A MEMORY RETOUCHED
The nineteenth wave of the ages rolls
Now deathward since thy death and birth.
Hast thou fed full men's starved-out souls?
Hast thou brought freedom upon earth?
Or are there less oppressions done
In this wild world under the sun?
Nay, if indeed thou be not dead,
Before thy terrene shrine be shaken,
Look down, turn usward, bow thine head;
O thou that wast of God forsaken,
Look on thine household here, and see
Those that have not forsaken thee.
A. C. SWINBURNE: _Before a Crucifix_.
I
Nearly twelve months after the treaty of peace with Germany had
been signed, a few of the men who had gone down from Oxford ten
or twelve years before met again at their annual college gaudy.
It may be not superfluous to explain that all masters of arts who
have kept their names on the books are invited in rotation, in the
second half of June, to the commemoration ceremony, to dinner in
hall, to a service next day and to breakfast in hall. From 1914 to
1918 the gaudies were discontinued; and 1920 provided the first
occasion on which the men who had taken their M.A. degrees in the
years immediately prior to the war received an invitation.
From the moment that they clambered into their hansoms, men
who had not seen one another for ten years lapsed into a world
which they had known as undergraduates in the last days of King
Edward's reign. They had come together from India and Africa:
clergymen, civil servants and officials of the Woods and Forests;
with or without lasting injury, they had survived the war on one
of its many fronts; some had grown rich, some had married and
begotten children; some had remained as materially unchanged as
they were unchanged in appearance; and, after a longer or shorter
Odyssey of adventure, all were now settled to their work in life.
Automatically they disinterred forgotten nicknames, and the
first of all seemed to cast a spell upon them and to revive the
atmosphere of the last night of their last term. The awnings and
supper-tent lingered on as a reminder of Commemoration; ornate
young men hurried through Tom Quad to the last ball of the week,
leaden-footed young men limped to the bathrooms next day as their
seniors made ready for prayers in the Cathedral.
Ten years before, a world to which their schools and universities
were but a window lay before a disintegrating Oxford generation;
and on its youth and enthusiasm, in an age which aspired to keep
soul and body in hard condition, depended the mark that each member
made in it. Half unconsciously, the young men of that epoch were
reacting to that epoch's literary fervour of humanity and rational
order: Galsworthy was teaching them that life should be gentle,
Wells that it should be tidy, Shaw that it should be ascetic. That
was the open noon of their idealism; those seemed the brave days
for men of democratic faith.
In little more than the hundred years which ended with Queen
Victoria's death an humane spirit of liberalism, not confined to a
single country, had forbidden torture and abolished slavery; it had
achieved political emancipation and religious toleration; in making
the whole of a community responsible for each part, it was slowly
inculcating an idea of fraternity; and, in asserting public right
between nations, it was beginning to merge in that universal spirit
which at intervals of many centuries shines through the world and
teaches men to regard mankind as one whole: the constant spirit of
Buddha, of Christ and of Tolstoi, the transitory half-understood
dream of Alexander and of Napoleon. The trend of history seemed,
in those days, to be a term interchangeable with the progress of
liberalism; whatever stood in its way seemed destined to fight a
losing battle; and the hope of the future was rooted in the record
of the past. Every difficulty that for a moment seemed insuperable
was matched by some old and seemingly insuperable difficulty which
had been overcome: if old age, lazy and without vision, predicted
that there must always be violence and injustice, youth could
retort that injustice and violence were diminishing daily; if war
continued, duelling in England had at least been abolished; if the
modern sportsman fired broadsides into a cloud of driven birds, he
was at least denied, and perhaps disinclined for, the pleasures of
cock-fighting. Life, until 1914, was sacred; and the conditions
under which life was carried on were becoming no less important
than life itself.
The young liberals of those days, taught to feel that every human
being must have a chance, through freedom, of attaining happiness,
believed in their cause and in their leaders; through the pitched
battles of the next four years their faith was undimmed. More than
this dumb allegiance it was not yet easy for them to give: still
little more than boys, most of them had careers to make before they
could participate actively in politics. Later, as a few of them
were ready to take their place in the line, a more urgent war burst
upon them; democracy at home had to be left to take care of itself,
though in August 1914 they hoped and expected their local democracy
would be caught up in a greater democracy; they believed then
that "a war to end war" would prepare the way for ultimate human
brotherhood.
Was it so fantastic a dream? In 1914 less than one hundred and
seventy years had passed since the last civil war in which
Englishmen fought against Englishmen on British soil; now England
was consolidated and uniform. Might there not soon be a time
when Europe, disarmed and controlled by an international police,
would be so far uniform and consolidated that war between any of
its component states would be no less unthinkable than war in
England between Lancashire and Cornwall? Until Ireland was driven
to anarchy, the common conscience of Great Britain refused to
tolerate disorder and free shooting; might there not be a time when
the common conscience of Europe refused to tolerate periodical
massacres? In 1914, though perforce their grip slackened on the
reforms nearer at hand, the souls of the young men were touched for
a moment by the universal spirit.
For the survivors who paced the quadrangles after dinner, peering
at the familiar staircases and glancing up at the silent windows,
every comer of the college was haunted by some one who would never
see Oxford again. In 1910 very few believed that a European
war was necessary; very many still believe that even by 1910 a
different and more honest diplomacy could have averted it. In 1914,
when war broke out, it was fancied that those who were offering
their lives would be rewarded everlasting freedom from the fear of
another war; could that still be fancied in 1920? It was felt and
said, too, that, as these men were venturing all for one corner of
the earth, they--if they came back--or their survivors should find
it so swept and garnished that they would know they had ventured to
good purpose. Oxford is still the kingdom of youth, and idealism
still flourishes in its shelter; but, when the gathering speed of
the London train cut short the last glimpse of Tom Tower and of
the cathedral spire, it was not easy to feel that the sweeping and
garnishing were complete.
