4
If “the historian of the future”, whom I have already invoked, have the microscopic vision and the titanic industry with which his predecessors credit him, I believe he must find space for a footnote, in brilliant, to describe our share in forming a critical opposition during the last four months of the armistice. In the days immediately following the 1918 election, the government had hardly an enemy; in the months after the peace-treaty was signed, it had hardly a friend. Even before the Economic Consequences of the Peace, even before the mutual vituperation of the allies, an independent mood of questioning and doubt succeeded to the hysterical assertions and demands of the mad election. How far we fostered that mood by means of open propaganda and private suggestion, how far we made articulate a frame of mind that was already struggling to express itself, I cannot say; but that the mood became contagious cannot be challenged. In these first spring days, Barbara’s circumspect cousin, Lord John Carstairs, avoided our house for fear of finding himself described as a ‘defeatist’, a friend of the enemy, a creature of Caillaux or a hireling of Stinnes. By the end of the summer, an alert opportunist such as Sir Rupert Foreditch sought publicity in the columns of Peace or opened his campaign by an attack on Seymour Street because our paper was frank and fearless and because “the Oakleigh gang”, as we were unflatteringly called, was too important and, in time, too numerous to be ignored.
On the morrow of the inaugural dinner, Bertrand hunted me out of doors to study “the great movement of men”, while he plotted with Barbara new days of keeping me on the run. No reference was made to our pitiful encounter at the stair-head; but I left a note to say that she was not to be called, and, when I carried in her breakfast, she looked up—with the eloquent silence of a dog—to thank me for understanding and to shew that she too understood. At once, after that, she began to discuss the party of the night before.
I am not going to pretend that my work for the next three years, though it left me without an hour, a house or a wife to call my own, was void of interest: duty compelled me to meet every one, from labour-leaders to cabinet ministers and from editors to bishops, who might be thought to influence action or opinion by a hair’s breadth; I had to read the new books and absorb a mass of papers; I explored different parts of the country to find what different classes were saying or thinking; and a New York reporter could not have been quicker to lay hands on the foreign bankers and diplomats who passed through London. Two or three dinner-parties were given in each week to these unofficial missionaries; I met my uncle daily at the Eclectic Club to pool our discoveries in collective psychology; and on Wednesday nights the staff of Peace assembled on their spurious Sheraton chairs and helped to hammer out a new message to mankind.
If from time to time I harboured unworthy projects for desertion, my weakness of purpose must be attributed to natural indolence and perhaps justifiable impatience. Our progress seemed so lamentably slow; our aims were so exasperatingly vague! Much as I valued Bertrand’s long experience, greatly as I admired his flashes of intuition, I dreaded his descents on Fetter Lane in these first discouraging months. From Sir Philip Saltash or from the spirit of the age he had caught an itch for supermen; and I went about my work with a shame-faced consciousness of inadequacy while my uncle clasped his hands over his stick and boomed oracularly of novel tendencies and strange expedients.
“We’re becoming precious,” he grunted unamiably at our second number. “Average opinion; the common touch: you mustn’t neglect that, George. If you take your friend Dainton as a barometer . . .”
And I was incontinently pricked into the least comfortable of my clubs, where I tested average feelings as they were represented in the changing utterances of one well-meaning and uniquely stupid legislator. The first experiment was made at a time when the successful candidates of the December election were uneasily hoping to be saved by the firmness and idealism of President Wilson from the consequences of their less temperate speeches.
“ ‘Wilson le bienvenu’,” Dainton murmured approvingly, as he laid down a welcoming number of Punch.
A few weeks later, I found the French press excitedly proclaiming that Germany was being let off too easily. Sir John Woburn demanded with all the polyphonic energy of the Press Combine why America should be allowed to deprive the allies of their just reparations; and Dainton assured me profoundly that the task of winning the war was child’s play compared with that of winning the peace.
“Damned obstinate fellow, Wilson,” he grumbled. “If he thinks we’re going to let him throw away all that our gallant boys fought for, he’ll have a rude awakening.”
Later still, he ceased to speak of the president altogether. Remembering Limehouse, he could not give implicit trust to the prime minister; but the gossip that floated from Paris to London convinced him that M. Clemenceau was the only statesman in Europe and he was content to leave himself in the hands of a man whose rare, sardonic utterances embodied the ferocity which Dainton had expressed so much less concisely in his election speeches. Members of parliament, he told me, had duties nearer home. Labour menaces were more important than quibbles about frontiers: coal strikes and railway strikes, both leading through nationalization and civil war to ruin and the disruption of the empire, were the proper study of political mankind. Sir Roger no longer spoke of the British working-man as one of “our gallant boys”; and I was invited to penetrate the disguise that sheltered a Russian communist. Before I could do justice to this conception, he had found new duties even nearer to the hand of a patriot. “Bolshevism” was bad, but it soon ceased, in Dainton’s eyes, to be quite so bad as “profiteering”; and neither, by the middle of the summer, was so exasperating nor so tenacious of life as Irish irreconcilability.
“If I could hold the wretched country under the sea for five minutes!,” he exploded.
