“Conquerors” they appear to the critic abroad: “the Island Pharisees” to the critic at home. Many attempts have been made in recent times to describe in fiction this new leisured life of England: the particular contemporary aspect of that Fair “wherein it was contrived should be sold all sorts of Vanity, and that it should last all the year long.” There is something of it in the Egoist, something also in the extraordinary analysis by Mr. Henry James of the meaning of situation in various companies of rich, idle persons whose utility or significance in any rational universe it is difficult to apprehend. Some of the younger novelists, with less detachment and with less acceptance, have attempted interpretation, not of the moods of the moment, but of the meaning of a whole society. Mr. Galsworthy, for example, in a rather fierce indictment—gazing at the struggle for continuance amongst the successful, like a spectator gazing at a struggle of ants or bees—has drawn up an impeachment of the country house and conventional life of successful England. His hero enters this society from abroad, examining it, as if for the first time, with curious eyes, without any background of the fortifying curriculum of the accepted English education. He is excited to questioning and resentment by the ironical smiles and comments of a foreigner, a chance acquaintance in a third-class carriage, who, having rejected everything, swallowed “all the formulas,” has no attitude but that of irony towards the folly of human things. He attempts to allay that resentment by personal examination of the various phases of the life of the “Conquerors.” He wanders desolately from the oppression of the club to the oppression of an artistic and literary gathering; and thence to the futility of the philanthropic attempt to elevate the lower classes by chess and coffee and bagatelle. He notes the well-fed, bullet-headed, jovial crowds in the streets, the wives and husbands who have settled down to a routine of affection, the wives and husbands who have settled down to a routine of dull hatred and acceptance. The complacency of it all, its satisfaction, its docility, its absence of high purpose and adventure, haunt him like a nightmare. He essays the countryside with no better result. He stays a night with a lonely vicar. He beholds a warder guarding the huge convict prison—symbol of the unsuitability of Christianity to practical affairs. He walks the English roads with an energetic Indian civilian, who is very content to run the machine, without caring to inquire whether the machine is worth running at all. Finally, in the atmosphere of the English country house, serene and dominant, and triumphantly content, he realises that he is not of this company. Some disturbing madness has come upon him, which compels him to inquire, where other men are content to enjoy. And that way lies madness—or the struggle up a hill path, difficult and extended, towards some new form of sanity. So he brands them with some contempt and some anger as “Pharisees”—the island Pharisees, who have mistaken the accident of their own favoured circumstances for the reward of merit, and now present an invincible complacency to all the arrows of outrageous fortune. In such a condemnation he is something less than just to a race which has been considerably misjudged and misunderstood. The men and women which fall under the lash of Mr. Galsworthy’s satire have none of the historic characteristics of the Pharisee. Their ancestors may have thanked God that they were not as other men are. These are but astonished that the distinction was noticeable or important. The “other men” have vanished from the picture. They would be acknowledged to be of common blood, common faith, common nationality. But they so readily pass unnoticed that it would seem a work of supererogation to drag them on to the stage at all. The standard of life which is only maintained by the labour of obscure persons becomes accepted as normal; to be received without questioning. It is less easy, indeed, to excite questions than to propound answers. In the study of the psychology of “Space” and “Time” the student is familiar with the difficulty, not of explanation but of inquiry: “here is space, here is time—What is all the pother about?” is the attitude of the plain man. And “here is human life, as we know it,” is the attitude of the “plain man” in the class where is accepted as fixed and unalterable, that the services of many shall minister to the comfort of the few. The “Conquerors” have got far beyond the stage of the Pharisee. They are the children’s children of those rather crude exponents of complacency and pride. They reveal no ostentatious complacency and pride. Their attitude is rather one of acceptance. It is not that they thank God that they are not as other men are. It is that they can imagine no conceivable readjustment of the universe which could make other men as themselves; or themselves different They are enterprising, but they shun adventure. They are kind, with no real possibility of sympathy. Enormous shut doors separate them from the real world: and they bend the world to their desires. “Doubts don’t help you,” says one of Mr. Galsworthy’s characters. “How can you get any good from doubts? The thing is to win victories.” “Victories?” is the reply. “I’d rather understand than conquer.” But the “Island Race” has preferred to conquer rather than to understand. And wisdom is justified of all her children.
