THE CONQUERORS
I
“England is a sieve” is the cry of the astonished audience in Mr.
Belloc’s brochure on the fiscal question. “Poor old England is
a sieve.” They were filled with horror at the Tariff Reformer’s
revelation of the surplusage of imports over exports, and his vision
of the golden sovereigns being drained from this country to pay for
these undesirable incursionists. They already contemplated the time
when the last piece of gold would have been transported to meet the
demands of the insatiable “foreigner,” and the whole country would
suddenly realise that its pockets were empty--that it had spent all
that it had. Undoubtedly similar if less pleasant arguments of a
vigorous fiscal campaign have succeeded in shaking belief in England’s
prosperity. It is still possible in train or street, or places where
men assemble, to find observers, with an air of sagacity, declaiming
upon England’s headlong rush towards poverty and the abyss. I remember
listening for many hours, on the journey over the St. Gothard to Milan,
to a fluent English traveller explaining to some astonished Italians
that England was steadily growing poorer year by year; less money
accumulated, less money spent. Such are the follies of untrained minds,
who are unable to read experience or to interpret figures. They cannot
apprehend the astonishing facts of “super-wealth” as accumulated in
this country; as accumulated in the past thirty years. That rate of
accumulation has never been before paralleled: just as the expenditure
which accompanies accumulation--for we are not a thrifty race--offers
something new in a standard of whole classes. A serious study of the
superfluous wastage of the nation might bring reassurance to all who
are afraid of an enforced austerity of manners; even if it provides
little gratification to those who would see expenditure devoted to
desirable ends. Statistics present to the reader incredible arrays of
increase: so much leaping forward of income-tax returns, unchecked by
wars, borrowings, or trade depressions; nearly two hundred millions of
the National Income divided amongst people whose individual incomes
exceed five thousand a year. Where does it go to? How is it consumed?
What asset of permanent value will be left behind as evidence of the
super-wealth of the twentieth century? The answers to these questions
are not entirely satisfactory. “Waste” is written large over a very
substantial proportion of the national expenditure, and that far more
in the private than in the public consumption. A Conservative leader
once informed a meeting in Scotland that if all the rich men were
abolished there would be no one left to give work to the poor people.
That, however, was rather a popular method of combating Socialism,
than a serious contribution to political economy. “To a retailer of
news,” says Mr. George Russell, “who informed him that Lord Omnium,
recently deceased, had left a large sum of money to charities, Mr.
Gladstone replied with characteristic emphasis, ‘Thank him for nothing.
He was obliged to leave it. He couldn’t carry it with him.’” And what
the rich man is to do with his money except to find employment, and how
he is to escape the burden of death duties or graduated income tax in a
world where every civilised nation has an eye upon his “super-wealth,”
are queries whose answer is conjectural.
The most obvious increase of this waste comes from the “speeding up”
of living which has taken place in all classes in so marked a fashion
within a generation. The whole standard of life has been sensibly
raised, not so much in comfort as in ostentation. And the result is
something similar to that in the insane competition of armaments which
takes place amongst the terrified nations of the world. One year ten
huge ironclads confront twenty. A decade after, fifteen huge ironclads
of another type have replaced the first: to be confronted again with
thirty of the new floating castles. So many millions have been thrown
to the scrap heap. The proportion of power has remained unaffected. It
is the same in the more determined private competition for supremacy
in a social standard. Where one house sufficed, now two are demanded;
where a dinner of a certain quality, now a dinner of a superior
quality; where clothes or dresses or flowers, now more clothes, more
dresses, more flowers. It is waste, not because fine clothes and
rare flowers and pleasant food are in themselves undesirable, but
because by a kind of parallel of the law of diminishing returns in
agriculture, additional expenditure in such directions fails to result
in correspondent additions of happiness. In many respects, indeed,
the effect is not only negatively worthless, but even positively
harmful. Modern civilisation in its most highly organised forms has
elaborated a system to which the delicate fibre of body and mind is
unable to respond. And the result is the appearance (whimsical enough
to Carlyle’s spectators “beyond the region of the fixed stars”) of
a society expending half its income in heaping up the material of
disease, to which the other half of its income is being laboriously
applied for remedy.
But the general effect (to the above-mentioned dispassionate
spectators) is of an extravagance of wealth and waste which is only
not insolent because it is for the most part unconscious, the sport
of blind forces rather than the deliberate defiance of the limits of
human endeavour. It is not insolence or--as it might have appeared in
the olden days--a determination to rival the fabled immortals, which
has charged all our high roads with wandering machines racing with
incredible velocity and no apparent aim. Many (such as W. E. Henley)
demand “Speed in the face of the Lord.” Others are inflamed with the
desire for “driving abroad in furious guise,” as an escape from the
_ennui_ of a life which has lost its savour; as in the tortured and
bored procession in old Rome, for the “easier and quicker” passing of
the “impracticable hours.” But a large proportion of those who have
employed motor cars in habitual violation of the speed limit, and
in destruction of the amenities of the rural life of England, have
done so either because their neighbours have employed motor cars, or
because their neighbours have not employed motor cars; in an effort
towards equality with the one, or superiority over the other. When
every man of a certain income has purchased a motor car, when life has
become “speeded up” to the motor-car level, that definite increase of
expenditure will be accepted as normal. But life will be no happier
and no richer for such an acceptance; it will merely have become more
impossible for those who (for whatever reason) are unequal to the
demands of such a standard. And the same is true of the multiplication
of meals; of the rise in the price of rent in certain districts
of London, for example, because every one wants to live there; of
numberless exactions and extortions which have grown up in a society
whose members are “like wealthy men who care not how they give.”
And mournfully enough this rather dull and drab extravagance of private
living is accompanied by a severe scrutiny of any kind of public
expenditure, and a resentful criticism of all efforts to stamp the
memory of this age upon enduring brick and stone. The London County
Council, housed in a few scattered hovels and warrens, proposed a
year or two back to devote a few hundred thousand pounds to an “Hôtel
de Ville,” situate on the banks of the river opposite Westminster.
And the opponents of the particular party in power had no difficulty
in stirring up the wealthier classes into the fiercest protest
against this attempt to leave the future with a permanent memorial of
twentieth-century London. The one dignified and conspicuous building
of the Victorian age--the Palace at Westminster--remains to-day
scamped, truncated, and unfinished, because the nation, in a cold
fit of retrenchment, was alarmed at the amount which it had already
lavished upon it. Dr. Dill has shown in the Roman Peace, during the
age of the Antonines and after, the people of the Empire turning with
enthusiasm to great communal building; and every city setting itself
to such achievements as remain to-day the wonder of the world. There
is something of brutality, indeed, as well as something of large
achievement, in the inadequacy of ends to means: as in the gigantic
Pont du Gard, marching in its grandeur over a deep valley in order
to conduct a tiny rivulet of water to a second-rate provincial city;
or the enormous stone arenas which in every ruined Roman town mark
the place of the communal games. But the brutality is charged with
strength; there is purpose in it, carried through with relentless
tenacity; the purpose of the bending of Nature’s stubborn resistance
to the designs of man. What kind of building will represent for the
astonishment of future eyes the harvest of the super-wealth of the
British Peace? The signs are not propitious. A Byzantine Cathedral
at Westminster, a Gothic Cathedral at Liverpool, a few town halls
and libraries of sober solidity, the white buildings which to-day
line Whitehall, and fill the passing stranger with bewilderment at
a race “that thus could build,” will be the chief legacies of this
present generation. The thirteenth century gave us the Cathedrals; the
sixteenth gave us the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge and the noblest
of English country houses. These tiny Englands, with populations, in
the aggregate, less than that of London to-day, and wealth incomparably
smaller, have left us possessions which we can admire but cannot equal.
