CONTENTS
| CHAP. | PAGE | |
| I. | The Spirit of the People | [ 1] |
| II. | The Conquerors | [ 19] |
| III. | The Suburbans | [ 68] |
| IV. | The Multitude | [ 96] |
| V. | Prisoners | [ 157] |
| VI. | The Countryside | [ 190] |
| VII. | Science and Progress | [ 209] |
| VIII. | Literature and Progress | [ 230] |
| IX. | Religion and Progress | [ 261] |
| X. | The Illusion of Security | [ 277] |
| XI. | Postscript | [ 304] |
| Index | [ 307] | |
THE CONDITION OF
ENGLAND
CHAPTER I
THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
WHAT will the future make of the present? That is a question which opens a wide field for speculation, but secures no certain reply. There is difficulty from two causes. The one is the imperfection of contemporary record, with its distortions or exaggerations of the life of to-day. The other is the inability of the life of to-day to picture its own appearance, even if accurately delineated, when set in historic background. So much of the future becomes then read into the present that (for example) altogether divergent elements in national life will be emphasised if that life be on the highway toward success, or hovering on the brink of calamity, or a cross section only of progress towards a national decay. The reconstruction of the past has been largely effected from the testimony of contemporary documents, each author setting out to write of his own personal experience. Yet with all the material at our disposal, the vision of it is still fluctuating and changing; varying in the estimate of individuals, and from decade to decade. To some the days of declining Rome represent a period of tranquillity and human enjoyment; to others they appear as a tremendous warning of the triumph of the deadly sins. The Middle Age stands for one set of historians as a period of gold and innocence; with stately purposes, solemn processions, and widely diffused, if frugal, comfort; the whole illuminated by great dreams of adventure and aspiration. To another it presents itself as a prolonged delirium in which men wrestled in the darkness with fear and torment. To-day, perhaps too complacently, we assume that history will sharply distinguish our particular period of security from such troublous upheavals of Birth or of Death. We see ourselves painted as a civilisation in the vigour of early manhood, possessing contentment still charged with ambition; a race in England and Europe full of energy and of purpose, in which life, for the general, has become more tolerable than ever before. We would confess that we had not been able to “still the old sob of the sea,” or compel Time to stand still in his courses, or abolish altogether those “two black birds of night,” sighing and sorrow. But we would exhibit a people labouring and enjoying, more secure from plague, pestilence, and famine than in former ages, so accustomed to carry out unimpeded the labours of the day as almost to have forgotten the experience of a time when life itself was precarious and hazardous, and every morning an adventure into the unknown. We would defend our Literature, our Art, our Architecture, as, if not indubitably inspired, yet respectable if judged by any but the highest standard; with an intelligence ever more widely diffused, much reading, some thought, even an original, or, at least, a courageous outlook towards the bigger problems of human existence and human destiny. Condemn our poverty, we confront it with our charity. Reveal the ravages of disease, cancer, appendicitis, complaints of the brain, nerves, and stomach, we retort with the revelation of our warfare against disease, maintained with a devotion and a determination unparalleled in all the past. If we have Atheisms, here are all our Churches; if Social Maladies, our Social Reformers. That any future estimate should associate us even in thought with the dying days of Rome or the delirium of the medieval twilight seems to us a proposition obviously incredible.
We have to remember, however, in such an estimate, that each generation stands in the roll-book of the centuries, not as it appears to itself, but as it appears to observers gazing, as from a distance, over a gulf of time. What records will survive, what evidence of existence, when all the pleasantness and amenity of little, comfortable, satisfied people have vanished over the limits of the world? Imagine, for example, the twentieth century interpreted to the twenty-fifth by its popular newspapers: to-day, more certainly than its popular drama, the abstract and chronicle of the time. England seen through the medium of its Sunday Press—the Press which to seven out of ten of its present inhabitants represents the sole picture they possess of the world outside their local lives—takes upon itself an appearance of violence and madness. Men and women knife each other in the dark. Children are foully butchered by unknown assailants. Suicides sprinkle every page:—now that a girl may die with another woman’s husband; now that a family may escape the hell of unemployment; now simply for weariness, because the whole effort of life has lost significance and crumbled into dust and ashes. The most insistent noise which reverberates through their pages is the clicking of the huge machine of English justice, as couples once married in affection are torn apart, or a long procession of murderers, thieves, absconding solicitors, fraudulent company promoters, are swept away into the cold silence of the penal prison. The supply seems never to run short. The various Courts are in continuous sitting, and yet never overtake the work so bountifully provided. Itinerant justices are even compelled to journey round the countryside, arresting their courses at the principal towns, in order more speedily to deal with the continuous parade of brutality, outrage, and unnatural crime. Is it possible, one can imagine the future historian demanding, that any one could have been in those days altogether sane? as he pictures the decent wayfarer stealing furtively through labyrinthine ways lest ruffians should spring upon him in the dark, clutching his difficult savings for fear that they should be snatched from him; with the terror of poverty yawning before him, against which no prudence can guard, in cities visibly given up to the dominion of lust and greed. All this is in England: with a Sunday Press, if liberally providing the salt and flavour which so many colourless lives demand, yet on the whole committed to some standard of accuracy, some reflection of the fact in the record. In America, where such limitations are voted tiresome, the vision becomes gigantic, monstrous, like the Gargantuan architecture of its distorted cities. The observer who, in any future civilisation which may arise there, should attempt reconstruction of the barbaric past from a file of the New York Sunday editions, would find himself plunged into a region grotesque and hideous, like evil dreams.
