A SETTING AND A DATE

"I am the captive of your bow and spear, sir. The position has its obligations—on both sides.... Brainy men languishing under an effete system which, when you take good holt of it, is England—just all England.... If you want to realise your assets, you should lease the whole proposition to America for ninety-nine years."

Rudyard Kipling: The Captive.

I

The men who in 1914 were of military age, as that definition was used on the outbreak of war, were born at earliest in the middle of the eighties. Queen Victoria was to reign for half a generation longer, Lord Beaconsfield was but lately dead, Mr. Gladstone had ahead of him more than a dozen years of life and one more term as prime minister, and Mr. Parnell was appearing for the first time as the maker and breaker of ministries.

Abroad, Prince Bismarck was still chancellor to the Emperor William I, and the third French Republic was young enough to be still unsteady on its legs; but, since British fears of Russian aggression had been for the most part interred with the bones of Disraeli's spirited foreign policy, the chief imperial problems related to the yet new British responsibility for Egypt and to border wars and punitive expeditions on the fringe of empire. At home, the conservatives, wagged by the tail of the "fourth party," were coming to terms with the liberal-unionists who had seceded from Mr. Gladstone in 1886; the liberal party, committed to home rule as a first charge, unless the findings of the Parnell commission should discredit its policy, was shelving the rest of its programme and secretly waiting for its leader's death in order to infuse a stronger radicalism than was palatable in the lifetime of a man who had first held office under Sir Robert Peel.

On either side of either house, as on either side of the Irish Sea, the dominant political problem from 1885 to 1895 was the problem of Irish self-government: on this old parties were split and new parties formed; from this proceeded the policies and controversies which filled the life of Parliament to the exclusion of almost everything else for the twenty years from 1895 to the great war. In the first home rule bill and the liberal defeat of 1886, in the Parnell commission and the second home rule bill, in the Parnell divorce and the defeat of Mr. Gladstone's last administration, in the constitutional struggle between Lords and Commons from 1893 to 1911, in the Wyndham land legislation, the devolution scheme and the fall of Mr. Wyndham, in the Irish councils bill, the third home rule bill, the threat of rebellion and the outbreak of civil war, English political history lay under the sable shadow of Ireland, English political interests and developments were sacrificed to Irish demands, and English political parties, jointly and severally, one after another, paid for their failure to give Ireland an acceptable form of self-government.

Though an Irishman brought up in England may lose the faith, the speech and the nationality of the one country without acquiring those of the other, he will inevitably be forced into an alternating sympathy with both; and, while he may hesitate to explain the English to the Irish or the Irish to the English, he is bound, by any affection that he may feel for either, to disperse by any means in his power the cloud of tragic misunderstanding which has for so long poisoned the life of both. It was said, in seeming paradox, at a time of diplomatic tension between Great Britain and the United States, that both countries laboured equally under the curse of a common language; and at all times, unless the same words embody the same ideas to both disputants, they will encounter less confusion by translating, however cumbrously, from one language to another. When an American says "gotten", he means "gotten"; but an Englishman is too ready to imagine that he meant to say "got", but unhappily knew no better—until, perhaps, set right. Similarly, a full half of the immemorial friction between Ireland and England arises from the vulgar belief that, because the two peoples employ roughly the same language, they must be one people; the other half from the abysmal ignorance of Ireland exhibited by the English and the no less abysmal ignorance of England exhibited by the Irish. Apart from those who for reasons of sport or business are taken regularly from the one country to the other, there is little intercourse between them: a hundred Englishmen go to France or Italy for one who goes to Ireland; and, without a steadying glimpse of reality to check a too exuberant imagination on either side, the Irishman deduces an England made up of commercial travellers from Liverpool and of six-day trippers to Killarney or Portrush, while the Englishman constructs a figure from the novels of Lever and half persuades himself that Irishmen habitually brandish shillelaghs and welcome bad government for its own sake and for love of a grievance. The literary conception[5] has been somewhat refined by the writings of Shaw and Synge, of Somerville and Ross, but he would be little out of pocket who offered a reward to any Englishman who could distinguish between the intonation of a Galway fisherman and the accent of Sir Edward Carson.

