They will say to you, that the chairs on which we are sitting were not
of gold at all.”
“That they were the simplest wooden chairs bought at a second-hand
shop!”
“That there was no electric light here, but ordinary tallow candles.
They will have the face to deny that the pictures had such broad, gold
frames. I seem to hear the sound of gold.”
“You see its gleam; that is enough, I think.”
“I seldom enjoyed music so much as at the balls of the Man. It is
divine music and it lifts the soul into the higher spheres.”
“I should hope that the music was good considering what is paid for it;
you should add that this is the best orchestra in the town; it plays on
the greatest occasions.”
“You hear this music long afterwards; it takes the soul captive. My
children, when they return from the balls of the Man, keep on humming
the music a long time afterwards.”
And they continue to talk in detail of the splendour of the house of
the Man, of his riches, of his many rooms, his numerous houses, his
wonderfully appointed bathrooms, and they all say in chorus--
“How rich!”
“How splendid!”
“How gorgeous!”
“How rich!”
The Man and his wife pass through the ballroom. The Man has grown grey,
but still seems strong and full of life; the wife is still pretty. The
Man is followed by his friends and his enemies. His friends have good
countenances and his enemies look horrible and evil. And as they pass
the guests vie with each other in praises of the Man and his wife, with
applause for the friends and hisses for the enemies. When they have
passed through to supper, the guests begin to grow anxious lest they
have been forgotten, and when at last they begin to grow convinced of
this, one of them says, “I cannot understand, I must frankly own, why
we came to a house with such a reputation. One should choose one’s
acquaintances more carefully.” At that moment a man in a gorgeous
livery enters and announces that the Man and his wife beg their
honoured guests to come to supper.
The guests all file off, saying in chorus, “What a livery! What music!
How gorgeous! How rich! What an honour! What an honour!”
The next scene is the misfortune of the Man. He has lost his money, he
has sold all his possessions, even his books. His one servant, an old
woman, tells this, and how there is nothing left in the large house but
rats; and how a fresh misfortune had just happened. The Man’s child
went for a walk, and some wicked person threw a stone at him and broke
open his head, and now he is lying sick and in danger of life. The
doctor comes and tells the anxious Man and his wife, who are now old
and worn (for the candle the grey figure still holds in his hands is
almost burnt down to its socket), that their son is asleep and will
probably get better. The Man looks at his drawing-table. “Look,” he
says to his wife, “I began to draw this when our boy was still well; I
stopped at this line and thought ‘I will rest and go on later.’ Look
what a simple and quiet line! And yet it is terrible to look upon, for
it may be the last line which I drew when my boy was still alive.”
Then he finds his son’s toys on the table; their presence there used
to make his work easier. They were bought in the days of the Man’s
poverty; a little wooden horse without a tail, and a squeaking clown.
The Man remembers how he used to talk to his little boy playing with
the gee-gee. “Where are you galloping to, gee-gee?” “Over the hills and
far away, papa, to kill the dragon because I’m a knight.” Then the Man
and his wife kneel and pray that their son may not die. Anything else,
but not that. The mother says, “Let my son live.” And the Man’s prayer
is as follows:--
“See, I pray to Thee, I bend my aged knees; I grovel in the dust
before Thee, I kiss Thy earth. Perhaps I have offended Thee: if so,
then forgive. It is true I was hard, envious, exacting: I often blamed
myself; wilt Thou forgive me? If such is Thy will, punish me, only
leave me my son; leave him, I pray Thee. I do not ask for mercy nor
for pity, but only for justice. Wicked men tried to kill him--those
who offend Thee with their works and make Thy earth hideous. Wicked,
pitiless ruffians! who throw stones from behind corners, from behind
a corner, the ruffians! Do not let them accomplish their evil work.
Staunch the blood; give back life to my son who is so good. Thou didst
take everything from me, but did I ever pray as a suppliant: ‘Give me
back my riches, give me back my friends, give me back my talent’? No,
never; even for my talent I never prayed. And Thou knowest what talent
is--it is greater than life. ‘Perhaps it must be so,’ methought, and I
bore everything--I bore everything. But now I pray on my knees, in the
dust, kissing the earth, let my son live! give my son back his life. I
kiss Thy earth.”
And then the wife goes to see after the child, and the Man falls to
sleep on the sofa and dreams happy dreams of his boy.
And the grey figure speaks and says even now, while the Man is dreaming
happily, his son has died. The Man awakes and his wife returns, and he
asks if his son is dead, and she answers “Yes.” The wife falls at the
Man’s feet and cries bitterly, and the Man turns to the grey figure and
curses his life and the day when he was born.
