THE SUBURBANS
They are easily forgotten: for they do not strive or cry; and for
the most part only ask to be left alone. They have none of those
channels of communication in their possession by which the rich and
the poor are able to express their hostility to any political or
social change. The Landed Classes or the brewing interests, on the
one hand, find newspapers energetic in fighting their cause; on the
other, see themselves securely entrenched in a “Second Chamber,” which
offers them a permanent majority. The Working Classes can organise
into unions, subsidise members of Parliament and a Labour Party, make
themselves both respected and feared. No one fears the Middle Classes,
the suburbans; and perhaps for that reason, no one respects them.
They only appear articulate in comedy, to be made the butt of a more
nimble-witted company outside: like “Mr. Hopkinson,” who is aspiring
to transfer his residence from Upper Tooting to Belgravia, or the
queer people who dispute--in another recent London play--concerning
the respective social advantages of Clapham and Herne Hill. Strong
in numbers, and in possession of a vigorous and even tyrannical
convention of manners, they lack organisation, energy, and ideas. And
in consequence they have been finding themselves crushed between the
demands of the industrial peoples on the one hand, and the resistance
of the “Conquerors” on the other. They act only when their grievances
have become a burden impossible to be borne. They act without
preparation, without leadership, without preliminary negotiation. They
rise suddenly, impervious to argument, unreasoning and resolute. And
the result is often a cataclysm which would be almost ludicrous if it
were not both random and pitiful.
Such action, for example, was revealed in the complete overturn of
London’s system of government which took place in the spring of 1908,
after a continuous rule of nearly twenty years of administration by
one party. Lord Randolph Churchill ended his political career because
he had “forgotten Goschen.” The Progressive Party ended its political
career in the Metropolis because it had forgotten the Middle Classes.
It recognised, indeed, and estimated not unfairly, the strength of the
rich, the artisans, the unskilled labourers. These three classes are
prominent factors in the modern European polity. But it had forgotten
the dimensions and latent power of those enormous suburban peoples
which are practically the product of the past half-century, and have
so greatly increased, even within the last decade. They are the
creations not of the industrial, but of the commercial and business
activities of London. They form a homogeneous civilisation,--detached,
self-centred, unostentatious,--covering the hills along the northern
and southern boundaries of the city, and spreading their conquests
over the quiet fields beyond. They are the peculiar product of England
and America; of the nations which have pre-eminently added commerce,
business, and finance to the work of manufacture and agriculture.
It is a life of Security; a life of Sedentary occupation; a life of
Respectability; and these three qualities give the key to its special
characteristics. Its male population is engaged in all its working
hours in small, crowded offices, under artificial light, doing immense
sums, adding up other men’s accounts, writing other men’s letters. It
is sucked into the City at daybreak, and scattered again as darkness
falls. It finds itself towards evening in its own territory in the
miles and miles of little red houses in little silent streets, in
number defying imagination. Each boasts its pleasant drawing-room, its
bow-window, its little front garden, its high-sounding title--“Acacia
Villa,” or “Camperdown Lodge”--attesting unconquered human aspiration.
There are many interests beyond the working hours: here a greenhouse
filled with chrysanthemums, there a tiny grass patch with bordering
flowers; a chicken-house, a bicycle shed, a tennis lawn. The women,
with their single domestic servants, now so difficult to get, and so
exacting when found, find time hang rather heavy on their hands. But
there are excursions to shopping centres in the West End, and pious
sociabilities, and occasional theatre visits, and the interests of
home. The children are jolly, well-fed, intelligent English boys and
girls; full of curiosity, at least in the earlier years. Some of them
have real gifts of intellect and artistic skill, receiving in the
suburban secondary schools the best education which England is giving
to-day. You may see the whole suburbs in August transported to the more
genteel of the southern watering-places; the father, perhaps, a little
bored; the mother perplexed with the difficulty of cramped lodgings and
extortionate prices. But the children are in a magic world, crowding
the seashore, full of the elements of delight and happy laughter.
The rich despise the Working People; the Middle Classes fear them.
