Yet in the crumbling and decay of English rural life, and the vanishing of that “yeoman” class which in Scotland provides a continuous breeding ground of great men, it would seem that it is from the suburban and professional people we must more and more demand a supply of men and women of capacity and energy adequate to the work of the world. Sufficiently vulnerable to criticism as they appear to-day, finding no one who will be proud of them because they are not proud of themselves, they yet offer a storehouse of accumulated physical health and clean simplicities of living. Embedded in them are whole new societies created by legislation and a national demand, whose present development is full of interest, whose future is full of promise. Here is, for example, the new type of elementary teacher—a figure practically unknown forty years ago—drawn in part from the tradesmen and the more ambitious artisan population, and now, lately, in a second generation, from its own homes. It is exhibiting a continuous rise of standard, keen ambitions, a respect for intellectual things which is often absent in the population amongst which it resides. Its members are not only doing their own work efficiently, but are everywhere taking the lead in public and quasi-public activities. They appear as the mainstay of the political machine in suburban districts, serving upon the municipal bodies, in work, clear-headed and efficient; the leaders in the churches and chapels, and their various social organisations. They are taking up the position in the urban districts which for many generations was occupied by the country clergy in the rural districts; providing centres with other standards than those of monetary success, and raising families who exhibit sometimes vigour of character, sometimes unusual intellectual talent. A quite remarkable proportion of the children of elementary schoolmasters is now knocking at the doors of the older Universities, clamouring for admittance; and those who effect entrance are often carrying off the highest honours. This process is only in its beginning; every year the standard improves; these “servants of the State” have assured to them a noteworthy and honourable future. Again, there is no doubt that the conception of social service is making progress against the resistance of whatever is solid in the suburban tradition of individualism and indifference. Even the Socialist no longer turns from the Middle Classes in disgust. He is coming to regard them as the most fruitful field for his propaganda. The women—or a remnant of them—are finding outlet for suppressed energy and proffered devotion in an agitation for the vote. Sixpenny reprints of proof or disproof of religion, the world’s classics in neat shilling volumes, sevenpenny novels, and a variety of printed matter are irrigating the suburbs with a fresh flood of literature. It is not impossible to conceive of a time when a Middle Class will definitely build up a standard of its own: no longer turning to a wealthy and leisured company above it for effective imitation of a life to which it is unsuited. Becoming conscious, for the first time, that it possesses elements to contribute to the stream of national life which can be provided neither by the rich nor the poor, it may gain that collective respect and pride in itself which it has not yet achieved. Abandoning its panic fear of the industrial peoples, it may find itself treating with them as an equal, exacting terms in return for its alliance. At best it may even resist the stampedes of those who find the support of the “Middle Classes” always easily obtainable for an agitation against the Income Tax or in favour of municipal reaction, or for any system which will “broaden the basis of taxation” by shifting it from the shoulders of the rich to the shoulders of the poor.
