MR. DABNEY OF _THE BALANCE_ LETS
HIMSELF GO
I had not long been over Bemerton's when Mrs. Duckie knocked at the
door to ask if Mr. Dabney, the gentleman upstairs, the gentleman on
the press, might have a few words with me.
Of course I said yes, and in a minute or so he came in--a man of the
ordinary age in London just now, clean shaved, with prematurely grey
hair, a slightly discontented expression, and a sensitive, critical
mouth.
He made the usual apologies that a well-bred man makes to a stranger
with whom he intends to be friendly, and attributed his visit to a
remark of Mrs. Duckie's to the effect that I had been living in
Buenos Ayres since 1875 and had only just returned. "It seemed to
me," he added, "that to an observant man London and the English
generally must after so long an exile present many changes, and I
thought you would perhaps allow me to ask you a few questions about
your impressions for an article in my paper."
I said that provided my name was not mentioned I had no objection
whatever, although I doubted, &c. &c.; but I might, as it happened,
have spared myself that excursion into conventional false modesty,
for I soon found that Mr. Dabney had no real intention of
interviewing me at all, but only wanted the stimulus of my
experience, or the excuse of my mere existence, to interview himself.
As he talked on I wondered if that is the way that all interviews by
the more capable and thoughtful journalists are done. May be.
His paper, it seems, is _The Balance_, a weekly critical review which
he runs almost single-handed ("Everything that means anything," he
says, "is done by one man"), the financial backing coming from a
source which he said he was not in a position to reveal, to me or
indeed to any one. _The Balance_ has a circulation of less than two
thousand; but, as Mr. Dabney says, every one who counts has to read
it. Its aim is to be sane, impartial, and fearless (the aim of all
of us), and Mr. Dabney really believes that it achieves this end; but
his mind, I should say, with all its vigour and acumen, though
naturally inclined to justice and courage, is about as capable of
impartiality as a prize-fighter is capable of metaphysics.
None the less, Mr. Dabney's paper, which I have since studied
carefully, makes the right effort, and it comes as a corrective to
the party organs that can see no good in any Bill brought forward by
the other side at any time, and particularly so when it chances to be
a measure promised vaguely by their own.
It is one of the least satisfactory thoughts that come to a reader of
the papers that so many men with the gift of expressing themselves
well and seeing fairly clearly into things should be so willing to
adapt their intellects to the party machine. We are all, of course,
born, as the poet says, Liberal or Conservative; but from journalists
one expects a rather more complex psychology. We look to journalists
to see a little farther not only into the future but also into the
past than ordinary persons. Unhappily in England just now, as I
remarked to Mr. Dabney, thus incurring his most vitriolic agreement,
the type of journalist who seems to have most readers is permitted to
be the least sagacious and the least independent.
Mr. Dabney is by nature a pessimist--so much so that one wonders what
he would do if any of the reforms he desires were to come into force.
He is one of those eloquent and clear-sighted men who must be in
revolt to be articulate and well-directed. He was for a long time
leader-writer on a daily paper, but gradually found himself more and
more irked by the necessity of expressing not his own views but his
editor's. At last, unable to bear it any longer, he retired. The
circumstance was recorded in the press in a paragraph in the ordinary
way, and the very next day Mr. Dabney received a letter from a
stranger asking him to prepare an estimate of the cost of a weekly
journal that should represent his own views and contain also a
sufficiency of acceptable various matter. He did so, on the most
disadvantageous scale that even his pessimism could devise, and the
next day he received a cheque for the first year's expenses and
instructions to begin at once. Under such unworldly conditions was
_The Balance_ born.
"You say you left England in 1875," Mr. Dabney began. "Then you are
now in a position to observe some very curious developments, for the
changes in London alone since that date have been extraordinary. Our
whole character seems to have undergone a revolution. We used to be
economical, home-keeping: we have become gad-abouts,
pleasure-hunters. We pour our money into the hands of entertainers
and restaurateurs. Remember, I speak of London. To what extent
England resembles London I am not in a position to say. But London
becomes daily more hedonistic, more atheistic. Plain living and high
thinking are discredited. High living and low thinking have it all
to themselves."