Fear, stimulated by every artifice of clever political campaigners, is
the motive power behind each successive uprising. In feverish hordes,
the suburbs swarm to the polling booth to vote against a truculent
Proletariat. The Middle Class elector is becoming irritated and
indignant against working-class legislation. He is growing tired of
the plaint of the unemployed and the insistent crying of the poor. The
spectacle of a Labour Party triumphant in the House of Commons, with a
majority of members of Parliament apparently obedient to the demands
of its leaders, and even a House of Lords afraid of it, fills him with
profound disgust. The vision of a “Keir Hardie” in caricature--with red
tie and defiant beard and cloth cap, and fierce, unquenchable thirst
for Middle Class property--has become an image of Labour Triumphant
which haunts his waking hours. He has difficulty with the plumber
in jerry-built houses needing continuous patching and mending. His
wife is harassed by the indifference or insolence of the domestic
servant. From a blend of these two he has constructed in imagination
the image of Democracy--a loud-voiced, independent, arrogant figure,
with a thirst for drink, and imperfect standards of decency, and a
determination to be supported at some one else’s expense. Every day,
swung high upon embankments or buried deep in tubes underground, he
hurries through the region where the creature lives. He gazes darkly
from his pleasant hill villa upon the huge and smoky area of tumbled
tenements which stretches at his feet. He is dimly distrustful of the
forces fermenting in this uncouth laboratory. Every hour he anticipates
the boiling over of the cauldron. He would never be surprised to find
the crowd behind the red flag, surging up his little pleasant pathways,
tearing down the railings, trampling the little garden; the “letting in
of the jungle” upon the patch of fertile ground which has been redeemed
from the wilderness. And whatever may be the future, the present he
finds sufficiently intolerable. The people of the hill are heavily
taxed (as he thinks) in order that the people of the plain may enjoy
good education, cheap trams, parks, and playgrounds; even (as in the
frantic vision of some newspapers) that they may be taught Socialism
in Sunday schools, with parodies of remembered hymns. And the taxes
thus extorted--this, perhaps, is the heart of the complaint--are all
going to make his own life harder, to make life more difficult for
his children. The man of forty has already sounding in his ears the
noise of the clamour of the coming generations. And these coming
generations, who are going to push him roughly out of his occupation,
and bring his little castle in ruins to the ground, are being provided
with an equipment for the struggle out of the funds which he himself
is compelled to supply. He is paying for his own children’s start in
life, and he is having extorted from him the price of providing other
people’s children with as good a start in life, or a better. He has to
lay by for his old age in painful accumulation of pence and shillings,
every one of which he can ill spare. And he now finds the old age of
the loafer and the spendthrift--so he interprets recent legislation
on the subject--bountifully provided for. He wonders where it is
all going to stop. He is becoming every day more impatient with the
complaining of the poor. He refuses to mourn over the sufferings of
the factory girl when he is offering a desirable position as general
“help” and can find no applicant. He believes that the “unemployed”
consist exclusively of those who are determined to go softly all their
days at the public expense--the expense of himself and his class. He is
labouring at his dismal sedentary occupation so many incredible hours
a day, while these men are parading their woes in exuberant rhetoric
at the street corner. And as he labours there enters into his soul a
resentment which becomes at times almost an obsession; in which all the
disability of his devitalised life is concentrated into revolt against
the truculent demands of “the British working man.”
He has had enough of it. He is turning in desperation to any kind of
protection held out to him. His ideals are all towards the top of the
scale. He is proud when he is identifying his interests with those of
Kensington, and indignant when his interests are identified with those
of Poplar. He possesses in full those progressive desires which are
said to be the secret of advance. He wants a little more than he can
afford, and is almost always living beyond his income. He has been
harassed with debts and monetary complications; and the demands of rent
and the rate-collector excite in him a kind of impotent fury. In that
fury he turns round and suddenly strikes down the party in possession,
glad to vote against the working man, whom he fears; and for a change,
which he hopes may lighten his present burden; and against a Socialism
which he cannot understand. So in an unexpected whirlwind of ferocity,
a Progressive Party, hitherto unconquerable, finds itself almost
annihilated. The general effect is that of being suddenly butted by a
sheep.
It is no despicable life which has thus silently developed in suburban
London. Family affection is there, cheerfulness, an almost unlimited
patience. Its full meaning to-day and the courses of its future still
remain obscure. Is this to be the type of all civilisations, when the
whole Western world is to become comfortable and tranquil, and progress
finds its grave in a universal suburb? Or is the old shaggy and untamed
earth going to shake itself suddenly once again and bring the whole
edifice tumbling to the ground? It has no clear recognition of its own
worth, or its own universe, or the scheme of the life of the world.