This fissure in the alliance between the Middle Class and the wealthy—the most absurd and irrational of all alliances, in which the advantage is all sucked by the one, and the burden borne by the other—would long ago have been demanded by the suburbans themselves but for one remarkable element in their present condition. Revolution, or at least vigorous progress, may always be predicted when in the case of any particular class the standard of comfort is permanently beating against a limitation of income, and permanently in revolt against such limitation. Such a conflict seemed inevitable a few years ago in the case of the Middle Classes. The “intellectual proletariat” was evidently being created, which could never obtain full satisfaction for its desires. It would fret always at its limitations. Its fretting would become vocal in a clamorous demand for economic change. And the “intellectual proletariat” has been the historic leader of all political and social revolutions. The process of its creation, however, seems likely to be checked, and in a curious fashion. The pressure is being reduced, not by any lowering of the standard of comfort demanded by the individual, for that is steadily rising in suburban England, but by the limitation of the family, pursued as a deliberate method of adjusting expenditure to income. The headlong collapse in the birth-rate of this country during the past twenty years—a fall greater than that in any other nation in Europe—is a collapse to which all classes save the very poorest are probably contributors. There are no exact figures available, of allocation to one section rather than to another. But there is much to indicate that this decline has gone far amongst those suburban populations in which a few years ago the discrepancy between the standard of comfort and the means available for its satisfaction was most conspicuous. The endurance of a continual indebtedness and frustration of desire, the indignation which will convert that endurance into a hunger for reform, the anger and envy against more prosperous people which is excited by the contrast of human inequalities under such conditions of torment, is being assuaged, not by reform itself, nor by any accepted reduction of the individual demands, nor by any falling back upon supernatural consolations. It is being averted by the repudiation of marriage, or its postponement, or its acceptance without the accompaniment of children. Here is a kind of ingenious method of turning the position, of climbing through the window when the door is closed. Judgment may vary between approval or regret, in accordance with the point of view of the critic. The nation must inevitably suffer from an artificial restriction of children amongst those very classes and families who should be most encouraged to produce them; who offer the best chances of raising, from a healthy stock and in simple homes, the men and women who will be the most desirable citizens of the future. And a nation is in a serious condition if its better stocks are producing smaller families or no families at all, and its least capable are still raising an abundant progeny. An appreciable amount of human discontent, on the other hand, is doubtless arrested by this method of eluding Nature’s blind struggle for existence; and those who have vested interests in contentment—who see changes bringing them less opportunity of life’s good things—will, no doubt, hail with approval so satisfactory a method of averting the operation of “natural” law. By such limitation of family the standard of comfort is reduced to the level of the income, and the clerk and professional classes can be identified with the prevailing order, instead of becoming centres of social upheaval.
But this limitation involves deliberate and artificial repudiation of paternity and motherhood, and as such is condemned by most ethical systems and by the Christian Church. Its widespread operation, now guaranteed by figures which may be deplored, but which cannot be denied, in itself reveals the considerable undermining process which suburban religion has undergone. Once again, therefore, it is necessary to notice this element of weakening supernatural sanctions: to inquire how far this process has gone, and whither it is tending. There will be no immediate catastrophe; for custom and convention will carry on the apparatus of organised belief long after the driving power of definite conviction has vanished, like a machine still running down after the motive power has ceased. There are renewed rallies in each generation, especially at the time of adolescence; revivals under the inspiration of American evangelists, or advocates of new theologies, or vigorous teachers who blend theology with politics, humour, or social entertainment. It may still be confidently affirmed to-day that, of all the various sections of English society, the suburban and Middle Class retains most resolutely its ancient religious convictions. These convictions are here more vigorously preserved than in the class below them, to whom, as a whole, religion has not yet come, or in the class above them, whose attitude towards Christianity has always been one of kindly patronage rather than of accepted allegiance. Yet it would be idle to overlook the ravages which have even here been made. These ravages must not be sought merely amongst the small bodies in open opposition, ethical societies and the like, or the much larger bodies in open indifference, such as the multitude of Sunday cyclists or the patrons of Sunday music. They will be found also amongst those who still own outward allegiance to the faith of their fathers, and still think themselves to be orthodox believers. “Some thirty years ago,” writes the Bishop of Birmingham, “there was a sort of Protestant religion, with a doctrine of the Trinity, of Heaven and Hell, of Atonement and Judgment, of Resurrection and Eternal Life, which for good or evil could be more or less assumed. Such a standard has gone. I seriously doubt whether nearly half the grown men of the country could seriously say that they believed that Christ is God, or that He really rose on the third day from the dead. It is not that they have become Unitarians. It is that their religious opinions are in complete chaos.”