Some progress towards understanding will be achieved when it is realised that the Irish derive from an older and different wave of westerly migration and were a civilised and proselytising nation when the English were a pagan collection of barbarian tributaries distracted by the withdrawal of the Roman legions from Britain. Insulated from Europe by a second sea, Ireland has retained a faith, a poetry and a mysticism which in England could not withstand the materialising influence of commercial development nor the imperial fruits of participation in European politics; the Irish have never regarded industrial pre-eminence as the goal of human energy and ambition, they never will; and they are deaf to the lure of imperialism. Those who confound mysticism with sentiment mistake the most mystical people in Europe for the most sentimental; the Irish are without sentimentality, and their cynicism, once realised, tempts the bewildered alien to doubt their spiritual quality until he discovers that cynicism may be used as protective colouring. In conflict with neighbours of sometimes less generous soul the Irish forgive easily, perhaps they forgive too easily; they never forget, and perhaps it would be for their good if they learned to forget. They are more chivalrous than most of the nations in Europe and more chaste than any. In common with the rest of the world they believe that a man is worthless unless he will die for his ideals; they believe also that an ideal is worthless if men will not die for it. To the English, who in normal times will do anything for an ideal but sacrifice themselves for it and who will risk their necks for anything but an ideal, this fanaticism is as inexplicable as it is exasperating.

In all political relations an Irishman interprets patriotism to mean his love for Ireland; in all relations with the British Government Ireland is offered, a year too late, what she would have accepted thankfully a year earlier. When English political parties are vying with one another to press upon Ireland a remedy for which the time has passed, it is hard to recall the days when coercion bill trod on the heels of coercion bill and "twenty years of resolute government" was proposed as the blunt, common-sense method of curing a nation that aspired to independence: Ireland turbulent, it was said, was unfit for self-government, Ireland at peace no longer wanted it. In two hundred and fifty years England had tried every expedient, from the Cromwellian massacres to the Wyndham land act, with the exception of just that political autonomy which she blessed so fervently when it was won by Greece and Italy, Bulgaria, Servia and Roumania. Still the Irish dreamed of a national destiny, still the imperial genius of the English bled Ireland slowly to death. More than a century after the act of union, a conservative ministry discovered that perhaps the Irish really desired to control their own fate; and the twenty years of resolute government ended in an abortive scheme of devolution. It is true that Mr. Wyndham, a great scholar, a greater gentleman and one of the greatest friends that Ireland ever had, was denounced, betrayed and left to die heartbroken; his work lived after him; and, when the Liberal party returned to power in 1906, it was agreed, though not admitted, by all that some concession must be made to the Irish demand for home rule; all in turn now prescribe milk, when brandy is required, and brandy, when oxygen alone will save the patient's life.

Day after day and year after year, the political youth of any one who was born after the first home rule bill has been overcast by Ireland; for a moment the dream of O'Connell and Parnell seemed likely to be realised by Redmond; but the shadow descended again in the hour of his death to darken the youth of another generation, as it descended in the hour of Mr. Gladstone's last defeat and retirement.

II

If the party of reform in the last years of the nineteenth century seemed to be waiting for the death of its leader, the whole English world seems, in retrospect, to have been waiting for the death of the older generation and for the passing of an era which was arrested in its decay by the venerable presence and vigour of the queen and Mr. Gladstone, of Cardinal Manning and Cardinal Newman, of Dr. Spurgeon and Miss Nightingale. The great Victorian age, solid and stable, rich in discovery and invention, richer in literature and art, spanned the historical chasm between the eighteenth century and the twentieth: the political unrest and transition which perplexed the sons of George III had given place to an order so settled that, in the last years of George III's granddaughter, it seemed to defy change; the licence which endured as a legacy of the Napoleonic wars and as a memory of the Regency had been ended by the example and influence of the queen; in material strength and in the bewildering splendour of imperial pageantry, England stood higher than at any time since the last years of Queen Elizabeth. There is a tendency among the shallow-minded of the present day to see only the stiff conventionality and smug complacency of Victorianism, to ridicule its solemnity and to castigate its occasional tastelessness: in the eyes of such critics, Victorianism is to be remembered only by the Albert Memorial. Already in the Queen's last years there might be heard murmurs of revolt against the bloodless rectitude of life which she inspired; hopes were entertained that, when at length the Prince of Wales came to the throne, cheerfulness might be allowed to break in; the English had been on their best behaviour for too long and were profoundly bored.