It is losing its old religions. It still builds churches and chapels
of a twentieth-century Gothic architecture: St. Aloysius, reputed to
be dangerously “High,” because its curates wear coloured scarves; the
Baptist Chapel, where the minister maintains the old doctrines of
hell and heaven, and wrestles with the sinner for his immortal soul;
the Congregational Church, where the minister is abreast with modern
culture, and proclaims a less exacting gospel, and faintly trusts the
larger hope. But the whole apparatus of worship seems archaic and
unreal to those who have never seen the shaking of the solid ground
beneath their feet, or the wonder and terror of its elemental fires.
There are possibilities of havoc in this ordered and comfortable
society which cannot easily be put by. The old lights have fallen
from the sky, existence has become too complex and crowded for the
influences of wide spaces reaching to a far horizon. Summer and winter
pass over these little lamplit streets, to-day the lilac and syringa,
to-morrow the scattered autumn leaves, in an experience of tranquillity
and repose. But with the ear to the ground there is audible the noise
of stranger echoes in the labyrinthine ways which stretch beyond
the boundaries of these pleasant places; full of restlessness and
disappointment, and longing, with a note of menace in it; not without
foreboding to any who would desire, in the security of the suburbs, an
unending end of the world.
Why does the picture of this suburban life, presented by however kindly
a critic, leave the reader at the end with a sense of dissatisfaction?
The query is aroused by examination of its actual condition. It is
excited not only by works written in revolt, such as those of Mr. Wells
or George Gissing, but also by the writings of Mr. Keble Howard and
Mr. Shan Bullock and Mr. Pett Ridge and others, who have attempted,
with greater or less success, to exhibit a kindly picture of suburban
society. At first this society appeared in literature as depicted by
cleverness, delighting in satire at the expense of bourgeois ideals.
Its historians were always in protest against its limitations, its
complacencies, its standards of social success and intellectual
attainment. But in later time this somewhat crude attitude of scornful
superiority has passed. Many writers with an intimate knowledge of
suburban and English Middle Class provincial life have attempted a
sympathetic and truthful description: the sincere representation of
a civilisation. But in all their efforts the general effect is of
something lacking; not so much in individual happiness, or even in
bodily and mental development, as of a certain communal poverty of
interest and ideal. The infinite boredom of the horrible women of “The
Year of Jubilee”--with its vision of Camberwell villadom as idle and
desolate as Flaubert’s vision of French provincial bourgeois life in
“Madame Bovary”--has been replaced by a scene of busy activity, with
interest in cricket and football results, “book talk,” love-making,
croquet and tennis parties for young men and women. And yet at the end,
and with the best will in the world, one closes the narrative with a
feeling of desolation; a revolt against a life which, with all its
energies and satisfactions, has somehow lost from it that zest and
sparkle and inner glow of accepted adventure which alone would seem to
give human life significance. Civilise the poor, one complains, expand
their tiny rubbish yards into green gardens, introduce bow-windows
before and verandahs behind; remove them from the actual experience of
privation, convert all England into a suburban city--will the completed
product be pronounced to be “very good”?
It is not the simplicity of suburban life which is at fault. Simplicity
in writing, or in character, is as difficult of attainment as it is
worth the attaining. And in so far as simplicity here exists--character
cut on elemental lines, or occupied with elemental things--it provides
an antidote to the complexities or cynicisms of other classes. No one,
except the vulgar, despises a Middle Class existence because it has
substituted a high tea for an elaborate dinner, because it uses speech
to reveal rather than to conceal thought, or because it refuses to
torture itself with analysis and emotion which are the products of mind
divorced from the ancient sanities of existence. Nor, again, is the
narrow separation from poverty and the abyss a cause for any legitimate
contempt, which makes the business of life for so many of them in their
tiny two-storeyed villas an enterprise hazardous and insecure. Rather
is the observer conscious, where this struggle exists, that there
has entered into the atmosphere the breath of salt wind, bracing if
austere, which can provide a more heroic sustenance than the atmosphere
in which such tests and challenges are denied. We may compare, for
example, two of Mr. Bullock’s stories of suburban life; the one, in
which he traces the attempt of a “twopenny clerk” to provide for the
needs of a family on an exiguous and precarious income; the other, in
which a prosperous family who have attained security set themselves
to the business of living under such favourable conditions. There is
humour in the struggles of Robert Thorne, as of all similar millions of
Robert Thornes, in his attempt to maintain his hardly-won standard of
decencies and modest comfort. There is resistance to hard circumstance
which the most critical onlooker will applaud--in the little boxes
for the division of income, labelled “Necessities,” “Outings,”
“Savings”--the first so rarely permitting any overflow into the second
and third; in the revolt against the shabby clothes and difficulties
created by unexpected illness; in the necessities of a clerk, who is
also a man, wheeling the perambulator on Peckham Rye, or scrubbing the
front doorsteps furtively after nightfall. But the humour is of the
ancient, not of the modern, significance; a humour not without tears in
it, with admiration also at the courage and determination which could
yet be content, and under such conditions, with “the glory of going
on and still to be.” For here is the sense of battles; and battle,
whether against deliberate foes, against the inimical force of Nature,
or the indifference of the crowd to the individual survival, is always
stimulating and bracing. And it is the battle depicted by Mr. Davidson
in his “thirty bob a week”; the “naked child against a hungry wolf,”
“the playing bowls upon a splitting wreck,” “daily done by many and
many a one” in a tenacious struggle, against the enemies of human
welfare, which illuminates and glorifies the monotonous streets of
suburban England.