II
"Whoever attempts to forecast the course systems of government
will take," wrote Lord Bryce in _Modern Democracies_, "must ...
begin from the two propositions that the only thing we know about
the Future is that it will differ from the Past, and, that the
only data we have for conjecturing what the Future may possibly
bring with it are drawn from observations of the Past, or, in
other words, from that study of the tendencies of human nature
which gives ground for expecting from men certain kinds of action
in certain states of fact. We cannot refrain from conjecture. Yet
to realise how vain conjectures are, let us imagine ourselves to
be in the place of those who only three or four generations ago
failed to forecast what the next following generation would see.
Let us suppose Burke, Johnson, and Gibbon sitting together at a
dinner of The Club in 1769, the year when Napoleon and Wellington
were born, and the talk falling on the politics of the European
Continent. Did they have any presage of the future? The causes
whence the American Revolution and the French Revolution were to
spring, and which would break the sleep of the people in Germany
and Italy, might, one would think, have already been discerned by
three such penetrating observers, but the only remarks most of us
recall as made then and for some years afterwards to note symptoms
of coming dangers were made by a French traveller, who said that
the extinction of French power in Canada had weakened the tie
between the American colonies and Great Britain, and by an English
traveller who saw signs of rottenness in the French Monarchy. Men
stood on the edge of stupendous changes, not discerning the causes
that were already in embryo beneath their feet, like seeds hidden
under the snow of winter, which will shoot up under the April
sunlight. How much more difficult has it now become to diagnose
the symptoms of an age in which the interplay of economic forces,
intellectual forces, moral and religious forces is more complex
than ever heretofore, incomparably more complex than it had seemed
to be before discovery had gone far in the spheres of chemistry,
physics, and biology, before education had been diffused through
all classes, before every part of the world had been drawn into
relations with every other part so close that what affects one must
affect the rest."
In ten years the men who hoped to beautify the world through the
agency of politics had learned something of parliament and of
its limitations; it is not the perfect instrument for a social
reformation or a spiritual revival; such vain imaginings revealed
the reformers' folly or at least their youth, but they were misled
by the resonant beatitudes of public speeches. Parliament and the
whole machine of government are, by their remoteness from the
public life of the nation, always a little loftier in temper than
the basest elements of the population: the House of Commons may be
blind, greedy, vindictive or persecuting, but at such moments it
is never so persecuting or vindictive, so greedy or blind as an
incensed mob would like it to be. On the other hand, parliament
and the whole machine of government never, in their most exalted
moments, attain such a nobility of soul as the mob outside achieves
in its disinterested moods. From the first day of war to the last
and for all their lapses into panic and madness, the uninstructed
silent masses were prompt in every crisis with more patience and
fortitude, more philosophy and more capacity for sacrifice than
parliament knew how to use. It is not through the House of Commons
that England will be made a home for heroes.
"We had no conception of the quality of politics," wrote Wells of
one character then aged fifteen, "nor how 'interests' came into
such affairs; we believed men were swayed by purely intellectual
convictions and were either right or wrong, honest or dishonest
(in which case they deserved to be shot), good or bad. We knew
nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a
whole nation changed by one lucid and convincing exposition....
We rebuilt London by Act of Parliament, and once in a mood of
hygienic enterprise we transferred its population _en masse_ to the
North Downs by an order of the Local Government Board. We thought
nothing of throwing religious organisations out of employment or
superseding all the newspapers by freely distributed bulletins.
We could contemplate the possibility of laws abolishing whole
classes; we were equal to such a dream as the peaceful and orderly
proclamation of Communism from the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral,
after the passing of a simply worded bill,--a close and not
unnaturally an exciting division carrying the third reading....
We were not fools; it was simply that as yet we had gathered no
experience at all of the limits and powers of legislation and
conscious collective intention...."
At one-or two-and-twenty the "mental inertia" of their conservative
opponents had discouraged the reformers from thinking that the more
drastic and dramatic methods of the French Revolution could be
applied to British legislation in 1910; of the entire efficacy of
legislation no doubt was entertained. Everything, it was believed
(and the liberal majority of 1906 believed it too), could be done
by means of a simply worded bill; all that a reformer needed was
those sure voters who would carry the third reading after "a close
and not unnaturally an exciting division"; and they were to be
found in Scotland and Wales, in the north of England and every
other liberal stronghold not yet seduced by factious, independent
labour.
In London, it was soon discovered, there was no help to be expected
save in the poor fringe of Camberwell and Hornsey, Stratford and
Battersea; the liberal oratory of the period taught that dukes and
slum-landlords were identical; and the young liberal was convinced
in those days that the London he knew was vehemently opposed to
all amelioration of social conditions. If, later, he found that
the most tory element in society had no greater liking than he for
dirt, disease, crime, misery and hunger, he found, too, that the
world in which his lot was cast for the next ten years was too
busily engaged to spare anything but mental inertia for social
reform. Its members displayed no ill-will; they subscribed hundreds
of thousands every year to charity, they worked like slaves for the
objects in which their interest had been aroused; but they did not
see and they would not be made to see that Europe was an extension
of England, that England was an extension of the village at their
lodge-gates and that they were acquiescing in conditions of want
and suffering, vice and crime which for very shame they would not
allow among their own tenants.
In the course of those ten years young liberals often wondered
what daily spur could be applied to imaginations and consciences
which are active enough when once the spur has been applied.