When those who opened their eyes on the second half of the eighties were still young children, the first attack was made on the outposts of Victorian "respectability": the "new woman" made her appearance, defiantly smoking in public and—until threatened with violence by an outraged and susceptible mob—bicycling about the streets of London in "bloomers"; new ideas were spread, new rights suggested and an alarming new freedom of discussion inaugurated by the plays of Ibsen; a new wave of riches poured into England from the Rand, their possessors resolute to enjoy them without the restrictions of an outworn decorum. The epithet which has become the historic description of these years is "roaring," and, if it described something which by modern standards was mild and blameless, the vigour of the word registers the public misgiving and astonishment at the thing which it described. Nevertheless, though this brawling exuberance gave an earnest of what would come when the brawlers had discredited Victorianism, as yet they misconducted themselves clandestinely or "under the eye of perpetual disapprobation": the nod and frown of the court were still potent; and the rulers of half-a-dozen great houses decided effectively and subject only to the veto of the queen who should be received in the small and envied world known as "society."

In the realm of literature, where the writ of social rulers did not run, a steady movement towards intellectual freedom, more permanent in its results and less open to criticism in its course, made itself felt; and few more illuminating contrasts between the mental range of late Victorianism and that of the present day can be presented than by a study of the once forbidden problems which may now be discussed in novels, on the stage and in the press. The free lover and the unmarried mother have escaped from the tribunal of the moralist into the consulting-room of the pathologist and the workshop of the artist; diseases never before mentioned have supplied the dramatist with a motive; vices still unmentionable furnish a hinted explanation to the psychologist. And between men and women of almost any age there is an unembarrassed interchange of opinion, not always free from the gratification of morbid curiosity, which exceeds the limits even of what may be debated in print. The belief in safety through innocence has been replaced by a belief in safety through knowledge; the war went far towards completing the work begun by the early prophets of women's rights; while the change in outlook must be recorded, there has not yet been time to judge it in its effects on the well-being of the nation or on the spiritual quality of the individual. The revolutionaries of this, as of all other epochs, are too much concerned in pursuing liberty as an end to regard it as a means.

To them the restrictions of Victorianism would be as intolerable as its pleasures would be insipid. London, in the nineties, formal and unvarying, was only in session from Easter until Goodwood; and the slave of routine followed his appointed path from Sussex to Cowes, from Cowes to a foreign watering-place or to Scotland and from Scotland, by way of long visits in different parts of the country, to the shires, returning to London in the spring after a taste of cosmopolitanism in the south of France. Once more in England, he attended a succession of parties as punctually and conscientiously as he murmured the responses in church; if they grew irksome, there was no alternative, and, if he absented himself, he incurred the suspicion, in that intimate small world, of having been left uninvited. So for seven days a week and for twelve weeks of seven days: the week-end party, which now diverts a few and exhausts the rest, only dates from the early nineties; Sunday was always passed in London, with church and church parade, a luncheon party and ceremonial calls to urge the lagging hours.

Though the young girl unchaperoned was the young girl abandoned, it is probably the young bachelor who would have most reason to dread the obligations entailed by a plunge back into the nineties. Etiquette ordained that he must leave cards at any house where he had dined or danced; and a call in those strict days, when no one but a sloven would dare to be seen without a tall hat between the months of May and July, postulated that the caller must array himself in frock-coat and all its concomitants and, for a reason still obscure, must carry his hat into the drawing-room. Later, as a concession to human weakness and in imitation of the bar, a morning-coat was permitted; serge suits and bowler hats, exhibiting themselves tentatively at either end of the week, were excused by a presumed sojourn in the country; and then, with the speed of an avalanche, the reign of dandified dowdiness set in, tidying itself slowly into comfort that was also presentable.

