It may be set down as an axiom that a nation which is in the proper enjoyment of all its faculties, which is healthy, wealthy, wise, and properly conditioned, must be producing a certain amount of poetry. From the beginning this has been so; it will be so to the end. When England was at her highest, when the best in her was having full play, she produced poets. Right down into the Victorian Era she went on producing them. Then she took to the Stock Exchange and an ostentatious way of life, and the supply of poets fell off. If we except Mr. Swinburne, who does not belong rightfully to this present time, there is not a poet of any parts exercising his function in England to-day. Furthermore, any bookseller will tell you that the demand for poetry-books by new writers has practically ceased to exist.
These statements will be called sweeping by a certain school of critics, and I shall be asked to cast my eye round the English nest of singing-birds, and to answer and say whether Mr. So-and-so be not a poet, and Mr. So-and-so, and Mr. So-and-so, and Mr. So-and-so. I shall also be asked to say if I am prepared to deny that of Mr. So-and-so's last volume of verse three hundred copies were actually sold to the booksellers. For the propounders of such questions I have one answer—namely, it may be so.
In the meantime let us do our best to find an English poet who is worth the name, and who is prescriptively entitled to be mentioned in the category which begins with Chaucer and ends with Mr. Swinburne. Shall we try Mr. Rudyard Kipling? Tested by sales and the amount of dust he has managed to kick up, Mr. Kipling should be a poet of parts. He is still young, and, happily, among the living; but it cannot be denied that as a poet he has already outlived his reputation. Two years ago he could set the English-speaking nations humming or reciting whatever he chose to put into metre. Some of his little things looked like lasting. Already the majority of them are forgotten. To the next generation, if he be known at all, he will be known as the author of three pieces—Recessional, the L'Envoi appended to Life's Handicap, and Mandalay. What is to become of such verses as the following?
'Ave you 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor,
With a hairy gold crown on 'er 'ead?
She 'as ships on the foam—she 'as millions at 'ome,
An' she pays us poor beggars in red.
('Ow poor beggars in red!)
There's 'er nick on the cavalry 'orses,
There's 'er mark on the medical stores—
An' 'er troopers you'll find with a fair wind be'ind
That takes us to various wars.
(Poor beggars! barbarious wars!)
Then 'ere's to the Widow at Windsor,
An' 'ere's to the stores and the guns,
The men an' the 'orses what makes up the forces
O' Missis Victorier's sons.
(Poor beggars! Victorier's sons!)
At the time of their appearance these lines and the like of them were vastly admired; everybody read them, most people praised them. They were supposed to stir the English blood like a blast of martial trumpets. Here at length was the poet England had been waiting for. There could be no mistake about him; he had the authentic voice, the incommunicable fire, the master-touch. He had come to stay. At the present moment the bulk of his metrical work is just about as dead and forgotten as the coster-songs of yesteryear. He has not even made a cult; nobody quotes him, nobody believes in him as a poetical master, nobody wants to hear any more of him. His imitators have all gone back to the imitation of better men. If a copy of verses have a flavour of Kipling about it nowadays, editors drop it as they would drop a hot coal. So much for the poet of empire, the poet of the people, the metrical patron of Thomas Atkins, Esq.
Another poet of empire—Mr. W.E. Henley—has fared very little better. "What can I do for England?" is, I believe, still in request among the makers of a certain class of anthology; but English poetry in the bulk is just the same as if Mr. Henley had never been. Even the balderdash about "my indomitable soul" has fallen out of the usus loquendi of young men's Christian associations and young men's debating societies. The Song of the Sword is sung no longer; For England's Sake has gone the way of all truculent war-poetry; and out of Hawthorn and Lavender perhaps a couple of lyrics remain. Mr. Henley attacked Burns when Burns had been a century dead. Who will consider it worth while to attack Mr. Henley in, say, the year 2002?
Possibly the real, true English poet who will in due course put on the laurel of Mr. Austin is Mr. Stephen Phillips. Yet Mr. Stephen Phillips is a purveyor of metrical notions for the stage, and in his last great work—Ulysses—I find him writing as follows:
Athene. Father, whose oath in hollow hell is heard,
Whose act is lightning after thunder-word,
A boon! a boon! that I compassion find
For one, the most unhappy of mankind.
Zeus. How is he named?
Athene. Ulysses. He who planned
To take the towered city of Troy-land—
A mighty spearsman, and a seaman wise,
A hunter, and at need a lord of lies.
With woven wiles he stole the Trojan town
Which ten years' battle could not batter down:
Oft hath he made sweet sacrifice to thee.
Zeus (nodding benevolently). I mind me of the savoury smell.
Athene. Yet he,
When all the other captains had won home,
Was whirled about the wilderness of foam:
For the wind and the wave have driven him evermore,
Mocked by the green of some receding shore.
Yet over wind and wave he had his will,
Blistered and buffeted, unbaffled still.
Ever the snare was set, ever in vain—
The Lotus Island and the Siren strain;
Through Scylla and Charybdis hath he run,
Sleeplessly plunging to the setting sun.
Who hath so suffered, or so far hath sailed,
So much encountered, and so little quailed?
Which is exactly the kind of poetry one requires for the cavern scene of a New Year's pantomime.
Possibly, again, the real, true English poet is Mr. William Watson, with his tiresome mimicry of Wordsworth and his high-and-dry style of lyrical architecture. Mr. Watson is believed to have done great things, but his r?le now appears to be one of austere silence; he is what the old writers would have termed a costive poet. And if his Collected Poems are to be the end of him, his end will not be long deferred. Or, possibly, the one and only poet our England of to-day would wish to boast is Mr. Arthur Symons. Mr. Symons writes just the kind of poetry one might expect of a versifier who, in early youth, had loved a cigarette-smoking ballet-girl, and could never bring himself to repress his passion. Here is a sample of Mr. Arthur Symons at his choicest:
The feverish room and that white bed,
The tumbled skirts upon a chair,
The novel flung half open where
Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints are spread.
And you, half dressed and half awake,
Your slant eyes strangely watching me;
And I, who watch you drowsily,
With eyes that, having slept not, ache:
This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?)
Will rise, a ghost of memory, if
Ever again my handkerchief
Is scented with White Heliotrope.
No doubt, if the English continue to descend the moral Avernus at their present rate of speed, Mr. Symons will become, by sheer process of time, the representative poet of the nation. It is part of a poet's duty to look into the future, and Mr. Symons appears to have taken the next two or three generations of Englishmen by the forelock. May he have the reward which is his due!
For the rest, they all mean well, and they all aim high; but one is afraid that nothing will come of them. There are Francis Thompson, and Laurence Housman, and Henry Newbolt, and Laurence Binyon, and F.B. Money-Coutts, and Arthur Christopher Benson, and Victor Plarr—amiable performers all, but each a standing example of poetical shortcoming. Perhaps one ought not to mention Mr. John Davidson and Mr. W.B. Yeats, because Mr. Davidson is a Scot, and Mr. Yeats, putatively, at any rate, an Irishman. In some respects these twain may be considered the pick of the basket. I am constrained to admit, however, that neither of them has as yet fulfilled his earlier promise.
So that, on the whole, England is practically without poets of marked or extraordinary attainments. The reason is not far to seek. She is losing the breed of noble bloods; her greed, her luxuriousness, her excesses, her contempt for all but the material, are beginning to find her out. Her youths, who should be fired by the brightest emotions, are bidden not to be fools, and taught that the whole duty of man is to be washed and combed and financially successful. Consequently that section of English adolescence which, in the nature of things, begins with poetry and gladness very speedily throws up the sponge. Consecration to the muse is no longer thought of among Englishmen. They cannot be content to be published and take their chance. The dismal shibboleth, "Poetry does not pay," wears them all down. What is the good of writing verses which bring you neither reputation nor emolument? One must live, and to live like a gentleman by honest toil, and devote one's leisure instead of one's life to poetry, is the better part. Meanwhile, England jogs along quite comfortably. She can get Keats for a shilling, and Shakespeare for sixpence. Why should she worry herself for a moment with the new men?
After much patient thinking, the English have come to the conclusion that there is but one branch of literary art, and that its name is Fiction. And by fiction the English really mean the six-shilling novel. I do not think it is too much to say, that since the six-shilling novel was first thrust upon our delighted attention it has never brought within its covers six shillings' worth of reading. The high priest and the high priestess who serve to the right and left of the altar of six-shillingism are, as every one knows, Mr. Hall Caine and Miss Marie Corelli. Each of them wears a golden ephod, with a breastplate of jewels arranged to spell out the magic figures, One Hundred Thousand. All the other priests of the Tabernacle look with awe and envy upon these two, because the other priests' breastplates have hard work to spell out fifty thousand, and some of them do not even achieve one thousand five hundred. Burnt-offerings of Caine and Corelli therefore fill the place with savour. A pair of sorrier writers never was on sea or land. Everybody knows it, nobody denies it, and nobody seems sad about it. The six-shilling novel is an established English institution. Caine and Corelli are its prop and stay, and the rest do their best to keep in the running and pick up the minor money-bags.
The perusal of six-shilling fiction is practically a sort of mania. It has seized in its grip the fairest England has to show, particularly matrons, the younger women, and stockbrokers. For the Englishwoman the daily round would lose its saltness did she not have handy the newest six-shilling novel by Mr. Caine, Miss Corelli, or the next literary bawler in the market-place. There are shops called "libraries," to which the Englishwoman repairs for her supplies of literary pabulum. Here the six-shilling novel has a great time. Strapped together in sixes, or packed in boxes of dozens, it is handed forth to the carriages of its fair devourers, and taken right away to its repose in the cultured homes of Bayswater and Kensington. From morning till night many Englishwomen do little but read this precious stuff. What they get out of it amounts in the long run to hysteria and an?mia. It brings about a general deadening of the mind and a general jaggedness of the emotions, coupled with an utter incapacity to take any save an exaggerated view of the facts of life. Discontent, disillusionment, ennui, boredom, ill-temper, a sharp tongue, and a cynical spirit are other symptoms which the six-shilling novel is prone to evoke. The habit is worse than opium or haschisch or tea cigarettes. It is just the devil, and that is all you need say about it. The persons employed in the opium traffic are supposed to be very wicked. To my mind, the persons employed in the fiction traffic are as wicked as wicked can be. When the foul disease began first to make its ravages obvious, there were not wanting persons who would have checked it and provided remedies for it. These persons squeaked somewhat, and nothing more has been heard of them. So the thing goes on unrestrained, and even applauded by press and pulpit alike; and the Englishwoman has become a confirmed, inveterate, and incurable fiction-reader. If a man have an enemy to whom he would do an abiding injury, let him persuade that enemy to obtain the six more popular six-shilling novels of the moment, and read them through. If the man's enemy sticks to his bargain—at which, however, he will probably shy in the middle of the second volume—the chances are that he gets up from that reading a broken and spiritless man. His brain will be as saggy as a sponge full of treacle, and his vision as unreliable as that of the alcoholist who always saw two cabs, and invariably got into the one that was not there.
