I have written thus far, partly to resolve my own doubts (which, however, are not resolved) but chiefly to excuse myself to those who may buy this book. I beg of them to believe that I have not reprinted these fugitive pieces without deliberation on their value. My friends tell me that any impressions of men of quality and genius have value, and undoubtedly Boswell's biography of Dr. Johnson confirms many mediocrities in their intention to accept a man's hospitality for the purpose of earning money by describing his personal habits in a public journal. We would be very grateful for an account of Shakespeare no better than any one of the chapters in this book. If an Elizabethan had had a mind like Boswell's and had noted down all that he ever heard Shakespeare say, had pressed him with questions on his work, had noted his personal appearance, his habits of dress, his ways of eating, his effect on women, his likes and dislikes, the thousand and one small things which, when summed up, make a man out of a myth, how happy we should all be, how many thousand commentators and emendators and wrathful Baconians and cypher maniacs would be put out of employment! One could cry with vexation at the thought that there was no one with sufficient intelligence to keep a diary during those last few mysterious years in Stratford-on-Avon when Shakespeare, though still a young man as ages go, ceased to work at his trade and went in silence to his grave. Such are the considerations which have affected me in my decision to reprint these chapters, though they may add very little to any one's knowledge of the men who are described in them. It is, perhaps, an additional factor in the decision that they record impressions made on the mind of a young man by his elders and betters and expressed at a time when he was ceasing to be young. The generation to which I belong was much impressed by the men whose work and beliefs are sketched in this book. All young men, whatever their class or culture, have heroes. The world, indeed, will end when young men cease to have heroes. Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells, Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc, Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore, Mr. Bennett and Mr. Galsworthy and, rather more remotely, "A. E." were heroes worthy of emulation by me and the likes of me. George Meredith and Mr. Hardy were too far up the slopes of Olympus for us to hope ever to touch the hem of their garments, but we were alive in the same world with them and sometimes spoke with people who knew them. Once, even, on a hot Sunday morning I walked for miles in Surrey, stiff with determination to see Meredith and to speak with him, even if I should have to skulk about his house the entire day and run the risk of being arrested for suspicious loitering; but my heart failed me when, tired and thirsty, I came into his neighbourhood. Who was I, I demanded of myself, that I should thrust my unimportant person on the notice of a genius? And when I had made that demand of myself, I realised that I could do no other than go away and leave the old man in peace. And so I went, though now I regret that I did, for a little while after I made my expedition to Box Hill, Meredith died and I had lost for ever my hope of seeing him. Time has been kinder to me over Mr. Hardy whose friendship I have the happiness to enjoy.
I have described these men as our heroes, but of course the degree of respect we gave to them varied. The feeling we had for Mr. Galsworthy, for example, was diminished by the fact that we were afraid he would turn aside and shed a few unaccountable tears. His work, particularly "The Man of Property," "The Country House" and "The Silver Box," had the great appeal which all passionately sincere work has, but it left some of us in a state of chilled speculation. We were afraid of the effect Mr. Galsworthy had on our emotions and we resisted him more, perhaps, than we ought to have done because we suspected him of sentimentality and were afraid he might let our minds down by pressing too hardly on our hearts. His work excited a remote pity in us, but it did not rouse us to wrath or warm our affections. His characters were the creatures of an aloof, impassive and immovable Destiny; and it is difficult to feel much interest in automatons. If a man is wronged by another man, I may be stirred to his defence, but if he is thwarted or crushed by some passionless Force which cannot be controlled or persuaded or defeated, I am unlikely to do more than murmur "Poor fellow!" and pass on my way. Spineless men, impotently submitting to Circumstances, do not stir the blood, and Mr. Galsworthy's characters, though they might excite our pity, killed our hope. Mr. Galsworthy seemed to us to say, "Vain youths, it is idle to make any effort! Things happen and they cannot be helped. You are doomed from the moment of your birth to die frustrated!..." He is easily made indignant by suffering, but we could not imagine him sounding a call to fight. We could think of him only in the act of surrender. We asked for a challenge; he counselled submission. He was a Tolstoyan, not of his Free Will, for he had no Free Will, but because he could not help himself. He turned the other cheek because he would not clench his fist. Mr. Hardy did not fill our mouths with dust as Mr. Galsworthy did, for his people, though they, too, were creatures of Destiny, were gallant creatures and went to their end with a noble gesture. He left us with the sensation that although we were obliged to submit to a doom determined for us by a Power that understood neither Itself nor us, yet we could put ribbons in our hats. We could die like men and not like rats. When Mr. Hardy celebrated his eighty-first birthday, his younger comrades in the craft of letters presented an address to him from which I quote the following passages:
"In your novels and poems you have given us a tragic vision of life which is informed by your knowledge of character and relieved by the charity of your humour and sweetened by your sympathy with human suffering and endurance. We have learned from you that the proud heart can subdue the hardest fate, even in submitting to it. When Mr. Justice Shallow sought to instruct Sir John Falstaff in the choice of soldiers, the knight said: 'Care I for the limbs, the thewes, the stature, bulk and big assemblance of a man? Give me the spirit, Master Shallow.' So would you have answered him, for in all that you have written you have shown the spirit of man, nourished by tradition and sustained by pride, persisting through defeat. You have inspired us both by your work and by the manner in which it was done. The craftsman in you calls for our admiration as surely as the artist, and few writers have observed so closely as you have the Host's instruction in the Canterbury Tales:
Your termes, your colours and your figures,
Keep them in store, till so be ye indite
High style, as when that men to kinges write.
