"THE OLD ORDER CHANGES"
Intellectual Apathy of Conservatives--A Novel Which Attempts to
Harmonize Socialist Principles with Conservative
In spite of the severance of my connection with the St. Andrews
Boroughs, I found, when I returned to England from Monte Carlo, that my
active connection with politics was not by any means at an end.
Politics, as a mere fight over details, or as a battle between rival
politicians, appealed to me no more than it had done during my
experience of electioneering in Fifeshire; but presently by family
events I was drawn once more into the fray. My cousin, Richard Mallock
of Cockington, had been asked, and had consented, to stand as
Conservative candidate for the Torquay division of Devonshire. His local
popularity, which was great, depended mainly on the engaging and
somewhat shy simplicity of his manner, on his honesty, which was
recognized by all, and on his generosity and sound sense as a landlord.
These latter qualities had lately been made conspicuous by his
administration of those parts of his property which were now, one after
another, being quickly covered with buildings. He was no student,
however, of statistics or political theory; as a speaker his practice
had been small, and he and his advisers asked me to give what
assistance I could.
One night early in July I had, at a large ball in London, spent a most
agreeable hour with a companion who was, like myself, no dancer, in
watching and discussing with her the brilliantly lighted company. At
last, catching sight of a clock, I found myself obliged to go. "I have,"
I said, "to be at Paddington at five o'clock in the morning. To-morrow I
must speak in Devonshire to a meeting of agricultural laborers." She
expressed approval and sympathy, and I presently found myself in the
dimness of the still streets, happy in the thought that soon I should be
among the smell of meadows and listening to the noise of rooks. The
following evening at a village on Richard Mallock's property, his
political campaign was to be inaugurated, and I was to be one of the
orators.
When the time for the meeting came I found myself erect in a wagon, with
a world of apple trees in front of me and a thatched barn behind, and
heard myself discussing the program of "three acres and a cow," of which
my listeners understood nothing, and I not more than a little. Compared
with such an audience the Liberals of St. Andrews were sages. The most
intelligent of the Conservative audiences in the constituency were those
got together under the auspices of the Primrose League. But Conservatism
even with them was no more than a vague sentiment, healthy so far as it
went, but incapable of aiding them in controversy with any glib Radical
opponent. I tried again and again during the following few weeks to call
their attention to the sources from which our national wealth generally,
and most of their own food, was derived, and particularly to the
economic significance of a town such as Torquay, much of the wealth of
which had its origin in foreign countries. In dealing, however, with
these matters, I met with no response more encouraging than puzzled
smiles; but whenever, for want of something better to say, I alluded to
"this great Empire on which the sun never sets," I was greeted with
volume of cheers sufficient, one might almost have thought, to have
secured the election of a Conservative candidate on the spot. Besides
myself, two other workers were active, who began their political life as
Richard Mallock's supporters at Torquay, and who subsequently rose to
eminence of a wider kind--George Lane Fox, as Chancellor of the Primrose
League, and J. Sandars as secretary and adviser to Mr. Arthur Balfour.
But they, so it seemed to me, found it no easier than I did to vitalize
the non-Radical or temperamentally Conservative classes with any
definite knowledge of the main conditions and forces on which their own
livelihood depended, and which Radicals and revolutionaries would
destroy. Of this state of mind I remember an amusing illustration.
Many Primrose League meetings, at the time of which I now speak and
later, were held at Cockington Court, which was now a political center
for the first time since the days of William and Mary. The proceedings
on one occasion were to begin with a few preliminary speeches, delivered
from some steps in a garden which adjoined the house. The chair was to
be taken by the Duchess (Annie) of Sutherland, who for many years spent
part of the summer at Torquay. Her opening speech consisted of five
words: "I declare this meeting open." Subsequently George Lane Fox moved
a vote of thanks to the duchess "for the very able way in which she had
taken the chair." Never did appropriate brevity receive a more deserved
tribute. These preliminaries having been accomplished, the business of
the day began. The slopes surrounding the house were dotted with various
platforms, from each of which addresses were delivered to all who cared
to listen. The audience which clustered round one of them was soon of
such exceptional size that I joined it in the hope of discovering to
what this fact was due. The platform was occupied by two county members,
both men of worth and weight, but not even the highest talents which
their warmest friends could attribute to them would account, so it
seemed to me, for the outbursts of uproarious applause which greeted
from time to time the one who was now speaking. In the applauded
passages I failed to detect anything more cogent or pungent than the
general substance of those which were passed by in silence. I could find
no explanation of this perplexing fact till I realized that behind the
platform was a tall, greased pole, up which successive competitors were
doing their best to climb, the victor's reward being a large leg of
mutton at the top of it, and the applause being excited by the feats,
not of the orator, but of the acrobats.