Mr. Dabney spoke with concentrated fury, through his teeth, as if I
were the primary cause of this calamity. I believe that of all
uncomfortable conversationalists (and the world is full of them) the
most uncomfortable are those who would convert you to your own way of
thinking. This is Mr. Dabney's weakness: he conceives of all his
interlocutors as heretics and antagonists.
"But to what," I asked him, "do you attribute this effect?"
"To too long a period of prosperity; to peace; and"--he almost spat
the words from him--"to the modern press. The new journalism may not
have produced it, but it has fostered it. Since you left England
there has sprung up a totally new press--a press that does not
dictate but flatters; that finds out what the mob wants and gives it
them. A press without any mind--nothing but an infernal instinct for
success. A press in the hands of young men in a hurry, without
knowledge, experience, or conviction. Opportunists, improvisers,
cynics."
"But surely there are good papers too?"
"One or two. But it is those others that have the public ear. They
are the true organs of the democracy."
"And yet," I said, "at the last General Election did not these
popular papers lose almost every seat?"
"Ah!" he said, "that is so. But that is not, I fear, any proof of
their want of influence generally. Political changes are deeper than
that. The mob is moved politically never by opinions but always by
personality. We don't in England vote for Liberals or Conservatives:
we vote for men. Sentiment controls us. We vote for one man because
we are sorry for him; for another, because we once met him somewhere
and he was very pleasant; for another, because his father's horse won
the Derby; for another, because his opponent is So-and-so whom we
detest. In England we never accept any one as a simple
fellow-creature: we must always fix not only an adjective upon him
but some personal feeling. That is why papers lose their influence
when elections are on. But at other times they can be steadily
operative for good or bad; they can vulgarise all they touch or
dignify it. The new press vulgarises. Its gods are false. It knows
no shame. When found out, it slavers. When chastised, it says, How
charmingly you use the whip."
Mr. Dabney was now happy. His face shone--it might have been with
the reflected glow of his molten words. He was the Savonarola of
Fleet Street.
"Cynicism," he went on, "is not the only fault. A gross sensuality
has also come upon us. A journalist should be something of an
ascetic, a recluse: an observer from without. He should not be in
the social machine; he should not know every one. How can you keep
your hands clean if you know every one? His dress suit should be
rusty; one cannot dine out without consuming salt, and by salt are we
captured. Journalists now eat too much and too well. It was a bad
day for England when a journalist first ate a plover's egg."
"Journalists, in short," I said, "should live over Bemerton's."
He grunted a short acknowledgment of my mild humour, and continued:
"Every nation, according to Arnold, has the papers it deserves. That
is true. The greater part of this nation, suffering just now from
swelled head and swelled stomach and swelled pockets, has the paper
it deserves. Cynicism and self-esteem run through everything.
Christian of course we never were, and never shall be, not even in
adversity; but we are no longer in the least afraid of God. We are
getting nasty, too. We buy messy little indecent novels by the
thousand, as far removed from honest British coarseness as the poles
are asunder. We have given up respecting the Bible.
"I will give you an instance of our new cynicism, our carelessness.
The other day, at one of the large music halls, a dancer appeared
nightly in nothing whatever but a skirt of beads, and capered as
provocatively as she was able round a waxen head. The dancer
affected to be Salome, the daughter of Herodias, while the waxen head
was intended for that of the decapitated John the Baptist, the
forerunner, if I remember aright, of our Lord. This in a London
music hall! The exhibition rapidly became the rage, and several
other halls, in the usual slavish imitative way, had their Salomes
too. Every one went to see and applaud the principal one, including
the Prime Minister, who subsequently, to mark his especial approval,
entertained the lady at 10 Downing Street. So far as I could
discover, I, who am a professed sceptic, was practically the only
person in London whose feelings were outraged. I call the incident
deplorably significant.