Once or twice, indeed, the critic is willing to suggest that perhaps the choice is not so mad a one after all. The ironical foreigner who prefers to resist, beg, cringe, and criticise, presents a figure not wholly heroic. He has fallen back on facts. He has sucked the salt and rind of life. He has deliberately contracted himself out of the universe of make-believe which he sees encompassing the people amongst whom his lot is cast. He enjoys his weakness and his laughter: the machine moves on; doing the work of the world. And these people, as he sees them—with their blindness to real issues, their carefully tended gardens, and the gates so severely padlocked which guard the pathways to waste spaces outside—may perhaps after all have learned the lesson of compromise in a world of frantic possibilities. The garden must be cultivated: cultivated, even if the sun which so pleasantly encourages its flowers to pass into kindly fruit is in reality a furnace of incredible fury; and the earth, of which this garden is a tiny segment, running along an illimitable inane towards no intelligible goal. “Spirit ruins you,” declares the little foreign barber, condemned always to shave paupers in the cellars of a Rowton lodging-house. “In this world what you want is to have no spirit.” The drôle Irish actor dies drunk in squalor, all because he has something in him “which will not accept things as they are, believing always that they should be better.” “When he was no longer capable of active revolution he made it by getting drunk. At the last this was his only way of protesting against society.” And occasionally, from the heart of the mechanical routine, there comes evidence that understanding is there—that understanding is possible: that not grossness or obtuseness or selfishness, as in the first hasty verdict, but the deliberate determination not to face the realities is the real motive power which keeps the system from falling into decay. For if the realities be faced, the bottom falls out of the world; and man, naked, shivering, and alone, is suddenly left defenceless, confronting the fire and the darkness. The hero of one of Mr. Galsworthy’s novels finds his uncle, a shrewd, insensitive man of business, criticising the modern uncensored drama. “‘What’s right for the French and Russians, Dick,’ he said, ‘is wrong for us. When we begin to be real we only really begin to be false.’ ‘Isn’t life bad enough already?’ he asks. It suddenly struck Shelton that, for all his smile, his uncle’s face had a look of crucifixion. He stood there very straight, his eyes haunting his nephew’s face; there seemed to Shelton a touching muddle in his optimism—a muddle of tenderness and of intolerance, of truth and second-handedness. Like the lion above him, he seemed to be defying Life to make him look at her.”[2]
“Defying Life to make him look at her” has been the effort of all societies which have been removed for a time from the immediate necessities of labour, hunger, and cold. That defiance of life is not so mad a thing as it at first appears. It attempts, and to a certain extent with success, to create a possible existence for an average which can never be far removed from the conventional. It works: that is its justification; this gospel of the Second Best, which substitutes a placid friendliness for love’s high ardour, and prettiness for beauty, and a compromise of cruelty and kindliness for social justice, and a standard of convention for the demands of a compelling religion. It is assailed in scornfulness and bitterness and passion, by the advocates of these various flaming emotions; by the religious prophets who demand sincerity; by the social prophets who cry for equality and compassion; by the artists who wish to challenge the unveiled Truth; by the great lovers who are outraged by this ignoble treatment of the “Lord of Life of terrible aspect.” But the thing swings forward, indifferent or but politely tolerant of the clamour; because its inhabitants know that the secure second best is a wiser choice (for them) than the hazards of an effort towards a doubtful larger attainment. Most of those who have demanded less limited horizons, and pressed forward to sail on uncharted seas, and adventured “beyond the sunset,” have vanished and been heard of no more. There is surely justification for any who in the face of such disasters confine their voyages to the familiar creeks and havens, and never willingly forsake the shelter of the shore.
And still to other nations—less successful in the economic struggle, less immovably confident in attainment—these people appear as “the Conquerors”: dominating the world with a certain serene confidence in the justice of their supremacy which is at once enviable and exasperating to the critic from outside. The Englishman abroad is inclined to gush a little at the fascination of the foreign freedom, especially at the charm and beauty of the South. He finds here manners, and an immemorial tradition of courtesy, and a less slavish devotion to material ends. But the South itself is under no such illusion. To these it is the English who are the people that have attained. Italy, Spain, Hungary, Bulgaria, are all desirous of unravelling the secret and accepting the standard of the dominant race. Even the writers of literature, although they may mingle a delicate irony with their praise, yet are content to emphasise the deficiences of their own people; in the contrast presented to them by the immigrant English who settle in their coasts, and maintain their own life and manners unconscious of the life and manners of their neighbours.