The drift of this “chaos” in modern thought is, indeed, as noticeable amongst those who still cling to religious exercises and sing the hymns of childhood as amongst the larger populations who regretfully or defiantly, or more often in sheer apathy, have abandoned these ancient traditions and ceremonies. And just as, in Denison’s famous verdict, our large organised charities are less a sign of our compassion than of our indifference, so it may be that the noise of fierce fighting amongst rival religions, the queer competition which Mr. Charles Booth discovered even in the remotest slums of London for the bodies and souls of their denizens, may be less an evidence of religious fervour than a manifestation of an ebbing vitality.
Yet the edifice collapses slowly, and in silence. No one can tell, at any definite moment, how far the disintegrating process has gone. Few records would be more illuminating than candid confessions, such as the confession recently made by Mr. Wells in his First and Last Things, honestly set down by quite ordinary people, in a casual street of a suburban terrace, of what they believed. If the industrious householders of “Homelea,” “Belle View,” “Buona Vista,” “Sunnyhurst,” and “The Laurels,” contiguous dwellings in Beaconsfield Road, Upper Norwood, were thus deliberately to face their convictions, the result might be surprising to the clergy of St. Aloysius and St. Clotilde, and the ministers of the Wesleyan Methodist Church and the Baptist Chapel, beneath whose discourses, attired in long black coats, they sit in decorous silence Sunday after Sunday, seemingly as docile and acquiescent as their fathers before them.
The loss of religion would not, indeed, be so serious a matter if it were being replaced by any other altruistic and impersonal ideal. Such have been found in a conception of patriotism, in efforts towards a social redemption, even in a vision of duty, sometimes hard and rarefied, which occupies its mind with the difficulties of the day. It is to be feared that these are not universal amongst the suburban peoples. Their lives are laborious and often disappointing. The rise in the price of the material things which they regard as essential is steady and continuous. House rent, and the rates laid upon house rent, clothes, food, the demands for small enjoyments, with the debt which often accompanies a too radiant conception of the possibilities of fixed income, leave little margin for superfluous expenditure. And as with the body, so with the soul. Considerable hours spent in not too exacting but conspicuously cheerless occupations, the natural harassments of Middle Class poverty, and the misfortune of loss or sickness, which is always unexpected and generally unprovided for, leave little surplusage of mental energy to be devoted to larger issues. Those who are intimate with the modern phases of suburban life think that they can detect a slackening of energy and fibre in a generation which is much occupied with its pleasures. It is a common complaint with the fathers that none of their children seem prepared to work in the manner in which they worked in the older days. It is a common complaint with the whole of a passing generation—the big manufacturers who built up England’s commercial supremacy, the veterans who remember the strenuous middle class existence of Victorian England—that the whole newer time thinks that it has little to do but to settle down and enjoy the heritage which has been won. The young men of the suburban society, especially, are being accused of a mere childish absorption in vicarious sport and trivial amusements.
It is curious to find this accusation driven home by just that variety of newspapers which has most completely exploited the nascent hunger of the sedentary boyhood of these classes for the excitements of gambling and adventure. The cheap and sensational Press found here a field ripe for its energies. It attained an immense commercial success from the provision of the stuff which this population demanded. Now the cleverest of its promoters are beginning to be a little alarmed at the results of its handiwork, and to eye with foreboding or with disgust the youth that has been moulded by its ideals. Under the circumstances, resentment at such scolding would appear not unnatural. In a popular play, designed to encourage or to ridicule Volunteering, the creature of this “Yellow Press” was recently revealed in all his vacuous vulgarity; and the “Yellow Press” itself turned in anger to assail its own darling and docile offspring. The retort, indeed, could be final and complete. “We have been nourished,” these could say, “in this unreal world of impudence, nonsense, vicarious sport and gambling. We began with our boys’ papers and guessing competitions. We were insensibly led on to efforts after a pound a week for life by estimating the money in the Bank of England on a certain day, or amassing gain in hundreds of pounds for guessing missing words or the last line of ‘Limericks.’ On the Sabbath, committed by our parents to some such literature as the Sunday Syndicated Press, we found there the same cheery game, smeared with a grease of piety; rewards and prizes here for guessing anagrams on Bible cities, or acrostics representing Kings and Queens of Israel. We were led on to talk and read and chatter about ‘sport,’ in biography of various football heroes, in descriptive reports of football matches, ever deepening in imbecility, until they rivalled the language of the lunatic asylum; stuff that uses its own phraseology, about ‘netting the muddied orange’ and ‘the ubiquitous spheroid,’ and ‘impelling the pill between the uprights.’ Our thoughts and growing interest were sedulously directed away from consideration of any rational or serious universe. We were exhorted to demonstrate patriotism by ‘mafficking,’ and informed that when we fell into the fountain at Trafalgar Square and subsequently embraced a policeman, we were performing a virtuous action. Then we are denounced because this universe of foolishness and frivolity has rendered us utterly unfit to face real things. Our slight world crumbles before such a challenge, as the daylight judges and condemns the scene of a night’s orgie.” “This short, slender, pale man,” says M. Hanotaux of Taine in 1870, “munching his throat lozenges, with squinting grey eyes behind his thick glasses, had at last seen things which astonished him—dying men, flowing blood, burning cities.” Dying men, flowing blood, and burning cities intruded suddenly into a world which is fashioned out of such emptiness and vanity exhibit but the same judgment as is revealed to the discerning mind through every passing hour.
And no one can seriously diagnose the condition of the “Suburbans” to-day without seriously considering also the influences of this chosen literature. There is nothing obscene about it, and little that is morally reprehensible. But it is mean and tawdry and debased, representing a tawdry and dusty world. You can see it in illustration. Photographs of the Englishman’s Home, showing the products of spectacular sport and silly gambling, falling amid their falling houses, face the picture of a negro on a raised platform pummelling an American, with tier upon tier of white, vacant faces—the Australian spectators—gazing with fierce approval. The reader passes—in such publications—from one frivolity to another. Now it is a woman adventurer on the music-hall stage, now the principal characters in some “sensational” divorce case, now a serial story in which the “bounder” expands himself, and is triumphant in an unreal universe. In the midst of all comes an appeal which, if it were to excite even a limited response, would sweep all this nonsense away, and land in bankruptcy the vast apparatus of newspapers which exploit and encourage the hunger of the suburban crowd. The work of corruption—the word is not too violent—in the matter of frivolous gambling competitions, is a systematic whole, beginning with the papers designed for boys and children. From absorption in these, with occasional rewards of five or ten shillings, a box of paints, or a bicycle, the growing youth passes to the “Limerick,” the picture puzzle, and the missing-word competition. At the end this newspaper world becomes—to its victims—an epitome and mirror of the whole world. Divorced from the ancient sanities of manual or skilful labour, of exercise in the open air, absorbed for the bulk of his day in crowded offices adding sums or writing letters, each a unit in a crowd which has drifted away from the realities of life in a complex, artificial city civilisation, he comes to see no other universe than this—the rejoicing over hired sportsmen who play before him, the ingenuities of sedentary guessing competitions, the huge frivolity and ignorance of the world of the music hall and the Yellow newspaper. Having attained so dolorous a consummation, perhaps the best that can be hoped for him is the advent of that friendly bullet which will terminate his inglorious life. Were this accomplished, the next day his own newspapers, the high priests of his religion, will rejoice over his death, and shamelessly gird at him for being what he is—the faithfullest of worshippers at their shrine.
This is the less desirable side of suburban life: a set-off against its many excellences. It probably represents but a passing phase in a progress towards intelligence and a sense of real values. That progress would be aided by any loosening of the city texture by which, and through improved means of transit, something of the large sanities of rural existence could be mingled with the quickness and agility of the town. At least the most hostile critics will acknowledge in these regions a clean and virile life: forming, when criticism has done its worst, in conjunction with the artisan class below, from which it is so sharply cut off in interest and ideas, the healthiest and most hopeful promise for the future of modern England.