The work done for the relief of suffering is immense; the sums
subscribed to charity are enormous; and yet by any standard they
are insufficient. For want of a better postulate the reformers
were agreed that it was incumbent on the state for every man and
woman to be secured at least the minimum of essentials; in the
search for a first principle of private conduct they would not have
refused the criterion whether an act would increase or decrease,
in any form or any degree, the world's total of unhappiness. To an
agnostic, the value of Christian ethics lay less in the protection
which they secured to the weak than in the chivalry which they
demanded of the strong; and, if the mentally inert began with a
test even so rudimentary as this, they might progress to a frame
of mind in which a man would be pulled up short by the fear, that,
whatever the gain to others, his act would cause pain to a single
living creature.
Pain of heart, pain of mind and pain of body are within the
experience of all; the desire to escape it is older and stronger
even than the desire to attain pleasure. And directly or
indirectly, by implication, or expression, the most generous and
humane men and women are daily adding to the world's suffering or
are consenting to leave it unreduced. If the war could not inspire
a consecration of life and a crusade for the extirpation of pain,
what other spur can avail to rouse this somnolent collective
conscience? Certain streets in every great city are thronged at
certain hours with the women whom patronage calls "unfortunate" and
superiority dubs "fallen"; the benevolent societies which exist to
"reclaim" them succeed as well as a gardener who tries to give back
its lost bloom to a rose. In misery of soul and suffering of body,
every prostitute adds to the world's total of pain; but no woman
can become a prostitute without the help of a man.
Here is a fate from which every man would save his mother, his
sister and his daughter; to a slumbering conscience, other men's
sisters and daughters do not matter.
III
In the last ten years, all those who find in mental inertia the
chief obstacle to progress have been forced to enquire what does
matter to the men and women whom they have been meeting. With
comparatively few exceptions these people are temperate, kindly
and faithful within conventional limits; they are as honourable
and veracious as they are expected to be; almost without exception
they are physically courageous, though they have little moral and
less intellectual courage; they have a sluggish pride and hardly
any dignity; they have great energy and resource, versatility
and endurance; many have charm, most have ability and some
have brilliance. A feudal aristocracy leavened by commerce has
produced a society of men and women whom an alien may, with
admiring detachment, consider the finest raw material for any
human enterprise in any part of the world. No nation scored as
high a total in as many different tests during the war. Before
1914, indeed, it seemed as if this incomparable human material was
running to waste; since 1919 it seems to be running to waste again.
The war shewed that in an emergency there was no less available
supply of courage and endurance, of self-sacrifice and ability than
ever before; these qualities are still there if any knew how to
rouse them; but it seems that, though the English will always train
for a race, they will not at other times keep themselves in even
moderately good condition.
In the reaction from the war nothing seems to matter. The _argot_
of London varies from week to week, like the style of dressing
and dancing; but the atmosphere is the same, the restlessness is
the same, the mad striving after effect is the same, the want
of purpose is the same; and it may be doubted whether the money
and energy demanded of such a life are justified by the tepid,
flat pleasure which they purchase. In ten years London has become
steadily and uncaringly more greedy and vulgar. Breeding is a
memory of childhood; manners grew blunt and were discarded during
the years between the South African war and 1914; happiness has
been lost to view in the hunt for distraction; and success is
measured, arithmetically, by invitations.
"Queer place," Mr. Jingle said of Rochester. "Dock-yard people of
upper rank don't know Dock-yard people of lower rank--Dock-yard
people of lower rank don't know small gentry--small gentry don't
know tradespeople--Commissioner don't know anybody."
London, it has been suggested, is less exclusive; and the only
person who is in serious danger of not being received is the
man who is detected cheating at cards. For all this facile
accessibility, however, the tradespeople cannot expect to visit
the small gentry without effort and assiduity. Before the war,
since the war and despite the harrowing preoccupation with war's
intensest crisis, a busy army of soft-voiced, watchful women have
plied their unflagging trade of "getting to know people"; in wealth
or in rank, in charm or in notoriety, in a combination of all or
any, there is always some one to be found on a slightly higher
plane, there is always one greater eminence from which exclusion
is synonymous with disgrace: to cross the threshold they will fawn
on those whom they despise and accept favours from those whom they
detest. Among men the vice is confined to the very young, the mean,
the vain and the insufficient; women are afflicted more widely and
deeply, for they feel their value depreciated when an invitation
passes them by. In the words of 'Algernon Moncrieff,' "Nothing
annoys people so much as not receiving invitations."
IV
A few of the passing generation have retained their vision; many
more have acquired a new vision from the heart-searching of war.
The conscious striving after beauty and the gift of laughter
alone differentiate man from the beasts; and to these few the
attainment of beauty still matters here and elsewhere. London is
still the greatest city of the world; it is no less true than in
Dr. Johnson's day that, when a man is tired of London, he is tired
of life; but it is difficult for any one who has lived for thirty
years in its midst to look patiently on while the lessons of the
war are forgotten and the debt owing to all who died in the war is
repudiated. This lapse into futility is, perhaps, only a temporary
reaction from the war; no man, thinking otherwise, would want to
go on living, for in little more than thirty years the generation
of which the time has now come to take leave has lost the greater
part of those things which it valued. For a few, their country has
been handed over to the blind violence and madness of anarchy; for
more, their political idols have been flung on their faces; for
all, their relations and friends have died in scores. The world of
the survivors, like that corner of it in which they assembled at
Oxford, is peopled with shades; the mood of the survivors is that
of H. W. Garrod, when he wrote his _Intruders_.
"One day, I knew, it had to be:
Sooner or later I must see
Another race of men invade
Rooms which the men I knew had made,
With books, with pictures on the wall,
With pipes and caps, with bat or ball,
Obscurely individual.
I hate your steps upon the stair,
Your vacant voices on the air ...
I hate your chatter overhead.
And your jests that fall like lead
Where only golden things were said
By the men that are dead, the men that are dead."
