And stepping across the threshold he strode across the garden with a step almost startlingly rejuvenated; and before his host had even moved he heard the Prime Minister’s voice in the distance lifted like a trumpet, like the voice of the great orators of fifty years ago.
Thus did the librarian who refused to change his clothes contrive to change his country. For out of this small and grotesque incident came all that famous revolution, or reaction, which transformed the face of English society, and checked and changed the course of its history. Like all revolutions effected by Englishmen, and especially revolutions effected by Conservatives, it was very careful to preserve those powers that were already powerless. Some Conservatives of a rather senile sort were even heard still talking about the Constitutional characters of the complete subversal of the Constitution. It was allowed to retain, indeed it was supposed to support, the old monarchical pattern of this country. But in practice the new power was divided between three or four subordinate monarchs ruling over large provinces of England, like magnified Lords-Lieutenant; and called according to the romance or affectation of the movement Kings-at-Arms. They held indeed a position with something of the sanctity and symbolic immunity of a herald; but they also possessed not a few of the powers of a king. They were in command of the bands of young men called Orders of Chivalry, which served as a sort of yeomanry or militia. They held courts and administered high and low justice in accordance with Mr. Herne’s researches into medieval law. It was something more than a pageant; yet there passed into it much of that popular passion which at one time filled half the towns and villages in England with pageants; the hunger of a populace which Puritanism and Industrialism had so long starved for the feast of the eyes and the fancy.
As it was more than a pageant, it was more than a fashion; but it had its stages and turning points like a fashion. Perhaps the chief turning point was the moment when Mr. Julian Archer (now Sir Julian Archer under the accolade of one of the new orders of knighthood) had seriously discovered that he must lead the fashion or be left behind it. All of us who have observed changes passing over a society know that indeterminate and yet determining instant. It applies to everything from women being allowed votes to women not being allowed hair. It was marked in the Suffragette movement, which many middle-class women had long supported, when great ladies began to take it up. It marks the transition from the time when it is the new fashion to the time when it is the fashion. Up to that moment examples may be numerous, but they are still notable; after that moment it is the neglect that is notable. That is the sort of moment, in every movement, at which Sir Julian Archer appears as he appeared now; a knight in shining armour, ready for every perilous emprise.
Yet Sir Julian Archer was too vain not to be in a sense simple, and too simple not to be in a sense sincere. Social changes of this sort are made possible among considerable masses of people, by two ironies of human nature. The first is that almost everyman’s life has been sufficiently patchy and full of possibilities for him to remember some movement of his own mind towards what has become the movement of the time. The second is that he almost always makes a false picture of his past, and fosters a fictitious memory, whereby that detail seems in retrospect to dominate his career.
Julian Archer (as has already been faithfully recorded) had written a long time ago a very boyish sort of a boy’s adventure story about the Battle of Agincourt. It was only one of the multifarious and highly modern activities of his successful career: and had not been even one of the most successful. But with the new talk all around him, Archer began to insist more and more on his initiative in the matter.
“They wouldn’t listen to me,” he said moodily shaking his head. “Doesn’t do to be a bit too early in the field. . . . Of course, Herne’s a well-read man; it’s his business. . . . I suppose he sees practically every book that comes out. Seems as if he had sense enough to take a hint, eh, what?”
“Oh, I see,” said Olive Ashley, raising her dark eyebrows in mild surprise. “I never thought of that.”
And she reflected at once ruefully and whimsically upon her own concentrated passion of medieval things, which everybody had first derided and then imitated and then forgotten.
The case was the same with Sir Aubrey Wister, that gallant though somewhat elderly knight; for thus also had been transformed the figure of the old aesthete who pottered about drawing-rooms and praised the great Victorians who had praised the great Primitives. He talked rather more about the great Primitives and less about the great Victorians. But as he had so often in the past patronised Cimabue and said an encouraging word to Giotto and Botticelli, it was not difficult for him to persuade himself that he had been a prophet lifting up his voice in vain, and predicting the coming of Mr. Herne as the Medieval Messiah.
“My dear, sir,” he would say confidentially, “the period was one of inconceivable vandalism and vulgarity. I really don’t know how I lived through it. But I pegged away; and, as you see, my work has not been altogether fruitless . . . ahem . . . not altogether fruitless. The very patterns of their costumes would have perished; hardly a single picture from which they are taking their designs would have survived–but for my little protest. It shows what a word in time will do.”