But where this “struggle to live” has passed into a “struggle to
attain,” the verdict is less enthusiastic. For that struggle to attain
too often means absorption in ignoble standards, and an existence
coming more and more to occupy a world of “make-believe.” When the
family is in a position of assured comfort or of affluence, the houses
ample stuccoed or pseudo-Georgian edifices, and the breadwinners in
posts of established security in the commercial or financial houses
of the city, the atmosphere often becomes stifling and difficult. It
may be that such a condition is in itself unsuitable to mankind in
the life of so uncertain and transitory a world: that existence which
is occupied with sedentary labour in an artificially constructed
aggregation of human beings herded in the same narrow grooves, is an
existence of necessity carrying with it the seeds of futility and
decay. Certainly the two chief accusations against the product of such
an existence would be of an imperfect standard of value about the
things which exist, and of a lack of demand for the existence of things
at present unattained. It is a wrong estimate of the significance--of
rank, of birth, of wealth, of various material accumulations--which
produces the more desolating ingredients of suburban life. Listen to
the conversation in the second-class carriages of a suburban railway
train, or examine the literature and journalism specially constructed
for the suburban mind; you will often find endless chatter about the
King, the Court, and the doings of a designated “Society”; personal
paragraphs, descriptions of clothes, smile, or manner; a vision of
life in which the trivial and heroic things are alike exhibited, but
in which there is no adequate test or judgment, which are the heroic,
which the trivial. Liberated from the devils of poverty, the soul is
still empty, swept and garnished; waiting for other occupants. This is
the explanation of the so-called “snobbery” of the suburbs. Here is
curiosity, but curiosity about lesser occupations; energies,--for the
suburbs in their healthy human life, the swarms of happy, physically
efficient children, are a storehouse of the nation’s energy,--but
energies which tend to scatter and degrade themselves in aimless
activities; “random and meaningless sociabilities” which neither
hearten, stimulate, nor inspire. So into a feud with a neighbour over
a disputed garden fence, or a bustling and breezy church or chapel’s
mundane entertainment, or a criticism of manners and fashion, dress and
deportment, will be thrown force and determination which might have
been directed to effort of permanent worth, in devotion to one of the
great causes of the world.
Beyond these incorrect standards of value there is a noticeable
absence of vision. Suburban life has often little conception of social
services, no tradition of disinterested public duty, but a limited
outlook beyond a personal ambition. Here the individualism of the
national character exercises its full influence: unchecked by the
horizontal links of the industrial peoples, organising themselves
into unions, or by the vertical links of the older aristocracy with a
conception of family service which once passed from parent to child.