It is not a mood of resignation or acquiescence, but of resolution,
hope and preparation to pay a debt and to take up, with hands
howsoever much enfeebled and reduced, the task left unfinished "by
the men that are dead." "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of
the church"; and, unless that seed bring forth a spirit of peace
abroad and of community at home, the blood will have been spilled
to no purpose. The survivors of this decimated generation have to
resist, to control or to convert the languid fatalists who would
drift helplessly and hopelessly into revolution or into another
war; they have to subdue and to convince the anarchist of Hyde
Park and of Park Lane, to drive "blood-sucker" from the lips of
the one and "Bolshevist" from the lips of the other, to mitigate
the credulity alike of those who find Russian gold in the pocket
of every opponent and of those who scent in all opposition a plot
for enslaving the proletariat. In a country that has endured,
bleeding but alive, after four years and three months of fighting,
there must be no talk of class-wars: and it must be realised that
the miscreant who bases political salvation on the lamp-posts of
Whitehall is own brother to the miscreant who would win economic
peace by shooting strike-leaders. If the war has not made of the
English, at least, a united people, the task lies ready to the hand
of those liberals who have survived it; if they lack a leader, it
is only for a moment.
One movement is ended. An _intermezzo_ is playing, perhaps is
already drawing to a close. Soon the new movement will begin.
"This world has been harsh and strange;
Something is wrong: there needeth a change.
But what, or where? at the last or first?
In one point only we sinned, at worst.
The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,
And again in his border see Israel set.
When Judah beholds Jerusalem,
The stranger-seed shall be joined to them.
To Jacob's House shall the Gentiles cleave,
So the Prophet saith and his sons believe.
Ay, the children of the chosen race
Shall carry and bring them to their place:
In the land of the Lord shall lead the same,
Bondsmen and handmaids...."
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Once when Charles II visited Westminster, Busby, the head
master, conducted him into school without uncovering: it would
never do, he explained, for the boys to think that there was any
one greater than himself. When the present king attended the
pancake greeze, Dr. Gow related this story; the king at once
commanded him to resume his cap.
[2] _Mon. Stat._, for _Monitor Stationis_.
[3] A contraction for "_Volsci_", the enemies of the "Romans",
_i.e._, the Westminsters of many generations ago.
[4] In such histories of intellectual development as I have
read, too little attention is paid to the dates at which certain
copyrights have expired and the other dates at which "popular
editions" have been issued. Cheap printing, often aided by this
new freedom to print, made available to the boys of my generation
a vast literature of history, biology, politics, economics and
theology. Darwin, Huxley, J. S. Mill and Carlyle were but a few of
those who lay at our disposal.
[5] Until Irish and English cease to put their trust in allegorical
caricatures, there can be no sympathetic understanding between
them. Mr. Max Beerbohm has written of the disillusion which he
sustained on finding that all bishops were not as Du Maurier had
drawn them for _Punch_; and it seems to be a natural failing
of the English to see themselves and others in the terms of a
Tenniel cartoon. Until the war, every German was blonde, fat, mild
and spectacled, with an equal love for sausages, beer, music,
metaphysics and a long, china-bowled pipe; the Frenchman, in
conical tall-hat, loose tie and peg-top trousers, was excitable
and gesticulatory, but polite and--after the _entente_ and
before the arrival of Carpentier--a man of whom much might be
made if he could be interested in field sports. The American,
thin, tall and chin-bearded, with fob-pockets and straps to his
trousers, was pregnantly deliberate in the artlessly blended
dialect of an East-Side saloon-keeper and a Middle-West farmer,
while the indolent but dogged John Bull was made the emblem of
stupid honesty, good sportsmanship and love of fair play; he was
represented as being charged, rather against his inclination, with
an imperial mission and as being endowed with a special skill in
administering an empire; he was credited with a marrow-deep love
of liberty and a genius for self-government. Even the war has done
little to disturb these complacent hallucinations.
[6] While this book was writing, I learned to my own regret and to
the abiding loss of the House, that Dr. Strong, an Old Westminster,
had been appointed to the bishopric of Ripon.
[7] From time to time the regular speakers went on strike. It was
then usual for one to propose the motion "That something be now
done" and to secure that it was not carried, thus holding up all
public business indefinitely. At Univ., I believe, it was customary
to open the proceedings of the "Shakespeare" with a resolution
"That the Bard be not read."
[8] In these years Ronald Knox, Patrick Shaw-Stewart and Charles
Lister occupied a place once filled by Raymond Asquith and, before
him, shared by John Simon, F. E. Smith, Hilaire Belloc and E. G.
Hemmerde.
[9] I am informed by my friend, Captain Stephen Holmes, M.C., to
whom I am indebted for many valuable suggestions, that the use
of the guest-table had to be suspended owing to the rush of new
members to the House in 1919.
[10] One man became so much obsessed by the universality of a
school in which all knowledge had a place, if he could but find it,
that he was discovered on the morning of his examination committing
to memory the statement of the _Morning Post_ that Lady X had left
Hill Street for Scotland; somehow, he felt, this had a bearing on
modern history; and I have no doubt that he used the information to
illustrate a point of manorial tenure or to differentiate between
the life of the new nobility and that described by Tacitus in the
_Germania_.
[11] I write of 1906-9, before women were admitted to degrees or
accorded an academic position or costume.
[12] Once a year the Gilbert and Sullivan operas came to Oxford;
the booking opened a week in advance, and a queue stretched the
length of George Street and half-way down the Corn. For days
before and afterwards every piano in the college was tinkling
with "The Silver Church" or the "Peers' Chorus." And we, in 1909,
were privileged to entertain at luncheon Fred Billington, a great
comedian and the greatest of all Pooh Bahs; fifteen or twenty
of us, of the true Gilbert and Sullivan faith, shyly fed him
with roast turkey and plum pudding, and he too was a little shy,
suspecting some practical joke.