“The work which we collective children of God do,” complained Matthew
Arnold, “our grand centre of life, our city for us to dwell in, is
London! London, with its unutterable external hideousness, and with its
internal canker of _publice egestas, privatim opulentia_, unequalled
in the world.” It was this contrast which gave point to a question
which otherwise the plain man would put by as absurd: “If England were
swallowed up by the sea to-morrow, which of the two, a hundred years
hence, would most excite the love, interest, and admiration of mankind,
the England of the last twenty years or the England of Elizabeth?”
Public penury, private ostentation--that, perhaps, is the heart of the
complaint. A nation with the wealth of England can afford to spend,
and spend royally. Only the end should be itself desirable, and the
choice deliberate. The spectacle of a huge urban poverty confronts
all this waste energy. That spectacle should not, indeed, forbid all
luxuries and splendours: but it should condemn the less rewarding of
them as things tawdry and mean. “Money! money!” cries the hero--a
second-grade Government clerk--of a recent novel--“the good that can
be done with it in the world! Only a little more: a little more!” It
is the passionate cry of unnumbered thousands. Expenditure multiplies
its return in human happiness as it is scattered amongst widening areas
of population. And the only justification for the present unnatural
heaping up of great possessions in the control of the very few would
be some return in leisure, and the cultivation of the arts, and the
more reputable magnificence of the luxurious life. We have called into
existence a whole new industry in motor cars and quick travelling, and
established populous cities to minister to our increasing demands for
speed. We have converted half the Highlands into deer forests for our
sport; and the amount annually spent on shooting, racing, golf--on
apparatus, and train journeys and service--exceeds the total revenue of
many a European principality. We fling away in ugly white hotels, in
uninspired dramatic entertainments, and in elaborate banquets of which
every one is weary, the price of many poor men’s yearly income. Yet we
cannot build a new Cathedral. We cannot even preserve the Cathedrals
bequeathed to us, and the finest of them are tumbling to pieces for
lack of response to the demands for aid. We grumble freely at halfpenny
increases in the rates for baths or libraries or pleasure-grounds. We
assert--there are many of us who honestly believe it--that we cannot
afford to set aside the necessary millions from our amazing revenues
for the decent maintenance of our worn-out “veterans of industry.”
To the poor, any increase of income may mean a day’s excursion, a
summer holiday for the children; often the bare necessities of food
and clothes and shelter. To the classes just above the industrial
populations, who with an expanding standard of comfort are most
obviously fretting against the limitations of their income, it may mean
the gift of some of life’s lesser goods which is now denied; music,
the theatre, books, flowers. Its absence may mean also a deprivation
of life’s greater goods: scamped sick-nursing, absence of leisure,
abandonment of the hope of wife or child. All these deprivations may
be endured by a nation--have been endured by nations--for the sake
of definite ends: in wars at which existence is at stake, under the
stress of national calamity, or as in the condition universal to
Europe a few hundred years ago, when wealth and security were the
heritage of the very few. But to-day that wealth is piling up into
ever-increasing aggregation: is being scrutinized, as never before, by
those who inquire with increasing insistence, where is the justice of
these monstrous inequalities of fortune? Is the super-wealth of England
expended in any adequate degree upon national service? Is the return
to-day or to posterity a justification for this deflection of men and
women’s labour into ministering to the demands of a pleasure-loving
society? Is it erecting works of permanent value, as the wealth
of Florence in the fifteenth century? Is it, as in the England of
Elizabeth, breeding men?
No honest inquirer could give a dogmatic reply. The present
extravagance of England is associated with a strange mediocrity, a
strange sterility of characters of supreme power in Church and State.
It is accompanied, as all ages of security and luxury are accompanied,
by a waning of the power of inspiration, a multiplying of the power
of criticism. The more comfortable and opulent society becomes, the
more cynicism proclaims the futility of it all, and the mind turns
in despair from a vision of vanities. It gives little leadership to
the classes below it: no visible and intelligent feudal concentration
which, taught in the traditions of Government and inheriting strength
and responsibility, can reveal an aristocratic order adequate to the
immense political and economic necessities of the people. Never,
especially during the reaction of the past twenty years, were fairer
opportunities offered to the children of wealthy families for the
elaboration of a new aristocratic Government of a new England; and
never were those opportunities more completely flung away. Its chosen
leaders can offer nothing but a dialectic, a perpetual criticism of
other men’s schemes, clever, futile, barren as the east wind. The
political creed which it embraces--the Protectionist system which
is going to consolidate the Empire and make every wife’s husband
richer--is almost entirely dependent for its propagation upon aliens
from outside; politicians, economists, journalists, bred in an
austerer life amongst the professional classes, and now employed by
a society which seems without capacity to breed leaders of its own.
It can compete for the pictures of great masters, but it leaves the
men of genius of its own day to starve. It continues, now as always,
garnishing the sepulchres of the prophets which its predecessors
have stoned. It maintains large country houses which offer a lavish
hospitality; but it sees rural England crumbling into ruin just
outside their boundaries, and has either no power or no inclination
to arrest so tragic a decay. It fills vast hotels scattered round the
coasts of England and ever multiplying in the capital, which exhibit a
combination of maximum expenditure and display with a minimum return
in enjoyment. It has annexed whole regions abroad, Biarritz and the
Riviera coast, Austrian and German watering-places, whither it journeys
for the recovery of its lost health, and for distractions which will
forbid the pain of thinking. It plunges into gambles for fresh wealth,
finding the demands of its standards continually pressing against
its resources; seeking now in South Africa, now in West Australia,
now in other Imperial expansions, the reward which accompanies the
conversion of the one pound into the ten. At best it is an existence
with some boredom in it; even when accompanied by actual intellectual
labour: the management of an estate and its agents, directorships, or
the overlooking of public and private philanthropies. At worst, more
perhaps in America than in England, where the standard has not so much
been overthrown as never securely established, it becomes a nightmare
and a delirium.
Delirium would seem to be the fate of all societies which become
content in secured wealth and gradually forget the conditions of labour
and service upon which alone that security can be maintained. “They
describe,” says Bagehot of the French memoirs, “a life unsuitable to
such a being as man in such a world as the present one: in which there
are no high aims, no severe duties, where some precept of morals seems
not so much to be sometimes broken as to be generally suspended and
forgotten--such a life, in short, as God has never suffered men to
lead on the earth long, which He has always crushed out by calamity or
revolution.” Those who are familiar with the methods of dissipation
of much of the new wealth of America--methods creeping across the
Atlantic--are familiar also with a life “unsuitable to such a being
as man.” This society is only distinguished from that which was
consumed in the French Revolution, by absence of the wit and grace
and polished human intercourse which in part redeemed so selfish and
profitless a company. The pictures given from time to time possess a
note of exaggeration. They flare a fierce white light upon a certain
group of rich people, with no toleration of shadows or half tones.
The thing stands ugly, in its pitiless glare, a vision not good to
look upon. Yet the essential facts remain. The picture is only not a
caricature, because the life it describes is itself a caricature. The
forces which have moulded it have driven it inevitably along certain
paths: resistance is useless. For in America enormous wealth--not only
beyond “the dreams of avarice,” but in such aggregations of millions
as make it inconceivable even to its possessors--has descended upon a
tiny group of persons who have exploited the resources of a continent.
The first generation accumulated these great possessions, in a fierce
hand-to-hand conflict in which strength and cunning triumphed, and
polish and pleasantness of manner and kindliness counted for nothing
at all. To the second generation is given the spending of it. There
are few traditions of social service. There are no feudal or communal
responsibilities of social obligation. Charity is resented by the
recipient and tiresome to the giver. The founding of Universities
becomes too commonplace to attract. Settlements are voted drab and
unsatisfying. Religion has become a plaything. All other avenues being
thus closed, there remain but a self-indulgence which in itself breeds
satiety, and a competition of luxurious display, which, in its more
advanced stages, passes into an actual insanity. The second generation
here is often weaker than its fathers. The fierce will-power which
ensured financial success in the most terrific financial struggle that
the world has ever seen, has exhausted the capacities of the family
lineage. It has been raised on the principle of “doing as one likes.”
