5 BLOOMSBURY AND SOUTH PLACE
In February the Gardens moved to Bloomsbury. Different people and more people came to the house; it was rather like the old days when papa had been a Unitarian. Mr. Stopford Brooke began coming to see papa again, and Dr. Martineau, and all his old and new friends who lived in London, even Father Stanton of St. Alban’s, Holborn, and Mr. Charles Spurgeon. The circle of papa’s friends had swollen and swollen with the years, from his undergraduate days onwards. Not only was papa lovable and popular, but he touched so many circles, fished in so many waters, and his fellow-fishermen of each particular water usually remained faithful to him even when he moved on to another pool. Good-humoured, witty Mr. Spurgeon, for instance, did not break with papa when he deserted the City Temple for a second go of Anglicanism, though he was sadly disappointed in him. Nor were papa’s interests bound by religion; he had friends, distinguished and indistinguished, among politicians, journalists, poets, professors and social reformers, besides his relatives and mamma’s. And now, of course, there was a quite fresh influx from the South Place Ethical Chapel. So, one way and another, what with papa’s friends and mamma’s and the children’s, a good deal of life flowed into the Bloomsbury Square house. Papa was, in his quiet way, happy now that the wrench was over. He was writing, and had for years been writing, a very long book on comparative religions, and for this he worked at the British Museum, which was so conveniently near. And on Sundays he went to South Place and worshipped ethically.
“Do not crouch to-day and worship,”
he would sing in his sweet tenor voice,
“The old past, whose life is fled;
Hush your voice to tender reverence,
Crowned he lies, but cold and dead.
For the present reigns our monarch,
With an added weight of hours;
Honour her, for she is mighty!
Honour her, for she is ours!”
(The author, Miss Adelaide Procter, had very rightly, it will be noted, dethroned a male and enthroned a female.)
So sang papa and mamma on a Sunday morning in April. Then someone rose and said a few ethical words about the desirability of not being fettered by religious dogma, and the congregation, who all thought this desirable too, listened attentively.
Papa gazed wistfully in front of him at the varnished seats and painted woodwork and the ethical texts inscribed round the walls. “Live for Others.” “Live Nobly.” “Duty First.” He had made the great sacrifice, and once more dethroned the past for honesty’s sake, and if it entailed a jarring of literary and artistic fastidiousness, who was he to rebel? God knew, he had been æsthetically happier joining in the Roman mass (tawdry and vulgar-looking as the churches where this service is held so often are) or chanting the Anglican liturgy in the little fourteenth-century church in Hampshire—though, as to that, some of the Hymns A. & M. were quite as bad as anything in the ethical hymn-book—but never had he been so utterly honest, so stripped to the bare bone of all complacency, humbug and self-deception as now. Or so, anyhow, he believed, but who shall read the human heart?
Again they sang:
“Hush the loud cannon’s roar,
The frantic warrior’s call!
Why should the earth be drenched in gore?
Are we not brothers all?”
For, sad to say, the earth was, in the spring of 1880, drenched (as usual) in gore. The gore of Afghans and British in Afghanistan, of Basutos in Basutoland, Chilians and Bolivians in South America, Liberals and Conservatives in Great Britain, where the elections were being fiercely contested, besides such permanently flowing gore as that of Jews in Russia and Christians in Turkey. The Ethical Society hoped pathetically that all these so unlikely persons would enjoy peace and brotherhood one day.
They trooped out into South Place. Grave, intelligent, ethical men and women clustered and hummed together like bees. They talked about the elections, which were going well, for nearly all the Ethical members were Liberals and the Liberals were sweeping the country.
“Why are Ethical members Liberals?” Rome enquired in the note book to which she committed as much of her private commentary on life as ever found its way to paper. “Partly, no doubt, because of the liberal attitude towards religion, but it must be more than that. T.C.” “T.C.” meant “trace connection” and was a very frequent entry. Rome looked forward to a time when, by means of prolonged investigation, all the connections she had noted should be traced; that, she held, would add to her understanding of this strange, amusing life. What, for instance, was the connection between High Church dogma and ornate ritual, between belief in class distinctions and in the British Empire, between dissent and Little Englandism, art and unconventional morals, the bourgeoisie and respectability, socialism and queer clothes? All these pairs and many others were marked T.C. and had a little space under them, in which the connection, when traced, was explained in concise and lucid language. In another part of the book there were pages assigned to “Curious uses of words.” Rome felt a great, perhaps a morbid, interest in investigating life and language. She wrote “Why are Ethical members Liberals?” when papa and mamma coming in from chapel told her how delighted South Place was with the elections. Papa, of course, had always been a Liberal through all his religious vicissitudes.
Vicky came in like a graceful whirlwind from Walworth, S.E., where she had attended church at St. Austin’s, the monastery of Brother à Beckett, and flung herself into a chair in ecstasy.