But the survival of this peculiar literature is too impossible—perhaps too dreadful—an assumption. Let us believe that the great works will endure—the poetry, the fiction, the social studies and declamations of the representative people of the age. Are we in any better plight? Select ten, say, of the greatest writers of the Victorian era, and attempt from the picture which they present to effect a reconstruction of the Victorian age. The product is a human society so remote from all benignant ways as to demand nothing less than the advent of a kindly comet which will sweep the whole affair into nothingness. Our fathers led their decent, austere lives in that Victorian age which now seems so remote from us, making their money, carrying out their business and boisterous pleasure, inspired by their vigorous, if limited, creeds. They wrangled about politics and theology; they feasted at Christmas, and in the summer visited the seaside; they gave alms to the poor, and rejoiced that they lived in nineteenth-century England. But to the prophets of their age they were unclean from crown of head to sole of foot, a people who had visibly exhausted the patience of God. You may choose your verdict where you please—in Carlyle’s “torpid, gluttonous, sooty, swollen, and squalid England,” given up to the “deaf stupidities and to the fatalities that follow, likewise deaf”; or, in Ruskin’s interpretation of the “storm cloud” as “a symbol of the moral darkness of a nation that has blasphemed the name of God deliberately and openly, and has done iniquity by proclamation, every man doing as much injustice to his brother as it was in his power to do.” You may accept the condemnation kindly, as in Meredith’s “folly perpetually sliding into new shapes in a society possessed of wealth and leisure, with many whims, many strange ailments, and strange fancies”; the condemnation plaintive, as in Arnold’s “brazen prison,” in which most men, with “heads bent o’er their toil,” languidly “their lives to some unmeaning task-work give”; the condemnation defiant and rejoicing, as in Morris: “Civilisation which I know now is destined to perish; what a joy to think of.” You may find it rising to a rather shrill shriek in the later Tennyson, with his protest against the city children—who “soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime”—with his calling upon vastness and silence to swallow up the noises of his clamorous, intolerable day. You may hear it sinking to a deep note of strong repudiation, in that vision of a city, “perchance of Death but certainly of Night,” from the heart of which, in the pulpit of a great cathedral, a strange preacher proclaims the triumph of night and its despairs. One observer looking to the future will see “the whole life of the immense majority of its inhabitants, from infancy to the grave, a dreary routine of soulless, mechanical labor.” Another will call for a cosmic cataclysm to quickly make an end. Another in a more chilling indifference will turn away from the unlovely sight as from a spectacle irrelevant, impossible. Literature has no tolerance for the existence of comfort and security which to so many people seems the last word of human welfare. And no reconstruction, from the works of genius, the great novelists, artists, critics, of the vanishing present, can provide any judgment much more satisfying to our pride than the judgment of summarised theft and fraud and violence which is the weekly enjoyment of many million readers.
