-a-dozen men who were alike only in the distrust which they aroused. From time to time the more ardent liberal skirmishers criticised the government; but their enthusiasm was damped by consistent failure to "make the red-hats go over the top"; it was finally destroyed by the faint-hearted attack of their leaders when at last they called ministers to account in 1918.The "Maurice Debate" is of party importance inregistering the death of the liberal party; it had indeed breathed its last eighteen months before, but the certificate was only written when Mr. Asquith was defeated on a division which challenged the honour of the prime minister and certain of his colleagues. Since the party meeting at the Reform Club on December 8th 1916 some of the more enterprising had snatched at office, others awaited their turn; of those who still sat on the opposition benches several were transferring their energies to commerce; and the division lists shewed that all but a faithful ninety-nine voted with the government or abstained from voting. For the next and last six months of the parliament's life, Mr. Lloyd George had nothing to fear in the House of Commons from the man whom he had supplanted.Following up his advantage, he took care in December that he should have nothing to fear from Mr. Asquith in the country. He that was not with the prime minister was against the man who had won the war and who aspired now to win the peace; there was no room for independence or qualification; a candidate went to victory with a "coupon" or to defeat without it. At such a time there was no lead or guidance from "old gang" headquarters; no alternative programme was offered; and the bemused elector was left to imagine that the liberals who refused the "coupon" without putting forward a policy of their own were plotting an assassin's war against a man whom they dared not fight openly. The coalition swept the country; the old liberal ministers were hurled from seats which some had occupied for a generation; and, as empty benches have their value in a division, the ministerial majority was strengthened by every vacant place once filled, before the Sinn Fein landslide,by a nationalist. So complete was the rout that, when Sir Donald Maclean and his scarred following of "Asquithian liberals" took their seats, the labour party challenged his right to be considered the leader of the opposition.IISince the general election a few seats have been won by "old gang" candidates; the liberal associations in the country have denounced Mr. Lloyd George, his followers and all their works; and Mr. Asquith has returned to the House as member for Paisley. The liberal party, however, is more deeply divided than ever; and an autocratic ministry has established itself so firmly that, while no one can defend its misgovernment, no one can shake it from its seat. The coalition liberals who parted from their old leader in despair or disgust cannot be detached; the party which was so wantonly shattered cannot be reconstructed; and, while the opposition remains numerically small and impotent in all but voice, the strange bed-fellows of the coalition cling comfortably to what they have lest a worse fate overtake them. Efforts have been made to "fuse" liberals and conservatives into one permanent union; and, though the organizations outside the House refuse to blend, the ministers within have contrived to discard the old shibboleths which in other days set men and parties in antagonism.The personnel of the ministry demands a moment's scrutiny. It was composed of liberals and conservatives, of the older statesmen and the young, in roughly equal numbers; it included one or two men, such as Mr. Fisher and Sir Robert Horne, who were new to political lifeand who were first-rate administrators rather than first-rate party men: while a coalition is fortunate in being able to draw upon two sources of political talent, it is less fortunate in having to recognise two party debts instead of one, and Mr. Lloyd George's second ministry contained probably more men of third-rate ability than any in modern history; the experiment of giving office to "business men" was not an unqualified success, and before long only Sir Eric Geddes remained in an embryonic department where he was spared the perhaps inevitable friction that occurs when a business man is brought in contact with civil servants. Labour has withdrawn from the coalition; the Irish members, with the exception of Sir Edward Carson, never entered it. When the first cabinet was formed in 1916, two of the appointments most strongly criticised were those of Lord Curzon and Lord Milner, who were felt to have failed in India and South Africa respectively and to be antagonistic to those ideals of democracy and nationalism for which, in theory, the war was being fought; it was added that Lord Milner was of German extraction. No one criticises them now, for nationalism and democracy have lost in public interest; but the cynic, with a recollection of former party divisions, may smile at the spectacle of Lord Curzon of Kedleston holding office under Mr. Lloyd George of Criccieth.The government has proved itself more varied than strong; but pure conservatism, pure liberalism and pure labour have been unable to organise an alternative. The attempt to perpetuate the coalition by fusing liberals and conservatives into a "centre party" was perhaps given new vigour by the fear that the liberal party would coalesce with labour. There is an engaging beliefamong statisticians and poets that they are the born leaders of nascent democracy, and few popular movements are long secure from their help and guidance: at the time of the 1918 general election Mr. Sidney Webb and Sir Leo Chiozza-Money staked out their claim. They were followed by an eager rush of itinerant intellectuals who were eager to sign on before a monopoly could be established. Soon a new formula was constructed for political grouping: the labour party was to be the party of "earned incomes," and the vast liberal and conservative middle-class of men and women engaged in commercial and "professional" work was at liberty to enter it.Though the invitation has not as yet been widely accepted, there have been some recruits to labour, and more will no doubt come in; to the historian the interest of this projected fusion lies in the change which it marks in political idealism. The old liberal creed would seem to be forfeiting the sympathy of its last supporters; politics are losing their soul; and material self-interest is being made the touchstone of government. It was perhaps inevitable that there should be a move in this direction at the end of a war which disturbed the financial equilibrium of every one in the country; inevitable, too, that more altruistic counsels should have to wait for a hearing until each man had done the best for himself in the licenced scramble which economists call the "distribution of wealth" and the "apportionment of taxation." The problems of the future, it is urged, are economic; in England at least there is now as much personal and religious liberty as any one cares to enjoy; foreign politics only become interesting as they precipitate or avert war; and war is over for the present. Intheir existing state of physical and nervous exhaustion the inarticulate millions are concerned only to attain the highest possible level of personal comfort and to bask there with the greatest possible degree of security. They are profoundly interested in wages and prices, but here their political interest stops short. Until it is seen whether this narrowing of political outlook is likely to be permanent, liberals will occupy themselves more profitably in studying it intelligently than in deploring it self-righteously. They must recognise that for the present at least the electors are considering every issue in terms of money; to nationalisation of industry they are applying the test: will it make living cheaper or dearer? So with a crusade against soviet government. So with the imperial mission of Great Britain in Mesopotamia. So with Free Trade. So with the resumption of commercial relations with Russia. It is only at Westminster that the nervous party organisers wonder whether the middle classes will "vote labour," whether the "old gang" can retain its hold on the liberal machine in the country, whether Mr. Lloyd George can form a new party and collect funds. The electors will vote at the prompting of their pockets. If they have