CHAPTER III
THE SUBURBANS
THEY are easily forgotten: for they do not strive or cry; and for the most part only ask to be left alone. They have none of those channels of communication in their possession by which the rich and the poor are able to express their hostility to any political or social change. The Landed Classes or the brewing interests, on the one hand, find newspapers energetic in fighting their cause; on the other, see themselves securely entrenched in a “Second Chamber,” which offers them a permanent majority. The Working Classes can organise into unions, subsidise members of Parliament and a Labour Party, make themselves both respected and feared. No one fears the Middle Classes, the suburbans; and perhaps for that reason, no one respects them. They only appear articulate in comedy, to be made the butt of a more nimble-witted company outside: like “Mr. Hopkinson,” who is aspiring to transfer his residence from Upper Tooting to Belgravia, or the queer people who dispute—in another recent London play—concerning the respective social advantages of Clapham and Herne Hill. Strong in numbers, and in possession of a vigorous and even tyrannical convention of manners, they lack organisation, energy, and ideas. And in consequence they have been finding themselves crushed between the demands of the industrial peoples on the one hand, and the resistance of the “Conquerors” on the other. They act only when their grievances have become a burden impossible to be borne. They act without preparation, without leadership, without preliminary negotiation. They rise suddenly, impervious to argument, unreasoning and resolute. And the result is often a cataclysm which would be almost ludicrous if it were not both random and pitiful.
Such action, for example, was revealed in the complete overturn of London’s system of government which took place in the spring of 1908, after a continuous rule of nearly twenty years of administration by one party. Lord Randolph Churchill ended his political career because he had “forgotten Goschen.” The Progressive Party ended its political career in the Metropolis because it had forgotten the Middle Classes. It recognised, indeed, and estimated not unfairly, the strength of the rich, the artisans, the unskilled labourers. These three classes are prominent factors in the modern European polity. But it had forgotten the dimensions and latent power of those enormous suburban peoples which are practically the product of the past half-century, and have so greatly increased, even within the last decade. They are the creations not of the industrial, but of the commercial and business activities of London. They form a homogeneous civilisation,—detached, self-centred, unostentatious,—covering the hills along the northern and southern boundaries of the city, and spreading their conquests over the quiet fields beyond. They are the peculiar product of England and America; of the nations which have pre-eminently added commerce, business, and finance to the work of manufacture and agriculture. It is a life of Security; a life of Sedentary occupation; a life of Respectability; and these three qualities give the key to its special characteristics. Its male population is engaged in all its working hours in small, crowded offices, under artificial light, doing immense sums, adding up other men’s accounts, writing other men’s letters. It is sucked into the City at daybreak, and scattered again as darkness falls. It finds itself towards evening in its own territory in the miles and miles of little red houses in little silent streets, in number defying imagination. Each boasts its pleasant drawing-room, its bow-window, its little front garden, its high-sounding title—“Acacia Villa,” or “Camperdown Lodge”—attesting unconquered human aspiration. There are many interests beyond the working hours: here a greenhouse filled with chrysanthemums, there a tiny grass patch with bordering flowers; a chicken-house, a bicycle shed, a tennis lawn. The women, with their single domestic servants, now so difficult to get, and so exacting when found, find time hang rather heavy on their hands. But there are excursions to shopping centres in the West End, and pious sociabilities, and occasional theatre visits, and the interests of home. The children are jolly, well-fed, intelligent English boys and girls; full of curiosity, at least in the earlier years. Some of them have real gifts of intellect and artistic skill, receiving in the suburban secondary schools the best education which England is giving to-day. You may see the whole suburbs in August transported to the more genteel of the southern watering-places; the father, perhaps, a little bored; the mother perplexed with the difficulty of cramped lodgings and extortionate prices. But the children are in a magic world, crowding the seashore, full of the elements of delight and happy laughter.
