TO
MY WIFE
PREFACE
“I ’VE got to a time of life,” says the hero of a modern novel, “when the only theories that interest me are generalisations about realities.” There are many contemporary observers who do not require advancing years and a wider experience of life to concentrate them upon so serious a study. It is not that they deliberately turn towards consideration of the meaning and progress of the actual life around them. It is that they cannot—with the best desire in the world—escape from such an encompassing problem. To those the only question before them is the present: the past but furnishing material through which that present can rightly be interpreted, the future appearing as a present which is hurrying towards them—impatient to be born. They ask for fact; not make-believe. With Thoreau, “Be it life or death,” they will cry, “We crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.”
The following pages offer an attempt to estimate some of these “realities” in the life of contemporary England. The effort might appear presumptuous, demanding not one volume but ten, the observation, not of a decade, but of a lifetime. I would plead, however, that any contribution may help in some degree the work of others in a more far-reaching and detailed survey. The right judgment of such an attempt should be directed not at its completeness, but its sincerity. In my former work as a critic and reviewer it was this test alone that I sought to apply to similar estimates of to-day and to-morrow. It is to this test alone that I now venture to appeal.
“Things are what they are. Their consequences will be what they will be. Why then should we seek to be deceived?” The custom of mankind to live in a world of illusion endows Butler’s magnificent platitude with something of the novelty of a paradox. For many generations—perhaps since man first was—we have succeeded in believing what we wished to believe. The process has gone so far as to have excited a kind of reverse wave. We are supposed to wish to believe what we believe. We identify diagnosis with desire, and think that the prophet of evil is secretly rejoicing over the impending calamity. We are convinced that no man would assert that certain events are going to happen if he did not wish them to happen. If an observer anticipates a victory for Tariff Reform he is supposed to be weakening on Free Trade. If he proclaims a decline in religion he is deemed to be little better than an atheist.
I have no doubt wrongly estimated and anticipated events of the present and future, and gladly acknowledge the personal and tentative character of each particular assertion. I should like, however, to think myself free from the charge of disguising polemic as observation. I should like, in a word, to think that no one would be able to ascertain, merely from the following pages, whether their author was advocate of Free Trade or Protection, Socialist or Individualist, Pagan or Christian.
Portions of some of these chapters have already appeared—in substance—in the pages of The Nation, and I am indebted to the proprietors of that journal for permission to reproduce them. The book has been completed under circumstances of haste and pressure, for which I must ask indulgence. I would have delayed its publication until further leisure was possible, did I see any opportunity of that leisure being attained. But any one who has chosen to embark upon the storm and tumult of public affairs, must henceforth reconcile himself to the limitation of other interests to odd corners of time and short holidays avariciously husbanded. If I had delayed a study of modern England to a less hurried and more tranquil future, I might have found that it would be a very different England which I should then be compelled to examine.
C. F. G. MASTERMAN
Easter, 1909