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.