not broken down the familiar lines of party division, it is because they are not deceived by any talk of a party which is to contain all the "earned incomes" and realise that there is no true distinction between incomes earned or unearned; taxation falls on the people with money, however acquired. They are as little deceived by warnings about "Bolshevism" and suspect that it is all a dodge to make their flesh creep. England, they feel, does not love revolutions and has a blind, stupid instinct for avoiding them; preeminently by never allowing too large a proportionof the population to become too hungry at the same time; prices indeed are high, but wages have risen to meet them; when trade has recovered after the war, prices will fall, but wages will tend to remain constant; the poorer classes will find themselves richer, the rich poorer; an immense economic revolution will have taken place without a single soviet. Every one is concerned to safeguard his own position.Though political interest in England has sunk to low-water mark in one direction, it has risen alarmingly in another. The national tradition of describing parliament as a "talking-shop" and of demanding machines or men who will "dosomething" may indicate some little confusion of thought among those who would make a deliberative assembly executive, but it prepares the way for a great constitutional change when men discover more certain and less dilatory methods of "doing something" than by parliamentary means; interest has shifted from the House of Commons to Fleet Street, to Unity House, to the periodical conferences of labour and, indeed, to any mass-meeting convened for any purpose by men or women who are in earnest about anything. Representative government is breaking down; direct government threatens to take its place; and the gravest problem of domestic statesmanship is to restore faith in parliamentary institutions.IIIThis temporary dislocation is no new phenomenon. The reform bill of 1867 became a serious part of the ministerial programme when a London mob pulled upthe railings of Hyde Park: that was direct pressure from below. Direct pressure from above came when Mr. Gladstone appealed, over the head of some four hundred critical, angular supporters, to vast mass-meetings throughout the country; their verdict and sanction overrode the authority of the discreet representatives who had been returned to interpret the will of the people; representative government yielded place, on occasion, to a direct mandate, to an informal referendum: in a word, to direct democracy. And, as democracy became articulate through the press and through public meetings, the doctrine was born that every political change must be inaugurated by a press and popular campaign.In the last six years every political revolution has been forced on the House of Commons from outside. The constitutional passage of home rule was checked in 1914 by a threat of military rebellion and popular violence; the suffrage was extended to women as the reward of their extra-parliamentary agitation and in the teeth of press and popular opinion; war with Bolshevist Russia was stopped by the labour party, outside the House; and Ireland, despairing of help or leadership from England, has set up a Sinn Fein government. In one form or another this is "direct action"; and "direct action" is theultima ratioof the governed against their governors when the elected representatives slip beyond the control of their electors. The course of legislation and of foreign politics is now determined by a series of political strikes. In 1920, the labour party tried its hand on a solution of the Irish problem. Certain railway workers refused to carry munitions for the government. The National Union of Railway Workers was urged to supportthis local strike and to declare a general strike if the government tried to run the Irish railways with the help of engineers working under military discipline. Here, if it had chosen to throw down the challenge, organised labour would have met and contended with the executive of representative government on the highest plane. Mr. J. H. Thomas shewed the statesmanship to avert or postpone this conflict by asking the prime minister to receive a deputation to discuss an Irish settlement from the standpoint of labour.At least for a time parliament has been superseded by the direct action of men who find themselves impotent as parliamentary electors but powerful—perhaps, in the future, all-powerful—as the mechanicians of the communal life. This change from constitutionalism to direct action, from representation to control at first hand, is too grave to be ignored. As men meet primarily in human associations for the comforts of life, they defeat the object of their association by encouraging or condoning trials of strength which establish nothing but the momentary triumph of the moment's victor; what has been secured by the railway strike of 1919 beyond the knowledge that the railwaymen can to a great extent paralyse the activity of the country and that the rest of the community can to a great extent improvise means and services for preventing complete paralysis?It is more than time alike for employers and employed to realise that they are the servants of the public: as every strike comes to an end at some time and on some terms, there is no reason in equity why a strike should ever begin; if the individual submits—and cheerfully submits—his honour, life and fortune to the arbitrament of a judge and jury, every man or body of men whowill not submit an industrial dispute to a similar tribunal is suspected of having discarded equity in favour of the doctrine that might, however temporary, is right. Employers and employed will only win public sympathy, if indeed they care to have it, when they agree to compulsory arbitration backed by the severest penalties for breach of agreement; the status of both is at present that of a robber-baron. It is more than time, too, for masters and men in any one industry to realise that they represent but a small proportion of the organised capital and labour in the country, a yet smaller proportion of the total life and wealth of the community.More needful even than the divorce between militant politics and militant economics is the reestablishment of public order.As the policeman is a symbol, as organised society depends far less on the executive officers of the law than on respect for the law, nothing but chaos can be expected of any successful resistance to law. When the law-breaker goes not only unpunished but rewarded and honoured, can it be expected that others will not follow in the footsteps of those who have risen by anarchy to be lord chancellor, lord of appeal, chancellor of the exchequer and leader of the Ulster party? The privy councillor who preaches and prepares armed resistance to law, the suffragette who breaks a window, the employer or the workman who breaks a contract, the conscientious objector who repudiates any liability that the soveran government may impose upon him is a danger, by contact and example, to the whole state, a mad dog whose extirpation is the first duty of all who value the stability of the state. Here, as everywhere, popular judgement is warped by social and intellectual snobbishness:the "passive resister," whose "nonconformist conscience" forbade his paying rates for the support of Church of England teaching was an object of impatient scorn; the lady of rank who declined to lick insurance-stamps at the bidding of a little Welsh attorney was a woman of pride and independence; the officers who threatened mutiny and the civilians who took up arms against home rule were regarded as heroes; but the men who preferred prisons and obloquy to the necessity of trying to take the life of their country's enemies were branded as traitors and cowards. There can only be one equitable rule: so long as a man remains a member of any community—nation, church, profession or club—he must submit scrupulously to its rules and only seek to change them by constitutional means.But, inasmuch as constitutional government is the art of understanding and coordinating to a common end human beings who are at once above and below the mute, mechanical conscripts of an autocracy, the governors have to make obedience easy by making government human. In the twentieth century man is too imaginative and too little servile to worship the inexorable soveranty of Hobbes'Leviathan. Men and women will submit