It pursues its existence through an unreal, fantastic world, in a
luxurious expenditure as fantastic as a veritable “Dance of Death.”
Mr. Upton Sinclair, Mr. Frank Norris, Mrs. Wharton, and other
American novelists have presented pictures of the luxurious waste and
extravagance of a plutocracy which have been scornfully repudiated by
its members. Yet almost every individual incident or place in “the
Metropolis”--“Castle Havens,” Newport, the queer palaces of New York,
the crude scattering of fortunes easily won in scratching the earth
or wrecking a railway--could be paralleled in the actual society of
America. Many could even be paralleled in England, where millionaire
company promoters, on their hectic path between poverty through
prosperity to prison or suicide, will purchase so many miles of good
English land, build round it a great wall ten feet high, construct
billiard rooms under a lake, remove a hill which offends the view. “He
was kind to the poor,” they wrote on the grave of one of them, who had
devastated the middle classes with the promise of high interest for
investment, guaranteed on his prospectuses by the names of Proconsuls
and Ambassadors of world-wide fame. The disease may not have attained
its full consummation in this country; that is in part because of a
standard which, though crumbling, still struggles to survive; in part
because the wealth accumulation is less sudden and overwhelming: in
part also because we are satisfied with less bizarre manifestations
of the always unsatisfied demand for pleasure. Yet we have parallels,
even in this country to “Castle Havens.” “It had cost three or four
millions of dollars, and within the twelve-foot wall which surrounded
its grounds lived two world-weary people who dreaded nothing so much
as to be left alone.” The house had many gables, in the Queen Anne
style: from the midst of them shot a Norman tower decorated with
Christmas tree wreaths in white stucco: overlapping this was the dome
of a Turkish mosque rising out of this something like a dove-cot: out
of that, the slender white steeple of a Methodist country church: on
top a statue of Diana. “Has there ever been any insanity in the Havens
family?” is the natural query of the visitor, as he gazed at this
astonishing erection.
All round are the “second generation”: young men, of whom it was said
that “if only they had had a little more brains, they would have been
half-witted”: women “who boast of never appearing twice in the same
gown”; one dreadful personage in Boston who wears each costume once,
and then has it solemnly cremated by her butler: women who artificially
make themselves barren, because of the inconvenience incidental to
motherhood, and lavish their affections upon cats and dogs. “It was
the instinct of decoration, perverted by the money-lust.” The men are
busy making money in order that their idle women may attain supremacy
in this mad race for display. The “second generation” are so bored
that ever more fantastic amusements are sought to stimulate jaded
interest. The one thing they all dread is “to be left alone.” “There
was a woman who had her teeth filled with diamonds; and another who
was driving a pair of zebras. One heard of monkey dinners and pyjama
dinners at Newport, of horseback dinners and vegetable dances in New
York.” “One would take to slumming and another to sniffing brandy
through the nose: one had a table-cover made of woven roses, and
another was wearing perfumed flannel at sixteen dollars a yard: one
had inaugurated ice-skating in August, and another had started a class
for the weekly study of Plato.” People’s health broke down quickly in
face of this furious pursuit of pleasure; then they ate nothing but
spinach, or lived on grass, or chewed a mouthful of soup thirty-two
times before swallowing it. “There were ‘rest cures’ and ‘water cures,’
‘new thought’ and ‘metaphysical healing’ and ‘Christian Science.’”
The young men were filled with the same delusion as the older women.
“Some were killing themselves and other people in automobile races at a
hundred and twenty miles an hour.” “There was another young millionaire
who sat and patiently taught Sunday School, in the presence of a host
of reporters: there was another who set up a chain of newspapers all
over the country, and made war against his class.” Behind this second
generation there was even the vision of a third, growing up in the
heart of such a nightmare: a third generation in which there would no
longer remain even the memories of the early struggles of the pioneers
of great fortunes to connect them with reality.
That reality it is impossible for such a society ever to apprehend.
Newspaper criticisms leave them entirely unmoved. The more unblushing
the record of scandals and viciousness and foolish, distorted
luxury in any “fashionable” paper, the more secure its circulation
amongst the very people who are assailed. They are indifferent to
the onslaughts upon their lives by persons “outside.” They know that
these people are not, as a matter of fact, condemning their lives.
They are only expressing their discontent at not being “inside.” The
pauper wants fresh meat instead of canned. The business man wants
his thousand a year to become two thousand a year. The anarchist who
demands revolution can be bought with a secure guarantee of a steady
income. In Mr. Hueffer’s entertaining novel of New York, a rich
man’s son, scandalised at the method by which his father obtained his
super-wealth, attempts restitution to the victims. They one and all
indignantly repudiate his “charity.” One and all they ask to “come in”
on the ground floor in any future flotations and manipulations which he
may be designing. They reject the return of the proceeds of piracy. All
they desire is a partnership in future piratical raids against a person
or persons unknown.
It is a society organised from top to bottom on a “money” basis, a
business basis, with everything else as a side show. The men listen to
President Roosevelt’s fierce words about the Trusts and Corporations.
They have no resentment. It is “only Teddy’s way.” It cheers up the
people with the hope that something will be done, while they themselves
are secure in the knowledge that everything which can be done is
in the control of the money power. When they find a reformer whom
they can silence by force, they crush him. If they cannot crush him,
they purchase him. If he can neither be crushed nor purchased, they
ignore him. Religion is easily woven into the scheme of things, and
pleasantly harmonised with the accepted way of living. The Bishop of
London preaches in Wall Street, eloquently urging the business men to
regard their wealth as a stewardship from God. Far from resentment,
the business men abandon the Stock Exchange gamble for a quarter of an
hour, press round the bishop to shake his hand. “Bishop,” they say,
“that discourse of yours made us feel real good.” Then they return
to the Stock Exchange gamble. A prominent preacher is lured over at
an immense salary from England to preach to a church of the wealthy.
He braces himself for a great effort, and denounces their riches,
their works, and their ways. He expects an outbreak of indignation. He
discovers instead a universal congratulation. The wealthy and their
wives flock to his church, hoping to hear some more. The receipts of
the pew rents double. They talk of raising his salary. The more he
denounces, the more they applaud. The experience indeed is common to
all similar societies: since the day when the prophet complained that
his listeners crowded to hear him as he denounced their vices, “and
so,” he reproaches himself, “thou art unto them as a very lovely song,
of one that hath a pleasant voice and can play well on an instrument.”
Only some realities cannot be altogether excluded. Change and Death
knock with gaunt hands, and refuse all proffered monetary bribes.
Here a frantic millionaire, going blind, offers two million dollars
to any one that can cure him. The high gods remain indifferent to the
challenge. Teeth drop out, hair drops off; old age creeps on apace:
the wealthiest are trembling at the approach of the end. The visitor
to “The Metropolis” from the south beholds “a golf course, a little
miniature Alps, upon which the richest man in the world pursued his
lost health, with armed guards and detectives patrolling the place
all day, and a tower with a search-light whereby at night he could
flood the grounds with light by pressing a button.” A motor accident,
an occasional sensational divorce case, the death of a child, tear
down suddenly all the blinds and cushions, revealing the richest as
unprotected as the poorest in a universe altogether indifferent to
such slight things as man’s profit and gain. Outside, an occasional
crisis, the panic fear of people to whom wealth means attainment,
that their wealth is vanishing, brings the accumulation of vast
fortune toppling to the ground. There follows a crop of suicides:
then the machine recovers and swings forward again on its blind,
staggering progress nowhither. The secret places of the world are
ravaged, the wise men subpœnaed, all cunning invention subsidised,
that some alchemy may be found which will resist the ravages of time,
preserve a beauty that is departing, stay the inexorable chariots of
the hours. There are even attempts to turn the flank of the enemy: by
“Christian Science” liberally supported, to abolish, if not disease,
at least its sufferings; by “Psychical Research,” to communicate with
a company pursuing a similar ineffectual existence beyond the grave.