Religion--if that were vital and compelling--would provide in part a
vista of larger horizons. When and where religion existed--even in its
rigid conception of heaven and hell and a straight way of salvation--it
offered some universes for contemplation beyond the orderly suburban
road and the well-trimmed suburban garden. It is to be feared, however,
that in the prevailing cloudiness about ultimate things which is
developing in the modern world, religion has been tending more and
more to resolve itself into social institutions, “Pleasant Sunday
Afternoons,” or exercise of the less adventurous forces of suburban
philanthropy. What remains? A public spirit in local affairs which is
deplorably low, which sends a minute percentage of voters to Council or
Guardian Elections, and accompanies a perpetual contempt for present
municipal mismanagement with a refusal of the personal effort required
to make that management clean and efficient. An outlook upon Imperial
affairs which is less a conception of politics than the acceptance of
a social tradition: which leaves suburban seats securely Conservative
not because the Conservative creed is there definitely embraced, but
because Conservatism is supposed to be the party favoured by Court,
society, and the wealthy and fashionable classes. And too often an
essential ignorance supplemented by an arrogance which refuses advice
and despises opposition. The result is a not too reputable product of
modern civilisation: that dense and complacent “Imperial citizen” who
despises “the foreigner,” and could set right or improve upon generals
in the field or admirals on the ocean, and is satisfied with its
universe and its limitations because it has resolutely closed all doors
and windows through which there might appear the vision of larger other
worlds. It is this particular suburban figure--with custom dominant,
accepted and inherited students of judgment, contempt for the classes
below it, envy of the classes above, and no desire for adventure or
devotion to a cause or an ideal--which has become too representative a
figure of a laborious and praiseworthy race of men. Against this type
of “honest man” have warred the anarchists, the artists, the advocates
of new moralities, the opponents of the accepted way. In revolt against
the dominion of so questionable a citizen, we are perhaps inclined to
forget the mitigating features: the good nature and ready generosity,
the cleanliness of life, the still unbroken family tradition; all
animated by that resolution, not so much deliberate as unconscious, to
“make the best of it,” in a world of incalculable purposes; in which,
indeed, some cloudiness of vision or some unusual courage would seem to
be necessary if the struggle is to be continued at all.
Yet in the crumbling and decay of English rural life, and the vanishing
of that “yeoman” class which in Scotland provides a continuous breeding
ground of great men, it would seem that it is from the suburban and
professional people we must more and more demand a supply of men
and women of capacity and energy adequate to the work of the world.
Sufficiently vulnerable to criticism as they appear to-day, finding no
one who will be proud of them because they are not proud of themselves,
they yet offer a storehouse of accumulated physical health and clean
simplicities of living. Embedded in them are whole new societies
created by legislation and a national demand, whose present development
is full of interest, whose future is full of promise. Here is, for
example, the new type of elementary teacher--a figure practically
unknown forty years ago--drawn in part from the tradesmen and the more
ambitious artisan population, and now, lately, in a second generation,
from its own homes. It is exhibiting a continuous rise of standard,
keen ambitions, a respect for intellectual things which is often
absent in the population amongst which it resides. Its members are
not only doing their own work efficiently, but are everywhere taking
the lead in public and _quasi_-public activities. They appear as the
mainstay of the political machine in suburban districts, serving upon
the municipal bodies, in work, clear-headed and efficient; the leaders
in the churches and chapels, and their various social organisations.
They are taking up the position in the urban districts which for many
generations was occupied by the country clergy in the rural districts;
providing centres with other standards than those of monetary success,
and raising families who exhibit sometimes vigour of character,
sometimes unusual intellectual talent. A quite remarkable proportion
of the children of elementary schoolmasters is now knocking at the
doors of the older Universities, clamouring for admittance; and those
who effect entrance are often carrying off the highest honours. This
process is only in its beginning; every year the standard improves;
these “servants of the State” have assured to them a noteworthy and
honourable future. Again, there is no doubt that the conception of
social service is making progress against the resistance of whatever is
solid in the suburban tradition of individualism and indifference. Even
the Socialist no longer turns from the Middle Classes in disgust. He is
coming to regard them as the most fruitful field for his propaganda.
The women--or a remnant of them--are finding outlet for suppressed
energy and proffered devotion in an agitation for the vote. Sixpenny
reprints of proof or disproof of religion, the world’s classics in neat
shilling volumes, sevenpenny novels, and a variety of printed matter
are irrigating the suburbs with a fresh flood of literature. It is not
impossible to conceive of a time when a Middle Class will definitely
build up a standard of its own: no longer turning to a wealthy and
leisured company above it for effective imitation of a life to which it
is unsuited. Becoming conscious, for the first time, that it possesses
elements to contribute to the stream of national life which can be
provided neither by the rich nor the poor, it may gain that collective
respect and pride in itself which it has not yet achieved. Abandoning
its panic fear of the industrial peoples, it may find itself treating
with them as an equal, exacting terms in return for its alliance. At
best it may even resist the stampedes of those who find the support of
the “Middle Classes” always easily obtainable for an agitation against
the Income Tax or in favour of municipal reaction, or for any system
which will “broaden the basis of taxation” by shifting it from the
shoulders of the rich to the shoulders of the poor.