still to starvation, torture and death rather than compromise with an ideal: it is doubtful citizenship, but it is a psychological problem to be faced and solved; it is best solved by preventing the martyr's high, tragic sense of desperation and by facilitating the methods of constitutional redress. Direct action is a final protest when the ways of constitutionalism are blocked; in Russia, in Ireland, in Egypt and India, the man with a grievance has been driven back on the bomb remedy. England dislikes sporadic violence as muchas general revolution: bombs are unlikely to be thrown in England, but the political strike will take their place as an alternative to the methods of representative government unless these methods can be made more sensitive to opinion. First the mode of election must be so changed that a minority candidate no longer slips into parliament over the struggling forms of his majority rivals; then the life of parliament must be so shortened that a member can be called to more frequent account; and lastly the constituency must have power to demand of its member that he submit himself for reelection when he is acting against its wishes. The representative must, in other words, become more and more the deputy. Such a development would have brought consternation to the heart of Edmund Burke; but it is the only alternative, in a press-ridden, publicity-ruled state, to direct action.These are the mechanics of politics, the fundamentals governing the relations of ruler and ruled in all states at all times. Politics—in the sense of a conflict between parties organised in obedience to common principles and in pursuit of common aims—have lately been shelved. Now—as always—the king's government must be carried on; now—for the first time—it must be carried on by the king's present ministers. To secure that consummation, the unbending partisans of other days have sunk their differences: Mr. Lloyd George and Lord Curzon, Mr. Churchill and Lord Birkenhead, Mr. Montagu and Mr. Balfour work side by side; though liberal and conservative stalwarts retain enough of the old spirit to assure their constituents that they would resign if a sacrilegious finger were laid on their cardinal principles, by luck, contrivance or the requirements ofthe moment Mr. Lloyd George has been able to avoid such controversial legislation as might split his ministry; and, where legislation threatened to become controversial, as in the latest home rule bill, the greatest living conciliator found a means of accommodating minor differences until a united cabinet recognised the absurdity of resigning office.Though every government falls more or less unexpectedly, there is no reason why the present one should not continue until its leaders judge the moment to be ripe for an election. A ministry is upset by opposition within the House or outside; the coalition has no organised opposition to fear beyond the "wee free" liberals, who are numerically unimportant, and the labour party, which is not yet ready to take control. Coalition liberals and coalition conservatives have at least one foot firmly planted in the promised land; before they try to plant the second foot, they have to remember Aesop's fable of the dog that snapped at the reflection of his own piece of meat. Outside the House there is plenty of criticism, plenty of opposition; but, though a little of the criticism becomes fruitful through the urgency of the press, there is no visible alternative government, no one wants a general election, and the public is bored with politics. The warning which Charles II gave to his ambitious brother might be quoted by any minister to any critic who wished to supplant him.Something as great as the war in its comprehensive, intimate attack on every member of the community will be required to reawaken general interest in politics: when Great Britain is even nearer bankruptcy and starvation, when the United States refuse her credit, when the world shortage of food affects the stomachs of theworld and the hungry, maddened hordes of central and eastern Europe break raveningly forth, it may be remembered that the misrule of the present government has an exact parallel, on a smaller scale, in the misrule of Louis XVI's ministers before the French revolution.IVOn the eve of the 1918 election the prime minister expressed his political ideal in the formula that England had to be made a home fit for heroes. How far he has realised this ideal in the years during which he has ruled the House of Commons without opposition is a question which the heroes themselves are best qualified to answer; but, exalted as was his vision, some may still feel that, since England contains men and women of most unheroic stature and is but a part of the inhabited world, his formula was inadequate. The young men of the generation which this book has attempted to describe were, from the first awakening of their intelligence, exercised over the function of government and divided over its aim by the political philosophy which they hammered out for themselves in reading and discussion. From different angles and by different paths they reached agreement on the postulate that, before all else, every man should have secured to him the minimum of essentials. He could not claim food, air and warmth of natural "right", for in organised society a man enjoys only those rights which his fellow-men allow him; but the communists accorded them as a payment on account, and the individualists as an insurance against revolution. Those who fought shy of party labels and regardedthemselves as having been born fortuitously and without consultation into a world from which there was no escape but by death felt that they had every inducement to live, by mutual consideration, on the best possible terms with their fellows and that life would be intolerable if a neighbour rifled their pockets as they slept or broke their heads if they snored. Those who gloried in the name of liberals and believed that the end of life was the attainment of beauty included in their minimum the claim that each man should have secured to him the chance of making his own life beautiful. With generosity not yet tarnished by experience and with hatred of injustice not yet tempered by custom, these young men felt that they could not be wholly comfortable while others were uncomfortable: the cries of the suffering might banish sleep, their desperation might threaten security; if they obtruded it, as they were so tastelessly prone to do, their misery might disquiet an over-active conscience. Policy joined hands with humanity in favour of giving every one his minimum of essentials.It had not been given when the war put an end to dreaming. It has not been given yet. It will not be fully given until a man is secure from disease and premature death; from pain, hunger, thirst and cold; from spiritual and intellectual fear; from terror of his fellow-man; from the educational inequality that sets him at a disadvantage with others; from the grievance that comes of a blow struck to his racial or religious sentiment. Twenty years ago, before they discovered the limitations of official politics, young liberals found from the contemplation of those ideals a vocation: they believed in equality of opportunity and swore by better housing, better feeding, better education; they sympathisedwith the aspirations of nationality half a generation before these were discovered and forgotten by the rest of England; they were disturbed by the thought that men were flogged to death in the Belgian Congo or massacred in Armenia; and, maybe, they wearied the complacent with statistics of all those who in a single year and in the richest country in the world died of cancer and consumption or rotted away with syphilis. The verminous, rickety child seemed no less a blot on civilisation than the short-lived prostitute who—they were assured—was irreclaimable, "because that sort of thing alwayshasgone on; it's the oldest profession in the world; and, of course, itisa safety-valve...."Twenty years of work and travel, twenty years of mingling with average, sensual men and women, twenty years' experience of inertia may have cured young liberals of their optimism, but it should have strengthened their faith. By now they have probably seen much of what, before, was made known to them only from books: they have walked through factories and seen girls turned into machines by the monotonous repetition of one part of one process; they