LONDON AND ELSEWHERE
"... These homes, this valley spread below me here,
The rooks, the tilted stacks, the beasts in pen,
Have been the heartfelt things, past-speaking dear
To unknown generations of dead men,
Who, century after century, held these farms,
And, looking out to watch the changing sky,
Heard, as we heard, the rumours and alarms
Of war at hand and danger pressing nigh.
And knew, as we know, that the message meant
The breaking off of ties, the loss of friends,
Death, like a miser getting in his rent,
And no new stones laid where the trackway ends.
The harvest not yet won, the empty bin,
The friendly horses taken from the stalls,
The fallow on the hill not yet brought in,
The cracks unplastered in the leaking walls.
Yet heard the news, and went discouraged home,
And brooded by the fire with heavy mind,
With such dumb loving of the Berkshire loam
As breaks the dumb hearts of the English kind,
Then sadly rose and left the well-loved Downs,
And so by ship to sea, and knew no more
The fields of home, the byres, the market towns,
Nor the dear outline of the English shore,
But knew the misery of the soaking trench,
The freezing in the rigging, the despair
In the revolting second of the wrench
When the blind soul is flung upon the air,
And died (uncouthly, most) in foreign lands
For some idea but dimly understood
Of an English city never built by hands
Which love of England prompted and made good...."
JOHN MASEFIELD: _August_, 1914.
I
Whatever the success of English public schools and universities
in training the sons of the wealthier classes for their part in
the professional and public life of the country, one result of an
educational system which takes charge of a boy at seven or eight
and releases him only at twenty-one or twenty-two is that he
enters upon his adult life and work later than the young men of
other countries, including those which impose a term of military
service. As all but a negligible few in England have to earn their
own livings and as several years of preparation are required before
the barristers, doctors or solicitors are qualified to practise
and before artists, politicians or men of business are of any use
in their calling, the English also make their entry into public
affairs later than other nations; they also marry later, but, as
the climate of England does not necessitate early marriage for men,
this influences the lives of the women more deeply and goes some
way towards explaining the social and psychological position of
girls who remain unmarried for some years after they are ripe for
marriage.
While the value of general experience, gained in other parts of
the world, may outweigh that of the technique, the atmosphere and
the moods of parliament, gained from within, it is indisputable
that most young men cannot enter the House of Commons even if
they wish.[17] On leaving Oxford, those who had not to earn their
living entered the army or returned to manage their estates; the
politicians dispersed for the most part to the Temple, to Fleet
Street and to the City, there to forget that they were politicians
until they had mastered the business of making themselves
independent. And a few spent the whole or a part of the next years
in acting as _aides-de-camp_ to colonial governors or in travelling
privately for the study of imperial and foreign conditions.
Those who remained in London and those who periodically returned
thither in the five years before the war alike discovered that they
were in a new imperial Rome in a new silver age. All who had waited
for the passing of Victorianism were rewarded for their patience
by finding a vacuum which they were free to fill in what way
soever they chose; and to the task they brought unbounded energy,
almost unbounded wealth, a vigorous dislike of restraint and an
ingenuous ignorance of tradition. Never, in the recorded history
of England, has the social power of money been greater; never has
the pursuit of pleasure been more widespread and successful; never
has the daily round of the educated and reflective, of the wealthy
and influential, of the stolid and slow been brought nearer to
the feverishness, the superficiality and the recklessness which
characterized one section--but one only--of the French in the years
immediately before the first revolution.
Until his receptivity and taste for mild excitement became blunted,
a young bachelor, who found in London at this time an indefinite
prolongation of his most careless and gregarious undergraduate
mood, could contrive to divert himself with enviably little effort:
one dance was, indeed, very like another, the only difference
between two _débutantes_ was that of name, and--like Disraeli's
young exquisite--he might come to relish bad wine as a relief from
the monotony of excellence; but, before he grew jaded, there was
nothing, save a substitute for his own attendance, with which his
hostesses refused to provide him. Morning after morning, in those
spacious years, brought to his bedside a thick pile of invitations;
as he breakfasted and dressed, his telephone was only released by
one anxious friend in order that another might use it; luncheons
and dinners, theatres and operas, balls and week-end parties poured
down upon him in promiscuous welcome. The enervating suspicion
that he was achieving a personal triumph by being passed from
house to house and from list to list was quickly dissipated when
he recognised himself as one of six men whom his dinner hostess
had pledged herself to bring; but his self-respect could always be
restored by the reflection that, if his entertainers were solely
concerned to collect so many male heads, he himself only wanted a
place where he could smoke, dance and sup between the moment of
leaving the theatre and the moment of going to bed. Every one was
the gainer by his presence.