Seriously, however, what is there about this English fiction—or, for that matter, about Scottish fiction—that men and women should buy it and devour it to the exclusion of all other literary fare? It is ill-written, it is not original, it is not like life, it is not beautiful, it is not inspiring, it does not touch the profound emotions, it means nothing, and it ends nowhere. The reason of its popularity is, that it appeals to an indolent habit of mind, and, as a general rule, is calculated to excite the passions, and particularly to open up questions which experience has shown to be best left alone. In nine cases out of ten, where a popular work of fiction is concerned, it is always possible to put one's finger on the chapter or passages on which its popularity is based; and in nine cases out of ten that chapter or those passages have to do with sexual matters. The questions which arise out of the relation of man and woman are no doubt vitally important and most interesting; but that they should be discussed in an unscientific, irresponsible, and catch-penny way by everybody who can trail a pen is something of a scandal. If an author can succeed in inventing a sexual situation which could not by any possible chance exist for a moment in real life, or if he can put a glow and a gloss on the tritenesses of love and lust, his success as a fictionist is to all intents and purposes assured. What is sometimes spoken of as wholesome fiction scarcely exists—anyway, nobody reads it. It is the carefully constructed book about sex that sells and is read. Such a book need not be flagrant, as was once thought to be the case; it can be "a work of art"—a thing of veiled suggestion, delicate, unobjectionable, and seemingly meet to be read.
One has hesitation in asserting that such books ought not to be written or ought not to be circulated. It is difficult to justify any attitude of intolerance in such a matter; yet the fact remains that the maids and matrons of England, together with the men who have the leisure and sufficient lack of brains to read fiction, are being stuffed season by season and year by year with about the most undesirable kind of sexual philosophy that could well be placed before them. Of any Englishwoman of the leisured class above the age of sixteen years it may be said, as was said of the late Professor Jowett in a different sense, "What I don't know isn't knowledge." And the instructor in all cases is a fictionist. If a man took his notion of business, or politics, or art, out of six-shilling novels, he would be set down for a fool. Yet most Englishwomen get their view of love and the married relation from these extraordinary works, and it is taken for granted that nobody is a penny the worse. For my own part, I should incline to the opinion that the only persons who are a penny, not to say six shillings, the worse, are the English middle and upper classes as a body.
Much has been said in derision of what the English call the Kailyard school of fiction—Kailyard fiction being, I need scarcely say, a brand of fiction written by Scotsmen usually in Scotland, and sold in the English and the American markets. Everybody of taste and judgment cheerfully admits that Kailyarders are not persons of genius. For the delectation of the Southerner they have made a Scotland of their own, the which, however, is not Scotland. They have made a Scottish sentiment, a Scottish point of view, a Scottish humour, a Scottish pathos, and even a Scottish dialect, which may be reckoned quite doubtful. At the same time, one looks in vain to the Kailyarders for anything that is worse than slobber—anything really noxious and dreadful, that is to say. One might read Kailyard for ever and a day without coming to great moral grief. Indeed, I would point out that, on the whole, the Kailyard system of ethics partakes somewhat of the character of the system of ethics which used to be unfolded in the melodrama of our grandfathers' days. Virtue rewarded, vice punished, is the moral upshot of it. And in any case, and let it be as bad and as meretricious and as greatly to be deprecated as one will, we must always remember that the Kailyard book is a work invented and manufactured, not for Scotsmen, but for the Anglo-Saxon—the Englishman and his offshoots.
Some months back a considerable hubbub arose in English literary circles because M. Jules Verne had been saying to an interviewer, at Amiens of all places in the world! that the novel as a form of literary expression was doomed, and would gradually die out of popular favour. It is safe to say that, in the eyes of sundry critics of pretty well every nationality, the novel has been doomed any time this last fifty years. Yet the novel comes up smiling every time. Since it was reduced in price to six shillings in England it has undoubtedly deteriorated, not only as a piece of writing, but also in the matter of ethical intention. So long as it remains the prey of some of its latter-day exploiters, so long will it continue to deteriorate. So long as the English mind continues to be feeble and unwholesome, and to yearn for artificial thrills and undesirable emotions, so long will English fiction continue to be of its present decadent quality. As the capitalist says, it is all a question of supply and demand. The great aim of writers of fiction, or at any rate of ninety-nine per cent. of them, is to produce an article that will sell. You must turn out what the public want, and they will assuredly buy it. The knack of hitting the public taste looks easy to acquire, and the fictionist strives after it with all his might. Many are called to make fortunes out of novel-writing: few are chosen. But nobody can examine the work of those few without perceiving that for weal or woe—principally for woe—they know their business.
Of course, it goes without saying that a very considerable amount of fiction is published in England which is just as mild and just as innocuous as tinned milk. To this puling variety of fiction, however, the English do not appear to be very greatly drawn. It crops up with great regularity every publishing season, it is solemnly reviewed in the critical journals, and it even stands shoulder by shoulder with stronger meat in the bookshops. But the fact remains that it does not sell; to see "Second Edition" on it is the rarest occurrence. In fine, the English will have their fiction spiced, and highly spiced, or not at all. Mealy mouthed writers, over-reticent, over-blushful, over-austere writers, they do not want; neither have they any admiration for a writer who is plagued with a feeling for style, and who may be reckoned an artist in the collocation of words. Their much-vaunted Meredith has never had the sale of a Crockett or a Barrie or a Hocking, or, for that matter, of a J.K. Jerome. The English have little or no literary taste, little or no literary acumen, and they expect their fictionists to give them anything and everything save what is edifying.
Of old—that is to say, twenty years ago—the great majority of the English people suffered from a mental and general disability which was termed "provincialism." If you hailed from Manchester, or Liverpool, or Birmingham, or Edinburgh, or Glasgow, the kind gentlemen in London who size people up and put them in their places assured you that you were a provincial, and that you would have to rub shoulders a great deal with the world—by which they meant London—before you could rightly consider yourself qualified to exist. Against the epithet "provincial," however, not a few persons rebelled, when it was applied flatly to themselves. Most men of feeling felt hurt when you called them provincial. In the world of letters and journalism to call a man provincial was the last and unkindest cut of all, and it usually settled him, just as to say that he has no sense of humour settles him to-day. Then up rose Thomas Carlyle and Robert Buchanan and a few lesser lights, who said, "You call us provincials: provincials we undoubtedly are, and we glory in the character." This rather baffled, not to say amazed, the lily-fingered London assessors, and gradually the term "provincial," as a term of opprobrium, passed out of use.
It is admitted now on all hands that the provincial is a very useful kind of fellow; and when the metropolis feels itself running short of talent and energy, the provincial is invariably invited to look in. Latterly, however, the Londoner and the dweller in English provincial cities have begun to exhibit a distinctly modern disorder, which may be called, for want of a better term, "suburbanism." In London, which may be taken as the type of all English cities, suburbanism is pretty well rampant. It has its origin in what the Americans would call "location." A man's daily work lies, say, in the City or in the central quarters of London. For various reasons—such, for example, as considerations of health, expenditure, and custom—it is practically impossible for him to live near his work. He must live somewhere; so he goes to Balham, or Tooting, or Clapham, or Brondesbury, or Highgate, or Willesden, or Finchley, or Crouch End, or Hampstead, or some other suburban retreat. London is ringed round with these residential quarters, these little towns outside the walls. A visitor to any one of them is at once struck with its striking and painful similarity to all the others. There is a railway station belonging to one of the metropolitan lines; there is a High Street, fronted with lofty and rather gaudy shops; there is a reasonable sprinkling of churches and chapels; there is a brand-new red-brick theatre; and the rest is row on row and row on row of villa residences, each with its dreary palisading and attenuated grass-plot in front, and its curious annex of kitchen, or scullery, behind. Miles and miles of these villas exist in every metropolitan suburb worth the name; and though the rents and sizes of them may vary, they are all built to one architectural formula, and all pinchbeck, ostentatious, and unlovely. No person of judgment, nobody possessed of a ray of the philosophic spirit, can gaze upon them without concluding at once that the English do not know how to live. Take a street of these villas, big or little, and what do you find? You note, first, that nearly every house, be it occupied by clerk, Jew financier, or professional man, has got a highfalutin name of its own. The County Council or local authority has already bestowed upon it a number. But this is not enough for your suburbanist, who must needs appropriate for his house a name which will look swagger on his letter-paper. Hence No. 2, Sandringham Road, Tooting, is not No. 2, Sandringham Road, Tooting, at all; but The Laurels, if you please. No. 4—not to be outdone—is Holmwood; No. 6 is Hazledene; No. 8, The Pines; No. 10, Sutherland House; and so forth. Then, again, if you walk down a street and keep your eye on the front windows of this thoroughfare of mansions, you will note that every one of those windows has cheap lace curtains to it, and that immediately behind the centre of the window there is a little table, upon which loving hands have placed a green high-art vase, containing a plant of sorts. And right back in the dimness of the parlour there is a sideboard with a high mirrored back.