We know—at once—that this is a one-sided verdict. Of ten thousand citizens, all but three or four will pass their lives unchronicled; and these three or four—a murderer, an adulterer, an adventurer, a saint—will come to stand alone as lives whose existence is recorded. The remainder pursue their brave and patient labours, not too exacting in ideal, not too clamorous in pleasure, not at the end having very much to complain of, or being very eager to complain. So—in every civilisation, in every century, have passed the lives of the multitude of mankind. Yet it is change—obscure change in economic conditions, in aspirations, in faiths, in energies or lassitudes—which is responsible for the rise and fall of nations, for the variegated panorama of an ever-changing world. We have enjoyed in England security and settled society since the period of the great Civil War. For two hundred and fifty years ten generations have flourished and faded in a universe where regular government and an ordered apparatus of justice have guaranteed that life shall be reasonably safe, and that foresight shall attain reward. We are coming to believe that no circumstance will ever arise in which an insurance policy will not be honoured on presentation, and contracts entered into by the parents be fulfilled by the children. Yet during the whole of this period there have been cataclysms of change in the intimate life and convictions of the people which are more instinctive than opinions. So that the nineteenth-century civilisation is far removed from the eighteenth, and the twentieth from the nineteenth, in the estimate of the kingdom of the Soul. A study of those changes—a revelation and diagnosis of the hidden life of England—would be a study exceedingly worth attempting to-day. It would be a study which, passing from the external organisation, the condition of trade, the variation in fortune, would endeavour to tear out the inner secret of the life of this people: to exhibit the temper, mettle, response, character of an island race at a particular period of its supremacy. Changes in such temper and character are usually only revealed in times of national crisis: just as an individual only comes to “know himself” when confronted with the challenge of some overwhelming choice or anxiety. And as at that moment he reaps the fruit of the long obscure processes of sowing and ripening, so a nation in social upheavals, foreign perils, or some similar intrusion of reality, discovers in a moment also that it no longer possesses adequate forces of resistance, or that its religion, its boast of power, its patriotism, have been meaningless phrases.
“Contemporary England”—its origin, its varying elements of good and evil, its purposes, its future drift—is a study demanding a lifetime’s investigation by a man of genius. But every tiny effort, if sincerely undertaken, may stimulate discussion of a problem which cannot be discussed too widely. It will study the most sincere of the popular writers of fiction, especially those who from a direct experience of some particular class of society—the industrial peoples, the tramp, the village life, the shop assistant, the country house—can provide under the form of fiction something in the nature of a personal testimony. It is assisted by those who to-day see instinctively the first tentative effort towards the construction of a sociology—investigation into the lives and wages, social character, beliefs and prejudices of various selected classes and localities. Biography is not without its contribution, especially the biography of typical men—a labour-leader who reveals himself as a conspicuous member of a labouring class at the base, or a politician who voices the scepticisms, manners, fascinations, and prejudices of a cultured, leisured society at the summit of the social order. The satirist and the moralist, if the grimace in the case of the one be not too obviously forced and bitter, and the revolt in the case of the other not too exacting and scornful, may also exhibit the tendencies of an age. And there is always much to be learned from those alien observers, each of whom, entering into our midst a stranger, has set down his impression of the life of our own people with something of the freshness and curiosity of a child on a first visit to Wonderland.
And here indeed it is largely upon foreign criticism that we have to depend. We are familiar with the “composite photograph” in which thousands of superimposed likenesses result in the elimination of personal variants, the production of a norm or type. We seek a kind of mental or moral “composite photograph” showing the average sentiment, the average emotion, the average religion. And this is a method of investigation far more familiar to Europe, where introspection is regarded as a duty, than to England, where introspection is regarded as a disease. Most modern attempts at the analysis of the English character have come from the European resident or visitor. In books translated from the French, like that of M. Boutmy, or from the German, like that of Dr. Karl Peters, the Englishman learns with amazement that he presents this aspect to one observer, that to another. His sentiments are like that of the savage who is suddenly confronted with the looking-glass; or, rather (since he is convinced that all these impressions are distorted or prejudiced), like the crowd which constantly gathers before the shop windows which present convex or concave mirrors—for the pleasure of seeing their natural faces weirdly elongated or foreshortened. Yet we are compelled to read such books. We are compelled to read all such books. Even as a result of such unfair description we acknowledge the stimulus and challenge which such description affords. We cannot help being interested in ourselves. Sometimes, indeed, these impartial minds are able to sting us into anxiety by their agitation over things which we generally accept as normal. Again and again the foreigner and the colonial, entering this rich land with too exuberant ideals of its wealth and comfort, have broken into cries of pain and wonder at the revelation of the life of poverty festering round the pillars which support the material greatness of England. A picture to which we have become accustomed, which we endure as best we may, seems to them a picture of horror and desolation. Again and again we have found our material splendours and extravagances which have developed by almost inconspicuous gradations year by year and generation by generation, set out for surprise or condemnation, by those who had maintained a tradition of simplicity, even of austerity, in England’s social life. Again and again a revisit, after prolonged absence, has exhibited some transformation of things of which those who have been living in the current are hardly themselves conscious—a transformation effected by no man’s definite desires.