While the excess of demand over supply set a premium on young
bachelors, it forced down the value of those who entertained them
and drove entertaining to a lasting discount. In 1910, a few of the
Victorians still left cards at the houses where they had dined; by
1914, the custom was suspect as a weak admission of thankfulness;
and, when the gracious days of the great small courtesies were
voted obsolete, an uncaring telephone invitation from the lips of a
butler was inevitably met by an acceptance or a refusal as careless
of even formal obligation. The despised prim decorum of Victorian
social intercourse was replaced by head-hunting on the one side
and by moss-trooping on the other; and, as, in three years, there
was more entertaining and less hospitality in London than in any
other part of the world, so there was also less gratitude and more
greed. The young girl with social gifts, and the young man without,
were not only enabled but encouraged to live from Tuesday until
Friday at the expense of those whom they would have disdained to
call their friends; and the parasite had by no means exhausted
the flow of hospitality when he bade farewell to his party in the
early hours of Saturday morning. If he played golf, lawn-tennis
and bridge, if he played any one of them, if--playing no games of
any kind--he could satisfy his hostess that he would be content to
slumber in the country for two nights and a day, he would receive
more invitations than he could use.
II
In the engaging or tragic folly of the æsthetes, in the literary
and artistic adventures of the nineties, in the blatancy and
arrogance of the new imperialism, the death-knell of the Victorian
age was sounded before the death of Queen Victoria. Between the
end of the South African war and the outbreak of hostilities with
Germany, there was time for the whole face of English social life
to be changed.
There was time, and there was a will. English society, so defiant
of definition, had hitherto been founded on an aggregate of
families deriving their influence from landed estates and made
sensible of their obligations by their territorial position. The
original nucleus was gradually increased by recruits from among
those who made fortunes in commerce or rose to a commanding
position in politics or the public services; but the new blood
filtered in so sparingly that it was absorbed and transmuted by the
old. The existing order was not threatened until the personality
and power of those who clamoured without the gate exceeded the
resistance of those who wilted within.
The balance of strength began to be reversed when one of the
periodical waves of new riches coincided with a sharp depreciation
in the old media of wealth: the industrial millionaire, the Rand
magnate, the American heiress and the cosmopolitan Jew, hitherto
suspect and shy, made a simultaneous appearance at a time when to
the afflictions of agricultural depression was added the capital
taxation of the Harcourt death duties. Welcomed by the most august
and forced upon the most repellent, new and alien faces appeared
at Cowes, on the turf and at Covent Garden; new names among the
birthday honours and in the list of those who rented grouse-moors.
Faced with the choice of marrying money or of economising and doing
without it, the old aristocracy of land crossed its blood with the
new aristocracy of commerce, hoping no doubt that the system by
which isolated newcomers had been tamed would prevail to convert
the barbarian host in companies and to baptise it in platoons. On
either side lessons were given and received; but, while interest
urged the stranger to acquire ready-made an air of breeding, the
fading memory of a waning prestige could not preserve to the older
society the arbitrament in manners which it had held unchallenged
before this surrender to wealth.
A few families resisted the lure and kept their doors straitly
barred; but, as Dane-gelt, instead of buying security for English
soil, only tempted more Danes in search of more gold, so the first,
partial capitulation brought more invaders with ever more and more
gold to offer in exchange for a slice of England. As influence
and importance were focussed on money and no longer on land,
power shifted from the landed estates to London; the steadying
responsibilities of a territorial position, which was already
threatened by subversive democratic ideals, were allowed to dwindle.