If you made acquaintance with half a dozen of the occupiers of these houses, and were invited into the half dozen front rooms, you would find in each, in addition to the sideboard before mentioned, a piano of questionable manufacture, a brass music-stool with a red velvet cushion, an over-mantel with mirrored panels, a "saddle-bag suite," consisting of lady's and gent's and six ordinary chairs and a couch; a centre-table with a velvet-pile cloth upon it, a bamboo bookcase containing a Corelli and a Hall Caine or so, together with some sixpenny Dickenses picked up at drapers' bargain-sales, Nuttall's Dictionary, Mrs. Beeton's House Book, a Bible, a Prayer Book, some hymn-books, a work-basketful of socks waiting to be darned, and a little pile of music, chiefly pirated. At night, when Spriggs comes home to The Laurels, he has an apology for late dinner, gets into his slippers, and retires with Mrs. Spriggs, and perhaps his elder daughter, into that parlour. There he reads a halfpenny newspaper till there is nothing left in it to read; then he talks to Mrs. Spriggs about that beast So-and-so, his employer; and Mrs. Spriggs tells him not to grumble so much, and asks the elder daughter why she doesn't play a chune to 'liven us up a bit. "Yes," says Spriggs, "what is the good of having a piano, and me buying you music every Saturday, if you never play?" Whereupon the elder daughter rattles through Dolly Gray, The Honeysuckle and the Bee, and Everybody's Loved by Some One; and Spriggs beats time with his foot till he grows weary, and thinks we had better have supper and get off to bed.
This kind of thing is going on right down both sides of Sandringham Road—at Holmwood, at Hazledene, at The Pines, and at Sutherland House, as well as at The Laurels—every week-day evening between the hours of eight and midnight. In point of fact, it is going on all over Tooting. It is the suburban notion of an 'appy evening at home; and, hallowed as it is by wont and custom, everybody in Tooting takes it to be the best that life can offer after business hours. Perhaps it is. Just before supper, or haply a little afterwards, however, Spriggs says that he believes he will take a little stroll "round the houses." He puts on a straw hat in summer and a tweed cap in winter, and proceeds gravely down the Sandringham Road until he reaches a break in the long array of villas, and is aware of a rather flaring public-house. Into the saloon bar of this hostelry he walks staidly, nods to the company, and asks the barmaid for a drop of the usual. "Let me see," says that sweet lady; "Johnny Walker, is n't it?" "Well, you know it is," says Spriggs, as he hands over threepence. With the glass of whisky in his hand he retires to the nearest red plush settee, and looks listlessly at the illustrated papers on the little table in front of him, drinks somewhat slowly, smokes a pipe, exchanges a word about the weather with the landlord of the establishment, says there's time for another before closing time, has another, and at twelve-thirty trots off home.
The seven or eight other men in the saloon bar being respectively the occupiers of Holmwood, Hazledene, The Pines, Sutherland House, etc., have done almost exactly as Spriggs has done in the way of drinks and nods and illustrated papers and having a final at twenty minutes past twelve. But during the whole evening they have not exchanged a rational word with one another. They have nothing to talk about; therefore they have not talked. They are neighbours, and they know it; but they all hold themselves to be so much superior to one another that they have scorned to speak to each other, except in the most cursory and casual way. Next morning, at a few minutes to nine o'clock, they will all be scooting anxiously along the Sandringham Road with set faces, damp brows, and a fear at their hearts that they are going to miss their train. They will travel in packed carriages, half of them standing up, while the other half growls, to Ludgate Hill or Moorgate Street, as the case may be, and then rush off again to their respective offices, in fear and trembling this time lest they should be three minutes late and the "governor" might notice it.
This is the life of the males in the Sandringham Road year in and year out. Through living in the same houses, in the midst of the same furniture, listening to the same pianos, drinking at the same public-houses, going to business in the same trains, they become as like one another as peas. They are all anxious, all dull, all short of sleep, all short of money. In brief, they have become suburbanized. The monotony and snobbery and listlessness of their home life are reflected in their conduct of the working-day's affairs. There is not a man amongst them who has a soul above his job. Each of them sticks at business, not because he loves it or likes it, but simply because he knows that, if he were discovered in a remissness, he would get what he calls "the sack." Each of them "lunches"—oh, this English lunch!—at the bar of a public-house on a glass of bitter beer and a penny Welsh rare-bit. Each of them feels a bit chippy and not a little sleepy of an afternoon, and each of them races for his train in the evening, chock-full of worry and bad-temper. You must live in the suburbs if you are to live in London at all, and there is no escape from it.
The lines of the female suburbians are cast in more or less pleasant places. They do not need to go to town every day. There are shops galore, filled with just the goods they want, round the corner; and there is always the next female on both sides to gossip with. For, unlike the male suburbian, the female suburbian will talk to her neighbours. Her conversation is of babes, and butchers' meat, and the piece at the theatre, and the bargains at the stores in the High Road, and "him." He, or "him," means the good lady's husband. She never by any chance refers to him either by his Christian name, or his surname, or as "my husband." It is always, "He said to me this morning," or, "As I was saying to him before he went to business,"—which, I take it, is a peculiarly English habit. The female suburbian goes out to tea sometimes, usually at the house of some suburban relative. Her dress is a curious blend of ostentation and economy. She will be in the fashion; and, being an Englishwoman, "expense is no object," providing she can get the money. She has no notion of thrift; she is perennially in arrears with the milk and the insurance man; and when money gets very tight indeed, she lectures her husband on his wicked inability to make more than he is getting. The whole life, whether for male or female, is dreary, harried, unrelieved, and destructive of everything that tends to make life affable and tolerable.
In view of the obvious evils suburbanism has brought about in the English metropolis, it might have been expected that the English provincial cities would have done their best to avoid similar troubles in their own areas. So far from this being the case, however, the craze for suburbanism is making itself apparent wherever one turns. City and borough councils lead the way by erecting, at the public expense, artisans' and clerks' dwellings well out of the town. They hold that fresh air, the open country, and cheap railway fares are all that is wanted to make the English citizen's life a perennial joy to him. Yet the dwellings they erect are of the shoddiest and least homelike kind, the fresh-air which is to do the worker and the children so much good is a doubtful quantity, and the cheap railway fares are bragged about without regard to the time taken up in travelling and the hurry and anxiety to catch trains. Suburbanism as a stereotyped and soul-deadening institution is of purely English origin. In no other country in the world do convention and what other people will say so rule the lives of men as they do in England. Suburbanism is in many ways the most obvious of the many products of English convention. It is at once an indication of brainlessness, want of intelligence, and incipient decay. Apparently there is to be no limit to it. Outside London new suburbs spring up almost weekly. But their newness brings no changes in its train. Each new suburb is mapped out and built exactly on the lines of the old ones; each is destined for the reception of exactly the same kind of stupid people; each will be the living-ground of generations of people still more stupid.
The English man-about-town—and I am not acquainted with any other sort—is, to put it mildly, a devil of a fellow. Who he may be, how he gets a living, whether he gets a living, how and why he became a man-about-town, and whether, after all, he is really a man-about-town, are matters which are wrapt in mystery. Everybody knows him, yet nobody knows much about him. You meet him everywhere, yet nobody can tell you how he gets there. His acquaintance is astonishing, ranging from dustmen to dukes, as it were; he cuts nobody, though he is intimate with nobody; he is familiar with his world and all that it expects of him; and he plays the game skilfully, correctly, and as a gentleman should. There are droves of him in London; probably no other city in the world could, with comfort, accommodate so many of him. He lives in the sun; he is the joy and pride of the restaurateurs' and the café-keepers' hearts; no billiard-room is complete without him; he shines at bars of onyx; music-halls and theatres could not get on without him; and, on the whole, it is his useful and pleasing function to keep the West End of London and its offshoots going. What the West End of London means to the man-about-town is a large question. It means clubs in the morning, with a tailor, a hatter, a bookmaker or two, thrown in; it means expensive lunches, lazy, somnolent afternoons, big dinners, hard drinking, cards, night clubs, and a day that ends at three o'clock in the morning. Nobody but an Englishman could stand the racket; nobody but an Englishman could find satisfaction in so doing.
The man-about-town is the last expression of an unhealthy plutocracy; he is the child of means, the son of his father, the pampered darling of his mother; and he has never understood that life was anything more than a frivolous holiday. Whether he has money or happens to have spent it all, he sets the standard of expenditure for everybody who would be considered in the movement. He also sets the fashion in hats, coats, trousers, fancy waistcoats, shoes, walking-sticks, and scarf-pins for Englishmen at large. It never occurs to him that he does this, but he does it. He it is, too, who is the prime supporter and patron of the manly English sports, horse-racing, glove-fighting, coaching, moting, polo, shooting, fishing, yachting, and so forth. In these exercises he finds great delight. When he is not busy dining and wining and painting the town red, sport is the mainstay of his existence.
He is usually young till he reaches the age of thirty, when he begins to decline rapidly. But the older he gets the younger he gets. Although he may lose his hair, and be compelled to have resort to false teeth and elastic stockings, his spirits are invariably of the cheerfullest, his laugh is boisterous, his interest in life acute, and he continues to be passionately fond of food and drink. It is not till his locks become hoar, his purse well-nigh empty, and the number of his years well over threescore-and-ten that he begins to droop. Englishmen will point him out to you in cafés, and say with hushed voices, "You see that man,—the one with the frowsy beard and his hat atilt—well, he spent a hundred and fifty thousand twice! A hundred and fifty thousand, my boy! What did he do with it? Oh, well, what do people do with money? There's a man, sir, that's seen life: used to have a house in Berkeley Square; has owned three Derby winners; built the Thingamybob Theatre for Miss Jumpabouty; knows everybody; has hobnobbed with the King when he was Prince of Wales; used to be hand-in-glove with the Duke of —— and that crowd; and now, damme! he hasn't a pennypiece."
All this with the air of a person who is showing you something worth seeing. It is the English fatuity, first of all, to admire the man who is possessed of wealth; secondly, to admire a man who is throwing his money away; and, thirdly, to look with respectful awe upon the man who has thrown it away. It warms the English heart and fires the English imagination to see the son of a recently deceased provision-dealer playing the prince at the best hotels, plunging at Ascot and Monte Carlo, buying up the stalls at the Frivolity at the behest of Lottie Flutterfast, and generally flinging to the winds the hard-earned and, to a great extent, ill-gotten estate of his late lamented parent. By all the best people—by all the best English people, that is to say—such a youth is received and made welcome, if not exactly taken to the bosom. Englishmen ask him to dinner simply because he has money. They are aware that his courses will not bear examination, that his tastes are gross, that his intellect is none of the brightest. He has nothing to say for himself; he is neither entertaining, nor amusing, nor instructive. The Englishman has no ulterior designs upon him; he does not hope to get him into this or that financial swim, neither does he desire to marry his daughter to him; he simply feels that it is well to be friendly with money and the man-about-town.