The rich despise the Working People; the Middle Classes fear them. Fear, stimulated by every artifice of clever political campaigners, is the motive power behind each successive uprising. In feverish hordes, the suburbs swarm to the polling booth to vote against a truculent Proletariat. The Middle Class elector is becoming irritated and indignant against working-class legislation. He is growing tired of the plaint of the unemployed and the insistent crying of the poor. The spectacle of a Labour Party triumphant in the House of Commons, with a majority of members of Parliament apparently obedient to the demands of its leaders, and even a House of Lords afraid of it, fills him with profound disgust. The vision of a “Keir Hardie” in caricature—with red tie and defiant beard and cloth cap, and fierce, unquenchable thirst for Middle Class property—has become an image of Labour Triumphant which haunts his waking hours. He has difficulty with the plumber in jerry-built houses needing continuous patching and mending. His wife is harassed by the indifference or insolence of the domestic servant. From a blend of these two he has constructed in imagination the image of Democracy—a loud-voiced, independent, arrogant figure, with a thirst for drink, and imperfect standards of decency, and a determination to be supported at some one else’s expense. Every day, swung high upon embankments or buried deep in tubes underground, he hurries through the region where the creature lives. He gazes darkly from his pleasant hill villa upon the huge and smoky area of tumbled tenements which stretches at his feet. He is dimly distrustful of the forces fermenting in this uncouth laboratory. Every hour he anticipates the boiling over of the cauldron. He would never be surprised to find the crowd behind the red flag, surging up his little pleasant pathways, tearing down the railings, trampling the little garden; the “letting in of the jungle” upon the patch of fertile ground which has been redeemed from the wilderness. And whatever may be the future, the present he finds sufficiently intolerable. The people of the hill are heavily taxed (as he thinks) in order that the people of the plain may enjoy good education, cheap trams, parks, and playgrounds; even (as in the frantic vision of some newspapers) that they may be taught Socialism in Sunday schools, with parodies of remembered hymns. And the taxes thus extorted—this, perhaps, is the heart of the complaint—are all going to make his own life harder, to make life more difficult for his children. The man of forty has already sounding in his ears the noise of the clamour of the coming generations. And these coming generations, who are going to push him roughly out of his occupation, and bring his little castle in ruins to the ground, are being provided with an equipment for the struggle out of the funds which he himself is compelled to supply. He is paying for his own children’s start in life, and he is having extorted from him the price of providing other people’s children with as good a start in life, or a better. He has to lay by for his old age in painful accumulation of pence and shillings, every one of which he can ill spare. And he now finds the old age of the loafer and the spendthrift—so he interprets recent legislation on the subject—bountifully provided for. He wonders where it is all going to stop. He is becoming every day more impatient with the complaining of the poor. He refuses to mourn over the sufferings of the factory girl when he is offering a desirable position as general “help” and can find no applicant. He believes that the “unemployed” consist exclusively of those who are determined to go softly all their days at the public expense—the expense of himself and his class. He is labouring at his dismal sedentary occupation so many incredible hours a day, while these men are parading their woes in exuberant rhetoric at the street corner. And as he labours there enters into his soul a resentment which becomes at times almost an obsession; in which all the disability of his devitalised life is concentrated into revolt against the truculent demands of “the British working man.”
He has had enough of it. He is turning in desperation to any kind of protection held out to him. His ideals are all towards the top of the scale. He is proud when he is identifying his interests with those of Kensington, and indignant when his interests are identified with those of Poplar. He possesses in full those progressive desires which are said to be the secret of advance. He wants a little more than he can afford, and is almost always living beyond his income. He has been harassed with debts and monetary complications; and the demands of rent and the rate-collector excite in him a kind of impotent fury. In that fury he turns round and suddenly strikes down the party in possession, glad to vote against the working man, whom he fears; and for a change, which he hopes may lighten his present burden; and against a Socialism which he cannot understand. So in an unexpected whirlwind of ferocity, a Progressive Party, hitherto unconquerable, finds itself almost annihilated. The general effect is that of being suddenly butted by a sheep.
It is no despicable life which has thus silently developed in suburban London. Family affection is there, cheerfulness, an almost unlimited patience. Its full meaning to-day and the courses of its future still remain obscure. Is this to be the type of all civilisations, when the whole Western world is to become comfortable and tranquil, and progress finds its grave in a universal suburb? Or is the old shaggy and untamed earth going to shake itself suddenly once again and bring the whole edifice tumbling to the ground? It has no clear recognition of its own worth, or its own universe, or the scheme of the life of the world. It is losing its old religions. It still builds churches and chapels of a twentieth-century Gothic architecture: St. Aloysius, reputed to be dangerously “High,” because its curates wear coloured scarves; the Baptist Chapel, where the minister maintains the old doctrines of hell and heaven, and wrestles with the sinner for his immortal soul; the Congregational Church, where the minister is abreast with modern culture, and proclaims a less exacting gospel, and faintly trusts the larger hope. But the whole apparatus of worship seems archaic and unreal to those who have never seen the shaking of the solid ground beneath their feet, or the wonder and terror of its elemental fires. There are possibilities of havoc in this ordered and comfortable society which cannot easily be put by. The old lights have fallen from the sky, existence has become too complex and crowded for the influences of wide spaces reaching to a far horizon. Summer and winter pass over these little lamplit streets, to-day the lilac and syringa, to-morrow the scattered autumn leaves, in an experience of tranquillity and repose. But with the ear to the ground there is audible the noise of stranger echoes in the labyrinthine ways which stretch beyond the boundaries of these pleasant places; full of restlessness and disappointment, and longing, with a note of menace in it; not without foreboding to any who would desire, in the security of the suburbs, an unending end of the world.