By the end of the South African war London had become a
cosmopolitan place of entertainment with more money, a greater
zest for pleasure, a larger proportion of sycophants and a weaker
control by any recognized group of social leaders than any other
European capital. The first flood of Rand, Jewish, American
and native commercial wealth, which had been at least in part
unobtrusively absorbed, was followed by a second flood which
English society was still too much saturated to take in; and for a
dozen years the tottering sea-wall of society was buffeted by angry
and uncontrolled waves of wealth. As the new rich of those days had
abandoned one social sphere without establishing their position
in another, their first task was to surround themselves with men
and women who would accept their hospitality and mitigate their
solitude; a few impoverished promoters furnished lists of eligible
names; money and the amenities of the big hotels, which were then
springing up in London, accomplished the rest. During those years
there was on one side a steady stream of rich newcomers who asked
only that their parties should be well attended; on the other, a
stream no less steady of those who saw in this opportunity the
finger of God.
A temporary check was imposed in 1910, when the sudden death
of King Edward plunged the country into mourning, but in 1911
London crowded two seasons into one. Perhaps there was a fear that
the new reign would usher in simpler manners and a more austere
way of life, perhaps the pleasure-loving, who had lived for a
twelve-month, murmuring in undertones behind shuttered windows,
grudged their days of abstinence. The coronation gave legitimate
excuse for carnival; and in 1912 the fear of reaction merged into a
resolve to postpone the reaction until carnival had spent itself:
the resources of the new rich, not yet exhausted, began to seem
inexhaustible; and every day, by unfitting the parasites for any
other life, multiplied their number. By 1913 the lust for amusement
had become constant and was whipped by a neurotic dread of
anticlimax; by 1914 there was a panic feeling that this old order
could not last. Already war had rumbled distantly since Agadir;
twice in the Balkans the rumblings had given place to storms which
suggested how the suffering and ruthlessness of twentieth-century
fighting would transcend all that had been known before and had
demonstrated how strong were the meshes which held all European
diplomacy involved, how weak the paper safeguard of peace. The
labour world had half risen in the great railway strike of 1911 and
might any day rise in its full strength; Ireland was at the mercy
of two lawless armies; and the government was powerless even to
prevent a determined body of women, already opposed by overwhelming
public opinion, from breaking windows and burning churches.
"How long, O Lord?" asked one.
"Après moi, le deluge; mais après le deluge ...?" asked another.
And in the first week of August, 1914, the cynics who had been
watching the growth of hostility between classes agreed that, if
there had been no war, it would have been necessary to create one.
These were the mad, neurotic years of private horseplay and public
lawlessness, when no hoax was too gigantic, no folly too laborious
to be undertaken for a wager and when ill-conditioned defiance led
every class in the land to proclaim that, if it disliked a law,
it would disobey it. They were days of great costume-balls, of
freak dinners and of nascent night-clubs. Perhaps they are best
regarded as the years which, of all in recent times, the ingrained
puritanism of the English would most gladly forget.
Under the shock of war it became fashionable to look upon this
wanton life as an offence to God, which the scourge of God was
being used to end; and from an audience whose heart is not yet
healed the satirist of those years can always be sure of applause.
It is easy to paint too glittering a picture and to foster a new
sense of superiority which is not justified. For a dozen years
before the war there was much ostentation and polite mendicancy,
much frivolity of head and vulgarity of soul among a world of
merrymakers who had been born without a feeling for responsibility
or who had shaken off the restraints of tradition. Was their crime
more grave than that?
Every vulgarian must be vulgar in his own way; so long as the
institution of private property continues, rich and poor are
equally free to misspend their money; and, though they differed
in their means and in their tastes, rich and poor were equally
guilty of waste, display, lawlessness and sloth; a just sumptuary
law would have borne as hardly on one as on the other. In the
absence of a civic conscience, all struggled to obtain the maximum
of personal enjoyment with the minimum of exertion, protesting
self-righteously the while against the idleness and improvidence
of their neighbours; and, if the poor murmured at the misuse
of surplus wealth, the rich were sometimes amazed at their own
moderation in not resenting the sight of so much leisure with so
little taxation among the working classes.
While those who mocked at the primness and overthrew the decorum of
the Victorian era constructed a social system which to Irish eyes
seemed intolerably vulgar and mercenary, it may be pleaded that the
new and alien arbiters of taste, lacking any tradition of breeding,
could hardly be expected to know any better and that Providence
would surely have made allowances for this before unloosing the
scourge.