Even a bankrupt or "broke" man-about-town is better to the Englishman than none at all. With such a person he will foregather and be pleasant in the sight of all men. "Old So-and-so," he says, "is a dear old sort. He is broke, of course, and sometimes he rather worries one for sovereigns. But I have never deserted a pal in adversity in my life, and I am not going to begin with Old So-and-so." Thus your good snob Englishman would lead you to believe that he was on terms of intimacy and affection with Old So-and-so in Old So-and-so's palmy money-squandering days. Whereas, in point of fact, he never clapped eyes on the man till he had spent his last farthing.
It is all very English, and to a mere Scot a trifle astonishing. The Scot, if I know him at all, takes no joys of spendthrifts, however prettily dressed, and, least of all, can he be brought to court the society of a man who has reduced himself to beggary by extravagance and riot. The bare gift of prodigality and the bare reputation of having been wealthy are nothing to the Scot. If he wants men to admire, he can find men of solider quality. The Englishman, on the other hand, has no great love for either solidity or worth; the first makes him envious; the second bores him. Though he may himself be a person of judgment and sober life, he likes to have about him men who are going or who have gone the whole hog, and who pursue their pleasures without restraint, remorse, or fear. Hence the man-about-town will always figure interestingly in English society. There is romance about him. He has been foolish, and perhaps even wicked; but he belongs to the select coterie of people who, when all is said, make the gay world go round.
Mr. Crosland has very kindly suggested that "under the inspiring tutelage of the national bard Scotland has become one of the drunkenest nations in the world." I shall not retaliate as one might do, but shall content myself by referring the reader to the easily accessible tables of statistics, which render it quite plain that Scotland's drunkenness is very considerably exceeded by the drunkenness of England.
In London, at any rate, strong drink flows like a river. There are 5300 licensed houses in the metropolitan area alone. In Kilburn, a suburb of more or less irreproachable respectability, there are twenty-five churches and chapels and thirty-five public-houses. During late years public-house property has begun to be looked upon in the light of a gilt-edged investment. Turn where one will, one finds the older inns are being swept away, while on their sites are erected flaring gin-palaces, with plate-glass fronts, elaborate mahogany fitments, gorgeous saloon and private bars, painted ceilings, inlaid floors, and electric light throughout. Behind the bar, instead of mine host of a former day and his wife and daughter, there are half a dozen perked-up barmaids with rouged cheeks and Rossetti hair, and a person called the manager, who for ￡2 a week runs the place for its proprietors—a Limited Company, which owns, perhaps, twenty or thirty other houses. In the conduct of these mammoth drinking-places three great points are kept in view: namely, that a quick-drinking, stand-up trade pays better than any amount of slow regular custom; that the English drinker of the lower class cannot tell the difference between good drink and bad, often preferring, indeed, the bad to the good; and that, as bad liquor is cheaper than good, the sound commercial thing to do is to supply bad liquor.
With these admirable axioms continually before it, the English trade has prospered amazingly. More drink and worse drink is sold in England to-day than has ever been sold in England before. Through legislation intended to ensure sound liquor and the proper conduct of licensed houses the proprietors have consistently made a point of driving the usual brewer's dray. "In order to meet the Food and Drugs Adulteration Act, all spirits sold at this establishment, while of the same excellent quality as heretofore, are diluted according to strength." "The same excellent quality as heretofore" is choice, and so is "diluted according to strength." As for the beer, we dilute also the beer according to strength. When we are caught at it, it is a mistake on the part of the cellarman, who has been discharged; and the fine is so small in proportion to the profit on selling water, that we smile at the back of our necks and keep on diluting according to strength. Our whole system, in fact, is designed to make people drink, and to make them drink the worst that we dare put before them.
Now, the Scot, drunkard or no drunkard, does have something of a taste in liquor. The best clarets have gone to Scotland (in spite of Mr. Crosland) since claret became a dinner wine. You cannot put off a Scot with either bad whisky or bad beer. He knows what whisky should be and what beer should be, and in Scotland, at any rate, he never has any difficulty in getting them. But the English, taking them in the mass, are quite the other way. Any sort of wine, provided it be properly fortified and sophisticated, passes with them for the real thing. Their Scotch whisky is about the most wholesome thing they drink; but large quantities of this are bought by English merchants in a crude state, and rammed down the public throat without a thought to maturing, blending, and otherwise rendering the spirit potable. English beer, we have been told in song and story, is the finest beer in the world. Yet nobody can visit an English brewery without discovering that English beer is not English beer at all. Glucose in the place of malt, quassia and gentian in the place of hops, finings in the place of storage, are the universal order; and so depraved and perverted has the fine old English taste in beer become that brewers who have set up to provide an honest article and sent it out to their customers have had it returned with the curt comment that "nobody would drink such hog-wash, and what the customers wanted was beer, and not brewer's apron." Every now and again scares crop up in consequence of the use of improper ingredients; there is an inquiry, a Royal Commission, and the Englishman still goes on stolidly drinking. Arsenic will not drive him away from his favourite tipple, neither will cocculus indicus or any of the round dozen abominations upon which the brewer's chemist takes his stand.
If there is one thing more than another that is considered the chief necessity of life in the English household of the poorer class, it is beer, and its sister beverage, porter. From morning till night the can is continually going between the house of the artisan and the neighbouring "public." The first thing in the morning the artisan himself must have a couple of goes of rum and milk; by eleven o'clock he is ready for a pint of four-half; at noon, when he knocks off for dinner, he will imbibe a quart or more of the same beverage; and at night, after work, he sits in the taproom till closing-time, and drinks as much as ever he can pay for or chalk up. Meanwhile, his wife must have her drop of porter in the morning, her drop of bitter to dinner, and her drop of something hot before going to bed. Also on Saturday afternoons, when the twain go marketing together, they must have a few drinks, just to show there is no ill-feeling; while on Saturday night the artisan not infrequently improves the shining hours by "getting blind," to use his own elegant phrase. Thus it quite commonly happens that a third and even a half of the total income of a household of the artisan class is spent in alcohol. Thrift, provision for a rainy day and for old age, become an impossibility. Underfeeding usually walks hand in hand with overdrinking; the man loses his nerve, the woman her comeliness and her capacity; and the end is pauperism and a pauper's grave, if nothing worse.
Among the English middle and upper classes there is distinctly a greater tendency to moderation than among the lower classes. For all that, the middle classes especially can point to a great many brilliant examples of the fine art of soaking. Publicans, betting-men, commercial travellers, proprietors of businesses, solicitors' clerks, journalists, and the like get through an amount of drinking in the course of a day which would probably appal even themselves if they kept an account of it. "Let's 'ave a drink," is invariably one of the first phrases dropped when two Englishmen meet. "We'll 'ave another" is sure to follow; and so is, "'Ang it, man! we must have a final." Among the middle classes, too, as also among the upper classes, there is a very great deal of secret drinking, particularly among women and persons whose professional or official positions necessitate the maintenance of an appearance of extreme respectability. The grocer's license and his fine stock of carefully selected wines and spirits offer a ready means of supply to the female dipsomaniac, who would not be seen in a public-house for worlds; besides, gin can be charged as tea in a grocery account, and many a bottle of brandy has figured in such accounts under the innocent pseudonym of "rolled ox-tongue."
Though the English upper classes, as I have said, drink with a certain moderation, their moderation really embraces a quantity of liquor which would send the artisan quite off his head. Whiskies-and-sodas at noon, Burgundy at lunch, with cognac to one's coffee, three kinds of wine at dinner, followed by liqueurs and whisky, make no appreciable mark on a man who is living at his ease and can sleep as long as he likes; but the sum total of alcohol is quite considerable, and probably greater than that consumed by the "drunken sot" for whom my lord has such contempt.
Of English drinking, generally, one may remark that it is done in a very deliberate and unsociable way. The English cannot be said to drink for company's sake. They do not foregather and carry on their drinking merrily. In their cups they are neither witty nor happy, but just dull and dour and inclined to be quarrelsome. They drink for drinking's sake,—for the sake of intoxication, and to drown trouble. I wish them good luck and less of their vile concoctions!
The subject of diet—he prefers to call it diet—is apparently one of unlimited interest to the Englishman. Meet him where you will, he is ever ready to discuss, first, the weather, and then the things—that is to say, the kinds of food—that agree with him. Indeed, you could almost stake your life on extracting from any strange Englishman you happen to come across some such statement as, "I can't abide eggs," or, "Veal always makes me bilious," within ten minutes of opening up a conversation with him. The Englishman's house, we are told, is his castle; and the Englishman's hobby, surely, is his digestion. In point of fact, ninety-nine per cent. of adolescent and adult English people suffer from chronic indigestion in a more or less severe form. Flatulence, heartburn, colic, and "liver" are the Englishman's mortal heritage. He is invariably troubled with some of them, and quite commonly with all. If you relieved him of them he would scarcely thank you, because he has nursed them from his youth up, and what he really wants is amelioration, and not cure. Probably this is the reason why in the midst of his wails and his unholy talk about diet he continues to feed in precisely the grossest, greasiest, and least rational manner that generations of bad feeders have been able to develop.
Of mornings, if you sojourn with an English family, you will be invited to breakfast at half-past eight. Promptly at that hour they serve a sort of sickly oatmeal soup, compounded apparently of milk and sugar, which they call porridge. Then follow thick and piping-hot coffee with 'am and eggs, fish, or a chop, and bread and butter and marmalade as a sort of wind-up. The man who tackles this menu goes to business belching like a torn balloon. By eleven o'clock, however, he is ready for a little snack—oysters and chablis, prawns on toast, a mouthful of bread and cheese and a bottle of Bass, or something of that kind. Then at half-past one there is lunch, practically a dinner of several courses, or a cut from the joint, accompanied by what the English euphoniously term "two veg." At tea-time your Englishman must needs lave himself in a dish of Orange-Pekoe or Bohea, to the accompaniment of lumps of cake. And at long and last comes dinner, the crowning guzzle of the Englishman's day, and a function usually spread over a couple of hours. It will be perceived that this gustatory programme or routine has been copied from the French. The French put away two good meals per diem, one at noon and the other in the evening, and there is no reason why the English should not do the same. When you come to think of it, dinner in the middle of the day is a low, under-bred, undistinguished arrangement; also not to dine at night is to run the risk of not losing one's figure, and of having the neighbours say that one cannot afford it.