The fifth and last scene is the death of the Man. It is in an
underground cellar where drunkards are laughing and raving. The Man
sits apart and alone with his head buried in his hands. His wife is
dead, his house is empty; there is nowhere for him to go, he is utterly
alone and he is dying, for the candle in the hands of the grey figure
has almost burnt out. The old crones who appeared in the first scene
of all return once more; they talk and they repeat the set phrases of
the guests at the Man’s ball: “How rich! How gorgeous!” They dance
round the Man to the tune of the foolish polka which was played at his
ball. “Do you remember?” they whisper. “You are going to die. Do you
remember? ‘How rich! How gorgeous!’”
The dance of the crones grows wilder and swifter, and at last the
Man raises himself and cries, “Where is my sword and my shield? I am
disarmed--help! Be cur ...” and he falls on a chair and dies. The
candle in the hands of the grey figure goes out. The grey figure says,
“Be still! The Man is dead.” The crones sing and dance round the dead
Man to the sound of the foolish polka, but at last all grows dark and
there is silence.
This play might have been written eight hundred years ago. And whatever
happens to the world, as long as men exist, it will be understood. It
could be played in Chinese without losing one jot of its import or
its message; it is outside of time and place, independent of man’s
fleeting customs and various manners, for it merely repeats the cry of
pain uttered in sublime accents by the Hebrew poet, and re-echoed by
all suffering singers in all times and countries, from Aeschylus to
Leopardi. But it only shows one side of the mysterious medal; there
is another, a shining side which other poets have seen and sung:
Dante, Goethe, and Shelley, for instance, in his “high and passionate”
“Adonais,” when he says--
“Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.”
A DREAM IN THE DUMA
In the following paper I have attempted to transplant the facts and
atmosphere of recent Russian history into English surroundings: to
imagine the Russian Revolution happening in England.
Two or three days ago, while I was listening to a Ministerial
explanation in the Duma, I fell asleep and dreamt a strange dream which
I will now relate.
I dreamt I was in a third-class carriage in England on the
South-Western line; the train was evidently going to London, and we
were somewhere between Cobham and Surbiton. In the carriage there was a
mixed collection of persons. A clerk going up to the City, two workmen,
a gay man in flannels with a straw hat, an elderly man with grey hair
and spectacles, a young lady wearing a cotton blouse and a straw hat,
carrying a hamper with flowers sticking out of it, a middle-aged man
who looked like a commercial traveller, and a young mechanic.
“The _Morning Post_ out again to-day,” said the mechanic to the workman.
“Oh! ah!” said the workman.
“Under its own name?” asked the elderly gentleman.
“Yes,” said the mechanic, “they fixed it up with Scotland Yard.”
“Why was it stopped?” asked the young man in flannels.
“In the personal column there was a paragraph,” said the mechanic,
“saying as Lord Kitchener was living like at Buckingham Palace--which
he was--and at Scotland Yard they said as this was an instigation like
to kill him.”
“I suppose they’re sure to kill him some time,” said the young man in
flannels.
“Yes,” said the commercial traveller, “they’ll probably shoot him
in the back; cowards and swine I call ’em. If only we had a strong
Government they’d all be ’ung.”
“I suppose you think that is less cowardly than shooting down the
workmen in Manchester,” said the young lady in great indignation.
“’Ere, ’ere,” said the workman.
“Got what they jolly well deserved,” said the commercial traveller. “In
what other country would they stand workmen making barricades in the
street and trying to kidnap the Governor, I should like to know.”
“It was Admiral Fisher’s fault,” said the young lady; “directly he was
made Governor of Manchester he made such a tactless speech; on purpose,
of course, to incite the people to rise.”
“He simply said he wasn’t going to have any nonsense, and he meant to
keep order in the town,” said the commercial traveller.
“Provocation! Provocation!” said the workman and the young lady in
chorus.
“The people in Manchester ought to have waited for Parliament to be
summoned,” said the old gentleman, who was reading the _Standard_.
“Wait, wait, wait; that’s all everybody has to tell us,” said the young
man. “We got very little from the first Parliament, and now they’re
going to dissolve this one, I suppose.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Why, the Government, of course,” said the young man.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I am a stranger and I don’t quite understand. I
don’t know what’s been happening in this country.”