All such observations, however, are faced with some fundamental difficulties. One of these is the difficulty of ascertaining where the essential nation resides: what spirit and temper, in what particular class or locality, will stand to the future for twentieth-century England. A few generations ago that difficulty did not exist. England was the population of the English countryside: the “rich man in his castle,” the “poor man at his gate”; the feudal society of country house, country village, and little country town, in a land whose immense wealth still slept undisturbed. But no one to-day would seek in the ruined villages and dwindling population of the countryside the spirit of an “England” four-fifths of whose people have now crowded into the cities. The little red-roofed towns and hamlets, the labourer in the fields at noontide or evening, the old English service in the old English village church, now stand but as the historical survival of a once great and splendid past. Is “England” then to be discovered in the feverish industrial energy of the manufacturing cities? In the vast welter and chaos of the capital of Empire? Amongst the new Plutocracy? The middle classes? The artisan populations? The broken poor? All contribute their quota to the stream of the national life. All have replies to give the interrogator of their customs and beliefs and varying ideals. All together make up a picture of a “roaring reach of death and life” in a world where the one single system of a traditional hierarchy has fissured into a thousand diversified channels, with eddies and breakwaters, whirlpools and sullen marshes, and every variety of vigour, somnolence, and decay.
Again, no living observer has ever seen England in adversity: beaten to the knees, to the ground. No one can foresee what spirit—either of resistance or acquiescence—latent in this kindly, lazy, good-natured people might be evoked by so elemental a challenge. England is often sharply contrasted with Ireland, and the Irish with the English people. What spirit would be manifest amongst the English people to-day if they had been subjugated by an alien conqueror, with their lands dispossessed, their religion penalised, their national ideals everywhere faced with opposition and disdain? Such an experience might have been stamped upon history if the Armada had reached these shores; it might have “staggered humanity” with unforgettable memories. Would an invaded England offer the resistance of an invaded Germany, or of an invaded Spain, in the Napoleonic Wars? How would we actually treat our “Communists” if they seized London after a time of national disaster and established a “Social” Republic? No one can tell what a man will do in such a shock as the Messina earthquake, or when the shells of the invader, without warning, crash through the ruins of his home. And no one can foresee what a nation will do in adversity which has never seen itself compelled to face the end of its customary world.
Again, we know little or nothing to-day of the great multitude of the people who inhabit these islands. They produce no authors. They edit no newspapers. They find no vocal expression for their sentiments and desires. Their leaders are either chosen from another class, or, from the very fact of leadership, sharply distinguished from the members of their own. They are never articulate except in times of exceptional excitement; in depression, when trade is bad; in exuberance, when, as on the “Mafeking” nights, they suddenly appear from nowhere to take possession of the city. England, for the nation or foreign observer, is the tone and temper which the ideals and determinations of the middle class have stamped upon the vision of an astonished Europe. It is the middle class which stands for England in most modern analyses. It is the middle class which is losing its religion; which is slowly or suddenly discovering that it no longer believes in the existence of the God of its fathers, or a life beyond the grave. It is the middle class whose inexhaustible patience fills the observer with admiration and amazement as he beholds it waiting in the fog at a London terminus for three hours beyond the advertised time, and then raising a cheer, half joyful, half ironical, when the melancholy train at last emerges from the darkness. And it is the middle class which has preserved under all its security and prosperity that elemental unrest which this same observer has identified as an inheritance from an ancestry of criminals and adventurers: which drives it out from many a quiet vicarage and rose garden into a journey far beyond the skyline, to become the “frontiersmen of all the world.”[1]
But below this large kingdom, which for more than half a century has stood for “England,” stretches a huge and unexplored region which seems destined in the next half-century to progress towards articulate voice, and to demand an increasing power. It is the class of which Matthew Arnold, with the agreeable insolence of his habitual attitude, declared himself to be the discoverer, and to which he gave the name of the “Populace.” “That vast portion of the working class,” he defined it, nearly forty years ago, “which, raw and half-developed, has long been half hidden amid its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman’s heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bending what it likes, breaking what it likes.” “To this vast residuum,” he adds, “we may with great propriety give the name of Populace.” To most observers from the classes above, this is the Deluge; and its attainment of power—if such attainment