The French programme would be all very well if it were carried out on French lines all through. But it is not. When you say "soup" in a French restaurant, it means that you will be served with half a dozen table-spoonfuls of consommé, or petite marmite, or bisque, as the case may be. When the Englishman says "soup," he means enough thick stock to wash a bus down. What is more, he gets it and swallows it. And it is so all down the menu—too much of everything, and don't you think you can put me off with your blooming hom?opathic portions. A liberal table, no stint, good food, and plenty of it, is one of the bulwarks of English respectability. That bad digestion and talks about diet follow is nobody's fault.
This profusion—this overfood, as it were—has been brought to its noblest expression by the English aristocracy, whose tables literally groan with costly viands, whose spits are always turning, and whose scullions and kitchen wenches are as an army. It is related that when a certain duke found it necessary to retrench, and was advised by his family solicitor to get rid of his fifth, sixth, and seventh cooks, his grace remarked, "But ——, So-and-so, a man must have a biscuit!" And the English middle class of course faithfully imitates to the best of its powers the English upper class, and so on through the grades. Among all classes there is a rooted prejudice against food that happens to be cheap. To this day people who eat escallops are rather looked down upon, for no other reason than that oysters run you into half a crown a dozen, while you can get excellent escallops at ninepence. So the herring, the whiting, and other kinds of cheap fish are considered little better than offal by persons who can afford to pay for sole and salmon. Turtle soup is infinitely to be preferred to any other soup in the world because it is dearer, and champagne is drunk, not because people like it, but because it looks swagger and testifies to the possession of means. These gustatory idiosyncrasies are purely English, and obviously they are the offspring of the English love of display and superfluity.
Among the lower classes the general feeding, though cheaper, is just as wasteful and just as gross. Excluding bread, it consists chiefly of inferior cuts of butcher's meat with charcuterie and dried fish thrown in. It has been complained against the Scot that he is none too clean a feeder, delighting hugely in inferior meats. Haggis is held forth as a great exemplar in point. But it cannot be denied that throughout England the one kind of emporium for the sale of comestibles which flourishes and is unfailingly popular is the pork or ham-and-beef shop. And here what do you obtain? Why, exactly the meats which gentlemen of the type of Mr. Henley describe as offal. They include, in addition to pork in and out of season, pig's feet, pig's heads, pig's liver and kidneys, pig's blood sausages, the "savoury duck" or mess of seasoned remnants, tripe boiled and raw, and chitterlings. So that the haggis of Scotland is fairly well balanced. I am not suggesting for a moment that the English display other than a proper judgment in devouring these dainties. But if they will favour the pork shop and its contents, they can scarcely expect to be set down for an angel-bread and manna-eating people.
Perhaps the chief scandal about English feeding lies in the condition of the English hotels. On the Continent an hotel is an establishment for the accommodation of travellers requiring food and rest. In England an hotel is an establishment for the accommodation of landlords and waiters. "High class cuisine," says the tariff card, also "wines and spirits of the best selected quality." Yet one's experience tells one that, though the bill will be heavy, neither the cuisine nor the wines will be more than passable, much less high class. A menu which is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, bad cooking, careless service, and a general lack of finish, are the things one may expect at an English hotel with the tolerable certainty of not being disappointed. To complain is to draw forth the ill-disguised contempt of bibulous head-waiters and the stiff apologies of haughty proprietors. But beyond that mortal man will never get, because the English hotel is an immemorial and conservative institution, and as wise in its own conceit as the ancient sphinx. Of late and in London attempts have been made to organise hotels adapted to the best kind of requirement. So far as I am aware, only two of them have really succeeded, and the charges at both places are quite prohibitive.
Closely identified, one might almost say affiliated, to the English hotel is the English railway-buffet, of which so much has been said in song and story. The sheer horribleness of the "refreshments" here provided has passed into a proverb. The English themselves admit that if you wish to know the worst about refreshments, you should drink the railway-buffet tea and partake of the railway-buffet sandwich. They also admit that for abominations in the way of a?rated waters, milk, beer, and whisky, pastry, cakes, hard-boiled eggs, cold meats, boiled chicken and ham, and chops and steaks from the grill, the railway-buffet takes the palm; and they admit further that the Hebes who dispense these comestibles to the hungry and howling mob have the manners of duchesses. Yet the English without their railway-buffets would be an utterly woebegone and miserable people. Put an Englishman down at a strange railway-station with a half-hour wait before him. He has but one resort: he inquires right off for the buffet, and there he gorges and swizzles till the warning bell advises him of the departure of his train. If there is no buffet, he becomes a dejected, pallid man, and threatens to write to the newspapers. So long as the railway-buffets continue to exist, the English digestion can never aspire to perfection, even though English feeding and cooking outside railway-stations became ideal; for a single "meal" of railway-buffet viands would permanently disorganise the digestive capabilities of the most ostrichy ostrich that ever walked on two legs.
The English love to be ruled, just as eels are said to take delight in being skinned. They hold that a nation which is properly ruled cannot fail of happiness. Their notion of rule may be summed up in the phrase, "Law and order." The Englishman believes that law and order are heaven-sent blessings especially invented for his behoof. "Where else in the world," he will ask you grandiloquently, "do you get such law and such order as you get in England—the land of the free?" If anybody picks his pocket, or encroaches upon his land, or infringes his patent rights, or diverts his water-courses, the Englishman knows exactly what to do. There is the law. They keep it on tap in great buildings called courts, and persons in wigs serve out to you precisely what you may deserve with great gusto and solemnity. The man picked your pocket, did he? Three months' imprisonment for the man. Somebody is making colourable imitations of your patent dolls' eyes. Well, you can apply for an injunction. And so on.
This is law. All Englishmen believe in it, particularly those who have never had any. When it comes to the worst, and the Englishman finds that he really must take on a little of his own beautiful specific, he usually begins by falling into something of a flutter. Those bewigged and sedate persons seated in great chairs, with bouquets in front of them and policemen to bawl "Silence!" for them, begin to have a new meaning for the Englishman. Hitherto he has regarded them complacently as the bodily representatives of the law in a free country. He has smacked his lips over them, rejoiced in their learning, wit, and acumen, warmed at the notion of their dignity, and thanked God that he belonged to a free people—free England. Now, when it comes to a trifling personal encounter before this mountain of dignity—this mountain of dignity perched on a mountain of precedent, as it were—the Englishman shivers and looks pale. But his solicitor and his counsel and his counsel's clerk—particularly his counsel's clerk—soon put him at his ease, and instead of withdrawing at the feel of the bath, he is fain to plump right in. Whether he comes out on top or gets beaten is another matter; in any case, the trouble about the thing is that, win or lose, it is infinitely and appallingly costly. Law, the Englishman's birthright, is not to be given away. If you want any, you must pay for it, and pay for it handsomely, too. Otherwise you can go without. The English adage to the effect that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor is one of those adages which are very subtly true. There is a law for the rich, certainly. There is also a law for the poor—namely, no law at all. On the whole the Englishman who has not had his pristine dream of English law shattered by contact with the realities is to envied. All other Englishmen, whether their experience has lain in County Courts, High Courts, or Courts of Appeal, talk lovingly of English law with their tongues in their cheeks.
With respect to order, the much bepraised handmaiden of law, I do not think that the English get half so much of her as they think they do. She costs them a pretty penny. The up-keep of her police and magistrates and general myrmidons runs the Englishman into some noble taxation; yet where shall you find an English community that is orderly if even an infinitesimal section of it has made up its mind to be otherwise? In London at the present moment there are whole districts which it is not safe for a decently dressed person to traverse even in broad daylight; and these districts are not by any means slum districts, but parts of the metropolis in which lie important arteries of traffic. There is not a square mile of the metropolitan area which does not boast its organised gang of daylight robbers, purse-snatchers, watch-snatchers, and bullies who would beat a man insensible for fourpence, and whose great weapon is the belt.
For convenience' sake these people have been grouped together under the term "Hooligan." The police—the far-famed London police—can do nothing with them. They admit that they are ineradicable and irrepressible. The magistrates and the newspapers keep on asseverating that "something must be done." That something apparently consists in the capture of a stray specimen of the tribe, who is forthwith given three months, with perhaps a little whipping thrown in. But hooliganism is a business that continues to flourish like the green bay-tree, and London is no safer to-day than it was in the time of the garotters. As the belt is the weapon of the London robber, and as Hooligan is his name, so we find in all the larger provincial towns gangs of scoundrels with special instruments and slang names of their own. In Lancashire and the Black Country kicking appears to be the favourite method of dealing with the order-loving citizen. In some of the northern towns the knuckle-duster, the sand-bag, and the loaded stick are requisitioned; and in all cases we are told the police are powerless. The fact is, that, on the whole, England cannot be reckoned an orderly country. The "hooligans" and their provincial imitators are just straws that show the way of the wind. When these persons say: "We will do such and such things in contravention of the law," there is practically nothing to stop them. In the same way, when a community determines to run amuck on an occasion of "national rejoicing" (such as the late Mafeking night), or because a strike is in progress, or a charity dinner has been badly served, or the vaccination laws are being enforced, it does so at its own sweet will, and order can be hanged. Once a week, too,—namely, on Saturday nights,—English order, like the free list at the theatres, is entirely suspended. Saturday night is the recognised and inviolable hour of the mob. Throughout the country your flaring English gin-palaces are at their flaringest; the beer-pumps sing together with a myriad voices, and the clink of glasses takes the evening air with beauty. Until, perhaps, eight o'clock all goes well; then the quarrelsomeness which the English masses extract from their cups begins to assert itself, and the chuckers-out (in what other country in the world are there chuckers-out?) and the police begin to be busy. Till long after midnight their hands are full, and it is not until the Sabbath is a couple of hours old that the English masses seek their rest. In the meantime what squalid indiscretions, what sins against humanity, what outrages, have not been committed? The bare consumption of drink alone has been appalling; the bickerings, angry shoutings, indulgences in pugilism and hair-pulling, have been infinite; and on Monday morning the police-courts will have their usual plethora of drunks and disorderlies, wife-beatings and assaults on the police, with, perhaps, a case or two of manslaughter and a murder to put the crown on things.