Why does the picture of this suburban life, presented by however kindly a critic, leave the reader at the end with a sense of dissatisfaction? The query is aroused by examination of its actual condition. It is excited not only by works written in revolt, such as those of Mr. Wells or George Gissing, but also by the writings of Mr. Keble Howard and Mr. Shan Bullock and Mr. Pett Ridge and others, who have attempted, with greater or less success, to exhibit a kindly picture of suburban society. At first this society appeared in literature as depicted by cleverness, delighting in satire at the expense of bourgeois ideals. Its historians were always in protest against its limitations, its complacencies, its standards of social success and intellectual attainment. But in later time this somewhat crude attitude of scornful superiority has passed. Many writers with an intimate knowledge of suburban and English Middle Class provincial life have attempted a sympathetic and truthful description: the sincere representation of a civilisation. But in all their efforts the general effect is of something lacking; not so much in individual happiness, or even in bodily and mental development, as of a certain communal poverty of interest and ideal. The infinite boredom of the horrible women of “The Year of Jubilee”—with its vision of Camberwell villadom as idle and desolate as Flaubert’s vision of French provincial bourgeois life in “Madame Bovary”—has been replaced by a scene of busy activity, with interest in cricket and football results, “book talk,” love-making, croquet and tennis parties for young men and women. And yet at the end, and with the best will in the world, one closes the narrative with a feeling of desolation; a revolt against a life which, with all its energies and satisfactions, has somehow lost from it that zest and sparkle and inner glow of accepted adventure which alone would seem to give human life significance. Civilise the poor, one complains, expand their tiny rubbish yards into green gardens, introduce bow-windows before and verandahs behind; remove them from the actual experience of privation, convert all England into a suburban city—will the completed product be pronounced to be “very good”?
It is not the simplicity of suburban life which is at fault. Simplicity in writing, or in character, is as difficult of attainment as it is worth the attaining. And in so far as simplicity here exists—character cut on elemental lines, or occupied with elemental things—it provides an antidote to the complexities or cynicisms of other classes. No one, except the vulgar, despises a Middle Class existence because it has substituted a high tea for an elaborate dinner, because it uses speech to reveal rather than to conceal thought, or because it refuses to torture itself with analysis and emotion which are the products of mind divorced from the ancient sanities of existence. Nor, again, is the narrow separation from poverty and the abyss a cause for any legitimate contempt, which makes the business of life for so many of them in their tiny two-storeyed villas an enterprise hazardous and insecure. Rather is the observer conscious, where this struggle exists, that there has entered into the atmosphere the breath of salt wind, bracing if austere, which can provide a more heroic sustenance than the atmosphere in which such tests and challenges are denied. We may compare, for example, two of Mr. Bullock’s stories of suburban life; the one, in which he traces the attempt of a “twopenny clerk” to provide for the needs of a family on an exiguous and precarious income; the other, in which a prosperous family who have attained security set themselves to the business of living under such favourable conditions. There is humour in the struggles of Robert Thorne, as of all similar millions of Robert Thornes, in his attempt to maintain his hardly-won standard of decencies and modest comfort. There is resistance to hard circumstance which the most critical onlooker will applaud—in the little boxes for the division of income, labelled “Necessities,” “Outings,” “Savings”—the first so rarely permitting any overflow into the second and third; in the revolt against the shabby clothes and difficulties created by unexpected illness; in the necessities of a clerk, who is also a man, wheeling the perambulator on Peckham Rye, or scrubbing the front doorsteps furtively after nightfall. But the humour is of the ancient, not of the modern, significance; a humour not without tears in it, with admiration also at the courage and determination which could yet be content, and under such conditions, with “the glory of going on and still to be.” For here is the sense of battles; and battle, whether against deliberate foes, against the inimical force of Nature, or the indifference of the crowd to the individual survival, is always stimulating and bracing. And it is the battle depicted by Mr. Davidson in his “thirty bob a week”; the “naked child against a hungry wolf,” “the playing bowls upon a splitting wreck,” “daily done by many and many a one” in a tenacious struggle, against the enemies of human welfare, which illuminates and glorifies the monotonous streets of suburban England.