The visitor is sometimes surprised that the New Theatre contains
no boxes; the reason was supplied, in my day, by a famous living
actor, who explained that he and his friends had attended a
melodrama in the old theatre and had taken an uncontrollable
dislike for the villain's trousers. As Æschylus undertook to finish
any prologue of Euripides with the words "_ληκύθιον ἀπώλεσεν_," so
this undergraduate party qualified the villain's every boast and
confession with the words: "_Not_ in those trousers."
The dialogue ran roughly thus:
_Villain._ I will carry the girl off and make her my wife----
_Interrupters._ _Not_ in those trousers.
_Villain._ I will be revenged----
_Interrupters._ _Not_ in those trousers.
_Villain._ I will stick at nothing----
_Interrupters._ _Not_ in those trousers.
As the curtain fell on the first act, the interrupters leapt from
their box on the stage and pursued the villain down the Corn and
the High until they captured him on Magdalen Bridge. They then
returned to the theatre with the offending trousers but without the
villain.
Jowett, as vice-chancellor, decreed that in the new theatre no
boxes should be built.
[13] The late Sir Edward Cook once did me the honour to quote the
words of one of my own characters: "I am tempted to wonder whether
it much matters what a man be taught, so long as he meet enough men
who have been taught something else." Therein lies the difference
between university education and all other kinds.
[14] It is hardly possible to think of Oxford in those years
without thinking of the second volume of _Sinister Street_ and
of the great picture in which Compton Mackenzie's observation,
memory and delicate realization of atmosphere were so triumphantly
blended. At the House we had, no doubt, a stereotyped conception
of the "typical" New College man; Balliol, no doubt, had its
conventional idea of the average St. John's man; it was left to
Compton Mackenzie to shew, from the angle of Magdalen, the reaction
of the Exeter "type" on the imagination of Univ. The book is
confined within the limits which Oxford of necessity imposes on
herself as the theme or background of a novel; Oxford is a phase
through which youth passes, a kingdom wherein it tarries, a hive
where it grows and works towards maturity; it is not generally a
scene of romance, of spiritual crisis or emotional clash; and,
because most novels on Oxford persist in forcing drama into the
least dramatic lives, they stand condemned as psychological
confusions. It is a kingdom of youth because youth is made
comfortably secure from the material conflicts of conventional
drama; and youth, however intensely interested in itself, does not
regard its spiritual conflicts seriously, it no longer agonizes
in doubt nor wrestles in prayer, and, if it fall in love, ecstacy
will disturb its digestion as little as despair will derange its
slumbers. And the novelist of Oxford who writes with perspective
and a sense of the appropriate must treat his material as youth
awakening but not yet awake and as youth snugly protected from
reality.
For this reason and under these limitations, all women, all men who
do not know Oxford and even the men who do will, in that order, be
prudently advised to leave Oxford alone; after _Sinister Street_,
with its analysis and atmosphere, its restraint and its consummate
handling of countless figures on a giant canvas, there is no room
for a book conceived on similar lines or scale; the novelist must
force upon Oxford something which Oxford disowns or he may turn
disgustedly away from a place where innumerable people talk and
think endlessly about something that does not matter to any one
else and where nothing ever happens.
[15] The House went head of the river in 1907 and remained there
for the rest of my time, an achievement to be periodically
celebrated with a triumphant bump-supper, fire-works and a bonfire
which once afforded to some an opportunity of venting their
displeasure on the Oxford Pageant stands.
[16] Mark Twain was the recipient of an honorary degree in these
years, and the welcome accorded him was characteristic. By an
unhappy coincidence certain news-bills had appeared with the words:
"ARRIVAL OF MARK TWAIN IN ENGLAND. THEFT OF ASCOT GOLD CUP." Before
he was allowed to take his degree, an untiring undergraduate
chorus demanded to know: "Now, Mark, what did you do with the Gold
Cup?" His reply I never heard; it was probably adequate, though
occasionally he met his match in repartee. Once when he was staying
in England as a young man, the income-tax authorities sent him
an assessment form which he referred to Queen Victoria with the
statement that he had not the honour to be one of her subjects; she
must forgive his writing to her, because, though he did not know
her, he had once had the pleasure of meeting her son. "He," said
Mark Twain, "was driving in his coach of state to St. Paul's, and
I was on the top of a 'bus." Many years later, when he returned to
England in his glory, he was presented to King Edward who said that
he was glad to meet him again. "Again, sir?" echoed Mark Twain.
"Have you forgotten our first meeting?" asked the king. "I was in
my coach of state, driving to St. Paul's, and you were on the top
of a 'bus."
[17] Lord Wolmer, the late W. G. C. Gladstone and the late Francis
McLaren are the only exceptions that I recall in my own time.
[18] The phrase is borrowed from my friend, Walter Roch.
[19] The parliament which ultimately conceded the vote was
substantially the same that had refused it in 1913; its "mandate"
was still primarily for the parliament bill and the bills covered
by that; but the war changed, with other things, the responsibility
of a member to his constituents and the new franchise was granted
by men with no more authority to grant it than to abolish the
monarchy or to make marriage compulsory.
[20] The name applied to themselves by members of a party which
is Scottish in origin and which has, in the course of history,
repudiated its allegiance to the Catholic Church and the Stuart
dynasty and threatened to repudiate its allegiance to the
Hanoverian dynasty.
[21] These quotations are taken from Mr. Hugh Martin's _Ireland in
Insurrection_.
[22] This and the following quotations are taken from _The Complete
Grammar of Anarchy_ compiled by Mr. J. J. Horgan.
[23] But not Viscount Grey.
[24] Anatole France, in _Les Dieux ont soif_, which was written
several years before the war of 1914, gives a few specimens of the
portents and rumours which agitated Paris when the armies of the
allies were marching against the revolutionary government. They
were, almost without exception, reproduced in England in the first
month of the war.