In the main, therefore, law and order may be counted among John Bull's many illusions. They are, as one might say, sweet to meditate upon; they look all right on paper, and they sound all right in the mouths of orators. For the rest the Englishman who is wise smiles and keeps a folded tale. One may note, before leaving this entertaining subject, that in England lawyers and laymen alike take a special pride in admitting a certain ignorance. At the bare mention of Scots law they lift up pious hands and impious eyes and say, "Thank Heaven, we know nothing about it!"
Lord Rosebery, whom the worthy Mr. Crosland dislikes on purely racial grounds, is usually credited as the originator of what has latterly become the Englishman's watchword, "Educate, educate, educate!" Whether it was the Scotch half of Lord Rosebery or the English half that prompted him to this simple human cry, I shall not pretend to say. On the other hand, it is certain that when his Lordship offered the English such a profound piece of advice, he gave them exactly the counsel that they most needed; for, though the English boast of their knowledge, though they are the arrogant possessors of seats of learning out of which can come nothing but perfection, though they possess ancient universities and ancient public schools, though they have a school-board system and free education, and though their country is overrun with middle-sized men who play billiards and drink bitter beer and call themselves schoolmasters, they are indubitably and unmistakably an uneducated people.
Until the passing of the Elementary Education Act of 1870, learning in England amounted practically to a luxury. Only the rich might be permitted to know things. It was a case of schools, colleges, and universities for the sons of noblemen and gentlemen. The rascally lower classes might look after themselves. It is open to question whether the rascally lower classes were not, on the whole, educationally better off in that day than they are at present. That, however, is by the way. But in the later sixties the reformer got his eagle eye on the rascally lower classes. He perceived that the rascally lower classes were in bad case. They got drunk, they used foul language, they smoked short pipes, and, Heaven help them! they could not read. Anticipating the English or Scotch half of Lord Rosebery, as the case may be, the reformer said, "Educate, educate, educate!" And it was so. The English have been educating ever since. They educated to such purpose that thirty years later Lord Rosebery felt it incumbent upon himself to bid them educate, educate, educate! In those thirty years the rascally lower classes learned somewhat. They were supposed to discover, inter alia, that knowledge was power. They were told that a hodman who could write his name was a better hodman than the hodman whose sign-manual was a cross. They were led shrewdly to infer that their pastors and masters and general betters owed their supremacy to knowledge; and that if they, the rascally lower classes, would only instruct their children, these same children might wax great in the land and carry burdens no more. The rascally lower classes sent their children to school, some of them cheerfully, some of them with groans; and the stars began to shine over England's darkness.
What has come to pass all men know. Every Englishman gets the smatterings of a literary education, and believes in his heart that he was cut out by the Almighty to be a clerk. The honest trades and handicrafts are no longer desirable in the minds of English youth. To take one's coat off with a view to livelihood is a business for dolts and fools. Advertise in England for an office-boy and you shall receive five hundred applications; advertise for a boy to learn plumbing, and you will be offered, perhaps, two daft-looking lads, who after much thrashing have managed to attain the age of fourteen years.
The fact is, that the English do not know what education means. At the public schools, and at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, education has become, to a great extent, a social matter. You go to these places to learn, certainly; but you also go with a view to the formation of a desirable and influential acquaintance, and to get upon your forehead the mark which is supposed to make glorious the public-school and university-bred Englishman. As a general rule, that mark is altogether imperceptible to the eyes of the unelect, who, if the truth must be told, discover the university man not so much by his manners or conversation as by his ineptitudes. When one comes to consider the principles upon which the public-school and university system are worked, one is quite prepared to admit that, were it not for the element of snobbery patent in the system, English public schools and universities alike would in the long run have to be disestablished. As it is, they are the conventional resort of aristocratic adolescence, and permitted to exist only on condition that, if a low middle-class person can find the money and keep up the style, he, too, may join the angelic host. To the man of temperament, to the scholar, to the man who loves learning for learning's sake, the English universities have precious little to offer.
After Oxford and Cambridge, one turns to London and the non-resident foundations, all of them, I believe, modern. Here, as it seems to me, the English err again. Broadly speaking, these institutions, wittingly or unwittingly, devote their energies to the preparation of young men for the Civil Service. If you are an English board-school teacher at ￡80 a year and you discover that a second-class clerk in the Circumlocution Department commences at ￡300 a year, and that, roughly, the examination to be passed is the same as for matriculation at London, you naturally go in bald-headed for matriculation at London. For the learning you get by these efforts you have not the smallest respect. If, on presenting yourself for examination by the Civil Service Commissioners, you come out sufficiently high on the list to secure an appointment, well and good. If not, your labour has been wasted. It is this spirit which is at the bottom of the English ignorance. With them, learning, education, is a means to an end, and not in the least its own exceeding great reward. Hence a properly educated Englishman is almost as rare as a blue rose. For the masses—the rascally lower orders, that is to say—there are the board schools. Here for thirty years past has been enacted about the sweetest travesty of education that the mind of man could conceive. For the teaching of the children of the rascally lower orders, the wise English Government, with the assistance of the wise English school boards, has invented what is to all intents and purposes a new type of man. And his name shall be called Schoolmaster. He began Heaven knows how. But if you inquire into him, you will find that he has spent three years at a Government training college, and that prior to this experience he was for some years a pupil teacher; also that he is a son of the people, and that his father drove an engine or kept a shop. In these latter circumstances he was, perhaps, fortunate. The marvellous fact about him is that, in spite of his years of pupil-teachership and of his three years at a Government training college, he is not a man of either learning or culture. I am told that an English pupil teacher is not expected to fash himself by the study of either Latin or Greek. Two books of Euclid will see him through the stiffest of his examinations. He does not need to have even a nodding acquaintance with modern languages; and as for science, if he really wants some, he must pick it up at evening classes. Even when he passes into the Government training college,—where, by the way, he is instructed and boarded and lodged gratis,—his studies do not become in any way profound. The history of England, the geography of the world, arithmetic according to Barnard Smith, algebra according to Dr. Todhunter, Latin and Greek according to Dr. William Smith (Part I.), with a little French,—a very little French,—bring him to the end of his tether.
Really, the whole business is childish. Any youth of average capacity should get through the entire three years' course in six weeks. Of course, there is the so-called technical training to reckon with; that is to say, a man at one of these colleges is supposed to spend a great deal of his time, and no doubt does, in perfecting himself as a teacher; but one would have thought that actual practice in an ordinary school would be the best instructor in this respect. In any case, nobody can consider closely the English schoolmaster as manufactured at Government training colleges without perceiving that the Government turns out a very remarkable article indeed. I have no desire to belittle a hard-worked, and probably underpaid, body of public servants. Their profession is a thankless one. I do not think for a moment a single man of them went into it with his eyes open, and I know for a certainty that the school boards and the Government between them have so hedged it round with petty annoyances that a man possessed of feeling must loathe it. It is probably this feeling of loathing of his work that keeps the English schoolmaster down. He knows that it is vain for him to go a hair's-breadth out of the beaten tracks. The school boards must have grants; the Government inspectors must be satisfied. There is only one method of ensuring these desirable consummations: that one way amounts to sheer mechanism and slog. The English schoolmaster must have no temperament. If he possess such a thing, he is bound to come to great grief. Hence the whole weight of the English system is, from first to last, employed in the work of knocking temperament out of him and keeping it out. His three years' free training particularly tend to make a slack, unthinking sap-head of him. He gets a parchment which entitles him to call himself a certificated teacher, and he is taught to imagine that for downright learning there is nothing like himself under the sun. In this latter surmise he is quite right. The schoolmaster in England, though he will probably be another quarter of a century waking up to the fact, counts for next to nothing. Men of parts avoid him; men of no parts laugh at him. For himself, I imagine, he will long continue to believe in his heart that he is a great man, a little lower, perhaps, than a parson, but certainly a little higher than a policeman.
The real value of English education, like the real value of most other things, becomes apparent when it is put to the test of practical affairs. Any employer of labour will tell you that, whether an English boy come to him from a board school or a school of a higher grade, whether he be the son of a ploughman or of what the English call a professional man, he is always and inevitably a good deal of a fool. You have to teach him how to lick stamps. You have to teach him that, excepting in so far as he can write and read, what he has learned at school is not wanted; you have to teach him how many beans make five; you have to teach him that punctuality and accuracy are worth more in business than all the botany he ever learned; and all the time you have to watch him like a cat watching a mouse. "Fire out the fools!" once exclaimed Dr. Robertson Nicoll. I do not think it is too much to say that, if the average English employer took the hint, he would have nobody left to do his business for him.
To amuse oneself is the great art of life. From the English point of view, the finest kind of amusement is to be obtained by killing something. Fox-hunting, deer-stalking, grouse-shooting, pheasant-shooting, pigeon-shooting, and even rabbit-shooting still stand for a great deal among the best class of Englishmen. Of old, the masses had their bull-baitings, dog-fights, and cock-fights. These, however, are no longer regarded as legitimate forms of amusement, and the masses, being for various reasons unable to hunt foxes and shoot pheasants, have to fall back on recreations in which killing takes place only by accident. There is the race-course and the football-field. The masses are expected to consider themselves happy. Outside racing and football, however, the come-day, go-day Englishman has a good many facilities for recreation. Although in most communities the grandfatherly authorities have abolished the old feasts and fairs, which provided periodic saturnalia of merry-go-rounds and wild-beast shows, it is a poor townlet which cannot nowadays boast its permanent settlement of cocoanut-shies and shooting-galleries, where on Saturday evenings the true-born Englishman may find substantial joys. Then, for the Londoner, in addition to this kind of thing, there are from time to time provided vast orgies at Hampstead Heath, the Welsh Harp, Barnet Fair, and other choice resorts. Here, again, it is a case of cocoanuts, shooting-galleries, swing-boats, steam-roundabouts, and a?rial flights, backed up with donkey-rides, a free use of the tickler and the ladies' teaser, unlimited confetti throwing, and unlimited beer. These amusements, of course, are on the face of them quite innocent, and equally English and unintellectual.