III
The breach between Victorianism and that which succeeded it was not
more complete in manners than in art and literature. By the time
that King George V ascended the throne, the great lights of the
preceding century were, almost without exception, flickering out
or already extinguished; those who survived the transition in time
were none the less influenced so deeply by the change in atmosphere
that their later work differs from the earlier as much as one man's
from another's. This is so much more than the normal advance from
youth to maturity that it suggests a revaluation, a new point of
view and a reaction to changed psychological conditions without.
While Kipling's art as a supreme story-teller attained by natural
development to a rarer perfection, his change of standpoint may
be measured by the distance from any one of the _Plain Tales_ to
_They_ or _The Brushwood Boy_; with Conrad the change is from
_Nostromo_ to _Chance_; with James from _The Wings of a Dove_ to
_The Awkward Age_.
The younger men, untrammelled by memories of what they had tried to
express in a previous incarnation, worked with a freedom of which
they only became conscious when they paused to compare it with
the restrictions under which their predecessors laboured. It has
been said that, in the early nineties, _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_
opened a new chapter in dramatic history; when it was reproduced a
dozen years later, it hardly seemed, for all its skill and power,
so daring as before; and, if it were reproduced again to-day after
another dozen years, the younger critics would doubtless continue
to praise its technique, but they might be unable to realise its
psychology. In 1920 it is felt to be surprising that any one
should bother when a man marries his mistress; that she should
commit suicide when another old lover comes back into her life is
inconceivable: to the modern playwright that is not a dramatic
theme worthy of his mettle, to the modern English world that is not
a problem to cause more than passing embarrassment to any one.
Whether England has become morally more lax or merely less reticent
about its laxity is a problem which no one can solve; but the
greatest change that has overtaken literature and art in the last
twenty years is in the new freedom to choose any theme and to
treat it by any method. The plays of Shaw and the novels of Wells
had embraced every subject from brothels and baldness to God and
gunpowder-factories, from patent medicine and politics to love and
linen-drapery. The form of the medium has changed as profoundly
as the content; the play and the novel have been made an avowed
platform for the dramatic or narrative discussion of any thesis
that interests the author at any given moment.
This new emancipation has been accompanied by a new receptivity,
welcome at first and only dangerous when criticism seeks to
navigate without a compass; a new willingness to explore unfamiliar
spaces and to experiment with new instruments. The twenty years
which have passed since Queen Victoria's death have seen the
literary birth, development or at least general recognition of a
company so varied as Synge and Barker, Housman and Yeats, De Morgan
and Galsworthy, Masefield and Rabindranath Tagore, to take but a
few; it has seen translations of Russian novels and Chinese lyrics,
of Belgian mystical essays and Scandinavian realistic plays; there
is no form of literature, whatever its atmosphere and language, to
which a hearing has been refused.
Nor is this merely an Athenian craving for something new. All--and
perhaps more than all--that was worth rescuing of Oscar Wilde's
perverse wit was restored to circulation as soon as the English had
satisfied their love for a legal separation between art and morals;
Samuel Butler was one of several to enjoy a posthumous vogue; and,
if the other heroes were rearranged in the national pantheon, many
were brought into prominence who had long languished in obscurity.
This period saw an immense flood of cheap reprints issuing from a
dozen different publishers; more experiments were tried on more
Shakespearean plays than ever before; and theatrical societies
produced Elizabethan and Restoration dramas which had been left
long unplayed.
These years were enriched by two repertory seasons at the Court and
Duke of York's Theatres, in which some of the maturest work of Shaw
and Barker, Galsworthy and Barrie was seen; and the Abbey Theatre
company came annually from Dublin to delight new audiences with
some of the greatest comedies, the greatest tragedy and the finest
teamwork in acting that had been seen in London for a generation.
As a rule, however, the stage was more fortunate in what it
revived than in what it presented for the first time; dramatic
literature has lagged so far behind other forms that playwrights
would compose and managers produce what no conscientious novelist
or self-respecting publisher dared to expose for sale. The level
of acting, too, was no higher than might be expected in a country
where actors and actresses "starred" on the strength of a single
part and continued in one groove, with plays written down to them,
because they had not endured the discipline of a diversified early
training. To suggest that the English get the drama that they
deserve would be unfair to a nation which, on the whole and with
startling exceptions, enjoys and supports the rare good plays
offered to it; yet there rests unexplained the mystery that,
although the dramatic is the most lucrative form of writing,
although managers and public were clamouring for plays, although
the theatres were filled with erotic comedies, brain-saving revues,
emasculated French farces, clattering American melodramas and
perverse, senile sentimentalities, there were not in these years
more than three British playwrights who could be trusted to give a
recognisable representation of life.