From your first book to your last, you have written in the 'high style, as when that men to kinges write,' and you have crowned a great prose with a noble poetry."
Those extracts express, I think, some of the quiet quality of courage discoverable in the determinism of Mr. Hardy, but absent from the determinism of Mr. Galsworthy.
III
Our attitude towards Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells, Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc was very different from our attitude towards Mr. Galsworthy. These challenging, fighting, protesting men were concerned less with pity for the victims of life than with anger against or opposition to the oppressors of life. They did not wring their hands; they put up their fists. The Early Twentieth Century Youth listened respectfully to Mr. Galsworthy, but he went out to fight with Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells and Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc. These four men did not move him in equal measure. Mr. Wells stimulated him with the quick succession of his ideas, but disconcerted him also with the rapidity with which he shed one idea for another. While we were willing to challenge everything and make it justify its existence, we were eager also to find firm ground for our feet. We felt that Mr. Wells ought to make up his mind a little more carefully before he took the public into his confidence. Mr. Shaw's awful consistency, even when he took to religion, drew us to him more than Mr. Wells's willingness to modify or enlarge his views. Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton stimulated us in a different way from that in which Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells stimulated us. Mr. Wells sent us out into the world in search of new and more adequate formulæ; Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton checked us in headlong flights with words of warning and remonstrance. They reminded us that man is of the earth, earthy; that man does not live by Good Will alone; that society is composed of a great variety of beings, generous and mean, exalted and debased, hearty and miserable, noble and ignoble, self-sacrificing and self-seeking, kind and cruel; and they reminded us also that unless we took care to remember this vital fact of the variety of man, we should lose our way in the deserts ahead of us. They told us that Mr. Wells's "Good Will" was merely Godwin's "Universal Benevolence" all over again, and that Godwin's doctrine had made the way easy for the Utilitarians and the growth of a devitalizing political theory which expressed itself in the brutal industrial system of the first half of the nineteenth century. Mr. Wells sought to convict man of a sense of stupidity and disorganization, but they sought to convict him of a sense of sin. Mr. Wells reminded man of his power to aspire; they reminded him of his lapse from grace. Mr. Wells said, "You can climb!" They said, "You have fallen!" He said, "Think!" They said, "Repent!" The world, in Mr. Wells's opinion, needed Love and Fine Thinking. In the opinion of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton it needed the love of God and faith in the Catholic Church. There probably was less difference in essentials between Mr. Wells and the Chesterbelloc, as Mr. Shaw nicknamed them, than appeared on the surface of things. The Catholic Church in its organized state may move Mr. Wells to admiration, though, in its religious aspect, it probably moves him only to derision. It is a shabby sort of faith, with a tendency to tawdriness which makes it ultimately unsuitable to the spiritual needs of a gentleman, although adequate to the needs of servant-girls and actors. No one who has visited a Catholic church or witnessed the ceremonials in Rome can help, if he or she be possessed of any culture at all, feeling that the whole business is second-rate: the effort of an overblown actor-manager to interpret Shakespeare in pretentious terms. The fundamental sanity of Mr. Chesterton has, no doubt, saved him from the folly of secession to Rome, but his partiality for it and Mr. Belloc's rigid attainment to it, made the young men of my time suspicious of the Chesterbelloc. Mr. Belloc said, on a public occasion, that he would support the Church in an act of repression if the Church came into serious conflict with an antagonist; and he proved that he meant what he said by applauding the execution of Ferrer, the anti-clerical, in Spain. It was natural, perhaps, that my Orange blood should boil when I heard Mr. Belloc palliating the offences of his obsolete church, but my more tolerant friends were as dashed by his behaviour as I was, and what respect we had for him was considerably diminished by the knowledge that he would always come to heel when some priest snapped fingers at him. Neither he nor Mr. Chesterton, although their criticism interested and on occasions checked us, ever established dominion over us because of their preoccupation with Catholicism. They might spell the word with a capital C, but we knew very well that Mr. Belloc in his heart spelt it with a small one, and we were not going to deliver ourselves into the hands of men who were priest-ridden, however "jolly" they might be or however well they might write.
We were not interested in their beer-swilling habits which we regarded as queer nastinesses in otherwise reputable persons. Their efforts to make a tenet of religion out of beer-swilling seemed to us to be as ridiculous as would be an effort by a Chinaman to make a tenet of religion out of opium-smoking.
Mr. Shaw was incontestably the supreme figure among these men of mind who stimulated and influenced the young men and women of the Early Twentieth Century. I doubt whether any one has ever captured or held the fancy of young men as Mr. Shaw captured and held our fancy. Dr. Johnson had an influence as powerful in his time as Mr. Shaw had in ours; but Dr. Johnson's influence was mainly exercised over men of older years than we were, of more established habits than we had; and I doubt very much whether he affected their thoughts and outlook on life so profoundly as Mr. Shaw affected us. He could not persuade the faithful Boswell to accept his view of the American colonists, and his pamphlet, "Taxation No Tyranny" displeased his friends as much as it appeared to gratify George III and his supporters. Dr. Johnson was a critic and a scholar with very little creative ability; he was too conservative a man to be a man of genius; and he looked back too often for the liking of young men who are always looking forward. His love of tradition and settled order, while it was pleasing to men of an age when comfort and security and familiar things began to attract the mind more than effort and adventure and change, made him unattractive to the stirring minds of young men. Shelley derived from Godwin, not from Johnson.
There is a passage in Boswell's "Life of Dr. Johnson" in which Dr. Johnson's peculiar views on the respect due to men of rank are set out very clearly.