[25] _W. G. C. Gladstone: A Memoir._ By Viscount Gladstone.
[26] I am told that a similar herd-hallucination overtook Paris in
the war of 1870. A rumour that the Crown Prince's army had been
surrounded and that the news was posted at the Hôtel de Ville
brought the inhabitants by thousands into the streets till those
who were pressed against the Hôtel de Ville and those who were
farthest away alike maintained that they had read the official
report.
[27] Generosity and war seem incompatible!
_Wellington._ It's Marshal Ney himself who heads the charge.
The finest cavalry commander, he,
That wears a foreign plume; ay, probably
The whole world through!
_Spirit Ironic._ And when that matchless chief
Sentenced shall lie to ignominious death
But technically deserved, no finger he
Who speaks will lift to save him!
_Spirit of the Pities._ To his shame.
We must discount war's generous impulses
I sadly see.
THOMAS HARDY: _The Dynasts_.
[28] I remained at Westminster a year, judging that period to be as
long as I could support the daily risk of detection by pupils or
colleagues. Sometimes--now that it is all over--I blush to think
of the subjects that I essayed to teach; and sometimes I blush to
recall the lessons that I actually taught. Since leaving, I have
seen my year's work passed in more candid review than was possible
at the time and have been honoured with a place in the repertory of
imitations in which Westminsters love to indulge whenever two or
three are gathered together. If one or two of my least promising
pupils pay me the compliment of saying that I taught them at least
something, one or two of the most promising now ask me how it was
that I never discovered them cribbing in form or thrusting strange
gifts down the necks of their neighbours. Our warfare was waged
with good humour for the most part, though only a schoolmaster
knows how highly his sense of justice may be tested in dealing
with some one who is personally antagonistic to him. With many
I am proud to say that I made lasting friendships: during the
later years of the war I received letters from every front and
my old pupils came to see me when they were on leave; since the
war they write from Africa and America, I meet them in London and
Oxford, we abandon ourselves to school "shop", and they embarrass
me by occasionally addressing me as "sir". To my friends of the
Modern Transitus from Play Term, 1914, to Election Term, 1915,
to the Classical Transitus, the Modern Sixth, the Mathematical
Sixth, the History Sixth and the Seventh, wherever you may be, I
send greeting; my injustice was unintentional, my incompetence
incurable; I should be well pleased to think that your memories
of me are a hundredth part as kindly as my memories of you. For
perhaps the first three cautious days you were a little awed by me:
the cap and gown were imposing. I was taller than any of you, as an
Old Westminster I knew too much about detention school and penal
drill; above all, I also had lived in Arcady and had sat at those
very desks not ten years before; does it comfort you to know that
my awe of you continued for three terms? If ever the prayer-bell
had not rung before I shewed that I could not solve some diabolical
equation! If you had argued a little more confidently against my
magisterial rulings! If you could have seen into my mind during the
first week, when I took down your names, ranged you in alphabetical
order and guided myself despairingly by the two red-heads in the
form!
[29] I believe that the Education Office section, appropriately
enough, threw into Latin elegiacs the general confession beginning:
"My beat extends from (the sentry-box) to (the gate on Constitution
Hill) and must be patrolled regularly ..."; I never saw a copy.
[30] When Lord Emmott, the Director of the War Trade Department,
invited me to serve under him in the summer of 1915, I intended to
come only for the school holidays; as, however, the work of the
blockade increased steadily, I asked Dr. Gow to release me for as
long as I might be wanted.
[31] As it had been in existence for five months before I entered
it, I can only describe its early history from hearsay.
[32] Six years before, on the first night of _The Blue Bird_, I
remember constructing from the name of Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
a mental picture of some one very tall, very thin, very dark and
saturnine, with a long amber cigarette-holder and a single eyeglass
depending from a broad black ribbon. I had not then seen Max
Beerbohm's caricature of him; and, at our first meeting, I murmured
to myself, as hundreds have done before and since: "Of course! The
old sheep in _Alice Through the Looking-Glass_." As hundreds have
done before and since, I surrendered to his charm; and there is no
friend to whom I owe more. For over three years we worked together,
many hours a day for six days a week; our minds and moods found
something always in common; in five years there cannot have been
many days on which we did not meet or telephone or write. In the
next five years may there be as few!
I am not alone in fashioning an imaginary figure to bear such
a name. I am told that a distinguished black-and-white artist,
meeting the name fortuitously, would walk pensively through the
streets of London thereafter, searching the faces of the passers-by
for one that would fit his ideal, Alexander-Teixeira-de-Mattos
conception. And, when they met, I wonder if the artist was as
much frightened as every newcomer to the department. On my second
morning I looked up suddenly into a white impassive face; eyes
unchanging in expression regarded me through the tortoise-shell
spectacles which bestrid the impressive nose; the mouth was
tightly-shut; neither word nor movement explained this paralysing
figure which had glided to my table like some wandering sphinx. "I
am not sure whether your minute intends to convey ..." he began
at length and to my indescribable relief. Fear departed with that
word, and we collaborated in redrawing the minute. Sometimes the
Teixeira panic spread to distant committees which only knew his
exquisite handwriting and his disabling knowledge of English; they
hastened to do his bidding and to avert his wrath; no chairman
likes to apologize twice for "the curiously pococurantist attitude
of your committee", few care even to have the apology accepted with
the words that consigned so many controversial files to oblivion:
"Pray say no more. A.T."
[33] Sir Ian Hamilton's _Gallipoli Diary_ is one of many military
documents that shew that civilian morale at home cracked before
the morale of the soldiers under fire. There was a fantastic
legend that the English were unvaryingly calm and resolute, with
a calmness and resolution that became calmer and more resolute
with every demand. Nothing is farther from the truth. There
was a panic when the Amiens despatch was published; and every
outburst of popular violence or madness had panic as its origin
and explanation. The spy-mania, the attack on Lord Haldane, the
conscription campaign, the hunt for aliens and, finally, the
Pemberton-Billing case were each in turn the result of a panic
caused by accumulated despondency or by the violent despair induced
by a sudden reverse. The east-end Jews who cowered in tube stations
during air-raids had their own means of shewing fear; but it was
not the only means.