The mystery is deepened by the fact that, during the same period,
the English, who accept with resignation if not with pride the
stigma of being unmusical, crowded a lifetime of musical progress
into a few years. Covent Garden has always been a battleground
between those who wish to hear the greatest number of the most
interesting operas in their best rendering and those who find a box
and the second half of a tuneful banality the best place and time
for meeting again the friends whom they have not seen since dinner.
For a generation the two armies existed amicably side by side on
a compromise by which the music-lovers secured that, whatever the
opera, it should be competently given and the others conceded
that it might be competently given so long as no experiments or
innovations were made. Year after year the hackneyed _Rigolettos_
and _Lohengrins_, the _Traviatas_ and _Tannhaüsers_ soothed the
conservative hearing of any one whose musical education had been
arrested in childhood; from time to time the _Ring_ was given, but
the inordinate length of each part provided a plausible excuse
for those who stayed at home, and a martyr's crown or at least a
victor's laurel for those who attended.
Then, without warning, the new artistic receptivity spread to
music, and a trial was offered to new men and to new works. _Der
Rosenkavalier_ and _Elektra_ were given in those years; _Parsifal_
was played for the first time in England; and all whose knowledge
of ballet was limited to the Empire and Adeline Genée found
themselves led to a mountain-top and invited to regard the new
world wherein Pavlova and Mordken, Karsavina and Nijinski lorded
it. With the Russian ballet and under the shadow of war came the
Russian opera; and, while the old repertory was played at Covent
Garden, a new ecstacy was offered at Drury Lane by _Prince Igor_,
_Boris Godounov_ and _Ivan le terrible_. With the Russian opera
came an artist whose admirers have not yet determined whether he
is greater as a singer or as an actor, though they agree that as a
combination of the two he is the greatest figure on any operatic
stage in the world. The incomparable voice and superb presence of
Chaliapin blew a new vigour of youth and a new conception of beauty
into the stale dust of the London theatre.
Though the spirit of the emancipation breathed also on the
graphic and the plastic arts, as yet its breath has produced only
intoxication. For ten years one experiment has succeeded another,
one school has hustled another out of the way; and the artists
whom the public is enjoined to admire of a morning are devoured
by their own children in the afternoon. Beyond a contempt for the
academic and a revolt from the traditional--not always supported by
technical proficiency in the method rejected--the impressionists
and post-impressionists, the cubists, vorticists and dadaists have
not made plain the goal of their exploration and as yet, though
they have formulated new theories of art, they have not achieved a
new beauty. As, in the reaction from Victorian stiffness, social
emancipation led to a gilded hooliganism, so, in graphic art,
the reaction from the strictness of the pre-Raphaelites led to
chaotic lawlessness. If all England went mad for five years before
the war, her madness is registered, though--it may be hoped--not
immortalised, in the painting of the period.
IV
It was in these years of change and upheaval that the men of the
vanished generation served their apprenticeship and came to first
grips with life. Their fathers and grandfathers, seeing England
riven by a new political dispensation, had acquiesced grudgingly
in the transference of power without seeking to understand the
aspirations of the newly emancipated millions and without striving
to create a new and united community. The fact of social, economic
and racial antagonism, impressed upon them as the legacy of
the French revolution by a hundred years of riots, strikes and
wars, came to be buttressed in the middle of the century by a
biological doctrine which taught that antagonism of beast to beast
and of man to man, of class to class and of creed to creed, of
nation to nation and of hunger, cold and pestilence to all was an
eternal and ineluctable decree of nature. It was easier to repeat
half-comprehended phrases about a struggle for existence and the
survival of the fittest than to attack the disorder which is the
ineluctable and eternal result of antagonism.
After a hundred years of ill-will and dissension, a new generation
arose to protest against the confusion of this endless antagonism.
