“Men may escape from rope and gun,
Some have outlived the doctor’s pill;”
sang Captain Macheath to the fashionable world which thronged to hear the verities of “The Beggar’s Opera.”
Fighting and making up, alternate friends and foes, the nations of Europe have come in a thousand years to know one another fairly well. There was a short time when Napoleon’s threatened invasion awakened in England’s breast a hearty and healthy abhorrence of France. There was a long time when the phrase, “virgin of English,” applied to a few perilously placed French seaports (Saint-Malo, for example), revealed, as only such proud and burning words can ever reveal, the national hatred of England. Over and over again history taught the same lesson; that the will of a people is stout to repel the invader, and that a foreign alliance offers no stable foundation for policy. But a great deal is learned from contact, whether it be friendly or inimical; and the close call of the Great War has left behind it a legacy of percipience. It was an Englishman who discovered during those years that the French officers snored “with a certain politeness.” It was a great American who said that France had “saved the soul of the world.” It was a Frenchman who wrote comprehensively: “To disregard danger, to stand under fire, is not for an Englishman an act of courage; it is part of a good education.” When gratitude is forgotten, as all things which clamour for remembrance should be, and sentimentalism has dissolved under the pitiless rays of reality, there remains, and will remain, a good understanding which is the basis of good will.
At present the nations that were drawn together by a common peril are a little tired of one another’s company, and more than a little irritated by one another’s grievances. The natural result of this weariness and irritation is an increase of sympathy for Germany, who now finds herself detested by her former allies, and smiled upon by at least some of her former foes. All that she says, and she has a great deal to say, is listened to urbanely. General Ludendorff has assured the American public that Prussia was innocent of even a desire to injure England. What she sought was peace “on conditions acceptable and inoffensive to both parties.” The Crown Prince’s memoirs, which have been appreciatively reviewed, set forth in eloquent language the Arthurian blamelessness of the Hohenzollerns. “The results of the excessive Viennese demand upon Serbia involved us in the war against our will.”
The breathless competition for the memoirs of the exiled Kaiser was a notable event in the publishing world. The history of literature can show nothing to resemble it. In 1918 we gravely discussed the propriety of trying this gentleman for his life. In 1922 we contended with far more heat for the privilege of presenting to a gratified public his imperial views upon his imperial policy. Americans exulted over the acquisition of these copyrights as they exulted over the acquisition of the Blue Boy. It is a grand thing to be able to outbid one’s neighbour, and pay a “record-smashing” price for any article in the market. Certain inflexible and unhumorous souls took umbrage at this catering to a principle we professed to reject, at the elevation of Wilhelm the Second to the rank of the world’s most favoured author. They thought it implied a denial of all we reverenced, of all we fought for, of all we knew to be good. It really implied nothing but curiosity; and curiosity is not to be confounded with homage. Saint Michael is honoured of men and angels; but if he and Lucifer gave their memoirs to the world, which would be better paid for, or more read?
They Had Their Day
“To a man,” says an engaging cynic in Mr. Stephen McKenna’s “Sonia,” “sex is an incident: to a woman it is everything in this world and in the next”; a generalization which a novelist can always illustrate with a heroine who meets his views. We have had many such women in recent fiction, and it takes some discernment to perceive that in them sex seems everything, only because honour and integrity and fair-mindedness are nothing. They are not swept by emotions good or bad; but when all concern for other people’s rights and privileges is eliminated, a great deal of room is left for the uneasy development of appetites which may be called by any name we like.
Among the Georgian and early-Victorian novelists, Richardson alone stands as an earnest and pitiless expositor of sex. He slipped as far away from it as he could in “Sir Charles Grandison,” but in doing so he slipped away from reality. The grossness of Fielding’s men is not intrinsic; it is, as Mr. McKenna would say, incidental. Jane Austen, who never wrote of things with which she was unfamiliar, gave the passions a wide berth. Scott was too robustly masculine, and Dickens too hopelessly and helplessly humorous, to deal with them intelligently. Thackeray dipped deep into the strong tide of life, and was concerned with all its eddying currents. Woman was to him what she was not to Scott, “une grande réalité comme la guerre”; and, like war, she had her complications. He found these complications to be for the most part distasteful; but he never assumed that a single key could open all the chambers of her soul.
When Mrs. Ritchie said of Jane Austen’s heroines that they have “a certain gentle self-respect, and humour, and hardness of heart,” she must have had Emma in her mind. Humour hardens the heart, at least to the point of sanity; and Emma surveys her little world of Highbury very much as Miss Austen surveyed her little world of Steventon and Chawton, with a less piercing intelligence, but with the same appreciation of foibles, and the same unqualified acceptance of tedium. To a modern reader, the most striking thing about the life depicted in all these novels is its dullness. The men have occupations of some sort, the women have none. They live in the country, or in country towns. Of outdoor sports they know nothing. They walk when the lanes are not too muddy, and some of them ride. They play round games in the evening, and always for a stake. A dinner or a dance is an event in their lives; and as for acting, we know what magnificent proportions it assumes when we are told that even to Henry Crawford, “in all the riot of his gratifications, it was as yet an untasted pleasure.”