have looked, over the side of a liner, at straining, black, half-naked men who have already been turned into the semblance of shuffling, debased animals by the monotony of carrying coal; they are assured, perhaps, that industrial conditions are better in England than anywhere else, but they still wonder what life and what vision of beauty are possible to these slaves of the work-room and of the coal-lighter, who are not the less slaves because they enjoy freedom to move from one master to another. Sheltered indeed must be the life of any who have not found, in twenty years, adaily vent for the compassion which is the living breath of liberalism.The communist who seeks to abolish private property has more chance of success than the impatient reformer who tries to sweep away all the ugliness of modern life by breaking the mechanism on which modern life with its ugliness and its beauty depends. It is too late to make an end of industrialism; and man was harder used and more brutalised before the advent of machinery than ever since. His lot is improving daily; and all that the reformer can reasonably ask is that the rate of improvement shall be accelerated until the employer of labour no longer imposes on his work-people conditions that he would himself refuse. In war, a British officer does not order his men into an action which he is himself afraid to undertake; at the end of a march, he does not think of his own needs until he has seen that his men have their food. There is something perilously like shirking in the attitude of an employer who expects men and women to undertake hardships from which he stands aloof; and, directly or indirectly, all are employers.The mission of liberalism will not be fulfilled until it has achieved a form of civilisation whereof no part can inspire misgiving or shame. Every country has its dark places; the inhabitants of every country turn a blind eye to them until the upheaval of war, the outbreak of revolution or the spread of a new faith throws a challenge to every social institution and demands that it shall justify itself. When more than five million men voluntarily risked their lives in defence of one system against another, their decision was less a clean-cut choice than a blend of herd-instinct, collective hypnotism and that irrational feeling for associations which is called patriotism;the decision once taken, they committed themselves to a struggle in which one order of civilisation would probably maintain itself and another would probably be overthrown. If they preserved that which was less good and destroyed that which was more good, they sinned against the light; if they preserved that which was more good, they were still obliged to prove it so much the better that no sacrifice was too great for it; and, if in their scrutiny they discovered blemishes, they were bound to remove them for fear the enemy would say that they had sacrificed themselves for something that was not worth their lives. During the war, of course, every one was too busy to hunt for blemishes and to remove them.After the war every one is too busy; and those who once called themselves liberals have lost interest in everything but the cost of living, though the youngest of them can recall the days when the present prime minister's voice throbbed with emotion in describing the misery of the poor and in championing the outcasts of civilisation, wherever they were to be found.It is more than time for the young liberals of twenty years ago to recognise that the liberal faith has lost its prophets and that the prophets have lost their liberal faith.
POLITICS IN A DISSOLVING VIEW
Often when warring for he wist not what,An enemy-soldier, passing by one weak,Has tendered water, wiped the burning cheek,And cooled the lips so black and clammed and hot;
Then gone his way, and maybe quite forgotThe deed of grace amid the roar and reek;Yet larger vision than the tongue can speakHe there has reached, although he has known it not
For natural mindsight, triumphing in the actOver the throes of artificial rage,Has thuswise muffled victory's peal of pride,Rended to ribands policy's specious pageThat deals but with evasion, code, and pact,And war's apology wholly stultified.
1915.———————Thomas Hardy: "Often When Warring."
In the life of the English generation which found its climax and catastrophe in the war, the last chapter opened on armistice day and closed with the signature of the German peace treaty on July 19th, 1919. As with the armistice terms, so with the treaty: no one doubted that it would be signed, but, until it had been signed, all efforts at reconstruction, all attempts to resume a normal life of peace were tentative and provisional. The House of Commons in effect declared a legislative moratorium and, in the absence of the primeminister, marked time to the command of Mr. Bonar Law with the disciplined noise and the calculated absence of progress inseparable from that part of infantry drill.
As the general election of the previous December had been won on the cry that a coalition was necessary to the conclusion of a lasting peace, it might have been expected that the supporters of the coalition would have influenced the course of the peace negotiations. Beyond an occasional question, however, which seldom brought enlightenment to the questioner, and an occasional telegram of protest which can never have brought satisfaction to the protester, coalition members gave the government a free hand. In part, there were comparatively few with any parliamentary experience; in part, there was none who could draft a desirable alternative ministry, if his dissatisfaction with the present prime minister stimulated him to effective revolt; and, in part, there has probably never, since 1832, been a House of Commons so bankrupt in public spirit, courage, independence or conscience. Since the end of 1918 the government has triumphantly carried its supporters against their inclinations through a dozen crises of which any single one would have seen any other ministry disowned and broken by a less servile house: the peace treaty with Germany, as mischievous as it was dishonourable, was flung at parliament with an air of "Take it—or leave it and take the consequences"; the treaty with Turkey established the Ottoman government in Constantinople with licence to misgovern and to massacre as freely as in the past; the Russian policy began with invective and threats of war against the bloody-handed soviet and ended with the cordial grip of a hand which had only become more bloody in the interval; Ireland driftedthrough pats of conciliation and dabs of coercion to a state of anarchy which ministers hoped to end by means of a new home rule bill abhorred by every section of Irishmen; and, while financiers protested that the country had reached its taxable capacity, the government continued to live beyond its means and the chancellor of the exchequer complained that it was not in his power to retrench effectively.
For a similar display of cynical incompetence and reckless disorder the historian must go back to the days of a great autocracy in dissolution. The government of Louis XVI or of the last Roman emperor, would perhaps shew an equal record of vacillations, lethargy and light-hearted misrule; but in both instances anarchy ended in downfall; and, if history be past politics, present politics are future history. It is hardly straining the parallel to suggest that such misgovernment is always attributable to one cause, the lack of an efficient opposition; a composite government unchecked by fear of overthrow and uninspired by any loftier ideal than a groping instinct of self-preservation, is no less tyrannical and prone to abuse than a single ruler.
"These various Cæsars and their successors and their women-kind," says H. G. Wells, "were probably no worse essentially than most weak and passionate human beings, but they had no real religion, being themselves gods; they had no wide knowledge on which to build high ambitions, their women were fierce and almost illiterate, and they were under no restraints of law or custom. They were surrounded by creatures ready to stimulate their slightest wishes and to translate their vaguest impulses into action. What are mere passing blackthoughts and angry impulses with most of us became therefore deeds with them. Before a man condemns Nero as a different species of being from himself, he should examine his own secret thoughts very carefully."
