The great middle class, with its indeterminate boundaries, was happy, well-to-do, with a comfortable sense of ease and security, apart from the ordinary anxieties, tragedies, failures, of private and domestic life. People with “advanced” and extraordinary views made a lot of noise, but it hardly broke into the hushed gardens of the country houses of England. Labor was getting clamorous, with mock heroic threats of revolution, but was no real menace to the forces of law and order. Women were beginning to put forward claims to political equality with men, but their extravagance of talk had not yet been translated into wild action. The spirit of England was, in the mass, rooted to its old traditions, and its social habits were not overshadowed by any dread.
As a descriptive writer and professional onlooker of life (writing history and fiction in my spare time), I had, perhaps, some deeper consciousness than most people outside my trade, of dangers brewing in the cauldron of fate. I touched English life in most of its phases, high and low, and was aware, vaguely, perhaps a little morbidly, of undercurrents beating up strongly below all this fair surface of tranquility. As I shall tell later, I came face to face with three bogies of threatening aspect. One was Ireland in insurrection. Another was industrial conflict in England, linked up with that Irish menace. A third was war with Germany. Meanwhile, I chronicled the small beer of English life, and described its social pageantry—royal visits, the Derby, Henley, Fourth of June at Eton, the Eton and Harrow match, Ascot, Cowes, the Temple Flower Show, garden fêtes, Maud Allen’s dancing, the opera, the theater, fancy dress balls.
There was a new passion for “dressing-up,” in that England before the war. It seemed as though youth, and perhaps old age, desired more color than was allowed by modern sumptuary laws.
I attended a great fancy dress ball at the Albert Hall—one of many, but the most magnificent. All “the quality” was there, the most beautiful women in England, and the most notorious. I went, superbly, as Dick Sheridan, in pale blue silk, with lace ruffles, a white wig, white silk stockings, buckled shoes, a jeweled sword. It was strange how different a man I felt in those clothes. The vulgarity of modern life seemed to fall from me. I was an eighteenth-century gentleman, not only in appearance, but in spirit. I was my own great grandfather!
London that night was a queer sight anywhere within a mile of Kensington. Sedan chairs, carried by sturdy porters in old liveries, conveyed little ladies in hooped dresses and high wigs. Columbines flitted by with Pierrots. Out of taxicabs and hansoms and old growlers came parties of troubadours, English princesses with horned headdresses, Spanish toreadors, Elizabethan buccaneers, Stuart cavaliers.
At the ball I saw the faces of my friends strangely transfigured. They, too, were their own ancestors. One of those I encountered that night was a fellow journalist named “Rosy” Leach. He swaggered in the form of a Stuart gentleman, and said, “What a game is this life!” The next time I met him was when he wore another kind of fancy dress—khaki-colored—with high boots caked up to the tabs in the mud of the Somme fields. “Death is nothing,” he said, after we had talked a while. “It’s what goes before—the mud and the beastliness.” He was killed in one of those battles, like many others of those who danced with Columbine and the ladies of the gracious past.
This dressing-up phase was not restricted to London, or rich folks. There was a joyous epidemic of pageants, in which many old towns and villages of England dramatized their own history and acted the parts of their own ancestors. I was an enthusiast of this idea, and still think that for the first time since the Middle Ages it gave the people of England a chance of revealing their innate sense of drama and color and local patriotism. In most of these pageants the actors made their own costumes, and went to old books to learn something of ancient fashions, heraldry, arms and armor, and the history of things that had happened on their own soil and in their own cathedrals, churches, guild houses, and ruined castles, whose stones are haunted with old ghosts. The children in these pageants made fields of living flowers. Youth was lovely in its masquerade. Some of the pictures made by the massed crowds were unforgetable, as in the Oxford pageant, when Charles held his court again, and in the St. Albans pageant, when the English archers advanced behind flights of whistling arrows. If one had any sense of the past, one could not help being stirred by the continuity of English life, its unbroken links with ancient customs, its deep roots in English soil. At Bury St. Edmunds there was a scene depicting the homage of twenty-two gentlemen to Mary Tudor. Each actor there bore the same name and held the same soil as those who had actually bowed before the Tudor lady. It is why tradition is strong in the character of our race, and steadies it.
There was a comic and pitiful side to these shows, mainly caused by the weather, which was pitiless, so that often the pageant grounds were quagmires, and ancient Britons, Roman soldiers, Saxon princesses, Stuart beauties, had to rush for shelter from rain storms which bedraggled them. But that was part of the game.
London dreamed not at that time of darkened lights, prohibited hours for drink, the heavy hand of war upon the pleasures and follies of youth. Was there more folly than now? Perhaps vice flaunted more openly. Perhaps temptation spread its net with less need of caution—though I doubt whether there has been much change in morals, despite the park pouncing of policemen. There was more gayety in London, more lights in London nights, more sociability, good and bad, a great freedom of spirit, in those days before the war. So it seems to us now.
I was never one of the gilded youth, but sometimes I studied them in their haunts, not with gloomy or reproving eyes, being tolerant of human nature, and glad of laughter.