The condition of England

by Charles F. G. Masterman

I

LET us turn, then, from science to literature: to the attempt made by this age, or a certain section of it, to find self-conscious expression for its praise or blame. I spoke at the beginning of the impeachment of the nineteenth-century civilisation by its greater writers: their conviction of a mortal disease. We have few great writers and far less violence in denunciation. The change is becoming manifest as comfort increases and wealth accumulates, which has been manifest in all similar transformations. Literature loses its ardour and its inspiration. It becomes critical rather than invigorating: sceptical, questioning, sometimes with an appearance of frivolity, sometimes torturing itself with angers and despairs. The note to-day is that of a time of disenchantment. Here is reaction after the fashion of high hopes: indignation at the bankruptcy of things which promised much and accomplished so little; a conviction that the zest and sparkle has gone from a society which suddenly feels itself growing old.

“The great evil of our age,” is the summary of one clear-sighted critic, “is that we are constantly and terribly aware of evil.” With wealth accumulated to the astonishment of mankind, tribute sucked from all subject races, opulence which makes poorer nations envious, literature reveals no content, no deliberate acceptances, no high inspiration. “Our science, philosophies, and inventions and manufactures and infinite complexities have conspired to make us more discontented, even if we have not actually more cause for misery.”[19] The verdict of the sceptic from the heart of a civilisation advancing in material triumph and more comfortable in the world than ever before, is a verdict of weariness and vanity.

The “ache of modernism” and the turmoil of Whitman’s “growing arrogance of realism” confront the demands of the human spirit for adventure and of the human heart for triumph over time and change. Science in its buoyant beginnings had provided great inspiration, of wonderful gifts for man’s enjoyment, of wonderful knowledge of the universal secret. Sixty years ago it seemed to be offering humanity not only control of material forces and cunning invention, but also the interpretation of the secret of life and destiny. But science to-day—in the critic’s examination—protests in literature the affirmation of a bankrupt creed. The revelation of the secret has become the assertion of Haeckel, that “consciousness, thought, and speculation are functions of the ganglionic cells of the cortex of the brain.” And the inspiration of the discovery sinks back into the declaration that “Democracy is an expression of the constant desire for change, due to a hope that change will bring some remedy for the really incurable ills of human nature.” In such a critic as Mr. Hardy, reaction against this failure, the bankruptcy of the creed of science, passes into an almost savage revolt against the blind purposes of life; its clumsy cruelties, its lack of guidance or intelligible meaning. “Hardy goes so far as to suggest that God is either a defeated God or that He is indifferent, if not actually hostile, to men.” “Human beings are for him worthy of praise and pity because they have been laden with sorrows which they did not deserve, and are kinder to one another than God is kind to them.”[20] This great writer sees in vision the tragedy of “the modern vice of unrest,” of “the view of life as a thing to be put up with, replacing that zest for existence which was so intense in early civilisation.” “It is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.”

In face of such disillusionment the men who attempt literature attempt escape in various ways. And “escape” is the prominent aspect of to-day’s art, in a deliberate turning away from the realities of the present, which only a few accept as substance for artistic interpretation. Some fling themselves out of the main stream of life like the “Decadents,” finding satisfaction in sense-given impression, repudiating ultimate purposes. To these the present is already in Autumn, and its noises and tumults but the jarrings of a machine running down; worn with the dust of its own grinding. Others, like the psychological novelists, attempt analysis without affirmation or denial. They exhibit the world as they see it, or a particular select portion of it. They dissect a character or a situation in all its implications and aspects. They would be the first to repudiate either approval or criticism of this subject-matter of delicate and refined writing. At the opposite pole are the apostles of protest—a Gorky, a Wells, a Mark Rutherford, who stab and slash at a life so remote from the ideal, in furious revolt against its complacencies and cruelties. Some fall back on dreams and memories, finding, either in a transfigured past or in the kingdom of fantasy which never was upon the solid ground, satisfaction denied in a world which has become “so unworthy.” And others seek refuge in dreams of a transfigured humanity from the implacable defiance of present things; with pictures of that new world which yet shall rise when “every life shall be a song.” Beyond these are the fugitives who frankly take to flight; like Lafcadio Hearn, turning first to the south, then to the east, “to the unexplored Eastern mind which may yet afford a refuge from ‘modernism,’” and finding his latter days saddened by the aggressive entrance of “modernism” even into these remote fastnesses, and civilisation ravaging the simplicities of old Japan. In the near East, Mr. Scott James found the challenge frankly flung down, and the two forces—romanticism and “modernism”—joined at death grips. “‘Time!’ ejaculates the Montenegrin. ‘What is time? Time is nothing. You live, and then you die.’” The same resistance, the same overthrow is being revealed here as Mr. Fielding Hall discovered in a far East, and so unforgetably stamped into literature, in his picture of the passing of the soul of Burma before a conquering imperialism and a vigorous commercial development. “I know what it means, this civilisation,” says the priest of “Our Lady of the Rocks” in the remote mountain fastness of the Balkans. “My poor people. They have no idea what life is, out in the great world, and it is coming to them.” “Till now they have lived with God and the mountains. It is so very little that one needs in this life. We have so short a time here.”