“Well,” said the old man, “I suppose you know that two years ago after
the disastrous war in South Africa, and the disorders and the general
strike which followed it, the Government, acting under the advice of
Sir Ernest Cassel, the Prime Minister, decided to re-establish the old
liberties granted by the Magna Charta and to summon a Parliament--a
thing which had not occurred since the days of Oliver Cromwell. A
manifesto was issued in this sense, promising that henceforth no new
laws should be passed without the consent of the people, and that a
Parliament would shortly be summoned. This was taken by the whole
population to mean that the autocratic powers of the Monarch were to be
limited, and that the Government would henceforward be constitutional.
In the meantime no laws were promulgated, but the newspapers for the
first time for three hundred years began to write what they pleased;
all the Jews in the East End were massacred by hooligans at the
instigation of the Jacobites; many of the University dons were sent
to the Hebrides, and some of them to the Isle of Man and New Zealand;
the administration of the country continued to be in the hands of the
military governors instituted by Cromwell and confirmed by Charles II.,
and everything went jogging on until January, and since there was to
be a Parliament general elections had to be held. The task of making
an electoral law was entrusted to an official belonging to the Board
of Trade, who devised a law according to which the labouring class
should elect a member of their class for each borough, and besides this
should have a vote in the election of the remaining representatives
of the borough. This was done because the Government believed that
the labouring classes were fundamentally loyal and would prove
Conservative. The result of the elections was a triumphant majority for
the Liberals, who were represented by the flower of the English gentry,
among them being Lord Lansdowne, Lord Wemyss, and also by the most
eminent names of the Bar, science and literature, such as Asquith,
Haldane, Morley, Butcher, and Sir Charles Dilke. Whereas among the
gentry only six Jacobites were returned.
“The Liberals, who were nicknamed the C.B.’s, owing to one of their
leaders’ names being Campbell-Bannerman, were practically led by Mr.
Balfour, who was not allowed to stand for Parliament by the Government
for having edited the _Fortnightly Review_ during some months previous
to the elections. The labouring class returned fifteen Jacobite
peasants and one hundred men who professed to belong to no party, but
who as soon as Parliament was opened formed themselves into a Radical
group called the Labour Party; there were also about fifty Irishmen
and Scotchmen, who formed separate groups. The Parliament as soon as
it met demanded a responsible Minister, and, the Government refusing,
passed a vote of censure on the Ministers; Cassel had resigned before
Parliament met and been succeeded by Sir Thomas (afterwards) Lord
Sanderson, and Lord Methuen was appointed Minister of the Interior.
The Government being unwilling to yield on the subject of responsible
Ministry, dissolved Parliament, and declared that a general election
should be held in five months’ time. But the C.B.’s regarded the sudden
dissolution as unconstitutional, and published an address in which
they advocated passive resistance. For this they were disenfranchised.
Sir Thomas Sanderson resigned and was made a Peer, and Lord Methuen
was made Prime Minister. As disorders were feared, London and all the
large towns were placed under martial law. All the newspapers except
the _Times_ were suppressed, but the _Morning Post_, _Standard_, and
_Daily News_ were ultimately allowed to appear on certain conditions;
and the provincial Governors were given powers to hang people within
forty-eight hours without trial. On the other hand the revolutionary
element enormously increased. Oxford and Cambridge were closed, and
the undergraduates devoted their leisure to blowing up officials and
soldiers with dynamite. From two to three hundred high officials
perished in this manner, besides nearly all the rank and file of
the police in Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Edinburgh. Before the next
elections were held the Government took measures by which it hoped to
obtain a moderate Conservative result, and a majority composed of men
who considered Mr. Balfour’s policy too advanced. They disenfranchised
therefore the most educated portion of the lower class and ostracised
the Liberals; the election was therefore held under double pressure,
under that of the Government on the one hand and that of the
revolutionaries on the other. The Socialist Party was allowed greater
liberty than the Liberal Party, although the system of excluding any
individual who was superior in any sort of way to his fellow-beings was
rigorously adopted as regards the Socialists as well as regards the
Liberals. At the time of the dissolution of the first Parliament many
people, and among some who had great influence at Court, maintained
that it would be a good thing to form a Ministry either of the
C.B.’s or of leading men of the country gentry, such as the Duke of
Devonshire. This latter possibility was taken into consideration and
_pourparlers_ took place between the Prime Minister and the Duke; but
the Duke refused to take office unless guarantees for the adoption
of a thoroughly Liberal régime were given. As regards the C.B.’s the
Government said they were a set of doctrinaires, that Mr. Balfour was a
Jesuit, and that it was impossible to expect that a man who had written
a defence of philosophic doubt and spent many hours on the golf links
could possibly be capable of administrative work. The same argument was
applied to Mr. Haldane and Mr. Morley; these men, it was said, were
philosophers and men of letters, and could not be called statesmen.