ever were realised—the coming of the twilight of the gods. They see our civilisation as a little patch of redeemed land in the wilderness; preserved as by a miracle from one decade to another. They behold the influx, as the rush of a bank-holiday crowd upon some tranquil garden: tearing up the flowers by the roots, reeling in drunken merriment on the grass plots, strewing the pleasant landscape with torn paper and broken bottles. This class—in the cities—cannot be accused of losing its religion. It is not losing its religion, because it had never gained a religion. In the industrial centres of England, since the city first was, the old inherited faiths have never been anything but the carefully preserved treasure of a tiny minority. It is a class full of sentiment which the foreigner is apt to condemn as sentimentality. Amusing examples are familiar of its uncalculating kindliness. An immense traffic is held up for considerable time because a sheep—on its way to immediate slaughter—is entangled between two tramcars. The whole populace cheerfully submit to this inconvenience, sooner than consummate the decease of the unfortunate animal. In a certain pottery manufactory, the apparatus has been arranged for the baking process, and the fires are about to be lighted, when the mewing of a cat is heard from inside the kiln. The men refuse to proceed with the work. A whole day is spent in an endeavour to entice the cat out again; and, on this proving fruitless, in the unloading of the kiln, in order to rescue the creature. When it is liberated, it is immediately hurled—with objurgations—into the river. The men were exasperated with the trouble which had been caused and the time wasted; but they could not allow the cat to be roasted alive.
Next to this “sentimentality,” so astonishing to Europe—because so irrational—comes the invincible patience of the English workman. He will endure almost anything—in silence—until it becomes unendurable. When he is vocal, it is pretty certain that things have become unendurable. I once had occasion to visit a family whose two sons were working on the railway when the dispute between directors and the union leaders threatened a universal disturbance. I inquired about the strike. There was an awkward pause in the conversation. “Jim won’t have to come out,” said the mother, “because he isn’t on the regular staff.” “Of course Jim will come out,” said the father firmly, “if the others come out.” “The fact is,” they explained, after further silence, “we don’t talk about the strike here; we try to forget that there ever may be one.” It was the experience of a thousand homes. There was no recognised or felt grievance. There was no clear understanding of the purpose and meaning of it all. But there were firmly planted in the mind two bedrock facts: the one, the tragedy that the strike would mean in this particular household; the other, the complete impossibility of any other choice but of the boys standing with their comrades in the day of decision. And this is England; an England which has learnt more than all other peoples the secret of acquiescence, of toleration, of settling down and making the best of things in a world on the whole desirable; but an England also of a determination unshaken by the vicissitudes of purpose and time, with a certain ruthlessness about the means when it has accepted the end, and with a patience which is perhaps more terrible in its silence than the violence of a conspicuous despair.
These and other qualities form an absorbing subject of study. A figure emerges from it all. It is the figure of an average from which all its great men are definitely variants. No body of men have ever been so “un-English” as the great Englishmen, Nelson, Shelley, Gladstone: supreme in war, in literature, in practical affairs; yet with no single evidence in the characteristics of their energy that they possess any of the qualities of the English blood. But in submitting to the leadership of such perplexing variations from the common stock, the Englishman is merely exhibiting his general capacity for accepting the universe, rather than for rebelling against it. His idea of its origin or of its goal has become vague and cloudy; definite statements of the average belief, set out in black and white by the average congregation, would astonish the average preacher. But he drives ahead along the day’s work: in pursuing his own business, conquering great empires: gaining them by his power of energy and honesty, jeopardising them by his stiffness and lack of sympathy and inability to learn. So he will continue to the end; occupying, not in Mr. Pinero’s bitter gibe the “suburb of the Universe”; but rather that locality whose jolly, stupid, brave denizens may be utilised for every kind of hazardous and unimaginable enterprise; fulfilling the work of another, content to know nothing of the reason of it all; journeying always, like Columbus, “to new Americas, or whither God wills.”
It may be helpful to break up this composite figure of an “Englishman” into the various economic divisions of the present time, to examine what changes are fermenting amongst the rich, the middle stratum of comfort, the multitudinous ranks of the toilers, the dim hordes of the disinherited. A summary of science, art, literature, and religion in their influence upon the common life will indicate the changes most manifest, less in material conveniences than in the spirit of man. At the end arises the question of the future of a society, evidently moving in a direction which no one can foresee, towards experience of far-reaching change.