But where this “struggle to live” has passed into a “struggle to attain,” the verdict is less enthusiastic. For that struggle to attain too often means absorption in ignoble standards, and an existence coming more and more to occupy a world of “make-believe.” When the family is in a position of assured comfort or of affluence, the houses ample stuccoed or pseudo-Georgian edifices, and the breadwinners in posts of established security in the commercial or financial houses of the city, the atmosphere often becomes stifling and difficult. It may be that such a condition is in itself unsuitable to mankind in the life of so uncertain and transitory a world: that existence which is occupied with sedentary labour in an artificially constructed aggregation of human beings herded in the same narrow grooves, is an existence of necessity carrying with it the seeds of futility and decay. Certainly the two chief accusations against the product of such an existence would be of an imperfect standard of value about the things which exist, and of a lack of demand for the existence of things at present unattained. It is a wrong estimate of the significance—of rank, of birth, of wealth, of various material accumulations—which produces the more desolating ingredients of suburban life. Listen to the conversation in the second-class carriages of a suburban railway train, or examine the literature and journalism specially constructed for the suburban mind; you will often find endless chatter about the King, the Court, and the doings of a designated “Society”; personal paragraphs, descriptions of clothes, smile, or manner; a vision of life in which the trivial and heroic things are alike exhibited, but in which there is no adequate test or judgment, which are the heroic, which the trivial. Liberated from the devils of poverty, the soul is still empty, swept and garnished; waiting for other occupants. This is the explanation of the so-called “snobbery” of the suburbs. Here is curiosity, but curiosity about lesser occupations; energies,—for the suburbs in their healthy human life, the swarms of happy, physically efficient children, are a storehouse of the nation’s energy,—but energies which tend to scatter and degrade themselves in aimless activities; “random and meaningless sociabilities” which neither hearten, stimulate, nor inspire. So into a feud with a neighbour over a disputed garden fence, or a bustling and breezy church or chapel’s mundane entertainment, or a criticism of manners and fashion, dress and deportment, will be thrown force and determination which might have been directed to effort of permanent worth, in devotion to one of the great causes of the world.
Beyond these incorrect standards of value there is a noticeable absence of vision. Suburban life has often little conception of social services, no tradition of disinterested public duty, but a limited outlook beyond a personal ambition. Here the individualism of the national character exercises its full influence: unchecked by the horizontal links of the industrial peoples, organising themselves into unions, or by the vertical links of the older aristocracy with a conception of family service which once passed from parent to child. Religion—if that were vital and compelling—would provide in part a vista of larger horizons. When and where religion existed—even in its rigid conception of heaven and hell and a straight way of salvation—it offered some universes for contemplation beyond the orderly suburban road and the well-trimmed suburban garden. It is to be feared, however, that in the prevailing cloudiness about ultimate things which is developing in the modern world, religion has been tending more and more to resolve itself into social institutions, “Pleasant Sunday Afternoons,” or exercise of the less adventurous forces of suburban philanthropy. What remains? A public spirit in local affairs which is deplorably low, which sends a minute percentage of voters to Council or Guardian Elections, and accompanies a perpetual contempt for present municipal mismanagement with a refusal of the personal effort required to make that management clean and efficient. An outlook upon Imperial affairs which is less a conception of politics than the acceptance of a social tradition: which leaves suburban seats securely Conservative not because the Conservative creed is there definitely embraced, but because Conservatism is supposed to be the party favoured by Court, society, and the wealthy and fashionable classes. And too often an essential ignorance supplemented by an arrogance which refuses advice and despises opposition. The result is a not too reputable product of modern civilisation: that dense and complacent “Imperial citizen” who despises “the foreigner,” and could set right or improve upon generals in the field or admirals on the ocean, and is satisfied with its universe and its limitations because it has resolutely closed all doors and windows through which there might appear the vision of larger other worlds. It is this particular suburban figure—with custom dominant, accepted and inherited students of judgment, contempt for the classes below it, envy of the classes above, and no desire for adventure or devotion to a cause or an ideal—which has become too representative a figure of a laborious and praiseworthy race of men. Against this type of “honest man” have warred the anarchists, the artists, the advocates of new moralities, the opponents of the accepted way. In revolt against the dominion of so questionable a citizen, we are perhaps inclined to forget the mitigating features: the good nature and ready generosity, the cleanliness of life, the still unbroken family tradition; all animated by that resolution, not so much deliberate as unconscious, to “make the best of it,” in a world of incalculable purposes; in which, indeed, some cloudiness of vision or some unusual courage would seem to be necessary if the struggle is to be continued at all.