Failing merry-go-rounds and cocoanut-shies, the delights of which are apt to pall, the English masses have still left to them their main redoubt of rational enjoyment, which, for reasons no man may skill, is called the music-hall. The English music-hall is practically an expansion or efflorescence of the old-fashioned "sing-song." Sixty years ago the man who went out to take a stoup of ale at his inn was accustomed to be regaled with a little music free of charge. Mine host had possessed himself of a second-hand piano, and secured the services of some broken-down musician to play it for him. There was a great singing of old songs, and the time sped merrily, as it did in the golden age. These feasts of harmony brought custom, and in course of time the evening "sing-songs" at certain hostelries became organised institutions and were run on lines of great enterprise, the piano being supplemented by an orchestra, and the pianist by a number of professional singers and entertainers. Within the last fifty years the "sing-song" has been separated from its parent the alehouse, and has developed into the music-hall. To-day the English music-halls are almost as thick on the ground as churches and chapels. In the metropolis you would have a difficulty to count them. In the provinces every town of size supports two or three halls, and insists on London talent and London style. The class of entertainment provided may be costly and amusing, but it is certainly not edifying. The performers almost to a man, and one might say to a woman, are persons who can be considered "artists" only in the broadest sense, and whose ignorance and vulgarity are as colossal as their salaries.
Roughly, the entertainment may be divided into two sections, the one concerned with feats of strength, juggling, and the like, and the other with laughter-making and vocalism. As regards the first of these sections, a man who can balance a horse and trap on the end of his chin appears to give great satisfaction to an English audience. Why this should be so, nobody knows. The good purpose that may be served by balancing a horse and trap on the end of one's chin is not obvious; but the English masses are ravished by the spectacle. They also have a great fondness for the stout lady who catches cannon-balls on the back of her neck, for the other stout lady who risks her life nightly on the flying trapeze, for the gentleman who walks about the stage with a piano under one arm and a live mule under the other, and for the gentleman who rides the bicycle standing on his head. To the mind of the English masses these are marvels and well worth the money. They give a zest to life, they provide material for conversation, and their attraction seems perennial.
The great stand-by of the halls, however, is the laughter-making and vocal department. Here shine the great stars whose names are familiar on English lips as household words. Here is purveyed the culture, the song, and the humour of the English masses. It is from the music-hall stage that the vast majority of Englishmen take their tone and their sentiment. That renowned comedian, Fred Fetchem, strolls on to the boards of the Frivolity some night, and, assuming a fiendish grin, exclaims idiotically; "There's 'air!" Next morning and for many weeks thereafter all England says; "There's 'air!" on any and every occasion. "What ho she bumps!" "Now, we sha'n't be long," "Not half," "Did he?" and similar catchwords, all popular and all meaningless, capture the English imagination in their turn, and for a season, at any rate, Englishmen can say nothing else. It is the same with the music-hall song. Always there are current in England three or four "songs of the hour," which every Englishman worth the name sings, whistles, or hums; and always these songs, from whatever point of view regarded, are of the most blithering and bathotic nature. At the present moment the prime and universal favourite is that pathetic ditty, Everybody's Loved by Some One. For the benefit of the English, I quote the first stanza and the chorus of this work:
A lady stood within a busy city,
Her darling little daughter by her side;
She'd stopped to buy a bunch of pretty violets
From a ragged little orphan she espied.
The words she spoke were kinder than the boy had heard for years;
And in reply to what she asked, he murmur'd through his tears,
Everybody's loved by some one, everybody knows that's true,
Some have father and mother dear; sister and brother, too.
All the time that I remember, since I was a mite so small,
I seem to be the only one that nobody loves at all.
With this enchanting song the English welkin resounds by day and night. The great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman, full of four-ale and bad whisky, howls it in chorus at his favourite "public," work-girls sing it in factories, mothers rock their children to sleep with it, and every English urchin whistles or shouts it at you with unflagging zest. Of course, there are others; for example, there is I'm a P'liceman, which goes like this:
In the inky hour of midnight, when the clock is striking three,
As I stroll along my beet-root, many curious things I see:
Ragged urchins stagger past me to their mansions in the west;
Millionaires, through cold and hunger, on our doorsteps sink to rest;
Dirty dustmen in their broughams, off to supper at the "Cri.";
Then "Bill Sykes," the burglar, passes, with an eye-glass in his eye.
Such are the sights I witness when I am on my beat,
Filling my heart with sawdust, filling my boots with feet;
Covering half the pavement up with my "plates of meat,"
Though mother sent to say that I'm a p'liceman—
which—need one remark?—is intended for what the Scots are supposed to call "wut." Also, there is He Stopped:
Pendlebury Plum had a wart on his gum,
And he rubbed it with sand-paper hard;
The wart on his gum made Plum fairly hum,
When it stuck out about half a yard.
The wart grew so quick, when he rubbed it with a brick,
Till it looked like a short billiard-cue;
Said Plum to himself, "I shall die on the shelf,
For I'm darned if I know what to do."
So he went and got a pick-axe and shov'd it underneath,
Then he lifted up his jaw, and he swallowed all his teeth;
Then he stopped!
The verses I have quoted are a good, true, and fair sample of the kind of thing that finds favour among the English masses. I do not think that anything better is being proffered, and it is pretty certain that anything less inane would be doomed to failure. The fact is that the English mind in the lump is flat, coarse, and maggoty, and the English understanding is as the understanding of a feeble and ill-bred child. A couple of generations ago the songs popular among Englishmen had some claim to coherence, decency, and common sense; nowadays, however, the Englishman admits that "he cannot sing the old songs." He has gone farther and fared worse, and among the many symptoms of his decadence, none is more pronounced than his easy toleration of the balderdash that is being served up to him by the "'alls."
There is nothing in England more astounding or more tigerish than the city man. Englishmen have a fixed idea that they are the soul of generosity, indifferent to money, and not in the least sordid. When they are put to it for a type of sheer greediness it pleases them to point a finger at the Scot. Yet there can be no doubt that of late years the desire for riches has become the absorbing English passion. The ostentation and vulgar displays of the aristocracy and the newly rich have stirred the middle-class English heart to envy. How comes it that such and such a man sleeps on lilies and eats roses? He has "means," my friend. And what are "means"? Just money. If you are going to be happy in this life, if you insist upon a full paunch of the choicest—upon the ease and softness which are so grateful to decadent persons, if you would be in a position to possess all that the soul of the decadent person covets, you really must have money. And as you are a middle class Englishman whose people have omitted to leave you a million or so, it is very awkward for you. Life is short; the cup goes round but once.
You have ￡500. How is it to be made into ￡50,000, and that while the flush of youth still incarnadines your ambitious cheek? There is only one way: you must speculate—judiciously, if you can; but you must speculate. You are an Englishman and a sportsman, and sometimes you get your ￡50,000. Then all the world marvels and would fain do likewise, so that the ball is kept rolling. It is a ball full of money, and it rolls cityward. The generous, open-handed Englishmen who are the City take as much as they want and toss you the balance. The game is as fashionable as ping-pong: everybody plays it, and, win or lose, everybody calls it the Stock Exchange. I am told that the Stock Exchange proper is a reputable institution and essential to the well-being of the country. I do not doubt this for a moment; but round it there has grown up a specious and parasitical finance which is rapidly transforming the English into a nation of punters. "Fortunes made while you wait," is the lure to which the latter-day Englishman has been found infallibly to respond. The remnant of the common sense possessed by his excellent grandparents arouses in him a sneaking suspicion that the golden promises of the outside broker and the bucket-shop keeper are not to be depended upon. Yet he reads in his morning paper that no end of stocks and shares have risen a point or dropped a point, as the case may be, and he knows that if he had been in on the right side he would have made more money in a few hours than his excellent grandparents could have made in the course of a whole grubby lifetime. Hence, sooner or later, his patrimony, or few hundred of surplus capital, is planked into the ball that rolls citywards, on the off-chance that it may come back arm in arm, as it were, with thousands.
Even the more cautious sort of Englishman, who looks upon speculation with a deprecating eye and pins his faith on legitimate investment, is rapidly descending into the gambling habit. Schemes which promise fat dividends inflame his imagination and drag him out of the even tenor of his way. He is perfectly well aware that fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five per cent. in return for one's money is quite wrong somehow. But, on the other hand, the prospect ravishes, and there are concerns in the world which pay such dividends year by year without turning a hair. Only sometimes there is a colossal smash, and half the shopkeepers of England put on sackcloth and ashes and get up funds for one another's relief. To the looker-on the whole system is highly diverting; to the players in the game the fun will never be obvious.
The real truth about the matter is simply this—the standard of living in England is an inflated and artificial standard. Practically every Englishman lives, or longs to live, beyond his means. The workman and the workman's wife must put on the style of the foreman and the foreman's wife, and the foreman and the foreman's wife must appear to be nearly as comfortably off as the manager, the manager as his employer, all employers, shopkeepers, factory owners, iron-masters, engineers, printers, and even publishers as prosperous as each other, and so on till you come to dukes, than whom, of course, nobody can be more prosperous. It would be possible to bring together six Englishmen whose incomes ranged from ￡1 10s. a week to ￡50,000 a year, and whose dress and tastes would be pretty well identical. Fifty years ago the sons of the middle classes had really no inclination toward the superfluities. The dandy was rather laughed at among them, the gourmet was a monster they never by any chance encountered, and the libertine was a sad warning and a person to be eschewed. Nowadays it is all the other way: the gilt and tinsel and glamour and rapidity of the gay world have captured the English understanding and brought it exceeding low. There is little moral backbone left in the country. Money, money, money, to be ill gotten and ill spent, is the English ideal. The man who can go without is considered a crank or a fool or worse, or he is set down for an indolent fellow who should be given a month or two on the treadmill for luck. The whole duty of man—of Englishmen, that is to say—is to have money in ponderable quantities; the man without it is of no account at all. Nobody believes in him, nobody wants him, nobody tolerates him. He may be wise and witty and chaste and blessed with all the virtues, and still be received with great coldness by bank managers; and it is well known that the attitude of a bank manager towards a man is the attitude of society at large. If the bank manager beams and rubs his hands, "God's in His heaven: all's right with the world." If the bank manager frowns and sends you impertinent letters, you may last a week or a fortnight or a few months, but you are on thin ice, and you must please take care not to forget it. I should not be at all surprised if the omnipotent official whose business it is to discover what persons are or are not qualified to approach our British fountain of honour were one day found to be a bank manager in disguise.
