“But there is twenty times as much about that sort of thing in the papers as there is about our sort of things.”
There was no disputing it.
“We’re in a foreign country,” cried Arthur, going off at a tangent. “We’re in a foreign country. We English are a subject people.... Talk of Home Rule for Ireland!... Why are there no English Nationalists? One of these days I will hoist the cross of St. George outside this cottage. But I doubt if any one on this countryside will know it for the English flag.”
§ 2
Whatever is seems right, and it is only now, after five and twenty years of change, that we do begin to see as a remarkable thing the detached life that great masses of the English were leading beneath the canopy of the Hanoverian monarchy. For in those days the court thought in German; Teutonized Anglicans, sentimental, materialistic and resolutely “loyal,” dominated society; Gladstone was notoriously disliked by them for his anti-German policy and his Irish and Russian sympathies, and the old Queen’s selection of bishops guided feeling in the way it ought to go. But there was a leakage none the less. More and more people were drifting out of relationship to church and state, exactly as Peter’s parents had drifted out. The Court dominated, but it did not dominate intelligently; it controlled the church to no effect, its influence upon universities and schools and art and literature was merely deadening; it responded to flattery but it failed to direct; it was the court of an alien-spirited old lady, making much of the pathos of her widowhood and trading still on the gallantry and generosity that had welcomed her as a “girl queen.” The real England separated itself more and more from that superficial England of the genteel that looked to Osborne and Balmoral. To the real England, dissentient England, court taste was a joke, court art was a scandal; of English literature and science notoriously the court knew nothing. In the huge pacific industrial individualism of Great Britain it did not seem a serious matter that the army and navy and the Indian administration were orientated to the court. Peter’s parents and the large class of detached people to which they belonged, were out of politics, out of the system, scornful, or facetious and aloof. Just as they were out of religion. These things did not concern them.
The great form of the empire contained these indifferents, the great roof of church and state hung over them. Royal visits, diplomatic exchanges and the like passed to and fro, alien, uninteresting proceedings; Heligoland was given to the young Emperor William the Second by Lord Salisbury, the old Queen’s favourite prime minister, English politicians jostled the French in Africa as roughly as possible to “larn them to be” republicans, and resisted the Home Rule aspirations and the ill-concealed republicanism of the “Keltic fringe”; one’s Anglican neighbours of the “ruling class” went off to rule India and the empire with manners that would have maddened Job; they stood for Parliament and played the game of politics upon factitious issues. Sir Charles Dilke, the last of the English Republicans, and Charles Stewart Parnell, the uncrowned King of Ireland, had both been extinguished by opportune divorce cases. (Liberal opinion, it was felt, must choose between the private and the public life. You could not have it both ways.) It did not seem to be a state of affairs to make a fuss about. The general life went on comfortably enough. We built our pretty rough-cast houses, taught Shirley poppies to spring artlessly between the paving-stones in our garden paths, begot the happy children who were to grow up under that roof of a dynastic system that was never going to fall in. (Because it never had fallen in.)
Never before had nurseries been so pretty as they were in that glowing pause at the end of the nineteenth century.
Peter’s nursery was a perfect room in which to hatch the soul of a little boy. Its walls were done in a warm cream-coloured paint, and upon them Peter’s father had put the most lovely pattern of trotting and jumping horses and dancing cats and dogs and leaping lambs, a carnival of beasts. He had copied these figures from books, enlarging them as he did so; he had cut them out in paper, stuck them on the wall, and then flicked bright blue paint at them until they were all outlined in a penumbra of stippled blue. Then he unpinned the paper and took it on to another part of the wall and so made his pattern. There was a big brass fireguard in Peter’s nursery that hooked on to the jambs of the fireplace, and all the tables had smoothly rounded corners against the days when Peter would run about. The floor was of cork carpet on which Peter would put his toys, and there was a crimson hearthrug on which Peter was destined to crawl. And a number of stuffed dogs and elephants, whose bead eyes had been carefully removed by Dolly and replaced with eyes of black cloth that Peter would be less likely to worry off and swallow, awaited his maturing clutch. (But there were no Teddy Bears yet; Teddy Bears had still to come into the world. America had still to discover the charm of its Teddy.) There were scales in Peter’s nursery to weigh Peter every week, and tables to show how much he ought to weigh and when one should begin to feel anxious. There was nothing casual about the early years of Peter.
Peter began well, a remarkably fine child, Dr. Fremisson said, of nine pounds. Although he was born in warm summer weather we never went back upon that. He favoured his mother perhaps more than an impartial child should, but that was at any rate a source of satisfaction to Cousin Oswald (of the artificial eye).
Cousin Oswald was doing his best to behave nicely and persuade himself that all this show had been got up by Dolly and was Dolly’s show—and that Arthur just happened to be about.