III

Politically, too, it was felt that the passing of the Victorian era would be accompanied by upheaval and a transference of power.

The middle-class electorate which ultimately ruled England from 1832 to 1867 was extended by the reform bills of the latter year and of 1884 to include the vast majority of the adult male working-classes. At the time of this generous dilution Robert Lowe caustically suggested that it would be well to "educate our masters," and in the middle of his 1868 administration Mr. Gladstone introduced universal elementary education into England. The first children to benefit by this belated afterthought were men and women who were in the early twenties by the time that the generation which is now being described was able to read and to see what others were reading; its members grew up side by side with the numerous progeny of a popular, cheap press, and its future rulers were in a state to digest and discuss political problems for themselves and by themselves.

This is not to say that a knowledge of letters gave to democracy political wisdom; it is probable that, while new classes were enabled to spread and to receive political doctrines, later to unite and organise themselves into political bodies, their instinct for affairs became blunted and debased. "Some of us," wrote Lord Bryce in Modern Democracies, "remember among the English rustics of sixty years ago shrewd men unable to read, but with plenty of mother wit, and by their strong sense and solid judgement quite as well qualified to vote as are their grandchildren to-day who read a newspaper and revel in the cinema. The first people who ever worked popular government, working it by machinery more complicated than ours, had no printed page to learn from.... These Greek voters learnt their politics not from the printed, and few even from any written page, but by listening to accomplished orators and by talking to one another.... It is thinking that matters, not reading.... In conversation there is a clash of wits, and to that some mental exertion must go.... The man who reads only the newspaper of his own party, and reads its political intelligence in a medley of other stuff, narratives of crimes and descriptions of football matches, need not know that there is more than one side to a question.... The printed page, because it seems to represent some unknown power, is believed more readily than what he hears in talk.... A party organ, suppressing some facts, misrepresenting others, is the worst of all guides.... That impulse to hasty and ill-considered action which was the besetting danger of ruling assemblies swayed by orators, will reappear in the impression simultaneously produced through the press on masses of men all over a large country."

It is possible that the last thirty years may come to be regarded, in the development of democracy, as the history of the press rising victorious over the political mass-meeting, even as the political mass-meeting, since the days of Mr. Gladstone's electoral campaign of 1880, had been gradually rising victorious over the House of Commons. It is possible again that the present moment registers the highest point which newspaper influence will reach and that, during the next thirty years, the publicity of the cinematograph and of the poster will rise victorious over the press. The patriotism of the public during the war was kept alive by direct and simple appeals to enlistment and economy; they issued their message from every hoarding and competed for public interest with advertisements for patent foods and soaps. Though its want of dignity may have offended the fastidious, this method of propaganda permitted neither argument nor contradiction; the government stated its case and plastered the countryside with an exhortation or declaration for which the public paid and which the press could not overtake. Since the war, the government has employed this method of propaganda in more than one industrial dispute: wages and profits, nationalisation and private ownership are debated on convenient walls; it is recognised that, in a democracy, knowledge must not be denied to the people; and, as in the first French revolution, it is believed that the information can be supplied most attractively by the government itself. Robert Lowe, were he still alive, might feel malicious satisfaction in seeing the use to which democracy had put its long-deferred education and the manner in which the ultimate masters of democracy are educated.

The immediate effect of diffused, cheap printing and of the power of reading and expression was that democracy became articulate and organised, ready to play in the business of government that part to which it was entitled by its votes, but to which others were by no means ready to admit it. In the conversation and literature of these years may be traced a profound uneasiness at the onward march of labour, and the opponents of democracy vented their fear and hostility in outbursts of almost hysterical bitterness against the ignorant, gullible, self-seeking and rapacious proletariat into whose hands the welfare of the empire had been surrendered.