“What is it all worth?” is the question which lurks in the background,
refusing to be stifled; which drives occasional revolters, wearied of
the repetition of these pleasures, into efforts after philanthropies,
or to shoot wild beasts in remote places, or even into political and
religious adventure. So they come and after a little while they go,
none knowing whence or whither: a company of tired children, flushed
and uncomfortable from the too violent pursuit of pleasure: who
thought, in the snatching of what things seemed desirable in a life
given over to enjoyment, to effect an attainment which has ever been
jealously denied to the family of mankind.
* * * * *
But here, after all, in England or America, is only the life of the
few. If their existence is conspicuous it is because in distortion
and dangerous cases there can be most clearly realised the ravages
of disease. In England for the most part wealth is encased and
preserved in a wall of social tradition; and the majority of men,
however opulent, have some interests and occupations which redeem
them from the mere blind pursuit of pleasure. Yet in England it is
becoming increasingly questioned how far this wealth is providing
permanent benefit to the community. It is expended in the maintenance
of a life--a life and a standard--bringing leisure, ease and grace,
some effort towards charities and public service, an interest, real
or assumed, in literature, music, art, social amenity, and a local
or national welfare. But it offers little substantial advantage, in
endowment, building, or even direct economic or scientific experiment.
The percentages of legacy bequeathed to charity or to education are
lamentably low; and of these percentages most are deflected into
charity or religion in its least remunerative forms. Philanthropy is
large and liberal, but the aggregate of poverty remains unaffected by
it, or even, to the minds of the intimate observer, deepened. Much of
it appears less as the effort of intelligence and compassion than as
the random and often harmful attempt to satisfy a conscience disturbed
by penury adjacent to plenty. Social experiments involving thought
as well as money--a Bournville, a Toynbee Hall, a Limpsfield colony
for epileptics, a hospital for the new cure of consumption--are still
sufficiently rare as to attract attention. A few thousands bequeathed
to miscellaneous institutions out of a fortune of many hundred
thousands is still so unusual as to evoke considerable newspaper
adulation. The fact is, that the necessary expenditure upon an accepted
standard of living is so exacting and so continually increasing with
the increase of new demands, that little superfluity remains for
adventure in social or charitable effort. Some of the wealthiest
landlords have been reducing their pensions on their estates, now that
the State provides five shillings a week; in part, perhaps, in order
that the recipients should not be demoralised by this enormous access
of fortune; but in part because they can see other channels into which
this expenditure may at once be deflected. Families with incomes of
many thousands a year--caught in the cog-wheels of this vast machine,
this swollen definition of essential things--find a real difficulty in
making “both ends meet.” Most--in a calm hour--will deplore it. The
old look back with regret to an austerer day, to the time when central
London had no Sunday restaurant, and it was only necessary for the
few to know the few. The young--or the more thoughtful of them--look
forward with foreboding, wondering how long the artisan, the shop
assistant, the labourer, the unemployed, will content to acquiesce in a
system which expends upon a few weeks of random entertainment an amount
that would support in modest comfort a decent family for a lifetime.
“The most unpremeditated, successful, aimless Plutocracy”--so it
appears to one shrewd observer--“that ever encumbered the destinies of
mankind.” He sees it continually being recruited from below. Companies
rise like bubbles, expand, burst, carrying with them into the upper
air their promoters and the parasites which follow in their train.
Now it is the gold mines of South Africa which offer a particular
crop of amiable, ignorant, generously spending persons to swell the
general extravagance. Now from America comes the importation of
millions which are scattered in the home country in various forms of
elaborate expenditure. Now old-established businesses are renovated,
purchased, floated on the market inordinately “boomed”; with subsequent
collapse to the shareholders, with substantial margin of profit to
the “undertakers.” Those who retain the wealth thus cleverly won,
settle down in the English countryside to make the money circulate,
and generally to have a good time. Now, again, the more feverish
industry and energy of the new cities pile up a monopoly value of
millions upon the land which is “owned” by private persons: who find
themselves, as they rise and sleep, suddenly inundated with a steady
flow of money which is exacted as tribute from the working peoples.
So, in various ways, the enrichment of a new wealthy class which is
compensating for its newness by liberal hospitalities, and the effort
of some old-established rich families not to be pushed under in display
by these alien intruders, has “set a pace” which is driving the
whole of modern life into a huge apparatus of waste. Numbers go down
in the competition: then the country estates are sold and pass into
the hands of South African millionaires or the children of the big
traders, or the vendors of patent medicines. Others find themselves
continually in debt, adventuring into the City as directors of
companies, or attempting to obtain unearned increase by following in
the train of the great adventurers. Sometimes, as in the South African
promotions of 1895, the whole of a society flings itself into a furious
gambling mania, from which the few astute suck no small advantage, and
ultimately attain the honour which is the reward of great possessions.
There are many who endeavour to keep their heads in this confused
tumultuous world, who still cherish an ideal of simplicity, and upon
exiguous income will maintain a standard of manners and intelligence.
More and more, it would appear, these are destined to capitulate: to
be compelled to “give in” and accept the new expenditure, or to be
pushed aside as outside the main current of successful life. The vision
of this new “Plutocracy” appears to be drifting steadily away from
the vision which, at any historic time, has been held to justify the
endowment of leisure and comfort, and the control of great fortunes, as
a trust for the service of mankind.
For this “Plutocracy,” though accepting distinction in art, in
literature, in the governance of Empire, as a matter of evidence
to-day itself contributes but little to these desirable ends. Mr.
Mallock can laboriously demonstrate--in counter reply to the demands
of Socialism--that the wealth of the world is in the main increased
by the inventor, the individual, the ingenious multiplier of energy
and discoverer of scientific appliances. Many of the richer classes
accept such a demonstration as an infallible proof of the justice of
present wealth distribution. Other writers can justify an opulent
and leisured class above, for the provision of clever and energetic
persons who will cultivate the tradition of statesmanship, or encourage
disinterested experiment in advancement of knowledge or the service
of humanity. But the actual rulers of Empire, the men of science,
the great soldiers, the great artists and writers, as a matter of
fact very rarely appear as the children of, or are rewarded by the
qualifications for entrance into, the governing classes. The wills
and legacies presented day by day in the newspapers are themselves a
judgment and refutation of any attempt to demonstrate parallel between
achievement and material acquisition. At the summit are usually names
of obscure unknown persons, who bequeath, with sundry small diversions
into charity or hospitals, the bulk of their hundreds of thousands
to their relatives. Here a successful brewer, there a speculator in
land, again a “financier” in the city, or a landlord who has not even
had the enterprise to speculate, but merely placidly drawn his rents
from the developing town or half a countryside; or again, the owners
of large trade organisations now run by skilled and alert managers as
limited liability companies: these form the staple material of the huge
accumulations which make up the bulk of those hundreds of millions
which regularly pass every year from some few hundred persons to some
few other hundreds. Quite low down in this list of obscure wealthy,
conspicuous if they attain six figures, and often falling below five,
are the men who have created and have served; authors of European
distinction, generals with ten campaigns to their name, politicians
who have devoted their lives to public affairs, men of science who
have effected discoveries for which all humanity is richer. Under no
kind of analysis does examination of these names and figures provide
any co-ordination of wealth and capacity, or wealth and national or
imperial or humanitarian service. The observer has not only to lament
the paucity of talent amongst the children of families with high past
record of spacious and splendid renown. He is not compelled to turn
his attention in perhaps unfair emphasis to that section of society
which regards its possessions as a trinket or plaything, and, amid an
atmosphere of frivolity, is engaged in squandering its brief existence
through every variety of passionless pleasure. It is enough for him, in
analysing the ordinary undistinguished accumulation of great wealth,
to note the balance of social service on the one hand, of remuneration
on the other; and to wonder how long the obscure multitudes who labour
with so scanty a return, in order that these may enjoy, will continue
to be satisfied with what (to them) appears so improvident a bargain.