It is as a conquering race, secure, imperturbable, profoundly careless of opinion outside, that the astonished foreigner encounters the Englishman abroad. “I see them at work,” writes M. Marcel Prévost, from Biarritz, “and never perhaps have I better known and understood their Anglo-Saxon energy than here, on the French soil, in a French hotel, kept not by Germans or Swiss, but by the French of the Midi.” He applauds even while he criticises. He mingles his irony with admiration. He sees the Conquerors, not triumphant over the conquered, not consciously brutal to the conquered, but simply brushing them aside as irrelevant; never, indeed, seeing them at all. He sees, in fact, this English colony contemplating certain cities of France, not as a land with centuries of history beaten into its soil, but as a place where the amenities of climate enable them to transplant into a Southern air a portion of England. The French—even in the towns of the stranger, where the French colony is numerous, in London or in Barcelona, for example—never give the impression of a civic garrison engaged by the Mother Country. Whilst a few hundreds of English people in a French town, “obstinately speaking nothing but English, inhabiting only English lodgings, dressing only in the English fashion, practising their religion, their sports, and their games, with an easy ostentation, end by persuading us,” he ironically complains, “that we are the strangers—or at least the conquered nation.” It is this mingling of security and indifference that fills him with despair. In Biarritz, Pau, Dinard—he might have said in the whole côte d’azur of the Riviera—“the English have conquered us,” he declares. Excellent milieu pour étudier leurs procédés de conquête.
In the attempt to analyse the secret of this supremacy, he fixes attention especially upon three points. First, the English are at home abroad. When we go to foreign lands, says M. Prévost, it is the stranger who interests us, his manners and habits, his peculiarities, the ways in which he differs from us. When the Englishman goes abroad, the customs of the country, the opinion of the people amongst whom he lives, count for nothing. He comes to Biarritz to live his life, the traditional English life, made up of bounteous feeding, of violent physical exercise, of clubs, and of bridge. He describes the types which he found at the Hotel Victoria, all entirely complacent, all self-sufficient, all just blandly tolerant of the occasional presence of the native inhabitant in this frontier post of Empire. “Yes; all those people are entirely at home there. It is I who am the stranger, the profane, since I look upon them with curiosity, since I wish to learn something from them.” This accusation is an old one: accepted since the famous definition of the Continent in the verdict of the British tourist, as “ruins, inhabited by imbeciles”: since the refusal of the English lady to speak French in Paris, because, as she protested, “it only encourages them.” Here at least, amid much that has changed, the type is unchangeable. The conquering race cannot understand the conquered. No conquering race ever has understood the conquered: except when, understanding, its Imperial rule has begun its decline. If the English in India, it has been said, commenced to understand India, the episode of English rule in India would be nearing its close. The second “instrument of invasion,” this acute observer finds in a “Discipline of Life, unanimously accepted.” Their plan of conquest is traced in advance. They stamp their life upon the life of the invaded cities: demanding, and in consequence readily obtaining, those things which they judge indispensable to the discipline of their existence. These include especially l’installation hygiénique and l’installation sportive. At Biarritz to-day, the villas which are not entirely sanitary do not let. This is a more effective pressure than any bye-law of a local authority. They create—through their demands—hot air and vapour baths, certain conditions of ventilation, electric light, le seul qui ne “mange pas d’oxygène” disent-ils. They insist also upon their sports: golf, tennis, polo, hunting, shooting. They even patronise automobilism, whilst declaring, says M. Prévost slyly, “that it is not a true sport; they accuse it of not being an English sport.” To this they join their religion, or at least the outward manifestation of their religion. (One thinks of English “chaplains abroad.”) Given also to this an imperious complacency of costume, and all the materials are offered to provide the Anglican colony abroad with the impression of un corps d’occupation ayant son uniforme, ses titres, ses chefs. Ces sont bien des conquérants.
But beyond these superficial truculencies the observer may find a deeper interpretation of the cause of these triumphs. He sees the English, in these new Englands that they have made abroad, less intelligent, less generally cultivated than the French; less cultivated, less scientific, artistic, and laborious than the Germans. Yet it is these “barbarians,” not the French or the Germans, who have attained, almost without effort, the overlordship of the world. He ascribes this attainment to the fact that to-day the English are the only people who have truly national manners and characteristics. In a different order of things, but in equal measure, they exercise upon the manners of the world the Authority which the French exercised in the eighteenth century; when even those who hated them were compelled to copy them. “Manners and Customs in France,” he asks dejectedly, “what is it that can be developed to-day under this title? We have no longer ‘Manners and Customs.’ But the English retain their manners and customs with a stubborn placidity.” “You can love—more or less—certain qualities of this conquering people,” he concludes, “but how is it possible not to admire its strong national discipline?” “That is what ought to be learnt from it,” he exhorts his fellow-countrymen, “rather than ways of smoking or rules of play.”