"It seemed to me," Mr. Dabney continued, "sufficiently offensive that
a sacred figure such as John the Baptist--a figure of peculiar
sanctity to Christians--should be subjected to the indignity of
taking part in a music-hall performance at all, amid knockabouts and
comic singers and all the other seaminesses of those places; but it
was far worse that English people of high position should flock to
see it. For any head, you must see, would have done as well. The
girl had to dance more or less naked to some waxwork property: that
we will take for granted. Then why not the head, say, of Holofernes,
who is only in the _Apocrypha_? The spectacle might then have drawn
merely the Leader of the Opposition, but it should have served."
Mr. Dabney smiled a ghastly smile as he made his final joke and
paused for breath.
"Were there no protests at all?" I asked.
"There may have been a few," he said: "I was exaggerating a little;
but very few. Where were they to appear? A press that lives largely
by advertisements does not lightly advise people to stay away from
places of entertainment. Do you know," he added, "that my paper is
the only paper in London that does not take advertisements. So long
as there are advertisements there cannot be absolutely free speech.
It is not humanly possible.
"You may say," he went on (but I had said nothing of the kind. I
had, as a matter of fact, hardly opened my mouth: he had given me no
chance). "You may say," he went on, "that we are not more cynical
now than we were in the days of the Regency. True, perhaps. But
that is what makes it so serious. Because since the Regency we have
had eighty years or so of seriousness and steady improvement--the
Victorian Era, with its fine political and intellectual and religious
activity, its Reform Bill, its Tractarian movement, its Dickens and
Carlyle, its Browning and Ruskin, its awakening to new ideas. To-day
we are steadily going back on all that. We believe only in pleasure
and success: our one ideal is wealth."
"Well," I said, for I was getting a little tired, and perhaps I was a
little piqued too at the turn the "interview" had taken, "and what is
the remedy for all this evil?"
"War," he said. "Nothing more or less. A bloody war--not a punitive
expedition or 'a sort of a war'" (he quoted these words with white
fury). "That might get us right again."
"At great cost," I said.
"A surgical operation," he replied, "if the only means of saving
life, cannot be called expensive."
"But supposing we went under?"
"If we did, it would be better so. Then we should begin again in a
new spirit. Loss would be gain."
"A very dreadful form of cure," I said.
"True. But not more dreadful than the decay that comes from
complacency. A nation fighting for its life makes for me a finer
spectacle than a nation overeating at a banquet.
"The most sacred and valuable treasure that the English have lost,"
he went on more gravely, "is the capacity for self-denial. The old
figure of John Bull was never to my mind admirable. He not only
looked too secure in his own wealth and rectitude but too apoplectic.
But he was a better national symbol for the English than the new John
Bull that one would have to draw now were one a satirical artist with
critical vision--a John Bull more like a Maida Vale Jew. John Bull
grows materialistic and sensual. An anxious war would mend that.
Set him fighting for very existence, and you will bring out his good
qualities again."
"I don't agree with you," I said, "about war. Its horrors are too
horrible. What I think we want is a saint."
"You won't get one," said Mr. Dabney, "and besides, every saint has a
bee in his halo."
"I don't know that that matters," said I. "It is the bees that do
the work. The bee is often the most original part of the man's
brain, just as the skeleton is often the only really living thing in
the family's cupboard. Most people are dead.
"The saint," I went on, "that England needs is a saint of
extraordinary personal magnetism--a saint (as I see it dimly) whom
our young men and women will follow in enthusiastic ecstasy; a
saint----"
"A counsel of perfection," Mr. Dabney interrupted. "Will your saint
begin as a curate?" he inquired icily. "Remember that a pulpit
engaged in the struggle for existence is doomed as a friend. The
Church to-day is too much represented by angry casuists in the
Commons and anxious fathers of families in the vicarages; while
Nonconformity has become largely the preserve of astute and
prosperous journalists. One listens in vain for the unworldly voice.