And if this detached observer, inspired neither by hate nor envy, were
asked to summarise the social advantage of all this heaped-up wealth
expended by the few who have attained, he would be compelled to find it
in a social convenience and amenity; in the provision of opportunity,
embedded in pleasant surroundings and with bodily discomforts as far as
possible removed, for entertaining conversation.
So, concentrating themselves especially in London, for an annual
campaign of association, there gather every year the companies
of the successful. They have expended some half their days in
tranquillity and quiet places--in rural England, in high Swiss mountain
valleys--anywhere in which the too exasperated material of the human
mind can be nursed back into some semblance of sanity. They gather,
from the four winds, into the tumult of the capital, to occupy the
remaining half of the year in deliberate tearing the fabric of that
mind to pieces in an orgy of human intercourse. It is effort directed
at the highest pressure, with no interspaces of silence in which to
learn, to suffer, or to enjoy. It is the effort of those few who
have attained success in a race where the majority are content with
existence and endurance, to exhibit the magnitude of that success in
a transitory experience of too violently accelerated life. For these
months nobody is ever alone; nobody ever pauses to think; no one ever
attempts to understand. All quick and novel sensations are pressed
into the service of an ever more insistent demand for new things.
Parliament pays its tribute, in a labyrinth of dining-rooms and a
famous terrace, which is an annexe--as the Empire is an annexe--to the
activities of this restless energy. What passes for British Art in
a Royal Academy and other exhibitions; the Opera, dragging European
singers to stimulate an audience numbed by the whirl of circumstance;
any unexpected appeal, a decadent French play, actors from an earlier,
simpler, passionate South, an audacious novel or two, a passing
scandal, serve to infuse the concoction with some lambent vitality.
But, for the most part, it is talk--talk--talk; talk at luncheon and
tea and dinner; talk at huge, undignified crowded receptions, where
each talker is disturbed by the consciousness that his neighbour is
desirous of talking to others; talk at dances and at gatherings,
far into the night; with the morning devoted to preparation for
further talking in the day to come. It is talk usually commonplace,
sometimes clever, occasionally sincere; of a society desirous of being
interested, more often finding itself bored, filled with a resolute
conviction that it must “play the game”; that this is the game to be
played, that it must be played resolutely to the end. Elemental things
occasionally intrude, marriages, and those unexpected deaths which
refuse to postpone themselves to a more convenient out-of-season. What
does it all mean? No one knows. What does it all come to? Again, no one
knows. To many it stands for the inevitable, as the factory life is
inevitable to some, the field drudgery to others. A few it stimulates
with a consciousness of power in human intercourse and the subtle
sensation of rejoicing in a crowd. To a tiny remnant alone it presents
the appearance of a complicated machine, which has escaped the control
of all human volition, and is progressing towards no intelligible
goal; of some black windmill, with gigantic wings, rotating untended
under the huge spaces of night.
It is not illuminated by high ardours. It is not disfigured by
great crimes. The criticism of its “smartness,” its vulgarity, its
selfishness, advanced largely by women novelists and unfamiliar
critics, is based upon a biassed reading of values. There are those
who are pushing to get in, as there are those who are pushing to get
out. There are egoisms here as in all human energies; revolts which
drive their victims outside the accepted standards; reactions which
find expression in a petulance or a despair. Neither to-day nor
to-morrow will this strange turmoil stand for anything conformable to
the record of various pleasure-loving societies, which from time to
time have lived and flourished and died. But if its viciousness be
but the palest reflection of similar past efforts, its activities and
devotions are also set in grey. It has none of the fury of passionate
pleasure which accompanied the decline and fall of Rome; but it has
little of the large utterance, and magnificence of artistic display,
and consciousness of occupying a great arena in the world’s affairs,
which speaks from every day’s record of that long autumn of decay. It
has few of those feverish and almost unintelligible lusts and cruelties
which make the story of the Early Renaissance in Italy like the memory
of evil dreams. But, on the other hand, it will neither stamp upon the
stone and marble of its dwelling-places, nor store up upon the walls of
its cities and opulent houses, nor write in the life history of its men
and women, that harvest of an artistic beginning and a rich individual
experience which makes the Renaissance appear as one of the wonder-ages
of the world. To-day, here, in England, it plays and trifles with large
forces which, if it once understood, it might flee from in terror and
dismay. Its social and philanthropic enterprises are fairly ample; it
bestows considerable sums on public and private charities, shepherding
its friends into drawing-room meetings to listen to some attractive
speaker--an actor, a Labour Member, a professional humorist--pleading
for pity to the poor. It discusses the possibility of social upheavals
in that dim, silent, encompassing life in which all its activities
are embedded--the incalculable populations, which set the society
that matters in the midst of a rude and multitudinous society that
does not count. It plays in good humour with light schemes of Social
Reform; wondering, like the pleasant salons of Paris in the new age of
gold before the Revolution, whither events are tending; convinced, as
these salons also were convinced, that nothing can alter the effectual
standards of its world. It plays with religion; listening to the
agreeable discourses of one popular preacher, urging kindliness and
charity and toleration to all men; amused at the violence of another,
denouncing all its works and ways; a little disturbed by a third,
feeling the sudden intrusion of the cold hand of a universe in which
all its standards are unknown. “Sydney Smith talking,” wrote Carlyle
in his diary, “other persons prating, jargoning. To me, through these
thin cobwebs, Death and Eternity sat glaring.” Only in an occasional
solitary hour, in that magic twilight of a London summer evening, or
in the flare of a dim dawn over the sleeping city, do such disturbing
visitants tear the silence as with a sudden cry.
It is an aggregation of clever, agreeable, often lovable people, whose
material wants are satisfied by the labour of unknown workers in all
the world, trying with a desperate seriousness to make something of a
life spared the effort of wage-earning. It is built up and maintained
in an artificial, and probably a transitory, security--security which
has never been extended in the world’s history to more than a few
generations. It will continue with each until each drops out, if
uncomplaining, a little fatigued, and the fresh recruits take the place
of the deserters and the dead.
No study is more disheartening, none more disturbing, than the study
of those companies of human beings, which in various periods of social
security have attempted in similar fashion to play with the purposes of
life. “Some set their hearts on building and gardening,” wrote Tavannes
of the Court of the Valois, “on painting or reading or the chase. They
run after an animal all day and get their faces torn in the woods; or
they trot from morning till evening after a ball of wool; or they spend
the day and the night in games of hazard, from which they rise without
any great reluctance; or they buy arms and horses, and never use them.”
“Sadness and melancholy without a legitimate cause,” he declares, “are
their own just punishment; a failure to recognise the grace of God
which has made us immortal.” More than an age of Adventure, more even
than an age of reckless Wickedness, does time judge and condemn an age
of ineffectual Pleasure.
Where are the braveries, fresh or frayed? The plumes, the
armours--friend and foe? The cloth of gold, the rare brocade? The
mantles glittering to and fro? The pomp, the pride, the royal show?
The cries of war and festival? The youth, the grace, the charm, the
glow? Into the night go one and all.
_Mane floreat, et transeat: vespere decidat. Et custodia in
nocte_--“As a watch in the night.”