There is much sound common sense under this quiet irony and badinage. The qualities which have produced an English domination of Biarritz or Cannes are the qualities which have given to the race an Empire dominant over four hundred millions of variegated peoples. The qualities which have made them respected rather than loved at the continental watering-places are the qualities which would cause their subject peoples for the most part to contemplate the abandonment of their rule without regret. Strength, energy, and a certain crudity make up the blend of all Imperial races. It was so with the Romans: a conspicuous efficiency, a justice equally impartial and indifferent; aloofness with a certain disdain in it; an exercise of power almost startling in the disproportion of end to means. It is the vigour of a clumsy giant; sometimes exercising his strength in beneficent enterprise, in effecting desirable acts which no weaker agent can perform; sometimes—and generally unwittingly—crushing with heavy hoof things of whose value he has no conception. No Conquering Race can possess much power of introspection, of self-examination. “They do not fret and whine about their condition,” says Whitman of the animals. He could equally have said it about the English. No Conquering Race can possess patience: else it passes into the acquiescence of the South, whose favourite word is “to-morrow,” or the acquiescence of the East, which is content to let the thundering legions pass, and to plunge in thought again. No Conquering Race can possess irony: else it will uncomfortably suspect that its conquered peoples are secretly laughing at it, and this suspicion will excite it to resentment and reprisal. No Conquering Race can possess humour: for then one day it will find itself laughing at itself; and that day its power of conquest is gone. Those who would help mankind must not expect much from them, is the half sad, half cynical verdict of worldly wisdom. Those who would rule mankind must not expect much from themselves beyond rulership, is the lesson of history upon all Imperialisms. Above all, those who would do the work of the world must not trouble themselves very greatly with the inquiry whether the work of the world is worth the doing. If there are signs of menace in the present outlook they arise from just this fact: that a race which has conquered is now passing, it would seem, into a race that is comfortable; that the frivolous pursuit of pleasure rather than of wickedness, and the maintenance of a too exacting standard of material welfare is threatening to replace an older salutary simplicity; and that the reproach of Juvenal to Rome is not without justification in twentieth-century London, when he accused its successful peoples of having eaten of the herb of Sardinia. Moritur et ridet;—it laughs and dies.
For its efforts at conquest, however annoying to those who resent its domination, are enterprises of no mean or timid order. No nation need be ashamed of Empire on a large scale, or apologise for the overlordship of a Continent. To-day’s criticism deplores the weakening or vanishing of the qualities by which such conquest was attained: in an aristocratic caste which is merging itself in a wealthy class, and undergoing weakening in the process. It is not from the “Conquerors” but from a rather harassed and limited Middle Class that the “Empire builders” are now drawn: a Lord Macdonnell from the home of a peasant farmer in Ireland, a Cecil Rhodes from an English country parsonage. The men who are administering with varying success British East Africa and Northern Nigeria, and the huge machine of government in India, are mainly the children of the professional families, drawn abroad by love of adventure or absence of opportunity at home. There is little danger in England of any general popular uprising against aristocratic privilege, or even against a system which has concentrated in few hands so disproportionate a percentage of the national accumulation. But there may be danger of a kind of internal collapse and decay, in the deflection of vigour and intellectual energy to irrelevant standards and pleasures; in the inadequacy of that vigour and energy before nations ever becoming better equipped in the world struggle, and determined to make desperate efforts for the supreme position. The invocation to “wake up” is supposed to be addressed mainly to the working peoples, whose extravagant thirst for alcoholic refreshment, and whose Trade Unions, encouraging an enforced idleness, are creating, in this theory, a falling-off in commercial and industrial efficiency. But far more than among the “rude mechanicals,” a facing of realities is needed among the classes who have conquered and attained; who now, absorbed in the difficult art of living under elaborate standards, find little superfluous energy or wealth remaining for the setting of the house in order. A variable and random philanthropy is the substitute for Social Reform. A buying-off of the more energetic from below by honours and titles liberally bestowed, prevents the attack upon a whole class by the resentment of energy and intellect excluded from privilege. Free patronage and a liberal entertainment of authors, critics, playwrights, musicians, and ambitious politicians, removes the menace of an intellectual proletariat exciting anger and envy amongst the dim millions of the industrial populace. It has the sense also to know the limits of its interferences; to know that its power, inadequate to constructive effort, rests on inhibitions rather than activities. The rather ignoble rôle played by the House of Lords during the past decade reveals its weaknesses. It will allow changes which it profoundly dislikes, when compelled by fear. It will resist changes in action when that fear is controlled. It will altogether abandon the effort to initiate changes where change is essential. It can do little but modify, check, or destroy other men’s handiwork. It has no single constructive suggestion of its own to offer to a people confronting difficult problems, and harassed by the obligations of necessary reorganisations. It can neither breed leaders nor ideas. And because of this ultimate sterility—though it has all the cards in its hands and every material force in its favour—its power may gradually pass and be destroyed; to appear in history as one more aristocracy declining, not through the batterings of external enemies, but from the fretting and crumbling of an internal decay.