"The most successful revival of our time," he continued, "had to be
put frankly upon a gross material basis before it had a
chance--General Booth's progress as a social ameliorator being marked
by heartiness, shrewdness, and humour, much more than by any beauty
of holiness; while it is free from any suggestion of pure sacrifice,
since the _quid_ offered for the _quo_ is so splendid--happiness here
and an everlasting crown to follow, in exchange for giving up merely
a few oaths, merely a few debauches, merely a few blows on a wife's
body.
"England," he continued, "is still full of conscience, as it always
will be; but its activities have of late become more and more
altruistic. It is our neighbours that we have become so careful for,
rather than ourselves. We spend hours in Boulter's Lock on Sundays
meditating on the wisdom of keeping weaker vessels out of exhibitions
on that day, and statesmen solve knotty points of the Licensing Bill
over champagne at their clubs. Virtue we still consider the best
goal for others: but for ourselves, success. Success is the new god,
and will be, I suppose, for some time yet, so zealously is the altar
flame guarded.
"I think your plea for a saint is very charming, but I don't believe
in it. I don't think the English would know what to do with a saint
if they found one. Wales might, and Ireland might, but not England.
A saint, to work any kind of effect, must have an emotional,
self-forgetting material to work upon. There is very little here.
Sentiment we have, but not emotion. And we are too much afraid of
the ridicule of the people next door.
"I have often amused myself by speculating on the probable reception
that Christ would have were he now to appear in London. A character
sketch expressing the profoundest admiration in _The Daily Mail_; his
portrait in _The Daily Mirror_, probably beside that of public men
whom he more or less resembled; a guarded leader in _The Church
Times_; and in _The British Weekly_ an appeal to Nonconformists not
to lose their heads--yet--not until a little more was known.
"But now tell me," said Mr. Dabney, "what you have observed yourself.
For it seems to me I have done most of the talking."
"Oh," I said, "my observations have not been so profound as yours. I
have merely walked about the streets and seen the surface of things.
Of that kind," I said, "the most noticeable change that has struck
me--although it may, in common with all my other impressions, be
sheer illusion--is the increase of sarcastic facetiousness. London
has always, I imagine, indulged in this disguise of its real
feelings--this armour, one might almost say, against fate--but the
habit seems to be more diffused than I remembered. I think I discern
also an increase of genuine cynicism, as indeed you have
said--cynicism rather than pessimism, I should say; by cynicism
meaning a natural acceptance of the ills of life without grumbling at
them. The frame of mind comes, I suppose with you, largely from
irreligion, materialism; but it has been fostered, no doubt, by the
English climate. Not that the English climate has changed, but the
English people, in their increased love of pleasure and pursuit of
it, have come to think more of fine weather than they did, and not
finding it, have acquired a new bitterness. So at least it amuses me
to fancy. For the increased love of pleasure is visible on every
side."
Mr. Dabney agreed--very heartily, considering how little disapproval
there was in my voice. As he seemed in danger of resuming his eager
and caustic monologue, I hastily went on to say that I also agreed in
the main with him, but was disposed to think that the worst of the
case was confined to London and that the great heart of the country
was not cankered. "And even in London," I added, "I have noticed as
I walked about quite a number of kindly deeds, indicating that
good-heartedness and thought for others are still powerful here. I
watch your fine fury that such things can be," I added, "and I hear
of preachers lamenting the wickedness of the world; but I cannot
share either passion. My wonder is that people are so good. I think
that the courage and endurance and optimism of human beings are
amazing. Nothing is done for them: the brave hopefulness with which
they rise morning after morning is dashed by noon; but still they go
on, doing their best. And the more sceptical we grow, surely the
more is it to our credit to be brave and decent."