“That’s the point exactly; there are no principles, there are only parties. Whichever one gets in constitutes the ‘government,’ and its task is to hold labor by the throat while capital picks its pockets. Labor produces a sovereign a day, and capital takes it, and gives labor four shillings wages, and labor tips its cap and is grateful. And then capital’s favorite lady-novelist comes round with a market basket containing sixpence worth of food and medicine; which is called charity, and is the means of getting labor’s vote at election time.”
Such was the private life of Mrs. Humphry Ward. She was what is called “philanthropic”; that is, she was prominent in those society activities which help the poor by playing upon the vanity and love of display of the rich. Her life consisted in rushing about from one meeting to another, shaking hands and chatting, rushing home to dress and dine with prominent people, and then reading about it in the next day’s newspapers. She was so busy with all this that she could only find half an hour a day in which to read Greek!
The characters in her books are busy with the same kind of activities. The leading man is a handsome young aristocrat, whose occupation is becoming premier. We never have any idea why he wants to be premier, except that as hero that is his function. The idea that the people of England should ask reasons for making an empty-headed noodle into their premier is one that never occurs to anyone in the novels. What interests us is the efforts of the young man’s friends to push him in, and the efforts of his enemies to bar him out.
Success or failure in all such “political novels” depends on one factor, an entanglement of sex. It appears that the English voters insist rigidly upon one requirement—that the statesman who holds them by the throat while their pockets are being picked shall be ostensibly chaste. The law may be summed up by saying that he is permitted to have only one leisure-class female during his life. Of course, if she dies, he is permitted one more leisure-class female; but for the rest, he is required to satisfy his needs with females of lower classes. Political novels derive their plots from the fact that occasionally some statesman fails to conform to this law; there is a statesman who wants two ladies, or there are two ladies who want the statesman. Nature has not created man exclusively for the purpose of wearing a top-hat and a frock-coat, and making speeches in Parliament; nor do all women find complete satisfaction, like Mrs. Humphry Ward, in political labors to keep other women from getting the vote. There are women with mischief in them, who endeavor to tempt statesmen from exclusive devotion to “careers.” And the statesmen are tempted; they commit indiscretions, such as taking walks in the moonlight with the evil females; and a thrill runs through all “society,” and the tongues of the gossips wag furiously. Did they? Or did they not? The friends of the statesman rally to save him; and the enemies of the statesman sharpen their tomahawks; and Anglomaniacs, watching the scene, are thrilled as when Blondin on the tight-rope sets out to walk across Niagara Falls.
“We don’t really need to worry,” says Mrs. Ogi; “a hero is always a hero, and in all the books that I got from the little cigar-store in the Mississippi town, I cannot recall that one hero ever failed to become premier.”
“It would be interesting,” says Ogi, “to compile statistics on the question: How many premiers have there been in the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward, and how many in the recent history of the British Empire?”
CHAPTER C
THE UNCROWNED KING
We come now to study America in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The dominating factor in this period was the Civil War, a conflict in which the physical and moral energy of the country was exhausted. There followed the inevitable reaction: Abraham Lincoln was succeeded by the carpetbagger in the South and the tariff-boodler in the North. The very hero who had led the nation to victory, and had said, “Let us have peace,” entered the White House to turn the government over to corruptionists. In the two generations following the Civil War America made enormous material and some intellectual progress, but no moral progress discernible. As I write this book, our political morals are embodied in a post-campaign jest: “The Republicans should have stolen the Washington monument, and then Coolidge would have carried Florida and South Carolina.”
Provincial America in the decades following the Civil War based its religion upon the dogma that it was the most perfect nation upon God’s footstool. The whisky-drinking, tobacco-chewing, obscenity-narrating, Grand Old Party-voting mob would tolerate no criticism, not even that kind implied by living differently. To it an artist was a freak, whom it punished with mockery and practical jokes. There were only two possible ways for him to survive; one was to flee to New York and be lost in the crowd; the other was to turn into a clown and join in laughing at himself, and at everything he knew to be serious and beautiful in life. This latter course was adopted by a man of truly great talent, who might have become one of the world’s satiric masters if he had not been overpowered by the spirit of America. His tragic story has been told in a remarkable study, “The Ordeal of Mark Twain,” by Van Wyck Brooks.