[34] This is becoming a conventional aftermath of any war in
which the vanquished is so heavily defeated that he has to make a
superhuman effort to galvanize his country into new life. The same
alarms were spread by the Germans about the French in 1875.
[35] "It is said," writes Mr. Walter Roch in _Mr. Lloyd George and
the War_, "that as a result of this Conference ('the Constitutional
Conference which sat in secret between the two General Elections in
1910, and tried to reach a settlement of the constitutional issue,
by agreement'), in the course of which a wide range of topics must
have been discussed, Mr. Lloyd George then proposed, and committed
to writing, a scheme for a Coalition Government which would settle
the question of the House of Lords and Home Rule, adopt some form
of National Service, and finance the Navy by means of a loan. But
the details of this scheme are only vaguely known and add to our
confusion."
I am not aware, however, that the allegation has ever been denied.
[36] I have ventured to enumerate, twice within a few pages,
the chief causes of despondency at the end of 1916: the same
thought-wave, given off from the same psychological effervescence,
convinced President Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George that the allies
were beaten to their knees; the one was inspired to throw the
resources of America into the struggle, the other to take personal
charge of the war.
[37] 1920.
[38] Sir Ian Malcolm was inspired by this memorandum to write
his "rhymed endeavour to convey the contents of a grave
'pronunciamento' on deportment: compiled (it is believed) by Lord
Eustace Percy and issued to the Members of the Mission before
landing in the New World." The poem appears among the "Mission
Hymns" in _Stuff--And Nonsense_. "CIRCULAR NOTES"
_To the Mission_
In your hours of ease, I beg you
Missionaries, one and all,
Read, mark, learn, digest and pass on
This concise Encyclical.
You will find its interest chaining
--Sometimes even entertaining.
First of all you must remember
That you go to U.S.A.,
To a land of candid critics;
So be careful what you say.
I shan't mind the least if some
People think you're deaf and dumb.
If with questions you are pestered
By the Press for news athirst,
Do not risk replying till you've
Wired home for instructions first.
Heaven knows what might occur
If you answered "on the spur."
_E.G._: "Why bring re-made soldiers
On your diplomatic stunt?"
Should the ready lie elude you
Give a non-committal grunt,
Or remark with pungent wit
"_Miles nascitur non fit_."
(_Note: for General T. Bridges_--
Please observe a strict disguise;
Don't appear in medalled khaki
Or regard their martial cries.
If they cap you, don't salute;
If they challenge you, don't shoot.)
Should they ask if England's starving,
You may answer, "Look at me,
Do I seem emaciated
Or in need of sympathy?"
If you have the indigestion,
Ask for notice of the question.
Very possibly they'll ask you
"What is happening in Greece?"
"What about the Spring Offensive?"
Or what day the war will cease.
You should say, "I've no idea,"
And manœuvre for the rear.
There is just one other matter
Which diplomacy dictates
Should be handled with discretion
In non-alcoholic States;
'Twould be well received, I think,
If the Mission didn't drink.
That completes the list of topics
I would have you bear in mind;
To sum up: I urge my colleagues
To be deaf and dumb--not "blind."
Please observe punctiliously
These injunctions.
_s.s. Olympic._ A. J. B.
[39] This was, of course, before the great explosion.
[40] It was, I believe, originally intended that no speeches should
be delivered; but, when M. Viviani felt that he ought to say a few
words on behalf of the French, Mr. Balfour could not do less than
speak on behalf of his own mission. There was no time to prepare a
formal oration, but the exquisite phrasing of his inscription was
at least not less impressive than any speech. The original sheet of
paper on which it was written has been, I understand, chemically
treated against fading or decay and preserved among the historical
records of the United States.
"M. Viviani," said Mr. Balfour, "has expressed in most eloquent
words the feelings which grip us all here to-day. He has not only
paid a fitting tribute to a great statesman, but he has brought
our thoughts most vividly down to the present. The thousands who
have given their lives, French, Russian, Italian, Belgian, Servian,
Montenegrin, Roumanian, Japanese and British, were fighting for
what they believed to be the cause of liberty.
"There is no place in the world where a speech for the cause of
liberty would be better placed than here at the tomb of Washington.
But as that work has been so adequately done by a master of
oratory, perhaps you will permit me to read a few words prepared by
the British mission for the wreath we are to leave here to-day:
"'Dedicated by the British mission to the immortal memory of George
Washington, soldier, statesman, patriot, who would have rejoiced to
see the country of which he was by birth a citizen and the country
which his genius called into existence fighting side by side to
save mankind from subjection to a military despotism.'"
[41] It is sad to record that the unwonted strain and exertion were
too much for the advanced age of Mr. Choate, who died the following
day; yet I doubt whether he could have chosen a happier moment for
death than that which saw the great ambition of his life realised
in the cordial friendship and whole-hearted cooperation of the
United States and Great Britain.
[42] Sir William Peterson, then Principal of M'Gill University.
While writing this book, I received by wireless, on my way to South
America, the sad news of his death.
[43] In fact, General Pershing crossed independently.