This fissure in the alliance between the Middle Class and the
wealthy--the most absurd and irrational of all alliances, in which
the advantage is all sucked by the one, and the burden borne by the
other--would long ago have been demanded by the suburbans themselves
but for one remarkable element in their present condition. Revolution,
or at least vigorous progress, may always be predicted when in the case
of any particular class the standard of comfort is permanently beating
against a limitation of income, and permanently in revolt against
such limitation. Such a conflict seemed inevitable a few years ago in
the case of the Middle Classes. The “intellectual proletariat” was
evidently being created, which could never obtain full satisfaction
for its desires. It would fret always at its limitations. Its fretting
would become vocal in a clamorous demand for economic change. And
the “intellectual proletariat” has been the historic leader of all
political and social revolutions. The process of its creation, however,
seems likely to be checked, and in a curious fashion. The pressure is
being reduced, not by any lowering of the standard of comfort demanded
by the individual, for that is steadily rising in suburban England,
but by the limitation of the family, pursued as a deliberate method
of adjusting expenditure to income. The headlong collapse in the
birth-rate of this country during the past twenty years--a fall greater
than that in any other nation in Europe--is a collapse to which all
classes save the very poorest are probably contributors. There are
no exact figures available, of allocation to one section rather than
to another. But there is much to indicate that this decline has gone
far amongst those suburban populations in which a few years ago the
discrepancy between the standard of comfort and the means available for
its satisfaction was most conspicuous. The endurance of a continual
indebtedness and frustration of desire, the indignation which will
convert that endurance into a hunger for reform, the anger and envy
against more prosperous people which is excited by the contrast of
human inequalities under such conditions of torment, is being assuaged,
not by reform itself, nor by any accepted reduction of the individual
demands, nor by any falling back upon supernatural consolations. It is
being averted by the repudiation of marriage, or its postponement, or
its acceptance without the accompaniment of children. Here is a kind
of ingenious method of turning the position, of climbing through the
window when the door is closed. Judgment may vary between approval
or regret, in accordance with the point of view of the critic. The
nation must inevitably suffer from an artificial restriction of
children amongst those very classes and families who should be most
encouraged to produce them; who offer the best chances of raising,
from a healthy stock and in simple homes, the men and women who will be
the most desirable citizens of the future. And a nation is in a serious
condition if its better stocks are producing smaller families or no
families at all, and its least capable are still raising an abundant
progeny. An appreciable amount of human discontent, on the other hand,
is doubtless arrested by this method of eluding Nature’s blind struggle
for existence; and those who have vested interests in contentment--who
see changes bringing them less opportunity of life’s good things--will,
no doubt, hail with approval so satisfactory a method of averting the
operation of “natural” law. By such limitation of family the standard
of comfort is reduced to the level of the income, and the clerk and
professional classes can be identified with the prevailing order,
instead of becoming centres of social upheaval.
But this limitation involves deliberate and artificial repudiation of
paternity and motherhood, and as such is condemned by most ethical
systems and by the Christian Church. Its widespread operation, now
guaranteed by figures which may be deplored, but which cannot be
denied, in itself reveals the considerable undermining process which
suburban religion has undergone. Once again, therefore, it is necessary
to notice this element of weakening supernatural sanctions: to inquire
how far this process has gone, and whither it is tending. There will
be no immediate catastrophe; for custom and convention will carry on
the apparatus of organised belief long after the driving power of
definite conviction has vanished, like a machine still running down
after the motive power has ceased. There are renewed rallies in each
generation, especially at the time of adolescence; revivals under the
inspiration of American evangelists, or advocates of new theologies, or
vigorous teachers who blend theology with politics, humour, or social
entertainment. It may still be confidently affirmed to-day that, of
all the various sections of English society, the suburban and Middle
Class retains most resolutely its ancient religious convictions. These
convictions are here more vigorously preserved than in the class below
them, to whom, as a whole, religion has not yet come, or in the class
above them, whose attitude towards Christianity has always been one
of kindly patronage rather than of accepted allegiance. Yet it would
be idle to overlook the ravages which have even here been made. These
ravages must not be sought merely amongst the small bodies in open
opposition, ethical societies and the like, or the much larger bodies
in open indifference, such as the multitude of Sunday cyclists or
the patrons of Sunday music. They will be found also amongst those
who still own outward allegiance to the faith of their fathers, and
still think themselves to be orthodox believers. “Some thirty years
ago,” writes the Bishop of Birmingham, “there was a sort of Protestant
religion, with a doctrine of the Trinity, of Heaven and Hell, of
Atonement and Judgment, of Resurrection and Eternal Life, which for
good or evil could be more or less assumed. Such a standard has gone. I
seriously doubt whether nearly half the grown men of the country could
seriously say that they believed that Christ is God, or that He really
rose on the third day from the dead. It is not that they have become
Unitarians. It is that their religious opinions are in complete chaos.”