It is less profitable to condemn the present government than to enquire why there has been no effective opposition to hold it in check. The political revolution which placed Mr. Lloyd George in power was described by Mr. Asquith as a "conspiracy"; it was generally regarded as a discreditable piece of trickery, and even the stalwarts of the new order were for the most part reduced to mumbling that the end must justify the means and that, without a change, the war would have dragged on for ever. It is possible to see now that a psychological crisis was reached in December 1916 and that after more than two years of unending and unended fighting the herd-instinct demanded that someone should be made responsible. To the bulk of the liberal party who stood by Mr. Asquith, forgiving his high-handed behaviour in resigning without an adverse vote and without consultation of his supporters, the December crisis seemed a trial of strength between two men; it was believed first that no alternative ministry could be formed and then that it could not endure; the opposition liberals would have been more than human if they had cherished no hope of revenge; and they could claim disinterestedly and honestly that the new prime minister was at least not superior to the old in scruple and was certainly inferior in ability.
However great their resentment, however, the new management had to be given a trial; any show of factiousness would have been doubtful patriotism anddisastrous tactics; and the chief subject of discussion among the wire-pullers was how long the trial should continue. Much noise and dust accompanied Mr. Lloyd George's triumphal progress to No. 10 Downing Street; at last a "business government" had taken office, and Whitehall became filled with the unfamiliar forms of shipping-men and railway-men, newspaper-men and mining-men, all disciplined by practical experience at the head of great commercial enterprises, though unschooled to the teamwork of administration in which the pace and independence of each are regulated by his fellows. For a moment the political crisis seemed a successfulbourgeoisprotest against the spirit and methods of Balliol: neither Mr. Lloyd George nor Lord Beaverbrook, neither Lord Northcliffe nor Lord Rothermere, neither Sir Eric Geddes nor Sir Joseph Maclay, neither Lord Rhondda nor Mr. Neville Chamberlain was a Balliol man; and in his strength and in his weakness, in his mechanical efficiency and blank want of imagination, in his intellectual aloofness and touching belief that others too observed an Oxford standard of honour, Mr. Asquith was a typical product of Balliol.[56]
Nevertheless, when the dust and noise of removal had abated, there were found to be at least as many defects of administration as before; the wizard's wand failed to charm food from air or to conjure up men from the vasty deep in place of those who were being sent to rot in Salonica; the German front remained impregnable in the west; the new war-cabinet, for all its dash and fire, was "too late" to prevent the Russian revolution; andGerman submarine-commanders, perhaps in ignorance of the change that had taken place, continued to sink allied and neutral shipping. No improvement was observable until the United States entered the war; and the warmest panegyrist of the new government has never suggested that the credit for this decision should be given to the new prime minister. Those who look for a single principle or detail in which the second coalition varied the policy of the first are rewarded with an encomium on the blessings of a unified command; but official rhetoric did not conceal that the French were being given, with much advertising display, what was waiting for them whenever they chose to ask for it; and, if this be Mr. Lloyd George's sole innovation, the assertion that he won the war stands in need of revision, the more so since the publication of the memorandum in which Lord Milner, who was sent to "report," is shewn to have carried out the unification of command on his own responsibility and without reference to the prime minister.[57]Liberals of the rank and file, growing wearyof phrases about "instant daily decisions" and the advantage of "doing it now," over "waiting and seeing," found so little improvement abroad and so much calamitous disorder at home that within six months the new management seemed to have had a long enough trial: in that time cabinet rule had been abolished, nothing had been put in its place and the empire was at the mercy of half-a-dozen men who were alike only in the distrust which they aroused. From time to time the more ardent liberal skirmishers criticised the government; but their enthusiasm was damped by consistent failure to "make the red-hats go over the top"; it was finally destroyed by the faint-hearted attack of their leaders when at last they called ministers to account in 1918.
The "Maurice Debate" is of party importance inregistering the death of the liberal party; it had indeed breathed its last eighteen months before, but the certificate was only written when Mr. Asquith was defeated on a division which challenged the honour of the prime minister and certain of his colleagues. Since the party meeting at the Reform Club on December 8th 1916 some of the more enterprising had snatched at office, others awaited their turn; of those who still sat on the opposition benches several were transferring their energies to commerce; and the division lists shewed that all but a faithful ninety-nine voted with the government or abstained from voting. For the next and last six months of the parliament's life, Mr. Lloyd George had nothing to fear in the House of Commons from the man whom he had supplanted.
Following up his advantage, he took care in December that he should have nothing to fear from Mr. Asquith in the country. He that was not with the prime minister was against the man who had won the war and who aspired now to win the peace; there was no room for independence or qualification; a candidate went to victory with a "coupon" or to defeat without it. At such a time there was no lead or guidance from "old gang" headquarters; no alternative programme was offered; and the bemused elector was left to imagine that the liberals who refused the "coupon" without putting forward a policy of their own were plotting an assassin's war against a man whom they dared not fight openly. The coalition swept the country; the old liberal ministers were hurled from seats which some had occupied for a generation; and, as empty benches have their value in a division, the ministerial majority was strengthened by every vacant place once filled, before the Sinn Fein landslide,by a nationalist. So complete was the rout that, when Sir Donald Maclean and his scarred following of "Asquithian liberals" took their seats, the labour party challenged his right to be considered the leader of the opposition.
Since the general election a few seats have been won by "old gang" candidates; the liberal associations in the country have denounced Mr. Lloyd George, his followers and all their works; and Mr. Asquith has returned to the House as member for Paisley. The liberal party, however, is more deeply divided than ever; and an autocratic ministry has established itself so firmly that, while no one can defend its misgovernment, no one can shake it from its seat. The coalition liberals who parted from their old leader in despair or disgust cannot be detached; the party which was so wantonly shattered cannot be reconstructed; and, while the opposition remains numerically small and impotent in all but voice, the strange bed-fellows of the coalition cling comfortably to what they have lest a worse fate overtake them. Efforts have been made to "fuse" liberals and conservatives into one permanent union; and, though the organizations outside the House refuse to blend, the ministers within have contrived to discard the old shibboleths which in other days set men and parties in antagonism.