In 1833 Carlyle's TeufelsdrÖckh had written: "Two men I honour, and no third. First, the toil-worn Craftsman that with earth-made Implement laboriously conquers the Earth, and makes her man's. Venerable to me is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable, too, is the rugged face, all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is the face of a Man living manlike. O, but the more venerable for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee! Hardly-entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed: thou wert our Conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so marred." In 1850 the fear of Chartism had purged Carlyle's mind of this veneration, pity and love for a man living manlike, a hardly-entreated brother and a conscript who had been marred in fighting the battles of others. "Consider, in fact," he exhorts his readers, "a body of Six-hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneous persons set to consult about 'business' with Twenty-seven millions mostly fools assiduously listening to them, and checking and criticising them—was there ever since the world began, will there ever be till the world end, any 'business' accomplished in these circumstances?"

For fifty years, from Carlyle to Kipling, this scorn for a deliberative assembly and this contempt for an electorate which had hitherto been sedulously denied all political education frustrated all attempts to modify the old machine of government and to assimilate the new rulers to the old. "Bigots," said Macaulay, "... never fail to plead in justification of persecution the vices which persecution has engendered. England has been to the Jews less than half a country; and we revile them because they do not feel for England more than a half patriotism. We treat them as slaves, and wonder that they do not regard us as brethren...."

With little change of language, the disabilities of the Jews could be paralleled by the disabilities of labour; and both were defended by the same spirit of blatant intolerance which rose in a self-satisfied crescendo during the second half of the nineteenth century, till a cynic might have said that, as there had been no class-antagonism, it would become necessary to create one. Of the present conflict between classes and of any conflict in the immediate future the seeds were sown in the last years of Queen Victoria's reign.

IV

The men of this epoch grew up half-way between the second harvest of great nineteenth-century literature and the first crop of the twentieth. In their early boyhood, Tennyson was still Poet Laureate, Browning was still prolific and Swinburne's last song was not yet sung; George Meredith and Thomas Hardy were still in practise as novelists, and Robert Louis Stevenson was approaching the climax of his powers; John Ruskin, though silent, was still alive; the influence of Walter Pater was at its zenith; the reputation of Herbert Spencer stood higher than at any time before or since; and John Morley was in his prime. Among the younger men who were winning fame—with the surge and thunder that heralded the youth of the nineties—was Rudyard Kipling; the seething brain of H. G. Wells was boiling over into scientific romance; and old romance was brought to life by the charm of Anthony Hope. Among those who were doing the work for which a belated fame was reserved were Samuel Butler and Joseph Conrad. For experimenting, adventurous youth the pages of The Yellow Book lay open; "the men of the nineties" flashed meteorically across the deafened heavens, and, when they had passed with their falsity and clamour, there was discovered in their train the more abiding genius of Whistler and Beardsley, the precocious, detached perfection of Beerbohm, the occasional beauty of Gray and Dowson, the alternate paste and diamond of Oscar Wilde.

These were the last working years of Leighton and Watts, of Holman Hunt and Morris, of Tenniel and Crane; the heyday of Ricketts and Shannon; the morning of Phil May. They were the years, too, of the first illustrated magazines and of those Strands, ever memorable to the boys of that generation, in which Sherlock Holmes appeared month after month.

A new chapter in dramatic history was opened by Pinero with The Second Mrs. Tanqueray; and, though Shaw and Barrie were not yet come into their own, though Galsworthy and Barker were not yet articulate, the last decade of the nineteenth century was the summer time of the British stage for a hundred years. Irving ruled still imperially, with Terriss, Forbes Robertson and Wyndham among his marshals; Boucicault, Toole and Bancroft were still alive; it was not yet impossible to find a theatre for serious drama, and the seductions of burlesque and of musical comedy were confined to Daly's and the old Gaiety.

The music-halls of that period did not come within the purview of a boy: the humour was too broad, the air too much tainted, the associations too squalid; but in those days the true "variety entertainment"—exhibiting hardly less continuity than the modern revue—was still to be seen, the old-fashioned chairman still sat at his table surrounded by privileged friends, the prices were half those of the theatre, it was exceptional for a man to appear in evening dress and inconceivable for a woman of repute to appear at all.