II
“Conquerors” they appear to the critic abroad: “the Island Pharisees”
to the critic at home. Many attempts have been made in recent times to
describe in fiction this new leisured life of England: the particular
contemporary aspect of that Fair “wherein it was contrived should
be sold all sorts of Vanity, and that it should last all the year
long.” There is something of it in the _Egoist_, something also in
the extraordinary analysis by Mr. Henry James of the meaning of
situation in various companies of rich, idle persons whose utility or
significance in any rational universe it is difficult to apprehend.
Some of the younger novelists, with less detachment and with less
acceptance, have attempted interpretation, not of the moods of the
moment, but of the meaning of a whole society. Mr. Galsworthy, for
example, in a rather fierce indictment--gazing at the struggle for
continuance amongst the successful, like a spectator gazing at a
struggle of ants or bees--has drawn up an impeachment of the country
house and conventional life of successful England. His hero enters
this society from abroad, examining it, as if for the first time, with
curious eyes, without any background of the fortifying curriculum
of the accepted English education. He is excited to questioning and
resentment by the ironical smiles and comments of a foreigner, a
chance acquaintance in a third-class carriage, who, having rejected
everything, swallowed “all the formulas,” has no attitude but that of
irony towards the folly of human things. He attempts to allay that
resentment by personal examination of the various phases of the life
of the “Conquerors.” He wanders desolately from the oppression of the
club to the oppression of an artistic and literary gathering; and
thence to the futility of the philanthropic attempt to elevate the
lower classes by chess and coffee and bagatelle. He notes the well-fed,
bullet-headed, jovial crowds in the streets, the wives and husbands who
have settled down to a routine of affection, the wives and husbands
who have settled down to a routine of dull hatred and acceptance. The
complacency of it all, its satisfaction, its docility, its absence
of high purpose and adventure, haunt him like a nightmare. He essays
the countryside with no better result. He stays a night with a lonely
vicar. He beholds a warder guarding the huge convict prison--symbol of
the unsuitability of Christianity to practical affairs. He walks the
English roads with an energetic Indian civilian, who is very content
to run the machine, without caring to inquire whether the machine is
worth running at all. Finally, in the atmosphere of the English country
house, serene and dominant, and triumphantly content, he realises that
he is not of this company. Some disturbing madness has come upon him,
which compels him to inquire, where other men are content to enjoy.
And that way lies madness--or the struggle up a hill path, difficult
and extended, towards some new form of sanity. So he brands them with
some contempt and some anger as “Pharisees”--the island Pharisees, who
have mistaken the accident of their own favoured circumstances for the
reward of merit, and now present an invincible complacency to all the
arrows of outrageous fortune. In such a condemnation he is something
less than just to a race which has been considerably misjudged and
misunderstood. The men and women which fall under the lash of Mr.
Galsworthy’s satire have none of the historic characteristics of
the Pharisee. Their ancestors may have thanked God that they were
not as other men are. These are but astonished that the distinction
was noticeable or important. The “other men” have vanished from the
picture. They would be acknowledged to be of common blood, common
faith, common nationality. But they so readily pass unnoticed that it
would seem a work of supererogation to drag them on to the stage at
all. The standard of life which is only maintained by the labour of
obscure persons becomes accepted as normal; to be received without
questioning. It is less easy, indeed, to excite questions than to
propound answers. In the study of the psychology of “Space” and “Time”
the student is familiar with the difficulty, not of explanation but of
inquiry: “here is space, here is time--What is all the pother about?”
is the attitude of the plain man. And “here is human life, as we know
it,” is the attitude of the “plain man” in the class where is accepted
as fixed and unalterable, that the services of many shall minister to
the comfort of the few. The “Conquerors” have got far beyond the stage
of the Pharisee. They are the children’s children of those rather
crude exponents of complacency and pride. They reveal no ostentatious
complacency and pride. Their attitude is rather one of acceptance.
It is not that they thank God that they are not as other men are. It
is that they can imagine no conceivable readjustment of the universe
which could make other men as themselves; or themselves different They
are enterprising, but they shun adventure. They are kind, with no real
possibility of sympathy. Enormous shut doors separate them from the
real world: and they bend the world to their desires. “Doubts don’t
help you,” says one of Mr. Galsworthy’s characters. “How can you get
any good from doubts? The thing is to win victories.” “Victories?” is
the reply. “I’d rather understand than conquer.” But the “Island Race”
has preferred to conquer rather than to understand. And wisdom is
justified of all her children.
Once or twice, indeed, the critic is willing to suggest that perhaps
the choice is not so mad a one after all. The ironical foreigner who
prefers to resist, beg, cringe, and criticise, presents a figure not
wholly heroic. He has fallen back on facts. He has sucked the salt
and rind of life. He has deliberately contracted himself out of the
universe of make-believe which he sees encompassing the people amongst
whom his lot is cast. He enjoys his weakness and his laughter: the
machine moves on; doing the work of the world. And these people, as
he sees them--with their blindness to real issues, their carefully
tended gardens, and the gates so severely padlocked which guard the
pathways to waste spaces outside--may perhaps after all have learned
the lesson of compromise in a world of frantic possibilities. The
garden must be cultivated: cultivated, even if the sun which so
pleasantly encourages its flowers to pass into kindly fruit is in
reality a furnace of incredible fury; and the earth, of which this
garden is a tiny segment, running along an illimitable inane towards
no intelligible goal. “Spirit ruins you,” declares the little foreign
barber, condemned always to shave paupers in the cellars of a Rowton
lodging-house. “In this world what you want is to have no spirit.”
The _drôle_ Irish actor dies drunk in squalor, all because he has
something in him “which will not accept things as they are, believing
always that they should be better.” “When he was no longer capable
of active revolution he made it by getting drunk. At the last this
was his only way of protesting against society.” And occasionally,
from the heart of the mechanical routine, there comes evidence that
understanding is there--that understanding is possible: that not
grossness or obtuseness or selfishness, as in the first hasty verdict,
but the deliberate determination _not_ to face the realities is the
real motive power which keeps the system from falling into decay. For
if the realities be faced, the bottom falls out of the world; and man,
naked, shivering, and alone, is suddenly left defenceless, confronting
the fire and the darkness. The hero of one of Mr. Galsworthy’s novels
finds his uncle, a shrewd, insensitive man of business, criticising the
modern uncensored drama. “‘What’s right for the French and Russians,
Dick,’ he said, ‘is wrong for us. When we begin to be _real_ we only
really begin to be false.’ ‘Isn’t life bad enough already?’ he asks.
It suddenly struck Shelton that, for all his smile, his uncle’s face
had a look of crucifixion. He stood there very straight, his eyes
haunting his nephew’s face; there seemed to Shelton a touching muddle
in his optimism--a muddle of tenderness and of intolerance, of truth
and second-handedness. Like the lion above him, he seemed to be defying
Life to make him look at her.”[2]
“Defying Life to make him look at her” has been the effort of all
societies which have been removed for a time from the immediate
necessities of labour, hunger, and cold. That defiance of life is not
so mad a thing as it at first appears. It attempts, and to a certain
extent with success, to create a possible existence for an average
which can never be far removed from the conventional. It works: that
is its justification; this gospel of the Second Best, which substitutes
a placid friendliness for love’s high ardour, and prettiness for
beauty, and a compromise of cruelty and kindliness for social justice,
and a standard of convention for the demands of a compelling religion.