The personnel of the ministry demands a moment's scrutiny. It was composed of liberals and conservatives, of the older statesmen and the young, in roughly equal numbers; it included one or two men, such as Mr. Fisher and Sir Robert Horne, who were new to political lifeand who were first-rate administrators rather than first-rate party men: while a coalition is fortunate in being able to draw upon two sources of political talent, it is less fortunate in having to recognise two party debts instead of one, and Mr. Lloyd George's second ministry contained probably more men of third-rate ability than any in modern history; the experiment of giving office to "business men" was not an unqualified success, and before long only Sir Eric Geddes remained in an embryonic department where he was spared the perhaps inevitable friction that occurs when a business man is brought in contact with civil servants. Labour has withdrawn from the coalition; the Irish members, with the exception of Sir Edward Carson, never entered it. When the first cabinet was formed in 1916, two of the appointments most strongly criticised were those of Lord Curzon and Lord Milner, who were felt to have failed in India and South Africa respectively and to be antagonistic to those ideals of democracy and nationalism for which, in theory, the war was being fought; it was added that Lord Milner was of German extraction. No one criticises them now, for nationalism and democracy have lost in public interest; but the cynic, with a recollection of former party divisions, may smile at the spectacle of Lord Curzon of Kedleston holding office under Mr. Lloyd George of Criccieth.
The government has proved itself more varied than strong; but pure conservatism, pure liberalism and pure labour have been unable to organise an alternative. The attempt to perpetuate the coalition by fusing liberals and conservatives into a "centre party" was perhaps given new vigour by the fear that the liberal party would coalesce with labour. There is an engaging beliefamong statisticians and poets that they are the born leaders of nascent democracy, and few popular movements are long secure from their help and guidance: at the time of the 1918 general election Mr. Sidney Webb and Sir Leo Chiozza-Money staked out their claim. They were followed by an eager rush of itinerant intellectuals who were eager to sign on before a monopoly could be established. Soon a new formula was constructed for political grouping: the labour party was to be the party of "earned incomes," and the vast liberal and conservative middle-class of men and women engaged in commercial and "professional" work was at liberty to enter it.
Though the invitation has not as yet been widely accepted, there have been some recruits to labour, and more will no doubt come in; to the historian the interest of this projected fusion lies in the change which it marks in political idealism. The old liberal creed would seem to be forfeiting the sympathy of its last supporters; politics are losing their soul; and material self-interest is being made the touchstone of government. It was perhaps inevitable that there should be a move in this direction at the end of a war which disturbed the financial equilibrium of every one in the country; inevitable, too, that more altruistic counsels should have to wait for a hearing until each man had done the best for himself in the licenced scramble which economists call the "distribution of wealth" and the "apportionment of taxation." The problems of the future, it is urged, are economic; in England at least there is now as much personal and religious liberty as any one cares to enjoy; foreign politics only become interesting as they precipitate or avert war; and war is over for the present. Intheir existing state of physical and nervous exhaustion the inarticulate millions are concerned only to attain the highest possible level of personal comfort and to bask there with the greatest possible degree of security. They are profoundly interested in wages and prices, but here their political interest stops short. Until it is seen whether this narrowing of political outlook is likely to be permanent, liberals will occupy themselves more profitably in studying it intelligently than in deploring it self-righteously. They must recognise that for the present at least the electors are considering every issue in terms of money; to nationalisation of industry they are applying the test: will it make living cheaper or dearer? So with a crusade against soviet government. So with the imperial mission of Great Britain in Mesopotamia. So with Free Trade. So with the resumption of commercial relations with Russia. It is only at Westminster that the nervous party organisers wonder whether the middle classes will "vote labour," whether the "old gang" can retain its hold on the liberal machine in the country, whether Mr. Lloyd George can form a new party and collect funds. The electors will vote at the prompting of their pockets. If they have not broken down the familiar lines of party division, it is because they are not deceived by any talk of a party which is to contain all the "earned incomes" and realise that there is no true distinction between incomes earned or unearned; taxation falls on the people with money, however acquired. They are as little deceived by warnings about "Bolshevism" and suspect that it is all a dodge to make their flesh creep. England, they feel, does not love revolutions and has a blind, stupid instinct for avoiding them; preeminently by never allowing too large a proportionof the population to become too hungry at the same time; prices indeed are high, but wages have risen to meet them; when trade has recovered after the war, prices will fall, but wages will tend to remain constant; the poorer classes will find themselves richer, the rich poorer; an immense economic revolution will have taken place without a single soviet. Every one is concerned to safeguard his own position.
Though political interest in England has sunk to low-water mark in one direction, it has risen alarmingly in another. The national tradition of describing parliament as a "talking-shop" and of demanding machines or men who will "dosomething" may indicate some little confusion of thought among those who would make a deliberative assembly executive, but it prepares the way for a great constitutional change when men discover more certain and less dilatory methods of "doing something" than by parliamentary means; interest has shifted from the House of Commons to Fleet Street, to Unity House, to the periodical conferences of labour and, indeed, to any mass-meeting convened for any purpose by men or women who are in earnest about anything. Representative government is breaking down; direct government threatens to take its place; and the gravest problem of domestic statesmanship is to restore faith in parliamentary institutions.
This temporary dislocation is no new phenomenon. The reform bill of 1867 became a serious part of the ministerial programme when a London mob pulled upthe railings of Hyde Park: that was direct pressure from below. Direct pressure from above came when Mr. Gladstone appealed, over the head of some four hundred critical, angular supporters, to vast mass-meetings throughout the country; their verdict and sanction overrode the authority of the discreet representatives who had been returned to interpret the will of the people; representative government yielded place, on occasion, to a direct mandate, to an informal referendum: in a word, to direct democracy. And, as democracy became articulate through the press and through public meetings, the doctrine was born that every political change must be inaugurated by a press and popular campaign.