The drift of this “chaos” in modern thought is, indeed, as noticeable
amongst those who still cling to religious exercises and sing the hymns
of childhood as amongst the larger populations who regretfully or
defiantly, or more often in sheer apathy, have abandoned these ancient
traditions and ceremonies. And just as, in Denison’s famous verdict,
our large organised charities are less a sign of our compassion than
of our indifference, so it may be that the noise of fierce fighting
amongst rival religions, the queer competition which Mr. Charles Booth
discovered even in the remotest slums of London for the bodies and
souls of their denizens, may be less an evidence of religious fervour
than a manifestation of an ebbing vitality.
Yet the edifice collapses slowly, and in silence. No one can tell,
at any definite moment, how far the disintegrating process has gone.
Few records would be more illuminating than candid confessions, such
as the confession recently made by Mr. Wells in his _First and Last
Things_, honestly set down by quite ordinary people, in a casual street
of a suburban terrace, of what they believed. If the industrious
householders of “Homelea,” “Belle View,” “Buona Vista,” “Sunnyhurst,”
and “The Laurels,” contiguous dwellings in Beaconsfield Road, Upper
Norwood, were thus deliberately to face their convictions, the result
might be surprising to the clergy of St. Aloysius and St. Clotilde,
and the ministers of the Wesleyan Methodist Church and the Baptist
Chapel, beneath whose discourses, attired in long black coats, they
sit in decorous silence Sunday after Sunday, seemingly as docile and
acquiescent as their fathers before them.
The loss of religion would not, indeed, be so serious a matter if it
were being replaced by any other altruistic and impersonal ideal. Such
have been found in a conception of patriotism, in efforts towards
a social redemption, even in a vision of duty, sometimes hard and
rarefied, which occupies its mind with the difficulties of the day.
It is to be feared that these are not universal amongst the suburban
peoples. Their lives are laborious and often disappointing. The rise
in the price of the material things which they regard as essential
is steady and continuous. House rent, and the rates laid upon house
rent, clothes, food, the demands for small enjoyments, with the debt
which often accompanies a too radiant conception of the possibilities
of fixed income, leave little margin for superfluous expenditure. And
as with the body, so with the soul. Considerable hours spent in not
too exacting but conspicuously cheerless occupations, the natural
harassments of Middle Class poverty, and the misfortune of loss or
sickness, which is always unexpected and generally unprovided for,
leave little surplusage of mental energy to be devoted to larger
issues. Those who are intimate with the modern phases of suburban
life think that they can detect a slackening of energy and fibre
in a generation which is much occupied with its pleasures. It is a
common complaint with the fathers that none of their children seem
prepared to work in the manner in which they worked in the older days.
It is a common complaint with the whole of a passing generation--the
big manufacturers who built up England’s commercial supremacy, the
veterans who remember the strenuous middle class existence of Victorian
England--that the whole newer time thinks that it has little to do but
to settle down and enjoy the heritage which has been won. The young
men of the suburban society, especially, are being accused of a mere
childish absorption in vicarious sport and trivial amusements.
It is curious to find this accusation driven home by just that variety
of newspapers which has most completely exploited the nascent hunger
of the sedentary boyhood of these classes for the excitements of
gambling and adventure. The cheap and sensational Press found here a
field ripe for its energies. It attained an immense commercial success
from the provision of the stuff which this population demanded. Now
the cleverest of its promoters are beginning to be a little alarmed
at the results of its handiwork, and to eye with foreboding or with
disgust the youth that has been moulded by its ideals. Under the
circumstances, resentment at such scolding would appear not unnatural.
In a popular play, designed to encourage or to ridicule Volunteering,
the creature of this “Yellow Press” was recently revealed in all his
vacuous vulgarity; and the “Yellow Press” itself turned in anger to
assail its own darling and docile offspring. The retort, indeed, could
be final and complete. “We have been nourished,” these could say,
“in this unreal world of impudence, nonsense, vicarious sport and
gambling. We began with our boys’ papers and guessing competitions.