It is assailed in scornfulness and bitterness and passion, by the
advocates of these various flaming emotions; by the religious prophets
who demand sincerity; by the social prophets who cry for equality
and compassion; by the artists who wish to challenge the unveiled
Truth; by the great lovers who are outraged by this ignoble treatment
of the “Lord of Life of terrible aspect.” But the thing swings
forward, indifferent or but politely tolerant of the clamour; because
its inhabitants know that the secure second best is a wiser choice
(for them) than the hazards of an effort towards a doubtful larger
attainment. Most of those who have demanded less limited horizons,
and pressed forward to sail on uncharted seas, and adventured “beyond
the sunset,” have vanished and been heard of no more. There is surely
justification for any who in the face of such disasters confine their
voyages to the familiar creeks and havens, and never willingly forsake
the shelter of the shore.
And still to other nations--less successful in the economic struggle,
less immovably confident in attainment--these people appear as “the
Conquerors”: dominating the world with a certain serene confidence
in the justice of their supremacy which is at once enviable and
exasperating to the critic from outside. The Englishman abroad is
inclined to gush a little at the fascination of the foreign freedom,
especially at the charm and beauty of the South. He finds here manners,
and an immemorial tradition of courtesy, and a less slavish devotion
to material ends. But the South itself is under no such illusion. To
these it is the English who are the people that have attained. Italy,
Spain, Hungary, Bulgaria, are all desirous of unravelling the secret
and accepting the standard of the dominant race. Even the writers
of literature, although they may mingle a delicate irony with their
praise, yet are content to emphasise the deficiences of their own
people; in the contrast presented to them by the immigrant English
who settle in their coasts, and maintain their own life and manners
unconscious of the life and manners of their neighbours.
It is as a conquering race, secure, imperturbable, profoundly careless
of opinion outside, that the astonished foreigner encounters the
Englishman abroad. “I see them at work,” writes M. Marcel Prévost,
from Biarritz, “and never perhaps have I better known and understood
their Anglo-Saxon energy than here, on the French soil, in a French
hotel, kept not by Germans or Swiss, but by the French of the Midi.”
He applauds even while he criticises. He mingles his irony with
admiration. He sees the Conquerors, not triumphant over the conquered,
not consciously brutal to the conquered, but simply brushing them
aside as irrelevant; never, indeed, seeing them at all. He sees, in
fact, this English colony contemplating certain cities of France, not
as a land with centuries of history beaten into its soil, but as a
place where the amenities of climate enable them to transplant into
a Southern air a portion of England. The French--even in the towns
of the stranger, where the French colony is numerous, in London or in
Barcelona, for example--never give the impression of a civic garrison
engaged by the Mother Country. Whilst a few hundreds of English
people in a French town, “obstinately speaking nothing but English,
inhabiting only English lodgings, dressing only in the English fashion,
practising their religion, their sports, and their games, with an easy
ostentation, end by persuading us,” he ironically complains, “that
we are the strangers--or at least the conquered nation.” It is this
mingling of security and indifference that fills him with despair. In
Biarritz, Pau, Dinard--he might have said in the whole _côte d’azur_ of
the Riviera--“the English have conquered us,” he declares. _Excellent
milieu pour étudier leurs procédés de conquête._
In the attempt to analyse the secret of this supremacy, he fixes
attention especially upon three points. First, the English are at
home abroad. When we go to foreign lands, says M. Prévost, it is the
stranger who interests us, his manners and habits, his peculiarities,
the ways in which he differs from us. When the Englishman goes abroad,
the customs of the country, the opinion of the people amongst whom he
lives, count for nothing. He comes to Biarritz to live his life, the
traditional English life, made up of bounteous feeding, of violent
physical exercise, of clubs, and of bridge. He describes the types
which he found at the Hotel Victoria, all entirely complacent, all
self-sufficient, all just blandly tolerant of the occasional presence
of the native inhabitant in this frontier post of Empire. “Yes; all
those people are entirely at home there. It is I who am the stranger,
the profane, since I look upon them with curiosity, since I wish to
learn something from them.” This accusation is an old one: accepted
since the famous definition of the Continent in the verdict of the
British tourist, as “ruins, inhabited by imbeciles”: since the
refusal of the English lady to speak French in Paris, because, as she
protested, “it only encourages them.” Here at least, amid much that
has changed, the type is unchangeable. The conquering race cannot
understand the conquered. No conquering race ever has understood the
conquered: except when, understanding, its Imperial rule has begun
its decline. If the English in India, it has been said, commenced to
understand India, the episode of English rule in India would be nearing
its close. The second “instrument of invasion,” this acute observer
finds in a “Discipline of Life, unanimously accepted.” Their plan of
conquest is traced in advance. They stamp their life upon the life of
the invaded cities: demanding, and in consequence readily obtaining,
those things which they judge indispensable to the discipline of their
existence. These include especially _l’installation hygiénique_ and
_l’installation sportive_. At Biarritz to-day, the villas which are
not entirely sanitary do not let. This is a more effective pressure
than any bye-law of a local authority. They create--through their
demands--hot air and vapour baths, certain conditions of ventilation,
electric light, _le seul qui ne “mange pas d’oxygène” disent-ils_.
They insist also upon their sports: golf, tennis, polo, hunting,
shooting. They even patronise automobilism, whilst declaring, says
M. Prévost slyly, “that it is not a true sport; they accuse it of not
being an English sport.” To this they join their religion, or at least
the outward manifestation of their religion. (One thinks of English
“chaplains abroad.”) Given also to this an imperious complacency of
costume, and all the materials are offered to provide the Anglican
colony abroad with the impression of _un corps d’occupation ayant son
uniforme, ses titres, ses chefs. Ces sont bien des conquérants._
But beyond these superficial truculencies the observer may find
a deeper interpretation of the cause of these triumphs. He sees
the English, in these new Englands that they have made abroad,
less intelligent, less generally cultivated than the French; less
cultivated, less scientific, artistic, and laborious than the Germans.
Yet it is these “barbarians,” not the French or the Germans, who have
attained, almost without effort, the overlordship of the world. He
ascribes this attainment to the fact that to-day the English are the
only people who have truly national manners and characteristics. In a
different order of things, but in equal measure, they exercise upon the
manners of the world the Authority which the French exercised in the
eighteenth century; when even those who hated them were compelled to
copy them. “Manners and Customs in France,” he asks dejectedly, “what
is it that can be developed to-day under this title? We have no longer
‘Manners and Customs.’ But the English retain their manners and customs
with a stubborn placidity.” “You can love--more or less--certain
qualities of this conquering people,” he concludes, “but how is it
possible not to admire its strong national discipline?” “That is what
ought to be learnt from it,” he exhorts his fellow-countrymen, “rather
than ways of smoking or rules of play.”
There is much sound common sense under this quiet irony and badinage.
The qualities which have produced an English domination of Biarritz
or Cannes are the qualities which have given to the race an Empire
dominant over four hundred millions of variegated peoples. The
qualities which have made them respected rather than loved at the
continental watering-places are the qualities which would cause their
subject peoples for the most part to contemplate the abandonment of
their rule without regret. Strength, energy, and a certain crudity
make up the blend of all Imperial races. It was so with the Romans: a
conspicuous efficiency, a justice equally impartial and indifferent;
aloofness with a certain disdain in it; an exercise of power almost
startling in the disproportion of end to means. It is the vigour
of a clumsy giant; sometimes exercising his strength in beneficent
enterprise, in effecting desirable acts which no weaker agent can
perform; sometimes--and generally unwittingly--crushing with heavy hoof
things of whose value he has no conception. No Conquering Race can
possess much power of introspection, of self-examination. “They do not
fret and whine about their condition,” says Whitman of the animals. He
could equally have said it about the English. No Conquering Race can
possess patience: else it passes into the acquiescence of the South,
whose favourite word is “to-morrow,” or the acquiescence of the East,
which is content to let the thundering legions pass, and to plunge
in thought again. No Conquering Race can possess irony: else it will
uncomfortably suspect that its conquered peoples are secretly laughing
at it, and this suspicion will excite it to resentment and reprisal.