They were without experience.
“Mr. Winston Churchill, also a C.B., was said to be a Socialist at
heart, and Mr. Belloc, a member of the Labour Party, had to leave the
country to avoid arrest and emigrated to Russia, where he gave lectures
on English literature.
“The result of the second General Election proved to be a great
disappointment to the Government. Mr. Balfour and Mr. Morley stood as
candidates for London, but a week before their election Mr. Balfour
was disqualified on the grounds that he had only spent nine months of
the preceding year in London and Mr. Morley was also disqualified,
because there had appeared in the _Spectator_, a newspaper to which he
had been a leading contributor, a letter from an officer of the 60th
Rifles, stating that the policy of the Government was revolutionising
the Army. He was, however, shortly afterwards made a Peer and took his
seat in the House of Lords. In spite of the persecution of the Liberals
all the big towns returned Liberal members; Professor Butcher was
returned for Cambridge, and Mr. Strachan Davidson for Oxford, and in
all 90 Liberals were returned, 100 Socialists, 100 members belonging
to the Labour Party, 60 Irishmen, 30 Jacobites, and 30 Conservatives.
The Government brought forward a programme of elaborate reforms, which,
however, eschewed Ministerial responsibility, and it was soon clear
that the Liberals were dancing on a tight-rope over an abyss, and had
to depend for support either on the Conservatives or on the Socialists.
Shorn of all that constituted their strongest elements, their position
was pitiable, and they had among them no statesman strong enough to
build bricks out of straw, to dominate the situation and force his will
on the Assembly. That was the position the day after Parliament was
opened. During two months, however, the Centre managed to obtain a
working majority, but last week they were defeated by the alliance of
the Jacobites and the Socialists. And we are told that we may expect a
dissolution any minute, although it is, perhaps, to the influence of
the Government for Parliament to continue its existence, since it is
too weak to prove a serious danger. That is the situation at present.”
“Lord Lansdowne’s country house, Bowood, was burnt yesterday,” said the
young man in flannels, looking up from his newspaper.
“Yes,” said the commercial traveller, “and houses are being burned
and looted in the Midlands every day; that comes of having a weak
Government.”
“Three policemen were shot at Leeds by a youth seventeen years
old,” continued the young man, “and the foreman of the ironworks at
Wolverhampton was stabbed.”
“How cruel of the Government,” said the young lady, “to force people to
do such things!”
“Lord Althorp has been asked to leave the Turf Club by the Jacobites,”
said the young man.
“Why?” said the young lady.
“Because of his principles,” said the young man.
“Why,” said the young lady, “he’s a C.B., that is to say, almost a
Jacobite.”
“The C.B.’s are a Liberal Party based on sound democratic and
constitutional principles,” said the old man, much ruffled.
“Hear, hear,” said the clerk.
“The C.B.’s are a set of revolutionary liars paid by the Jews and the
Germans,” said the commercial traveller.
“The C.B.’s ain’t no good,” said the workman. “They’re in a funk of the
Government.”
“They’ve become Conservative,” said the mechanic.
“Yes, Jacobite,” said the young lady.
At that moment the train stopped. From one of the first-class carriages
a gentleman in uniform got down.
“Lord Kitchener,” said the young man, looking out of the window.
The young lady got out, carrying her hamper with her. As she walked
past the General she took something from it and flung it at him. There
was a terrific explosion, and I woke up.
A ZEMSTVO REPORT
The Zemstvo report of a large district in the centre of Russia for
the year 1907, the district of Morshansk, government of Tambov, is
in the highest degree illuminating as to the difficulties and the
problems with which Russian administrators and reformers are beset
at the present moment. Before proceeding to an analysis of the
report it will perhaps be as well to remind the reader of what the
Zemstvo consists. The Zemstvo is a County Council consisting of about
thirty-two members, of which twelve represent the nobility (practically
the large landowner class), twelve the peasants, and six the city or
cities of the district, one the clergy, and one the official class.
To represent the nobility a candidate must possess a certain quantity
of land (in the district I am speaking of, about 500 acres). Each
member is elected by his class. This County Council has in its hands
the management of nearly all the primary schools, the public health
department, the support and management of the roads and means of
communication, and various small but important matters connected with
farming and agriculture, besides the organisation of the county post.
To pay for all this the Zemstvo has the right to levy taxes on the
land. The Council elects a Standing Board of four members including the
chairman, which carries on the business from one yearly meeting of the
Council to the next, and is elected for three years. The Council also
sends representatives to another Zemstvo Council representing the whole
province, which is managed on similar lines.