The word "acrobats," indeed, represents not inaptly the character which
I had from the first imputed to the extreme reformers (whether Radicals
or Socialists) as a whole. These extremists were, in my opinion, at once
wrong and popular, not because they actually invented either the facts
or principles proclaimed by them, but because they practiced the art of
contorting facts into any shape they pleased, no matter what, so long as
this amounted to a grimace which was calculated to attract attention,
and which, in the absence of any opponents who could counter them by
detailed exposure, could, by constant repetition, be invested with the
prestige of truth. And why was exposure of the requisite kind wanting?
Simply because the Conservatives as a whole were so ignorant that they
did not know, or so timorous or apathetic that they did not dare to use,
the true facts, figures, or principles by the promulgation of which
alone the false might be systematically discredited. The need of a
scientific Conservatism equipped with these weapons of precision was not
so urgent at that time as it has since then become. But I felt it even
then. I foresaw how rapidly this need was bound to be aggravated. It had
haunted me even at Beaulieu, when I wandered among the sleeping flowers
by the light of Mediterranean moons.
The difficulties in the way of formulating a true scientific
Conservatism, which the masses shall be able to comprehend, I am the
last person to ignore. There is the difficulty of formulating true
general principles. There is the difficulty of collecting and verifying
the statistical and historical facts, to which general principles must
be accommodated. There is the difficulty of bringing moral and social
sentiments into harmony with objective conditions which no sentiment can
permanently alter. There is the difficulty of transforming many analyses
of facts of different kinds into a synthesis moral and rational, by the
light of which human beings can live; and, feeling my way slowly, I now
attempted to indicate what the nature of such a synthesis would be. In
so doing I felt that political problems of life reunited themselves with
those which are commonly called religious, and with which, during my
earlier years, my mind had been alone engaged.
This attempt at a synthesis was embodied ultimately in the form of
another novel, which I have mentioned already, and to which I gave the
name of _The Old Order Changes_. The scene of this story, like that of
_A Romance of the Nineteenth Century_, was, for the most part, the
Riviera, and the story itself was to a very great extent the product of
many solitary hours at Beaulieu, during which Monte Carlo and the system
became no more than a dream. _The Old Order Changes_, moreover,
resembles its predecessor in this--that the love interest centers in a
woman considered in relation to her higher beliefs and principles; but
whereas in _A Romance of the Nineteenth Century_ such higher beliefs and
principles are those connected with the mysticism of personal virtue,
they are connected in _The Old Order Changes_ with a sense of social
duty, as experienced by a well-born Catholic, to the mass of the common
people in respect of their material circumstances.
The heroine, who had come across the writings of modern agitators, in
which the masses are depicted as brutalized by an almost universal
poverty, most of the fruits of their industry being stolen from them by
the rapacious rich, becomes gradually possessed by the conviction that
this picture, even if exaggerated, is in the main true. Such being the
case, another conviction dawns on her, which troubles her nature to its
depth--namely, that the Catholic Church--her own religion by
inheritance--will for her have lost all meaning unless it absorbs into
the body of virtues enjoined by its doctrines on the rich a corporate
sense of their overwhelming obligations to the poor.
She lays bare the state of her mind to a highly connected and highly
intellectual priest, Father Stanley (who figures in _A Romance of the
Nineteenth Century_ also), and asks him if he thinks her wicked. The
priest's answer is No. "The Church," he says, "is always extending the
sphere of duty as from age to age needs and conditions change. Political
economy, as related to the conditions of labor, has indeed in our day
become a part of theology--its youngest branch; and as such, I, a
priest, have studied it. Every age has its riddle, and this riddle is
ours."
He then goes on to explain to her that the relation of the rich to the
masses is not so simple as she thinks it. The poverty which agitators
ascribe to all mankind, except a small body of plutocrats, is, he says,
neither so deep nor so universal as these persons represent it; and,
though in part it may arise from a robbery of the many by a rapacious
few, this is not the whole of the story. He points out that if a hundred
years ago the whole wealth of this country had been divided equally
among all, the masses would, as a whole, be poorer than they are now;
and that most of the wealth which is monopolized now by the few consists
not of abstractions which they perpetrate from a common stock, but of
additions to it which they have made themselves by their own talents and
enterprise. It is true, he proceeds, that if, having made these
additions, the few gave them away instead of retaining them for
themselves, as the principles of Socialism would demand, the wealth of
the many would be so far increased for the moment; but here comes the
practical question. If, of these additions, the few were to retain
nothing--if exceptional talent secured no proportionate reward--would
these additions, a part of which goes to the mass already, continue to
be made by anybody? This might be so if the great leaders of industry
had all of them the temperament of monks, whose one passion was not to
get, but to give; but to suppose this possible would be merely to dream
a dream. "It would be easier," he says, in conclusion, "far easier, to
make men Trappists than it would be to make them Socialists."