So that, on the whole, the Englishman has every inducement to get rich and to be very quick about it. His dealings with the "Stock Exchange"—that is to say, with the City—are but the natural expression of his anxiety to oblige all parties concerned. It is a pity that getting and spending should become the main concerns of his life; but, as he pathetically puts it, "One must do as Rome does, and some women are never content." The Stock Exchange is the only way.
What is more beautiful or meet to be taken to the bosom than the Englishman? Everybody loves him; his goings to and fro upon the earth are as the progresses of one who has done all men good. He drops fatness and blessings as he walks. He smiles benignity and graciousness and "I-am-glad-to-see-you-all-looking-so-well." And before him runs one in plush, crying, "Who is the most popular man of this footstool?" And all the people shall rejoice and say, "The Englishman—God bless him!"
Hence it comes to pass that in whatever part of the world the Englishman may find himself, he has a feeling that he is thoroughly at home. "I am as welcome as flowers in May," he says. "These pore foreigners, these pore 'eathen are glad to see me. They never have any money, pore devils! and were it not for our whirring spindles at home, I verily believe they would have nothing to wear." In brief, the Englishman abroad is always in a sort of Father Christmassey, Santa Claus frame of mind. He eats well, he drinks well, and he sleeps well. He calls for the best, and he PAYS for it. It is a wonderful thing to do, and it goes straight to the hearts of the "pore foreigner" and the "pore 'eathen." This, at any rate, is the Englishman's own view. It is a pleasing, consoling, and stimulating view, and it would ill become an unregenerate outsider rudely to disturb it. Indeed, I question whether the Englishman in his blindness and adipose conceit would allow you to disturb it.
When persons in France say, "à bas l'Anglais," your fat Englishman smiles, and says, "Little boys!" When people put rude pictures of him on German postcards, he smiles again, and says that the flowing tide of public opinion in Germany is entirely with him. When Dutch farmers propose to throw him into the sea, he becomes very red in the neck, splutters somewhat, and says, "I'm sure they will make excellent subjects in time." And when the savage Americans desire to chaw him up and swallow him, he says, "You astonish me. I have always been under the impression that blood was thicker than water." His desire is to live at peace with all men; but his notion of peace is to have his hand in both your pockets and no questions asked. He owns two-thirds of the habitable globe (vide the geography books), and every pint of sea is his (pace the popular song); he owns also everything that is worth owning. He is the Pierpont Morgan of the universe. Who could help loving him?
On the other hand, the excellent J.B. has not escaped calumny. If I were disposed to reproduce some of the slanders upon him, it goes without saying that they would make a rather large chapter. All manner of foreign writers have time and time again had a fling at the Englishman. They love him, but their love is not blind. They perceive that he has faults of a grievous nature, and they write accordingly. Curiously enough, too, quite severe criticisms of John Bull have been written in his own household. Mr. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, for example, who is an Englishman, and apparently innocent of Celtic taint, actually goes so far as to call the Englishman an Anglo-Norman dog:
Down to the latest born, the hungriest of the pack,
The master-wolf of all men, called the Sassenach,
The Anglo-Norman dog, who goeth by land and sea,
As his forefathers went in chartered piracy,
Death, fire in his right hand.
And the English poet goes on to elaborate his indictment against the Englishman, thus:
He hath outlived the day
Of the old single graspings, where each went his way
Alone to plunder all. He hath learned to curb his lusts
Somewhat, to smooth his brawls, to guide his passionate gusts,
His cry of "Mine, mine, mine!" in inarticulate wrath.
He dareth not make raid on goods his next friend hath
With open violence, nor loose his hand to steal,
Save in community and for the common weal
'Twixt Saxon man and man. He is more congruous grown;
Holding a subtler plan to make the world his own
By organized self-seeking in the paths of power
He is new-drilled to wait. He knoweth his appointed hour
And his appointed prey. Of all he maketh tool,
Even of his own sad virtues, to cajole and rule.
We are told, further, that the Beloved has tarred Time's features, pock-marked Nature's face, and "brought all to the same jakes," whatever that may mean. Also:
There is no sentient thing
Polluteth and defileth as this Saxon king,
This intellectual lord and sage of the new quest.
The only wanton he that fouleth his own nest,
And still his boast goeth forth.
This is an English opinion, and, consequently, worth the money. Mr. Blunt assures us that in putting it forth he has the approval of no less a philosopher than Mr. Herbert Spencer, and no less an idealist than Mr. George Frederick Watts. "I have not," says Mr. Blunt, "shrunk from insisting on the truth that the hypocrisy and all-acquiring greed of modern England is an atrocious spectacle—one which, if there be any justice in Heaven, must bring a curse from God, as it has surely already made the angels weep. The destruction of beauty in the name of science, the destruction of happiness in the name of progress, the destruction of reverence in the name of religion, these are the Pharisaic crimes of all the white races; but there is something in the Anglo-Saxon impiety crueller still: that it also destroys, as no other race does, for its mere vainglorious pleasure. The Anglo-Saxon alone has in our day exterminated, root and branch, whole tribes of mankind. He alone has depopulated continents, species after species, of their wonderful animal life, and is still yearly destroying; and this not merely to occupy the land, for it lies in large part empty, but for his insatiable lust of violent adventure, to make record bags and kill."
When the Beloved comes across reading of this sort he no doubt sheds bitter tears, and remembers how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child. And he goes on his way rejoicing, unimpressed and unreformed.
The fact of the matter is, that from the beginning, John Bull, though possessed of a great reputation for honesty and munificence, has never really been any better than he should be. When he interfered between tyrant and slave, when he went forth to conquer savage persons and to annex savage lands which somehow invariably flowed with milk and honey, he made a point of doing it with the air of a philanthropist, and for centuries the world took him at his own estimate. Even in the late war the great cry was that he did not want gold-mines. As a general rule he never wants anything; but he always gets it. It is only of late that the world has begun to find him out and that he himself has begun to have qualms. He feels in his bones that something has gone wrong with him. It may be a slight matter and not beyond repair, but there it is. He cannot put his hand on his heart and say; "I am the fine, substantial, sturdy, truth-speaking, incorruptible, magnanimous, genial Englishman of half a century ago!" The fly has crept into the ointment of his virtue, and the fragrance of it no longer remains. His attitude at the present moment is the attitude of the anxious man who perceives that life is a little too much for him, and keeps on saying, "We shall have to buck up!"
He is in two minds about most things over which he was once cock-sure. He could not quite tell you, for example, whether he continues to stand at the head of the world's commerce or not. Once there was no doubt about it; now—well, it is a question of statistics, and you can prove anything by statistics. Out of America men have come to buy English things which were deemed unpurchasable. The American has come and seen and purchased and done it quite quickly. The Englishman is a little puzzled; his slow wits cannot altogether grasp the situation. "We must buck up!" he says, "and take measures while there is yet time." He does not see that the newer order is upon him, and that inevitably and for his good he must be considerably shaken up. His own day has been a lengthy, a roseful, and a gaudy one; it has been a day of ease and triumph and comfortable going, and the Beloved has become very wealthy and a trifle stout in consequence. Whether to-morrow is going to be his day, too, and whether it is going to be one of those nice loafing, sunshiny kind of days that the Beloved likes, are open questions. It is to be hoped devoutly that fate will be kind to him: he needs the sympathy of all who are about him; he wants encouragement and support and a restful time.
It is said that his Majesty of Portugal, who has just left these shores, on being asked what had impressed him most during his visit, replied, "The roast beef." "Nothing else, sir?" inquired his interlocutor. "Yes," said the monarch; "the boiled beef." And there is a great deal in it. Through much devouring of beef the English have undoubtedly waxed a trifle beefy. It is their beefiness and suetiness—that fatty degeneration, in fact—which impress you.
Recognising his need of props and stays and abdominal belts, as it were, the Beloved has latterly taken to remembering the Colonies. He is now of opinion that he and his sturdy children over-seas should be "knit together in bonds of closer unity," "to present an unbroken front to the world," "should share the burdens and glories of Empire," and so on and so forth. The Colonies—good bodies!—saw it all at once. They had been accustomed to be snubbed and neglected and left out of count, and they had forgotten to whom they belonged. In his hour of need the Beloved cried, "'Elp! I said I didn't want you, but I do—I do!" and the Colonies sent to his aid, at a dollar a day per head, the prettiest lot of freebooters and undesirable characters they found themselves able to muster. Later, they sent several landau loads of premiers and politicians, who were fed and flattered to their hearts' content, and went home, no doubt, greatly impressed with the English roast and boiled beef. These gentlemen made speeches in return for their dinners; they were allowed to visit the Colonial Office and kiss the hand of Mr. Chamberlain; they saw Peter Robinson's and the tuppenny tube: and the bonds of Empire have been knit closer ever since.
Not to put too fine a point upon it, the Englishman's attempt to buttress himself up out of the Colonies has proved a ghastly failure. The scheme fell flat. The English may want the Colonies, but the Colonies do not want the English—at any rate, on bonds of unity lines. The banner of Imperialism which has waved so gloriously during the past lustrum will have to be furled and put away. The great Imperial idea declines to work; it has been brought on the political stage half a century too late. At best it was a fetch, and it has failed. The All-Beloved will have to find some other way out. Whether he is quite equal to the task may be reckoned another question. One supposes that he will try; for there is life in the old dog yet, at any rate, according to the old dog.
The End