Its fear to-day is Socialism: Socialism which it does not understand, but which presents itself as an uprising of the uneducated, suddenly breaking into its houses; their clumsy feet on the mantelpiece, their clumsy hands seizing and destroying all beautiful and pleasant things. So it lies awake at night, listening fearfully to the tramp of the rising host: the revolt of the slave against his master. From Socialism—as a code of economic organisation, ordering life on a military, disciplinary, and rational basis—it has perhaps less to fear than it sometimes imagines. For this “Socialism” is farther away in time than many ardent Socialists suppose. And if “Socialism” were consummated, there might be found under its rigorous régime more tenderness to an aristocratic caste and tradition than is anticipated by those who are terrified at the promise of its advent. These people, indeed, have less to fear from a demand for equality, than from a demand for efficiency: from the enforced necessity, either in a hazardous national crisis abroad, or in some stress of economic adversity at home, for the rule of energy and intelligence. The demand of the Napoleonic system—“the declared principle,” to “seek talent wherever it may be found”—might make havoc of the supremacy of the children of the “Conquerors”; might drastically determine that some less ruinous proportion of the national wealth was expended on aimless conventions and enjoyments. It may be desirable that the land of England, for example, shall be held in the hands of private owners, instead of being owned by the whole community. It seems to be increasingly questioned whether the land of England shall continue to be held by its present private owners: whether the landed classes of this country, in any ultimate standard of profit and loss, can justify the trust and high calling which has placed the welfare of the rural population in their keeping, and now sees little return but a decaying, deserted countryside. There is much, again, to be said for a Second Chamber in Government. There is little to be said for the present Second Chamber, except that in practice it appears to have disproved all its theoretical advantages: abstaining where in theory it ought to have struck, and striking where in theory it ought to have abstained. Aristocracy in England has been kindly and generous. Even as in part transformed into a plutocracy, it provides little of that attitude of insolence to the less fortunate which is the surest provocation of revolution. The action of a section of the motoring classes, indeed, in their annexation of the highways and their indifference to the common traditions, stands almost alone as an example of wealth’s intolerable arrogances, and has certainly excited more resentment amongst the common people than any extravagance of pleasure or political reaction. It is only in such manifestations as those of enjoyment deliberately associated with careless injury to the general convenience, that there is revealed the remotest possibility of a deliberate “class war” between the rich and the poor. Feudal England is dying, and the attempt to transform a caste basis of land and breeding into a caste basis of material possession seems doomed to failure. But it will fail less from external assault than from the inability of the inheritors of great fortune to maintain the energies and devotions through which that fortune has been made. “The Conquerors” will leave little bitterness behind them. There may even remain, in the memory of a more exacting age to come, a pleasant recollection of those who upheld, in time of tranquillity, a standard of manners and a tradition of kindliness, duty, and courage before life’s lesser ills. From public schools, which profess to teach “character” rather than to stimulate intelligence, through universities encouraging large expenditure on comfort, limitless bodily exercise, and an exiguous standard of intellectual effort, they pass to the “truly national manners and characteristics” which M. Prévost so much admires. In country residence, in solid aggregation in the metropolis, in lesser imitative effort amongst the provincial cities, they have cherished a code of hospitality, courtesy, criticism, mild and generous interest in public and private affairs. If that code is in part vanishing before the influx of the new “Super-wealth,” it yet exhibits, in the present generation, a still active power of assimilation. Not for conspicuous crimes, for selfishness, for class exclusiveness, or for insolence will this society be judged and condemned by the progress of time. It will pass—if it passes—because it is mistaking abnormal and insecure experience for the normal and secure; because an unwillingness to face reality is gradually developing a confusion between reality and illusion; because in its prosperity it may be stricken with blindness to the signs of the time.