Animated by this last argument, the heroine is led to dream a dream of
her own. Let it be granted, she says to herself, that the leaders of
modern industry capable of accepting the Socialist gospel are few, and
will always remain few. Still there may be some exceptions; and it may
not be unreasonable to expect that, under the influence of the Catholic
Church, certain great factories might be assimilated to Trappist or
Franciscan monasteries, the profits of which the monks would consecrate
to social purposes, voluntarily living the lives of the poorest of the
poor themselves. Here, she argues, we should have examples, at all
events, by which all might be moved, though all were not fit to follow
them.
This outburst of a girl's idealism is considered by the priest with a
sympathetic, yet at the same time a cautious, interest. When, turning
from the priest, she opens her mind to the hero, he regards some of her
ideas as exaggerated; but the affection which he feels for her as a
lover makes their appeal deeper. In _A Romance of the Nineteenth
Century_, the hero's love for the heroine resembles the affection of St.
Augustine for Monica--a love whose consummation is contingent on a
mystical union of both with "the Selfsame, the everlasting One." In _The
Old Order Changes_ the passion is contingent on a partnership with her
in some scheme of idealized political action for the social benefit of
the masses. But circumstances soon arise by which the two are estranged.
A mischief-maker, quite untruly, informs the heroine's aunts, who are
her guardians--Catholics of the strictest type--that the hero is still
carrying on an old intrigue with a beautiful Frenchwoman, now living at
Nice. This gossip is passed on to the girl. The aunts forbid the hero to
have any more communication with her; and the girl herself writes him a
cold letter which is tantamount to an abrupt dismissal.
The aunts and the niece leave him to find out the reason for himself,
which, since it is quite fictitious, he is unable to do. Having received
their letters, and smarting under a sense of wrong, he starts for a walk
among the mountains on the slopes of which his house, an old chateau, is
situated. He sprains his ankle, and some strangers bring him home in a
carriage. These strangers consist of an American general, who is a
Southerner, his attractive wife, and a singularly beautiful daughter.
Solitude being for him intolerable, he begs them to become his guests. A
few days later they arrive, and round him, like a naive Circe, the
beautiful daughter undesignedly weaves her spell. "Under her influence,"
as the words of the novel describe it, "the voices of men asking for
spiritual guidance, the growth of a democracy uneasily chafing for
change, dwindled in his ears till at last they were hardly audible."
This act of the drama is, however, abruptly interrupted by family
business, which recalls the hero to England. Meanwhile the Catholic
heroine and her aunts learn that he was wholly guiltless of the intrigue
at Nice imputed to him, and a kindly mediator discreetly gives him to
understand that if in a week or two he would meet them at the Italian
lakes, all would be forgotten and forgiven, if indeed there were
anything to forgive. It happens that an Italian cousin of his has put at
his disposal a villa in the middle of Lago Maggiore; and there his
reunion with the heroine and her Catholic kindred is accomplished. Other
friends, who are staying at Baveno, join the group, Father Stanley among
them. In the chapel of the villa he, by way of a sermon, gives them a
sort of address on the social problems of the time; and this throughout
has reference to the sort of ideas or projects of which the heroine had
already spoken to him.
He takes for his text the following words from St. James: "Go to now, ye
rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.
Behold, the hire of the laborers, which is of you kept back by fraud,
crieth. If a brother or sister be destitute, and if any of you say to
them, 'Depart in peace'; notwithstanding ye give not them those things
needful for the body, what doth it profit? To him that knoweth to do
good and doeth it not, to him it is sin." The priest then proceeds to
the question of what virtue and duty are. "To this," he says, "there are
two answers. The first is, that virtue and duty have for their object
God. The second answer is, that their object is our fellow men and the
health of the social organism, while our inducement to practice them is
in part the constant teasing of the tribal instinct or conscience, and
in part our imaginative sympathies, as stimulated by a glow of emotion
which is consequent on our contemplation of idealized Humanity as a
whole. Within certain limits," he says, "this second answer I take to be
entirely right; but if there were nothing further to add, I maintain
that it would be right in vain." Summing up the ideas of the heroine,
Miss Consuelo Burton, he says that the main duty which the Church to-day
enjoins on us is "our spiritual duty to the material conditions of the
poor"--our duty to adorn the cottage, though not to destroy the castle.
"Duty to the race as a substitute for duty to God is," he says, "worth
nothing. It means nothing. But duty to the race regarded as a new and
more definite interpretation of our duty to God is a conception which to
us Catholics of the present day means everything. Though it relates to
material things, it does not supersede spiritual. On the contrary, it
represents the spiritual world taking the material world into itself as
its minister, and the Catholic who realizes this will find that the
echoes of the mass and of the confessional follow him into the street
and mix themselves with the clatter of omnibuses. If any of you think
that he or she individually can do little, after all, to alter the
general condition of things, let them not be thereby disheartened. Let
them carry in their minds this divine paradox, that it is far more
important to every man that he should do his utmost for Humanity than it
ever can be for Humanity that any one man should do his utmost for
_it_."