[44] Judge Amos, now Judicial Adviser in Cairo, endorses
the substantial truth of the report which circulated about
his chess-playing at this time. A tall man with a folding
pocket-chessboard and a coloured silk handkerchief containing an
incomplete set of chessmen might have been observed at almost any
hour of the day or night prowling the deck with a preoccupied air
and seeking to lure any one into playing with him. Those who knew
the moves promptly beat him; those who did not know the moves had
them lucidly explained--and then beat him as promptly. He had, I
believe, exhausted the 6,000 Canadian troops, the ship's company
and the other members of the mission before approaching that corner
of the smoking-room in which, according to the story, I was sitting
with an expression of imbecility calculated to suggest that I
could not play chess and would not learn. He persevered with his
explanation and after five minutes challenged me to a game. I hate
to record that he did not win it.
[45] The phrase is borrowed from Mr. Asquith.
[46] One of the last words, in a long list beginning with
"Armageddon," to hypnotize the newspaper-reader.
[47] One evening I entered Covent Garden after the curtain had
risen. "M. Kerenski?" enquired the sole occupant of the box,
peering at me through the gloom. "I beg your pardon! I see that he
landed in England this afternoon."
[48] At the risk of a prophecy I would suggest that Masefield's
_Gallipoli_ has a lasting place in the treasury of great English
prose, so long, at least, as our present canons of perfection in
prose-style are maintained.
[49] I am not limiting myself strictly to those war-books which had
been published by the date of the armistice.
[50] "Honestly, I do not care about the clever people," confessed
'Lady Maybury'. "I find them _borné_, self-centred, touchy, and
embarrassing. They have _no_ conversation, and they always ask me
if I was at Ranelagh last Saturday. Have you ever observed that?"
[51] At Oxford I first heard the couplet which tells how
"From out their different tubs
Stubbs butters Freeman,
Freeman butters Stubbs,"
it was quoted by one member of a prolific triumvirate which then
filled a considerable proportion of the critical journals. In those
days it was hardly possible to read an article by A which did not
contain a panegyric of B's latest book; it was no less difficult to
read B's book without meeting a reference to what had been "most
justly observed by C."
[52] The volume of hostile reviews, surely too great to be
spontaneous and independent, which greeted _The Autobiography of
Margot Asquith_, was only less remarkable than the success which
the book achieved in spite of them.
[53] It will not have been forgotten that, in 1920, a cinematograph
actress received a welcome to London which may have been equalled
by crowned heads, but has, I should think, never been surpassed.
Wherever she went, the streets were thronged; in its desire to see
her, the crowd at a theatrical garden party nearly crushed her to
death. Would Madame Curie, I wonder, have secured a single cheer?
Would Miss Nightingale have been recognised?
[54] The temptation to make class-lists is almost irresistible: I
have been taken to task for saying in an introduction to Couperus'
_Old People and the Things That Pass_ that it was one of the
world's half-dozen greatest novels; but the temptation should be
resisted, for the proof of our fallibility is ever before our eyes.
[55] On the first night of _L'Heure espagnole_ a devil entered into
one member of the audience and tempted him to murmur at any open
door: "Is this not extraordinarily reminiscent of Aïda?" Complete
and immediate agreement was his reward.
[56] _Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret._ It is natural
for Balliol to gravitate to the cabinet; and distinction was lent
to the business government by the presence of Lord Curzon.
[57] _Memorandum_
TO THE CABINET BY LORD MILNER ON HIS VISIT TO FRANCE, INCLUDING THE
CONFERENCE AT DOULLENS, MARCH 26TH, 1918.
The Prime Minister having asked me to run over to France in order
to report to the Cabinet personally on the position of affairs
there, I left Charing Cross at 12.50 on Sunday, March 24th....
On arrival at Doullens I was at once seized by Clemenceau, who
startled me by the announcement that Haig had just declared that
he would be obliged to uncover Amiens and fall back on the Channel
ports. I told him I felt sure there must be some misunderstanding
about this, and that before the general Conference I thought it
was desirable that I should have a short conversation with the
Field-Marshal and the Army Commanders, whom I had not yet seen....
The views of the British Commanders having thus been cleared
up, the Conference assembled.... I asked whether I might have
a word with Clemenceau alone. I then told him quite frankly of
the conviction which had been growing in my mind ever since the
previous day, and had been confirmed by my conversations with
Wilson and Haig, that Foch appeared to me to be the man who had
the greatest grasp of the situation, and was most likely to deal
with it with the intensest energy. Could not he be placed by both
the Governments in a position of general control, and given the
sort of authority which he (Foch) had himself suggested to Wilson?
Clemenceau, whose own mind, I am sure, had been steadily moving in
the same direction, at once agreed, but he asked for a few minutes
to speak to Pétain. While he took Pétain aside, I did the same
with Haig. While I explained to the latter what was contemplated,
he seemed not only quite willing, but really pleased. Meanwhile,
Clemenceau had spoken to Pétain, and immediately wrote and handed
me the following form of words, to embody what he and I had just
agreed to:
_Le général Foch est chargé par les gouvernements britanniques
et français de coordonner l'action des armées britanniques et
françaises sur le front ouest. Il s'entendra à cet effet avec les
deux généraux en chef, qui sont invités à lui fournir tous les
renseignements nécessaires._
I showed this to Haig, who readily accepted it, but suggested that
it should be extended to cover the other armies--Belgian, American
and possibly Italian--that might be employed on the present
Franco-British front. To this Clemenceau at once agreed. We then
all went back to the table. The amended formula, which ran as
follows:
_Le général Foch est chargé par les gouvernements britanniques et
français de coordonner l'action des armées alliées sur le front
ouest. Il s'entendra à cet effet avec les généraux en chef, qui
sont invités à lui fournir tous les renseignements nécessaires._
DOULLENS,
_le 26 mars, 1918_.
was read out, and after a very short discussion, which amounted
to nothing more than cordial approval of the principle by all the
speakers, the document was signed by Clemenceau and myself, and
the Conference immediately rose with every appearance of general
satisfaction....
This quotation is taken from the special supplement to _The New
Statesman_ of 23 April, 1921.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
-Plain print and punctuation errors fixed.