No Conquering Race can possess humour: for then one day it will find
itself laughing at itself; and that day its power of conquest is gone.
Those who would help mankind must not expect much from them, is the
half sad, half cynical verdict of worldly wisdom. Those who would rule
mankind must not expect much from themselves beyond rulership, is the
lesson of history upon all Imperialisms. Above all, those who would do
the work of the world must not trouble themselves very greatly with
the inquiry whether the work of the world is worth the doing. If there
are signs of menace in the present outlook they arise from just this
fact: that a race which has conquered is now passing, it would seem,
into a race that is comfortable; that the frivolous pursuit of pleasure
rather than of wickedness, and the maintenance of a too exacting
standard of material welfare is threatening to replace an older
salutary simplicity; and that the reproach of Juvenal to Rome is not
without justification in twentieth-century London, when he accused its
successful peoples of having eaten of the herb of Sardinia. _Moritur et
ridet_;--it laughs and dies.
For its efforts at conquest, however annoying to those who resent its
domination, are enterprises of no mean or timid order. No nation
need be ashamed of Empire on a large scale, or apologise for the
overlordship of a Continent. To-day’s criticism deplores the weakening
or vanishing of the qualities by which such conquest was attained: in
an aristocratic caste which is merging itself in a wealthy class, and
undergoing weakening in the process. It is not from the “Conquerors”
but from a rather harassed and limited Middle Class that the “Empire
builders” are now drawn: a Lord Macdonnell from the home of a peasant
farmer in Ireland, a Cecil Rhodes from an English country parsonage.
The men who are administering with varying success British East Africa
and Northern Nigeria, and the huge machine of government in India,
are mainly the children of the professional families, drawn abroad by
love of adventure or absence of opportunity at home. There is little
danger in England of any general popular uprising against aristocratic
privilege, or even against a system which has concentrated in few
hands so disproportionate a percentage of the national accumulation.
But there may be danger of a kind of internal collapse and decay,
in the deflection of vigour and intellectual energy to irrelevant
standards and pleasures; in the inadequacy of that vigour and energy
before nations ever becoming better equipped in the world struggle,
and determined to make desperate efforts for the supreme position.
The invocation to “wake up” is supposed to be addressed mainly to the
working peoples, whose extravagant thirst for alcoholic refreshment,
and whose Trade Unions, encouraging an enforced idleness, are creating,
in this theory, a falling-off in commercial and industrial efficiency.
But far more than among the “rude mechanicals,” a facing of realities
is needed among the classes who have conquered and attained; who now,
absorbed in the difficult art of living under elaborate standards, find
little superfluous energy or wealth remaining for the setting of the
house in order. A variable and random philanthropy is the substitute
for Social Reform. A buying-off of the more energetic from below by
honours and titles liberally bestowed, prevents the attack upon a
whole class by the resentment of energy and intellect excluded from
privilege. Free patronage and a liberal entertainment of authors,
critics, playwrights, musicians, and ambitious politicians, removes
the menace of an intellectual proletariat exciting anger and envy
amongst the dim millions of the industrial populace. It has the sense
also to know the limits of its interferences; to know that its power,
inadequate to constructive effort, rests on inhibitions rather than
activities. The rather ignoble rôle played by the House of Lords during
the past decade reveals its weaknesses. It will allow changes which it
profoundly dislikes, when compelled by fear. It will resist changes in
action when that fear is controlled. It will altogether abandon the
effort to initiate changes where change is essential. It can do little
but modify, check, or destroy other men’s handiwork. It has no single
constructive suggestion of its own to offer to a people confronting
difficult problems, and harassed by the obligations of necessary
reorganisations. It can neither breed leaders nor ideas. And because of
this ultimate sterility--though it has all the cards in its hands and
every material force in its favour--its power may gradually pass and be
destroyed; to appear in history as one more aristocracy declining, not
through the batterings of external enemies, but from the fretting and
crumbling of an internal decay.
Its fear to-day is Socialism: Socialism which it does not understand,
but which presents itself as an uprising of the uneducated, suddenly
breaking into its houses; their clumsy feet on the mantelpiece,
their clumsy hands seizing and destroying all beautiful and pleasant
things. So it lies awake at night, listening fearfully to the tramp
of the rising host: the revolt of the slave against his master. From
Socialism--as a code of economic organisation, ordering life on a
military, disciplinary, and rational basis--it has perhaps less to
fear than it sometimes imagines. For this “Socialism” is farther away
in time than many ardent Socialists suppose. And if “Socialism” were
consummated, there might be found under its rigorous régime more
tenderness to an aristocratic caste and tradition than is anticipated
by those who are terrified at the promise of its advent. These
people, indeed, have less to fear from a demand for equality, than
from a demand for efficiency: from the enforced necessity, either in
a hazardous national crisis abroad, or in some stress of economic
adversity at home, for the rule of energy and intelligence. The
demand of the Napoleonic system--“the declared principle,” to “seek
talent wherever it may be found”--might make havoc of the supremacy
of the children of the “Conquerors”; might drastically determine
that some less ruinous proportion of the national wealth was expended
on aimless conventions and enjoyments. It may be desirable that the
land of England, for example, shall be held in the hands of private
owners, instead of being owned by the whole community. It seems to be
increasingly questioned whether the land of England shall continue to
be held by its present private owners: whether the landed classes of
this country, in any ultimate standard of profit and loss, can justify
the trust and high calling which has placed the welfare of the rural
population in their keeping, and now sees little return but a decaying,
deserted countryside. There is much, again, to be said for a Second
Chamber in Government. There is little to be said for the present
Second Chamber, except that in practice it appears to have disproved
all its theoretical advantages: abstaining where in theory it ought to
have struck, and striking where in theory it ought to have abstained.
Aristocracy in England has been kindly and generous. Even as in part
transformed into a plutocracy, it provides little of that attitude of
insolence to the less fortunate which is the surest provocation of
revolution. The action of a section of the motoring classes, indeed, in
their annexation of the highways and their indifference to the common
traditions, stands almost alone as an example of wealth’s intolerable
arrogances, and has certainly excited more resentment amongst the
common people than any extravagance of pleasure or political reaction.
It is only in such manifestations as those of enjoyment deliberately
associated with careless injury to the general convenience, that
there is revealed the remotest possibility of a deliberate “class
war” between the rich and the poor. Feudal England is dying, and
the attempt to transform a caste basis of land and breeding into a
caste basis of material possession seems doomed to failure. But it
will fail less from external assault than from the inability of the
inheritors of great fortune to maintain the energies and devotions
through which that fortune has been made. “The Conquerors” will leave
little bitterness behind them. There may even remain, in the memory
of a more exacting age to come, a pleasant recollection of those
who upheld, in time of tranquillity, a standard of manners and a
tradition of kindliness, duty, and courage before life’s lesser ills.
From public schools, which profess to teach “character” rather than
to stimulate intelligence, through universities encouraging large
expenditure on comfort, limitless bodily exercise, and an exiguous
standard of intellectual effort, they pass to the “truly national
manners and characteristics” which M. Prévost so much admires. In
country residence, in solid aggregation in the metropolis, in lesser
imitative effort amongst the provincial cities, they have cherished a
code of hospitality, courtesy, criticism, mild and generous interest in
public and private affairs. If that code is in part vanishing before
the influx of the new “Super-wealth,” it yet exhibits, in the present
generation, a still active power of assimilation. Not for conspicuous
crimes, for selfishness, for class exclusiveness, or for insolence
will this society be judged and condemned by the progress of time. It
will pass--if it passes--because it is mistaking abnormal and insecure
experience for the normal and secure; because an unwillingness to
face reality is gradually developing a confusion between reality and
illusion; because in its prosperity it may be stricken with blindness
to the signs of the time.