Fed on political catch-words and instructed by safe cartoons, Sir Roger Dainton, coalition-unionist member for the Crowley Division of Hampshire, would explain Ireland on alternate days by reference to the incurable dourness of the north and the ineradicable savagery of the south. He was the ‘pendulum voter’, the representative of all that is unstable, ill-informed and irresponsible in public life. For that I was prepared; for that Bertrand had sent me to study him. I was not prepared, however, to be accepted as a disciple and an ally. Dining weekly in Rutland Gate, I wondered whether the little man had ever before found any one who would listen to him: obviously, pathetically, he looked forward to our “good pow-wows”; and, when he saw me to the door and gave me a fresh cigar, still more when he said, “Then, next Tuesday as usual?”, I felt that I was being sent back to school with a sovereign in my hand and being invited to Crowley for my next leave-out day. My embarrassment was increased by a sense of black ingratitude. Sir Roger always made these meetings “an occasion within the meaning of the act”, as he called it, and opened his best champagne for me. When Barbara deserted me on the plea that we wanted to talk business and she would be in the way, Dainton redoubled his hospitality and became increasingly confused in speech. As I watched the clock, I would ask myself how such a man was admitted to the board of a company or tolerated in parliament; then, in a flash of revelation, I saw him as the type of all the class on which Sir Philip Saltash exercised the wiles of his publicity. Saltash was a logical inference from Dainton.
“Now you see why I told you to study him,” Bertrand chuckled, when I announced that I would resign my editorship before I submitted to another spell of Dainton’s political conversation.
In despair, I asked how our little office in Fetter Lane was to overtake and undo the work of Saltash and his forebears of the popular press. To this, however, my uncle had no answer.
Though he continued to speak of us as a chosen people, our mission of enlightenment was established on a paying basis by the success of our literary editors, who made of Peace the most feared and least loved review in London. As Hancock confined his criticism to novels and Mattrick to poetry, they could not be charged with rolling their own logs or obstructing a rival, though I noticed that Mattrick’s sweeping condemnations stopped short of “Mr. Hancock’s true lyrical genius” and Hancock’s devastating onslaughts on modern fiction made an exception in favour of Mr. Mattrick. My conscience became unquiet when books were sent out for review and I heard Hancock choosing critics who could be trusted to “sit on this sort of rot”; but, as the “rot” was usually written by men who seemed to be making a substantial income, I hoped that they could afford an occasional attack and console themselves with the knowledge that, in the Penmen’s Club, fifty yards away, a league of disgruntled novelists and poets was plotting the destruction of “the Hancock-Mattrick gang”.
“All the same,” Bertrand expostulated after a month or two, “we’re not running this paper so that one ill-tempered young gentleman can read what another ill-tempered young gentleman has said about a book he hasn’t troubled to finish. We’re not in touch yet with opinion. You don’t mix with enough people, George: it’s all the office, or the club, or Barbara’s parties.”
“But where am I to find your new men?,” I asked. “You say politics are no longer manufactured over a week-end party at Woburn. The political clubs only harbour your Tapers and Tadpoles. Where do men like Saltash and Wister and Foreditch do their work?”
“They take their pleasure at the Turf and Stage,” Bertrand answered sourly.
“I’m dining there with the O’Ranes to-night,” I said, as we began to walk home.
“Then you’ll probably meet them. New men, new meeting-places.” My uncle laughed mirthlessly. “If Pam or Johnnie Russell . . . It’s the rising tide of democracy. Agricultural depression and death duties have slowly strangled the landed classes; their social influence is tottering. Before the war, Asquith was almost the only prime minister, bar Dizzy, who wasn’t drawn from them; but the prime ministers of the future will come from the middle class . . . till they come from labour. And the stage changes with the actors,” he continued in a deep rumble that carried from the one side of Fleet Street to the other. “Circumspice! When the masses had been taught to read, Newnes gave them Tit-Bits; Pearson and Harmsworth followed with the cheap daily press; headlines took the place of news and arguments. The focus shifts to the newspaper office.”
We were passing a flamboyant, white-and-gold building described as a “Super Electric Palace de Luxe”; and I asked Bertrand if he thought pictures were coming to take the place of headlines.
“It’s not the instrument that matters, but the man who handles it,” he answered. “Does Saltash play on Ll-G. or does Ll-G. play on Saltash? You’ll know better to-night when you’ve seen the new stage with the new men on it. Your modern prime minister doesn’t waste his time with duchesses at Ross House or with dukes at the Carlton. He has suave young secretaries to feed the press; he has rich friends to provide him personally with the sinews of war. He has his publicity agent. And, if he’s wise, he has a chain of intermediaries running through the country, somebody always knowing somebody who knows somebody else, so that he can draw any one into his net at a moment’s notice.” As we crossed Waterloo Place, Bertrand glanced contemptuously at Mr. Gladstone’s old house in Carlton House Terrace. “There’d be no end to the buzzing if Ll-G. spent a week-end with Sir John Woburn: he must be trying to collar the Press combine! But if my Lord Lingfield entertains a few actresses and a jockey or two and a prize-fighter and if Woburn happens to come along . . .? That’s how politics are manufactured nowadays; and the Turf and Stage is the sort of place to see them manufacturing.”