Impatience with disorder, hatred of ugliness and preoccupation
with the government of man by man--a normal part of youth's mental
equipment--were stimulated in the dawn of the twentieth century by
the literary challenge of each year: in play after play Bernard
Shaw was attacking some social abuse with the penetration of an
old controversialist, the ferocity of a fanatic and the wit of
an Irishman; in novel after novel H. G. Wells cried out on the
slovenly thinking and spiritual laziness which barred beauty and
order from life; and in play after play and novel after novel John
Galsworthy pleaded for gentleness and explored with unanswerable
questions the place where a civic conscience should have been. At
no time since the days of the _philosophes_ has literature been so
much engrossed with the shortcomings of civilisation; at no time
has it appealed so fervently nor experimented so widely. The waking
dream of beauty was reinforced more than ever before by a sense
of personal responsibility; and a higher proportion of the young
men from twenty-two to twenty-seven were waiting only until they
were equipped to undertake it. With a background of new ethical
standards and of new political ideals, in an atmosphere of artistic
experiment and of social revolt, amid a shifting social population
and an unceasing redistribution of wealth, under the menace of
war abroad and of revolution at home, they first measured their
strength against the difficulties of the career that each had
chosen.
Between 1909 and 1914 a few married; but, as the necessity for
earning a living was their first concern in those days, the
majority were for the present as much debarred from matrimony as
from public life. A few went utterly to pieces, ranging in their
downfall from the squalor of touting among their friends for
insignificant loans to the supreme waste of suicide. One or two
flashed meteorically to the highest plane of their professions.
The rest followed an average course and in diplomacy or in the
civil service, in the army or in holy orders, in commerce or at the
bar, in medicine or in journalism worked with what patience they
could muster through the unproductive years of early plodding. By
1914 the original fortunate three or four who had entered public
life as soon as they came down from Oxford were reinforced by a
dozen more who had made enough progress in five years to fight an
election or at least to nurse a constituency; and five years were
long enough to enable the rest to decide whether they had made
wise choice of a career. Some of those who had been called to the
bar now abandoned their wearisome inactivity in order to make a
livelihood in the City; the young soldiers who had been sent into
the army to be kept out of mischief now assumed that they had
reached years of discretion and resigned their commissions; and any
one who had obstinately cherished the ambition of a literary life
might well, after five years, be deemed incurable.
It was the fate characteristic of nearly all that generation that,
as their training neared completion, they were called away for
ever from the work for which they had been trained and lost to the
peaceful service of mankind. By 1914 their seniors had completed
their apprenticeship and made their transition; though their
uprooting was greater, they had at least found for a moment their
place in the uncaring void. The apprenticeship of their juniors
had not yet begun: they passed from school or university to their
war-service, and the survivors postponed until the end of the war
their practical preparation for civic life. This is not to say that
one is to be envied more than another; in every country at the
outbreak of every war, one generation is more violently dislocated
than the rest; when all loss of life is waste of a nation's
resources, it may be felt that the most grievous waste is among
those who have completed their scholastic education and prepared
themselves for work which they can never fulfil. "Childhood makes
the instrument, youth tunes the strings, and early manhood
plays the melody." The vanished generation never played upon the
instrument; it was hardly tuned before it was struck to the ground,
and music of another kind was heard.
It is useless to speculate how much the loss has cost humanity; to
the men in the middle twenties at least as much as to the men of
any age it was left to pay for the madness of the world and the
crimes of its rulers. They were at the summit of their physical
condition; their spirit and training carried them unfalteringly
into the war; and, enrolling themselves in the first days, they
supported the chief burden of a game in which the odds lengthened
against them with every hour of immunity. A strange marching-song
sent them to their death: strident and shrill cries of impatience
with everything, revolt against everything; catches of crooning
waltz and clattering rag-time to bring back memories and to twist
hearts; the craving for excitement and the whimper of fretfulness;
the sigh of a world in despair heard in the silent pause of mankind
bewildered; all blended their notes to a thunder of confusion,
banishing thought. The onlookers cried in rival tumult that this,
at all events, would be the last war in history; and an echo of
their consoling philosophy carried to the departing troops and, in
the belief that this was a war to end war, furnished them at last
with a ready explanation of their going.
A few perhaps wondered why war could only be ended by war and
whether this was indeed the last war; hardly any one risked the
odium of penetrating official propaganda in order to enquire why
war had been made possible, though some liberals searched their
hearts to discover how the historic peace-party of Great Britain,
elected on other issues and periodically fed on professions of
good-will, had been persuaded in a day to honour, by payment in
flesh and blood, international obligations whose existence the
government had more than once denied.