For England is at once Titan and Dotard. Youth and old age, submissive strength and tyrannous impotence—these are the two forces which make the parallelogram of public life. The hard old father hobbles nobly on his ebony cane in the sunshine of the castle terrace, unwilling to shuffle off his gout and agues and be at peace, because he envies possession to this rugged giant of an heir-in-tail, whom he keeps carrying burdens, like Caliban, in the cattle yard. Happy the day when we shall bear the old man at last, with ceremonious countenances, to the expectant churchyard, and pack him solemnly away in his ancestral vault.
The habit of trusting in symbols instead of realities is not easily put off. Those who have lived in darkness cannot face the sun of truth at once; when the castle falls they run, not to the fields, but to the stalls and sheds. When the vengeance of disaster comes upon a nation, men fly instinctively from the owlish darkness of their ruined symbols to the twilight of other symbols.
Dreading above all things the multiple solitude which hastens every way at once; craving before all things that sureness of direction in space which makes the intensity both of hope and of prayer; fixing their eyes on a personality as the distracted peasant fixes his eyes on an image or an eikon, the crowd betake themselves, of a sudden unanimous impulse, all in one way, shouting the name of a saviour or a scapegoat, clearing confusion by the embodiment of vengeance and deliverance in limited thinkable dimensions. They burn the witch, and clamour round the prophet.
But of forty million men, who can say which is the true prophet?
In times of peace the mass of men live like fish in tanks, aware of dim shades that come and go beyond, recking little of what is outside their own tiny range of weed and gravel. To be great with the mass is not to be a collection of definite great facts, but only a constantly recurring vagueness. ‘I know his name,’ is the sum of ordinary knowledge of great men. But with constant repetition the name of a man or a cause takes on an awe-inspiring, trust-compelling quality, and the fishes cry ecstatically: ‘Napoleon!’ ‘Buller!’ ‘Chamberlain!’ ‘Carter’s Little Liver Pills!’ ‘Hurrah!’—and this makes fame. While the great Poet is starving obscurely into immortality, the crowd without is staring awestruck at the famous Laureate’s feather-nodding coach, as it rolls him to oblivion in St. Paul’s. Why are all these people craning and jostling in the roadway? Is it because they loved the Laureate’s poems? Did he touch some chord in their hearts which the poor Poet’s fingers were too delicate to handle? Not a bit! They know the one man’s verses no better than the other’s; they stand lamenting for the Laureate simply because they have so often heard his name.
And now Dwala’s was such a name. His mind and character were still unknown, even to journalists; but the wavering darkness of his name had long been familiar to the fish in every tank. For months they had read of him in papers and magazines: his wealth, his success, his eccentricity, had been the talk of England. Then he had gone into Parliament and figured large in the comic cartoons. Others, after short notability, had lost favour by their speeches or their deeds; Dwala had left his reputation to grow of itself, like a tree. They felt his largeness. He was talked of everywhere as the capable man of the Cabinet. A Minister, he was remarkable even among ordinary Members as the man who never spoke. He was the ‘strong and silent man in a babbling age.’
In the hour of despair the people clamoured, with as much reason as they usually have for such clamouring: ‘Prince Dwala alone can save us! Down with Glendover! Down with Whitstable! Down with Huggins! Dwala for ever!’ The papers talked of a new era and a new man, who was to ‘cleanse the Augean stable’ and set Old England on its legs again.
For the lobby and the drawing-room all this had to be translated into a new language, full of such terms as ‘popular in the House’—‘the support of the Church Party’—‘keep things going’—‘able to entertain’—‘stop the mouth of the Irish Members.’ The division of ‘politics’ from national life which such phrases indicate does not arise from any cynicism in the ruling classes, but from our system of government itself. The evil begins in the polling booth, where men are elected, not to sit for England, but to sit for a party or for local wants. The interest of the nation is the only interest unrepresented in the House of Commons.
Deafened with the shouts of the people, afraid to venture to his official home through the angry crowds that filled Whitehall, the Premier tendered his resignation, and retired—poor scapegoat—to his gardened grange, to finish his book on Problems of Pure Thought.