Memories of the future

by Ronald Arbuthnott Knox

But, it hardly needs to be said, these same causes produced moral results as well as physical. Just before the outbreak of hostilities, we were all very much concerned about the attitude of organized Labour, which had never indeed been in power since Ropes’s ill-fated Government, but had always been a strong political, and a still stronger economic influence, in the counsels of the country. There had not for some time been any actual strike on a large scale, the “secret service” both of employers and of labourers being sufficiently well informed to prevent any miscalculation: threats of strikes and of lock-outs were common, but it seldom proved necessary to call your adversary’s bluff. Still, the Unions were an important power. Ever since the thirties it had been illegal for any manual worker not to belong to the union of his trade; and this fact had strengthened the numerical force of the unions without in any way moderating their counsels since the time when (I think in the fifties) shop stewards began to be appointed by examination instead of election. The hot-heads were always in the controlling positions: what would the effect of this be in the event of the country going to war? The International Labour Convention held at Innsbruck in ’67 had passed a series of unanimous resolutions designed to render all future war impossible by means of concerted sabotage. Fortunately, the alleged violation of Article 259 by the British workers, and the suspected violation of Article 283 by the U.S. workers, had the effect of rendering the whole compact nugatory. But the temper of Labour in all countries was, throughout the war, distrustful and frequently menacing.

At the other end of the scale, there can be no doubt that the paying classes, by the luxury and frivolity of their lives, showed equally little preparedness for a great emergency. Mere wealth seemed to be the only passport to Society, and blood counted for nothing: the old hereditary aristocracy who could trace their honours back to the beginning of the century were swamped by a crowd of new creations. No doubt in many ways we were more civilized than our fathers; the coarse old type that would fill a quarter of a glass with whisky, or motor at breakneck speed along country lanes, had disappeared; it was hard to imagine the rude days (which I can just remember) when the ladies left the dinner-table half an hour or so before the men, “leaving the gentlemen,” as it was called, “to their wine.” But if we had lost some of the coarseness, we had also lost much of the salutary sternness and moral earnestness of my young days. In the twenties and thirties the Divorce Court, although it was already fairly busy, did still carry with it, even for non-Catholics, a certain savour of impropriety. The novels and the plays of the period, although many of them offend our modern taste by the coarseness of their expression, must, by comparison with our own, be freed from the charge of suggestiveness. We gambled in those days, but you still had to go abroad to do it on a large scale; there was no wireless installation to report the winning numbers on the tape machines of our West-End Clubs.

Family life, too, meant far more to us in the early part of the century than it did in the sixties and seventies. Even in London, husband and wife would share the same flat and entertain each other’s friends. When they paid visits of pleasure, to hunt, or to fish or to shoot deer (they were not content to photograph them as we do!), they often travelled together; and there would have been something ludicrous in the idea of a husband and wife meeting one another unexpectedly at a country-house party or at a dinner. Fathers would take an active interest in the education of their children, and sometimes even be called in to reprove them for a fault. Girls, until the age of seventeen or eighteen, usually lived with their parents, and did not go about without somebody to take care of them. Boys did not expect to be provided with latch-keys until they were twenty-one! For myself, I never had one until I set up my own establishment; nor did I feel aggrieved at the deprivation. I do not mean that all these things are particularly important; and indeed, the old tradition seems fussy and unnecessary to us nowadays; but this strictness of guardianship did stand for symbol of a certain orderliness and discipline of behaviour, which I miss sometimes, I am afraid, among the young ladies and the young gentlemen of a later generation! There was something to be said, after all, for the rugged old Puritan school which wore dark suits on Sundays, thought chewing unladylike, and held that night-clubs were “not the thing” for young girls.

How much this difference of outlook is the result of a decline in the matter of religious conviction, I cannot feel any certainty. As I see things, religion does not so often dictate to the world its standards of behaviour—a morality, or even a hypocrisy, can sometimes do that with equal effect—as help men and women to live up to the standards of the time and to rise above them. But I am afraid there is no doubt that in the sixties and seventies we had lost, in great measure, the unclouded faith and simple piety of the twenties and thirties. The religious revival in the Nonconformist Federation, which took place early in the sixties, was marked by no less extraordinary indications of spiritual exaltation than the revivals of earlier centuries; but alas! the total numbers of those who were affected by any movement within this body was no longer very considerable. The secession of the “Enthusiasts” in ’53 had drained the Anglican Church of all the elements in its own body which might have responded to a call of this kind. The Westernizers seemed to have no energy but for Church politics; they achieved, indeed, for a few years the long-cherished dream of reunion with the crumbling relics of Byzantine Christianity, but it was only in the character of Little Bo-peep that they were able to do so. The bulk of what had been the “good-will” of the Anglican connexion remained with the Relativist Party, the historical descendant of the old Liberal school of thought. The relativists were men of considerable intellectual force and deeply religious temperament, but hampered, as any religious body must be, by a total absence of belief in the supernatural. In the generation that had intervened between my girlhood and my old age Catholicism indeed had spread, but England had ceased to be a Christian country.