In the last six years every political revolution has been forced on the House of Commons from outside. The constitutional passage of home rule was checked in 1914 by a threat of military rebellion and popular violence; the suffrage was extended to women as the reward of their extra-parliamentary agitation and in the teeth of press and popular opinion; war with Bolshevist Russia was stopped by the labour party, outside the House; and Ireland, despairing of help or leadership from England, has set up a Sinn Fein government. In one form or another this is "direct action"; and "direct action" is theultima ratioof the governed against their governors when the elected representatives slip beyond the control of their electors. The course of legislation and of foreign politics is now determined by a series of political strikes. In 1920, the labour party tried its hand on a solution of the Irish problem. Certain railway workers refused to carry munitions for the government. The National Union of Railway Workers was urged to supportthis local strike and to declare a general strike if the government tried to run the Irish railways with the help of engineers working under military discipline. Here, if it had chosen to throw down the challenge, organised labour would have met and contended with the executive of representative government on the highest plane. Mr. J. H. Thomas shewed the statesmanship to avert or postpone this conflict by asking the prime minister to receive a deputation to discuss an Irish settlement from the standpoint of labour.
At least for a time parliament has been superseded by the direct action of men who find themselves impotent as parliamentary electors but powerful—perhaps, in the future, all-powerful—as the mechanicians of the communal life. This change from constitutionalism to direct action, from representation to control at first hand, is too grave to be ignored. As men meet primarily in human associations for the comforts of life, they defeat the object of their association by encouraging or condoning trials of strength which establish nothing but the momentary triumph of the moment's victor; what has been secured by the railway strike of 1919 beyond the knowledge that the railwaymen can to a great extent paralyse the activity of the country and that the rest of the community can to a great extent improvise means and services for preventing complete paralysis?
It is more than time alike for employers and employed to realise that they are the servants of the public: as every strike comes to an end at some time and on some terms, there is no reason in equity why a strike should ever begin; if the individual submits—and cheerfully submits—his honour, life and fortune to the arbitrament of a judge and jury, every man or body of men whowill not submit an industrial dispute to a similar tribunal is suspected of having discarded equity in favour of the doctrine that might, however temporary, is right. Employers and employed will only win public sympathy, if indeed they care to have it, when they agree to compulsory arbitration backed by the severest penalties for breach of agreement; the status of both is at present that of a robber-baron. It is more than time, too, for masters and men in any one industry to realise that they represent but a small proportion of the organised capital and labour in the country, a yet smaller proportion of the total life and wealth of the community.
More needful even than the divorce between militant politics and militant economics is the reestablishment of public order.
As the policeman is a symbol, as organised society depends far less on the executive officers of the law than on respect for the law, nothing but chaos can be expected of any successful resistance to law. When the law-breaker goes not only unpunished but rewarded and honoured, can it be expected that others will not follow in the footsteps of those who have risen by anarchy to be lord chancellor, lord of appeal, chancellor of the exchequer and leader of the Ulster party? The privy councillor who preaches and prepares armed resistance to law, the suffragette who breaks a window, the employer or the workman who breaks a contract, the conscientious objector who repudiates any liability that the soveran government may impose upon him is a danger, by contact and example, to the whole state, a mad dog whose extirpation is the first duty of all who value the stability of the state. Here, as everywhere, popular judgement is warped by social and intellectual snobbishness:the "passive resister," whose "nonconformist conscience" forbade his paying rates for the support of Church of England teaching was an object of impatient scorn; the lady of rank who declined to lick insurance-stamps at the bidding of a little Welsh attorney was a woman of pride and independence; the officers who threatened mutiny and the civilians who took up arms against home rule were regarded as heroes; but the men who preferred prisons and obloquy to the necessity of trying to take the life of their country's enemies were branded as traitors and cowards. There can only be one equitable rule: so long as a man remains a member of any community—nation, church, profession or club—he must submit scrupulously to its rules and only seek to change them by constitutional means.
But, inasmuch as constitutional government is the art of understanding and coordinating to a common end human beings who are at once above and below the mute, mechanical conscripts of an autocracy, the governors have to make obedience easy by making government human. In the twentieth century man is too imaginative and too little servile to worship the inexorable soveranty of Hobbes'Leviathan. Men and women will submit still to starvation, torture and death rather than compromise with an ideal: it is doubtful citizenship, but it is a psychological problem to be faced and solved; it is best solved by preventing the martyr's high, tragic sense of desperation and by facilitating the methods of constitutional redress. Direct action is a final protest when the ways of constitutionalism are blocked; in Russia, in Ireland, in Egypt and India, the man with a grievance has been driven back on the bomb remedy. England dislikes sporadic violence as muchas general revolution: bombs are unlikely to be thrown in England, but the political strike will take their place as an alternative to the methods of representative government unless these methods can be made more sensitive to opinion. First the mode of election must be so changed that a minority candidate no longer slips into parliament over the struggling forms of his majority rivals; then the life of parliament must be so shortened that a member can be called to more frequent account; and lastly the constituency must have power to demand of its member that he submit himself for reelection when he is acting against its wishes. The representative must, in other words, become more and more the deputy. Such a development would have brought consternation to the heart of Edmund Burke; but it is the only alternative, in a press-ridden, publicity-ruled state, to direct action.
These are the mechanics of politics, the fundamentals governing the relations of ruler and ruled in all states at all times. Politics—in the sense of a conflict between parties organised in obedience to common principles and in pursuit of common aims—have lately been shelved. Now—as always—the king's government must be carried on; now—for the first time—it must be carried on by the king's present ministers. To secure that consummation, the unbending partisans of other days have sunk their differences: Mr. Lloyd George and Lord Curzon, Mr. Churchill and Lord Birkenhead, Mr. Montagu and Mr. Balfour work side by side; though liberal and conservative stalwarts retain enough of the old spirit to assure their constituents that they would resign if a sacrilegious finger were laid on their cardinal principles, by luck, contrivance or the requirements ofthe moment Mr. Lloyd George has been able to avoid such controversial legislation as might split his ministry; and, where legislation threatened to become controversial, as in the latest home rule bill, the greatest living conciliator found a means of accommodating minor differences until a united cabinet recognised the absurdity of resigning office.
Though every government falls more or less unexpectedly, there is no reason why the present one should not continue until its leaders judge the moment to be ripe for an election. A ministry is upset by opposition within the House or outside; the coalition has no organised opposition to fear beyond the "wee free" liberals, who are numerically unimportant, and the labour party, which is not yet ready to take control. Coalition liberals and coalition conservatives have at least one foot firmly planted in the promised land; before they try to plant the second foot, they have to remember Aesop's fable of the dog that snapped at the reflection of his own piece of meat. Outside the House there is plenty of criticism, plenty of opposition; but, though a little of the criticism becomes fruitful through the urgency of the press, there is no visible alternative government, no one wants a general election, and the public is bored with politics. The warning which Charles II gave to his ambitious brother might be quoted by any minister to any critic who wished to supplant him.
