"How long, O Lord?" asked one.
"Après moi, le deluge; mais après le deluge ...?" asked another.
And in the first week of August, 1914, the cynics who had been watching the growth of hostility between classes agreed that, if there had been no war, it would have been necessary to create one.
These were the mad, neurotic years of private horseplay and public lawlessness, when no hoax was too gigantic, no folly too laborious to be undertaken for a wager and when ill-conditioned defiance led every class in the land to proclaim that, if it disliked a law, it would disobey it. They were days of great costume-balls, of freak dinners and of nascent night-clubs. Perhaps they are best regarded as the years which, of all in recent times, the ingrained puritanism of the English would most gladly forget.
Under the shock of war it became fashionable to look upon this wanton life as an offence to God, which the scourge of God was being used to end; and from an audience whose heart is not yet healed the satirist of those years can always be sure of applause. It is easy to paint too glittering a picture and to foster a new sense of superiority which is not justified. For a dozen years before the war there was much ostentation and polite mendicancy, much frivolity of head and vulgarity of soul among a world of merrymakers who had been born without a feeling for responsibility or who had shaken off the restraints of tradition. Was their crime more grave than that?
Every vulgarian must be vulgar in his own way; so long as the institution of private property continues, rich and poor are equally free to misspend their money; and, though they differed in their means and in their tastes, rich and poor were equally guilty of waste, display, lawlessness and sloth; a just sumptuary law would have borne as hardly on one as on the other. In the absence of a civic conscience, all struggled to obtain the maximum of personal enjoyment with the minimum of exertion, protesting self-righteously the while against the idleness and improvidence of their neighbours; and, if the poor murmured at the misuse of surplus wealth, the rich were sometimes amazed at their own moderation in not resenting the sight of so much leisure with so little taxation among the working classes.
While those who mocked at the primness and overthrew the decorum of the Victorian era constructed a social system which to Irish eyes seemed intolerably vulgar and mercenary, it may be pleaded that the new and alien arbiters of taste, lacking any tradition of breeding, could hardly be expected to know any better and that Providence would surely have made allowances for this before unloosing the scourge.
III
The breach between Victorianism and that which succeeded it was not more complete in manners than in art and literature. By the time that King George V ascended the throne, the great lights of the preceding century were, almost without exception, flickering out or already extinguished; those who survived the transition in time were none the less influenced so deeply by the change in atmosphere that their later work differs from the earlier as much as one man's from another's. This is so much more than the normal advance from youth to maturity that it suggests a revaluation, a new point of view and a reaction to changed psychological conditions without. While Kipling's art as a supreme story-teller attained by natural development to a rarer perfection, his change of standpoint may be measured by the distance from any one of the Plain Tales to They or The Brushwood Boy; with Conrad the change is from Nostromo to Chance; with James from The Wings of a Dove to The Awkward Age.