Whether or no decline in religion was the cause of it, it is certain that during that same generation the rigid virtues of the mid-Georgian era had been dissipated or obscured. A statesman of that earlier period would have resented the imputation of openly using his official knowledge to secure a business deal: we think of such an attitude as quixotic, but there was a certain nobility about it. The Press of that earlier period would have scorned to hush up a public scandal just because influential people were implicated in it: we call that a sentimental prejudice, but at least it was an error in the right direction. A divine of that earlier period would have felt a delicacy about subscribing to a formula of belief with which he found himself in total disagreement; it was a scruple, perhaps, but surely a scruple which did him honour. Men thought strenuously in those days, and lived earnestly, and worked without thought of reward. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven”—I can never read those lines of Wordsworth without being reminded of my girlhood’s days; and of more than one figure in the public life of that time I am tempted to say, with the regretful tone of one who has outlived her generation: “He was a man, take him for all in all, We shall not look upon his like again.”

I cannot resist quoting, while I am on this subject, some words from the very last letter I ever received from my friend Lady Polebridge.[^[16]] “You and I, my dear Opal,” she typed, “belong to a generation that is disappearing, and will not regret us (for who ever does really regret us?) when we are gone. Nothing so strongly affects me, when I look back, as the strong sense of the mutability of human things. We poor creatures choose our own friends, make our own groups round us, only for the rude hand of circumstance to redistribute and rearrange us when it wills. No illusion lasts, no experience is other than transitory. And yet when we look back upon our young days, we can surely say that there was more of stability and permanence about those peaceful, slow-going times than we can find in the bustle and hurry of to-day. Our youth belongs to the last generation of English life that really saw life steadily and saw it whole; that really had its innermost core rooted in the hard rock of purposeful, strenuous living. I shall not be sorry to go, when my turn comes, to a world full of the shadows of my old companions, where I shall perhaps find peace at last.”

Those words were written in 1971, only a year before the war actually broke out, and when, of course, we all saw that it was coming. Such then were the impressions of us older folk; and now let me leave it to my younger readers to say whether since then, with all the good resolutions we made when the crisis was upon us, we have really gone forward or gone back? Have we really fulfilled the promise of those desperate moments when, under the shadow of a world-catastrophe, we thought we had for once seen ourselves as we would like to be? Let me quote, though they have been often quoted, the words of Mrs. Bisset, in the early part of 1975, that rang like a trumpet-call throughout the theatrophones of the civilized world:

“We shall not lightly forget the lessons of the recent conflict. If we have learned that human nature, even in its degradation, can rise in its might and throw off its old evil habits under the stimulus of a great emergency, we will tell ourselves, in the years to come, that this human nature is worth labouring for and worth fighting for. If we have seen, at the same time, that the ideals which once satisfied and the conditions which once contented us were ideals which ambition should have despised, and conditions which dignity should have resented, we will remember in the days to come that we must never again let ourselves be duped by the ignoble lure of a false peace. We have fought for honour, for civilization, for high aims and pure enthusiasms: we have met the powers of evil, and forced upon them the conditions of a not dishonourable peace. And the power which has been generated by these years of relentless friction will, if we but canalize it aright, galvanize through centuries to come the failing dynamos of humanity.”

So it looked to us in ’75; I leave it to the consciences of my readers to determine whether we have lived up to those heroic sentiments.

And now I must unslip the catch, and put the lid upon my well-worn typewriter. I cannot tell what verdict will be passed on my poor efforts. In the old days, when reviewers held themselves bound to read through a book before they recorded their impressions of it, I should no doubt have had my weak points discovered by the eye of unfriendly criticism; to-day, one can still hope that one’s deficiencies will pass unobserved! I am afraid, now I come to look back over the record, that after all it is a chronicle of small doings; if I had known that I was to write reminiscences in my old age, perhaps I would have travelled further in search of impressions, and striven higher so as to satisfy my readers with the story of greater things. As it is, it must pass for an old woman’s gossip; and as such, let us hope that it will be lightly judged.