Something as great as the war in its comprehensive, intimate attack on every member of the community will be required to reawaken general interest in politics: when Great Britain is even nearer bankruptcy and starvation, when the United States refuse her credit, when the world shortage of food affects the stomachs of theworld and the hungry, maddened hordes of central and eastern Europe break raveningly forth, it may be remembered that the misrule of the present government has an exact parallel, on a smaller scale, in the misrule of Louis XVI's ministers before the French revolution.
On the eve of the 1918 election the prime minister expressed his political ideal in the formula that England had to be made a home fit for heroes. How far he has realised this ideal in the years during which he has ruled the House of Commons without opposition is a question which the heroes themselves are best qualified to answer; but, exalted as was his vision, some may still feel that, since England contains men and women of most unheroic stature and is but a part of the inhabited world, his formula was inadequate. The young men of the generation which this book has attempted to describe were, from the first awakening of their intelligence, exercised over the function of government and divided over its aim by the political philosophy which they hammered out for themselves in reading and discussion. From different angles and by different paths they reached agreement on the postulate that, before all else, every man should have secured to him the minimum of essentials. He could not claim food, air and warmth of natural "right", for in organised society a man enjoys only those rights which his fellow-men allow him; but the communists accorded them as a payment on account, and the individualists as an insurance against revolution. Those who fought shy of party labels and regardedthemselves as having been born fortuitously and without consultation into a world from which there was no escape but by death felt that they had every inducement to live, by mutual consideration, on the best possible terms with their fellows and that life would be intolerable if a neighbour rifled their pockets as they slept or broke their heads if they snored. Those who gloried in the name of liberals and believed that the end of life was the attainment of beauty included in their minimum the claim that each man should have secured to him the chance of making his own life beautiful. With generosity not yet tarnished by experience and with hatred of injustice not yet tempered by custom, these young men felt that they could not be wholly comfortable while others were uncomfortable: the cries of the suffering might banish sleep, their desperation might threaten security; if they obtruded it, as they were so tastelessly prone to do, their misery might disquiet an over-active conscience. Policy joined hands with humanity in favour of giving every one his minimum of essentials.
It had not been given when the war put an end to dreaming. It has not been given yet. It will not be fully given until a man is secure from disease and premature death; from pain, hunger, thirst and cold; from spiritual and intellectual fear; from terror of his fellow-man; from the educational inequality that sets him at a disadvantage with others; from the grievance that comes of a blow struck to his racial or religious sentiment. Twenty years ago, before they discovered the limitations of official politics, young liberals found from the contemplation of those ideals a vocation: they believed in equality of opportunity and swore by better housing, better feeding, better education; they sympathisedwith the aspirations of nationality half a generation before these were discovered and forgotten by the rest of England; they were disturbed by the thought that men were flogged to death in the Belgian Congo or massacred in Armenia; and, maybe, they wearied the complacent with statistics of all those who in a single year and in the richest country in the world died of cancer and consumption or rotted away with syphilis. The verminous, rickety child seemed no less a blot on civilisation than the short-lived prostitute who—they were assured—was irreclaimable, "because that sort of thing alwayshasgone on; it's the oldest profession in the world; and, of course, itisa safety-valve...."
Twenty years of work and travel, twenty years of mingling with average, sensual men and women, twenty years' experience of inertia may have cured young liberals of their optimism, but it should have strengthened their faith. By now they have probably seen much of what, before, was made known to them only from books: they have walked through factories and seen girls turned into machines by the monotonous repetition of one part of one process; they have looked, over the side of a liner, at straining, black, half-naked men who have already been turned into the semblance of shuffling, debased animals by the monotony of carrying coal; they are assured, perhaps, that industrial conditions are better in England than anywhere else, but they still wonder what life and what vision of beauty are possible to these slaves of the work-room and of the coal-lighter, who are not the less slaves because they enjoy freedom to move from one master to another. Sheltered indeed must be the life of any who have not found, in twenty years, adaily vent for the compassion which is the living breath of liberalism.
The communist who seeks to abolish private property has more chance of success than the impatient reformer who tries to sweep away all the ugliness of modern life by breaking the mechanism on which modern life with its ugliness and its beauty depends. It is too late to make an end of industrialism; and man was harder used and more brutalised before the advent of machinery than ever since. His lot is improving daily; and all that the reformer can reasonably ask is that the rate of improvement shall be accelerated until the employer of labour no longer imposes on his work-people conditions that he would himself refuse. In war, a British officer does not order his men into an action which he is himself afraid to undertake; at the end of a march, he does not think of his own needs until he has seen that his men have their food. There is something perilously like shirking in the attitude of an employer who expects men and women to undertake hardships from which he stands aloof; and, directly or indirectly, all are employers.
The mission of liberalism will not be fulfilled until it has achieved a form of civilisation whereof no part can inspire misgiving or shame. Every country has its dark places; the inhabitants of every country turn a blind eye to them until the upheaval of war, the outbreak of revolution or the spread of a new faith throws a challenge to every social institution and demands that it shall justify itself. When more than five million men voluntarily risked their lives in defence of one system against another, their decision was less a clean-cut choice than a blend of herd-instinct, collective hypnotism and that irrational feeling for associations which is called patriotism;the decision once taken, they committed themselves to a struggle in which one order of civilisation would probably maintain itself and another would probably be overthrown. If they preserved that which was less good and destroyed that which was more good, they sinned against the light; if they preserved that which was more good, they were still obliged to prove it so much the better that no sacrifice was too great for it; and, if in their scrutiny they discovered blemishes, they were bound to remove them for fear the enemy would say that they had sacrificed themselves for something that was not worth their lives. During the war, of course, every one was too busy to hunt for blemishes and to remove them.
After the war every one is too busy; and those who once called themselves liberals have lost interest in everything but the cost of living, though the youngest of them can recall the days when the present prime minister's voice throbbed with emotion in describing the misery of the poor and in championing the outcasts of civilisation, wherever they were to be found.
It is more than time for the young liberals of twenty years ago to recognise that the liberal faith has lost its prophets and that the prophets have lost their liberal faith.