A few years ago I selected for criticism and for praise certain contemporary writers who were refusing to take “opium.”[21] These set themselves definitely in the heart of present affairs to endeavour to understand and to interpret the meaning of their day and generation. In almost every case the progress of things since that estimate has taken them into darker and more ominous outlook upon the future of the modern world. To Mr. Wells it is all a “spectacle of forces running to waste, of people who use and do not replace; the story of a country hectic with a wasting, aimless fever of trade and money-making and pleasure-seeking.” The hero of his greatest novel reveals an experience fragmentary and disconnected in a tumultuous world. Mr. Wells can show that world in its rockings and upheavals, until beneath the seeming calm and conventionality of the surface view, is heard the very sound of the fractures and fallings; an age in the headlong rush of change. George Ponderevo is at one time floating immense financial companies, a king of speculation, courted by the great, one of England’s “Conquerors.” At another he is quarrelling and forgiving and quarrelling again with a little commonplace uncomprehending wife down in a commonplace villa at Ealing. He is learning to fly, absorbed in the work of scientific invention—the one real thing of solid resistance in a universe of slush and mud and make-believe. He is engaged in random, fantastic sociabilities at Beckenham or Chislehurst, discussing, under the conflagrations of sun and star, the respective merits, as domestic pets, of cat or dog. He is plunging, in disconnected adventure, into a piratical raid into West Africa after “quap,” a poisonous radio-active product of enormous value; and again, emerging from that terrific battle with unclean and tenacious forces, he is balancing toast on a tea-cup in a London drawing-room. He tumbles into love, driven forward by blind, tyrannous forces which overthrow reason and conventional restraint, against which he has never been warned, in whose service he can find no meaning. And in problems of sex which appear simple to the orthodox upholders of the existing moral standards, and simple, again, to the orthodox revolters from the existing moral standards, he can find nothing but perplexity and confusion—no certain guidance at all.

At the beginning the child is reared under the shadow of Bladesover, under the dominance of the great house, in the feudal tradition seen from the underside. And here was a civilisation which could be approved or condemned, but which at least stood as a coherent thing—a rule of life, a code of conduct, an organic society. But as he grows to manhood, Bladesover is sinking into decay, perishing, not knowing that it is perishing, thinking that it will endure for ever. The man who is living amid that long-drawn decline is wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. It is an age in passing. What is coming to replace it? No one knows. The religion, the moral affirmations and denials of Bladesover are vanishing with it. Like the great house, the outward seeming still maintains an appearance of life; still church steeple and feudal tower together dominate the countryside. But the inner heart of it has gone. Man, as he achieves maturity, as he achieves sincerity from the rubbish heap of dead and dying assertions and denials in which he is being upreared, finds himself naked and alone in the midst of all the clamour and violence of encompassing hordes of his fellows. No pillar of cloud by day, no pillar of fire by night, directs his onward journey. And the irony of the experience is provided by the fact that the moment of the apprehension of this loneliness is the moment also of the apprehension of magnificence in material achievement—when civilisation, intoxicated with the attainment of comfort, is crowning itself with flowers and calling itself immortal. The effect is similar to that of the splendour of a palace which is found to be designed by a madman.