We were insensibly led on to efforts after a pound a week for life
by estimating the money in the Bank of England on a certain day, or
amassing gain in hundreds of pounds for guessing missing words or the
last line of ‘Limericks.’ On the Sabbath, committed by our parents to
some such literature as the Sunday Syndicated Press, we found there the
same cheery game, smeared with a grease of piety; rewards and prizes
here for guessing anagrams on Bible cities, or acrostics representing
Kings and Queens of Israel. We were led on to talk and read and chatter
about ‘sport,’ in biography of various football heroes, in descriptive
reports of football matches, ever deepening in imbecility, until they
rivalled the language of the lunatic asylum; stuff that uses its own
phraseology, about ‘netting the muddied orange’ and ‘the ubiquitous
spheroid,’ and ‘impelling the pill between the uprights.’ Our thoughts
and growing interest were sedulously directed away from consideration
of any rational or serious universe. We were exhorted to demonstrate
patriotism by ‘mafficking,’ and informed that when we fell into the
fountain at Trafalgar Square and subsequently embraced a policeman, we
were performing a virtuous action. Then we are denounced because this
universe of foolishness and frivolity has rendered us utterly unfit to
face real things. Our slight world crumbles before such a challenge,
as the daylight judges and condemns the scene of a night’s orgie.”
“This short, slender, pale man,” says M. Hanotaux of Taine in 1870,
“munching his throat lozenges, with squinting grey eyes behind his
thick glasses, had at last seen things which astonished him--dying men,
flowing blood, burning cities.” Dying men, flowing blood, and burning
cities intruded suddenly into a world which is fashioned out of such
emptiness and vanity exhibit but the same judgment as is revealed to
the discerning mind through every passing hour.
And no one can seriously diagnose the condition of the “Suburbans”
to-day without seriously considering also the influences of this
chosen literature. There is nothing obscene about it, and little that
is morally reprehensible. But it is mean and tawdry and debased,
representing a tawdry and dusty world. You can see it in illustration.
Photographs of the _Englishman’s Home_, showing the products of
spectacular sport and silly gambling, falling amid their falling
houses, face the picture of a negro on a raised platform pummelling an
American, with tier upon tier of white, vacant faces--the Australian
spectators--gazing with fierce approval. The reader passes--in such
publications--from one frivolity to another. Now it is a woman
adventurer on the music-hall stage, now the principal characters in
some “sensational” divorce case, now a serial story in which the
“bounder” expands himself, and is triumphant in an unreal universe.
In the midst of all comes an appeal which, if it were to excite even
a limited response, would sweep all this nonsense away, and land
in bankruptcy the vast apparatus of newspapers which exploit and
encourage the hunger of the suburban crowd. The work of corruption--the
word is not too violent--in the matter of frivolous gambling
competitions, is a systematic whole, beginning with the papers designed
for boys and children. From absorption in these, with occasional
rewards of five or ten shillings, a box of paints, or a bicycle, the
growing youth passes to the “Limerick,” the picture puzzle, and the
missing-word competition. At the end this newspaper world becomes--to
its victims--an epitome and mirror of the whole world. Divorced from
the ancient sanities of manual or skilful labour, of exercise in the
open air, absorbed for the bulk of his day in crowded offices adding
sums or writing letters, each a unit in a crowd which has drifted away
from the realities of life in a complex, artificial city civilisation,
he comes to see no other universe than this--the rejoicing over hired
sportsmen who play before him, the ingenuities of sedentary guessing
competitions, the huge frivolity and ignorance of the world of the
music hall and the Yellow newspaper. Having attained so dolorous a
consummation, perhaps the best that can be hoped for him is the advent
of that friendly bullet which will terminate his inglorious life. Were
this accomplished, the next day his own newspapers, the high priests of
his religion, will rejoice over his death, and shamelessly gird at him
for being what he is--the faithfullest of worshippers at their shrine.
This is the less desirable side of suburban life: a set-off against
its many excellences. It probably represents but a passing phase
in a progress towards intelligence and a sense of real values. That
progress would be aided by any loosening of the city texture by which,
and through improved means of transit, something of the large sanities
of rural existence could be mingled with the quickness and agility of
the town. At least the most hostile critics will acknowledge in these
regions a clean and virile life: forming, when criticism has done its
worst, in conjunction with the artisan class below, from which it is so
sharply cut off in interest and ideas, the healthiest and most hopeful
promise for the future of modern England.