The memory of a child is pierced, deeply and without order, by quarter-comprehended sights and sounds. Those were the days of Lottie Collins and Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay, of The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo and of The Bicycle Made for Two—this last to commemorate the safety bicycle which took England by storm and urged the citizens of London in endless, untiring circles round Regent's Park on Sunday mornings. These were the days of May Yohe and Honey, ma Honey, of Hayden Coffin and Sunshine Above, of Albert Chevalier and his coster songs; of Dan Leno and Herbert Campbell in immortal partnership at Drury Lane pantomimes, of Corney Grain—and a piano; of Sims Reeves at the Queen's Hall, old and inexpressibly sweet; of Maskelyne and Cook at the Egyptian Hall, of Moore and Burgess at the St. James' Hall; they were the days of "Niagara" and the old Aquarium.

It was in the middle nineties, when the "knife-board" omnibus was still to be seen in the streets, that London was excited by an exhibition of "horseless carriages," though for a few years still a small boy might be driven to Berkeley Square on a summer afternoon, there to draw up under the trees opposite Gunter's and consume raspberry ices. In those days the cows and milk-stall were not yet evicted from St. James' Park; Booksellers Row had not been sacrificed to the improvement of London, which was then more picturesque and less sanitary. Those were the days of the long frost; the days of the Klondike gold-rush, the Jameson raid, the GrÆco-Turkish war; days in which a boy heard dying rumours of a "baccarat case," of the Parnell divorce, of Barnie Barnato's death, rumours more active but less intelligible of vast financial operations and vaster crashes.

The first five years of life, perhaps the first seven, are the hinterland of memory in which a trail is blazed by word or name and, later, a road straightened and made durable by reading. After seven, memory is in ordered cultivation: after 1895 public events marshal themselves and stand out against the uneventful background of the child's daily life. The fall of the Rosebery government seemed less important than Mr. Gladstone's retirement the year before and, to a boy, neither equalled in excitement the Diamond Jubilee with its thanksgiving-service and procession, its songs and marches, its bunting and illumination. A year later the news-bills stopped every passer-by with the words: "DEATH OF GLADSTONE"; and children who had never seen him cried in the streets of London as they had cried in America or Italy at the passing of Lincoln or Garibaldi.

A year later still came rumours of discord in South Africa; and the patriot of the private school waited eagerly for a declaration of war, less eagerly for news that President Kruger had yielded to pressure; the memory of the Spithead review which had followed the massing of an empire's troops at the Diamond Jubilee was still vivid, and in a hundred thousand truculent hearts there lurked the sinister thought that an army and navy were useless if they did not fight and that small nations existed, in the scheme of creation, to be taught sharp lessons. The handful of opponents who cried out on an impious war of aggression were shouted down or manhandled as "pro-Boers" until the cheers of the Irish and of a few radicals, when a British reverse was announced in the House of Commons, convinced the wondering militarists that opposition might be prompted by a moral sense as well as by native factiousness. These were the days of The Absent-Minded Beggar, of "Black Friday" and the Fall of Ladysmith, of the aged queen's recruiting-tour in Ireland, of the relief of Mafeking and "Mafeking Night" in London; the days when Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener were sent out to cut short the retribution which the arrogance of a swollen power had called down upon its head, the days of concentration-camps and "the methods of barbarism," of the "Khaki" election, of The Islanders and the last despairing shriek of that vulgar ferocity which had brought about this needless and iniquitous bloodshed; the days of Queen Victoria's last illness and death, the approach of peace.

The chapter of imperialism which opened with Mr. Chamberlain's ultimatum and ended with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's grant of self-government to the Union of South Africa was only symptomatic of a wider-spread arrogance and savagery. While the war was still in progress, another chapter of history, shorter but not less infamous, was being enacted in the suppression of the Boxer rising and—incidentally—in the looting of the palace at Pekin. It was in the middle of these two excursions that there began the six years' sojourn at Westminster, to which reference was made in the last chapter.