Illuminated by thoughts like these, the hero and the heroine are once
more drawn together; and when at night the guests go back to Baveno, and
the hero is left in his island villa alone, he betakes himself to a
boat, and awaits the approach of the morning. "At last," says the story,
"he put the boat about, with thoughts of returning home, and there, far
off, beyond the spikes of the mountains, he saw that the sky was pale
with the first colors of dawn. There, too, was the star of morning,
shining bright with a trembling steadfastness, and he knew that for him
a star had risen also. On his spirit descended the hush of the solemn
hour, which makes all the earth seem like some holy sanctuary, and there
came back to him two lines of Goethe's:
"The woman-soul leadeth us
Upward and on.
"Meanwhile on the sliding and glassy waters, that moved to left and
right at the touch of his dipping oars, there began to flicker a gleam
of faint saffron and rose color, and the breeze of the daybreak laid its
first touch on his cheek and gently stirred a straying lock of his hair.
The lights of Baveno, though still bright, looked belated, and the
mounting saffron was clear in the dome over him. Thoughts thronged on
his mind of many careers to which his life, with hers, might be
dedicated. Visions also, though he knew them too bright to last, floated
before him and made his being tingle--visions of great works done among
the toiling masses, of comfort and health invading the fastness of
degradation, and the fire of faith shining on eyeballs that had long
been blind to it."
I am not alluding here to _The Old Order Changes_ with a view to
discussing its merits or demerits as a novel. I am citing it merely as a
record of how my own social philosophy step by step developed itself,
the problems of economics and politics being step by step united with
those of psychology, of religion, of ambition, and the higher romance of
the affections. I am dealing with what took place in my own mind as an
example of analogous things which have probably taken place in the minds
of most men who, however they may differ otherwise from myself, have
been preoccupied in the same way. Thus the emotional optimism with which
this novel of mine ends--the vision of the Old Order as capable of
being born anew by a sudden reillumination of faith and new acquisitions
of knowledge--represents, it has subsequently seemed to me, a mood
analogous to that which possessed Lord Beaconsfield when he wrote his
romance _Sybil_, or when he seemed to insinuate that all social strife
might be ended by doles to the poor, distributed week by week through
the almoners of manorial lords.
Of Lord Beaconsfield's visions this is not the place to speak, I am
concerned here only with the growth and the defects of my own; and as to
the general theory of things which is dramatized in _The Old Order
Changes_, its merits and its defects seem to me to be these. As for its
merits, if compared with my earlier works, _Is Life Worth Living?_ and
_A Romance of the Nineteenth Century_--in which no cognizance is taken
of social politics whatever--_The Old Order Changes_ represents a great
extension of thought, social problems being brought to the fore as an
essential part of the religious. If compared with _Social Equality_, it
represents an extension of thought likewise, in that it shows (as
_Social Equality_ does not) how these two parts are connected.
It is, however, in two ways deficient. At the time when the book was
written, the extremist party in England, though comprising many militant
Socialists, was for practical purposes composed mainly of men who were
known as extreme Radicals. A prominent representative of this class war
was Bright. Another at that time was Mr. Joseph Chamberlain. Instead of
attacking all wealth, like Socialists, most of them were business men
who spent their lives in pursuit of it. They denounced it in one form
only--namely, land, and land only as the inheritance of aristocratic
owners. The extraordinary inconsistency of attitude by which these men
were characterized created an animus against them in the minds of
many--I myself being one--which, though far from being undeserved, was
not sufficiently discriminating. As I pointed out in _Social
Equality_--and the same argument was repeated in _The Old Order
Changes_--the great modern manufacturer, whatever he may think about old
landed families, represents the forces on which the increasing wealth of
the modern world depends. And yet in that novel I was more than once
betrayed into so far joining the Socialists as to partially accept or
repeat their denunciations of the modern manufacturers as persons owing
all their wealth to the plunder of those employed by them.
This extreme view is, indeed, corrected more than once by the priest;
but it is nevertheless insinuated in certain passages in which the
writer, by attributing them to the hero, seems to make it his own. It
was not till I had carried my statistical studies farther that I was
able to reduce the charge hurled by Socialists against the modern
employers to what are their true and their relatively small dimensions.
Meanwhile I felt that in _The Old Order Changes_, as a synthesis of my
previous writings, I had made my profession of faith as clearly as I
then could; and not long after its publication I betook myself for a
mental holiday to a country where I hoped to discover that modern
problems were unknown.