It is a “new hotel population” revealed as the ascendant race: the “multitude of economically ascendant people who are learning how to spend money.” They are “running the world, practically, running it faster and faster.” Of the fate of such an Age the hero here makes no prophecy. The sadness of his frustrated life, the denial of the only thing in life that he passionately desires, fills the whole scene with the sense of baffled purposes, of a striving that ends in nothing. “It may be,” he confesses at the end, “I see decay all about me because I am, in a sense, decay. To others it may be a scene of achievement and construction radiant with hope. I, too, have a sort of hope, but it is a remote hope, a hope that finds no promise in this Empire or in any of the great things of our time. How they will look in history I do not know.”[22]

And here speaks the ordinary man in his moment of introspection: in that rare moment when standing aside from the hurry and dust of it all he asks himself whence? why? and to what end? The other qualified critics of the time are scarcely less discomforting. Mr. Bernard Shaw, after devoting half his lifetime to the satirising of the advocates of order, seems determined to devote the other half to the satirising of the advocates of change. Ridicule of the hypocrisy and self-deceptions which are the permanent accompaniments of reform, is a task not only easy in itself, but exceedingly agreeable to all those to whom Reform itself is tiresome. The satirist enjoys, therefore, a widespread popularity. The portrait of the blatent Liberal phrasemonger in John Bull’s Other Island, the failure of philanthropy and the triumph of efficiency in Major Barbara, the universal confusion which falls upon the new moralists in the conversation in Getting Married, seems extraordinarily pleasant to all those to whom Liberal ideas and philanthropic ardours and new moralities are undesirable intruders in a well-regulated existence. Only occasionally, and then through the intervention of a “madman,” does the voice of the prophet declare “woe” to a world of blindness and illusion. Little Rosscullen, the Irish parallel to the remote Montenegrin village, invaded by the representatives of “Progress” is found far from any condition of idyllic innocence. Amid the splendour of the natural scene, the granite rock and heather in the setting sun, poverty, selfishness, superstition, ignorance, indifferent cruelty compete for mastery. The priest tyrannises and bullies, the farmer cheats the labourer; furtive cunning and idleness and revengeful memories occupy the place of the simple devotion and pastoral rejoicings of the popular picture. But the new world which is to civilise this dreary swamp of humanity out of existence offers to the observer food no more satisfying to the hungry heart of man. The “Progress” which modern life here unfolds to the medieval is a “progress” which terminates in blind endings—the product of the Town of Vanity. “I shall bring money here,” is the twentieth-century promise to all Rosscullens. “I shall raise wages. I shall found public institutions, a library, a polytechnic (undenominational, of course), a gymnasium, a cricket club, perhaps an art school. I shall make a garden city of Rosscullen. The round tower shall be thoroughly repaired and restored.” To which the twelfth century replies in an epitaph written over the graves of many kings. “Believe me, I do every justice to the efficiency of you and your syndicate. Mr. Broadbent will get into Parliament most efficiently; which is more than St. Patrick could do if he were alive now. You may even build the hotel efficiently, if you can find enough efficient masons, carpenters, and plumbers, which I rather doubt. When the hotel becomes insolvent your English business habits will secure the thorough efficiency of the liquidation. You will reorganise the scheme efficiently. You will legislate its second bankruptcy efficiently. You will get rid of its original shareholders efficiently, after efficiently ruining them. And you will finally profit very efficiently by getting that hotel for a few shillings in the pound. Besides these efficient operations, you will foreclose your mortgages most efficiently. You will drive Haffigan to America very efficiently. You will find a use for Barney Doran’s foul mouth and bullying temper by employing him to slave-drive your labourers very efficiently. And when at last this poor desolate countryside becomes a busy mint in which we shall all slave to make money for you, with our Polytechnic to teach us how to do it efficiently, and our library to fuddle the few imaginations your distilleries will spare, and our repaired Round Tower, with admission sixpence, and refreshments and penny-in-the-slot mutoscopes to make it interesting, then no doubt your English and American shareholders will spend all the money we make for them very efficiently in shooting and hunting, in operations for cancer and appendicitis, in gluttony and gambling; and you will devote what they save to fresh land-development schemes. For four wicked centuries the world has dreamt this foolish dream of efficiency. And the end is not yet. But the end will come.”[23]

Which outburst, like the denunciation of the American millionaires by the preacher whom they pay for such services, excites no resentment, but rather applause. “Too true,” replies Mr. Broadbent, “only too true, and most eloquently put.” “He has made me feel a better man,” is the grateful verdict. “I feel now as I never did before, that I am right in devoting my life to the cause of Ireland. Come along and help me to choose the site for the new hotel.”