At luncheons, dinners, garden-parties and receptions the talk veers sooner or later towards politics and national affairs. All “sets,” the fashionable, the artistic, the sporting, the adventurous, as well as the politicians themselves, meet and become absorbed in last night’s debate or the Bill to come up for its third reading tomorrow. By the way, for a foreigner to participate in these bouts of keen discussion, he must become addicted to the national habit: before going anywhere, he must read the Times.
As regularly as he takes his early cup of tea, every self-respecting Englishman after breakfast retires into a corner with the Times, and never emerges until he has masticated the last paragraph. Then and only then is he ready to go forth for the day, properly equipped to do battle. And he speedily discovers if you are not similarly prepared—and beats you. Of all the characteristic English things I can think of, none is so English as the Times. In it you find, besides full reports of political proceedings and the usual births, marriages, and deaths, letters from Englishmen all the way from Halifax to Singapore. Letters on the incapacity of American servants, the best method of breeding Angora cats, the water system of the Javanese (have they any?), how to travel comfortably in Cochin China, the abominable manners of German policemen, the dangers of eating lettuce in Palestine, etc., etc. Signals are raised to all Englishmen everywhere, warning them what to do and what to leave undone, and how they shall accomplish both. Column upon column of the conservative old newspaper is devoted to this sort of correspondence club, which has for its motto that English classic: prevention, to avoid necessity for cure.
The Englishman at home reads it all, carefully, together with the answers to the correspondents of yesterday, the interminable speech of Lord X in the Upper House last night, the latest bulletins concerning the health of the Duchess of Y. It is solid, unsensational mental food, and he digests it thoroughly; storing it away for practical future use. But the foreigner, accustomed to the high seasoning of journalistic epigram and the tang of scandal, finds it very dull. Unfortunately, the mission of the newspaper in most countries has become the promoting of a certain group of men, or a certain party, or a certain cause, and the damning of every other man or party or cause that stands in the way. The English press has none of this flavour. It is imbued with the national instinct for fair play, which, while it by no means prohibits lively discussion of men and measures, remains strictly impersonal in its attitude of attack.
The critic on the whole is inclined to deserve his title as it was originally defined; one who judges impartially, according to merit. He is a critic of men and affairs, however, rather than of art. He lives too much in the open to give himself extensively to artistic study or creation. And Englishmen have, generally speaking, distinguished themselves as fighters, explorers, soldiers of fortune, and as organizers and statesmen, rather than as musicians, painters, and men of letters.
Especially in the present day is this true. There are the Scots and Shackletons, the Kitcheners, Roberts, and Curzons; but where are the Merediths, Brownings, Turners, and Gainsboroughs? Literature is rather better off than the other arts—there is an occasional Wells or Bennett among the host of the merely talented and painstaking; more than an occasional novelist among the host of fictioneers. But poets are few and uneventful, playwrights more abundant though tinged with the charlatanism of the age; while as for the painters, sculptors and composers, in other countries the protagonists of the peculiar violence and revolution of today—in England, who are they?
Underwood & Underwood
THE GREAT ISLAND SITE
We go to exhibitions by the dozen, during the season, and listen conscientiously to the latest tenor; but seldom do we see art or hear music. In the past, the great English artists have been those who painted portraits, landscapes, or animals; reproducing out of experience the men and women, horses, dogs, and out-of-doors they knew so well; rather than creating out of imagination dramatic scenes and pictures of the struggle and splendour of life. Their art has been a peaceful art, the complement rather than the mirror of the heroic militancy that always has dominated English activity. Similarly, the musicians—the few that have existed—have surpassed in compositions of the sober, stately order, oratorios, chorals, hymns and solemn marches. Obviously, peace and solemnity are incongruous with the restless, rushing spirit of today, to which the Englishman is victim together with all men, but which, with his slower articulation, he is not able to express on canvas or in chromatics.
Cubism terrifies him; on the other hand he is, for the moment at least, insanely intrigued by ragtime. The hoary ballad, which “Mr. Percy Periwell will sing this day at Southsea Pier,” is giving way at last to syncopated ditties which form a mere accompaniment to the reigning passion for jigging. No one has time to listen to singing; everyone must keep moving, as fast and furiously as he can. There is a spice of tragi-comedy in watching the mad wave hit sedate old London, sweeping her off her feet and into a maze of frantically risqué contortions. Court edicts, the indignation of conservative dowagers, the severity of bishops and the press—nothing can stop her; from Cabinet ministers to house-maids, from débutantes to duchesses, “everybody’s doing it,” with vim if not with grace. And such is the craze for dancing, morning, noon and night, that every other room one enters has the aspect of a salle de bal—chairs and sofas stiff against the walls, a piano at one end, and, for the rest, shining parquetry.