“A service straight from heaven!” she cried. “Too utterly utter! Such incense—perfumes of Araby! And Brother à Beckett preached about the authority of the State over the Church. It simply doesn’t exist. The State is nowhere and not to be taken the slightest notice of.... And who do you think was there, just in front of us—Mr. Pater, and the adorable Oscar in a velveteen coat, looking like the prince of men and talking like the king of wits (yes, mamma, talking, but in quite an undertone). But too utter! I was devastated. I was with Charles. I’d made him come with me to try if grace would abound—but no, not yet; Charles remains without, with the dogs and the ...”
“Vicky,” mamma interpolated.
“... and the sorcerers, mamma dear,” Vicky finished, innocently. “What did you think I was going to say?”
“You must allow Charles his conscience, Vicky,” said papa.
Charles was Vicky’s half-affianced suitor, but unfortunately an agnostic, or rather a Gallio, and Vicky declared that they should not become regularly engaged until such time as Charles should embrace the Anglican, or some other equally to be respected, church. Unbelief might be fashionable, but Vicky didn’t hold with it. Also, and worse, Charles was not yet in the æsthetic push; he was, instead, in the Foreign Office, and took no interest in the New Beauty. Velveteen coats he disliked, and art fabrics, and lilies, except in gardens, and languor except in offices, and vice except in the places appointed for it. And all these distastes would, as Vicky complained, make the parties they would give such a difficulty. Vicky told Charles that, unless he conquered them, she might feel compelled to become affianced instead to Mr. Ernest Waller, a young essayist who understood Beauty, though not, indeed, Anglicanism, as he had been a pupil of Mr. Pater’s in the days when Mr. Pater had been something of a pagan. But better burn incense before heathen gods, said Vicky, than burn none at all.
So, when papa said, “You must allow Charles his conscience,” Vicky returned, firmly, “Dear papa, no. Conscience should be our servant, not our master. That’s what Brother à Beckett said in his sermon this morning. Or, anyhow, something like it. Conscience is given us to be educated and trained up the way it should go. An unruly conscience is an endless nuisance. He that bridleth not his own conscience ...”
Papa, sensible of his own so inconveniently unbridled conscience, said, mildly, “I think Brother à Beckett was perhaps referring to the tongue,” and Vicky lightly admitted that her memory might have got confused.
“But never mind sermons and the conscience, here’s grandpapa,” she said, and sure enough, there was grandpapa, who was staying with them on a visit. Grandpapa was the father of mamma and a Dean, and was a very handsome man of seventy-five, and he was one of the last ditchers in the matter of orthodoxy and had yielded no inch to science or the higher criticism, and believed in the verbal inspiration of the Bible and the divine credentials of the Anglican Establishment, and disliked popery, ritual, dissent and free thought with equal coldness. Papa he had never approved of; a weak, vacillating fellow, whose reputation was little affected by one disgraceful change more or less. It did not particularly signify that papa had joined the Ethical Church; nothing about papa particularly signified; a weak, wrong-headed, silly fellow, who would certainly, for all his scholarship, never be a Dean. It was far more distressing that Anne (mamma), who ought to have made a firm stand and saved her husband from his folly, should thus abet him and follow him about from church to church. And the children had been deplorably brought up. Grandpapa, who thought it blasphemous not to believe in Noah and his ark, and even in the date assigned to these by Bishop Ussher, and had written to the Times protesting against the use in schools of the arithmetic book of Bishop Colenso on account of the modernist instruction imparted by this Bishop to the heathen in this matter of the date of the ark—grandpapa heard these unhappy children of his daughter’s discussing the very bases of revealed truth; grandpapa, who held that our first parents lost paradise through disobedience, pride, inquisitiveness and false modesty, heard Maurice’s perverse defiance of law and authority, Rome’s calm contempt and conceited criticism of accepted standards, Stanley’s incessant, eager, “Why, what for, and why not?” and Vicky’s horror at the breadth and crudeness of the Prayer Book marriage service.
Grandpapa, being a Conservative and a Disraelian, was just now not well pleased. He did not think that the Gladstone Government would be able to deal adequately or rightly with the inheritance of foreign responsibilities left them by their predecessors. South Africa, Egypt, Afghanistan—what would the Liberals, many of them Little Englanders in fact though not yet in name, do with all this white man’s burden, as the responsibilities of Empire were so soon, so horribly soon, to be called? Had grandpapa thought of it, he would certainly have called them that. His grandson, Maurice, called them, on the other hand, “all those damned little Tory wars,” a difference in nomenclature which indicated a real difference in political attitude.
Grandpapa entered with the Observer, which regretted as he did the way the elections had gone, and with the Guardian, which did not. He sat down and patted Vicky on the shoulder, and said that Canon Liddon had preached at St. Paul’s, where he had attended morning service.
“A capital defence of the faith,” said grandpapa. “Bones to it, and substance. None of your sentimental slop. You’ve all been running after ethics, or ritual, or this, that and the other, but I’ve had the pure Word. Liddon’s too high, but he’s sound. I remember in ’55....”
One of grandpapa’s familiar stories, told as old people told their stories, with loving rounding of detail.
Vicky’s mind reached vainly back towards ’55 and could not get there. Crinolines and sweeping whiskers, the pre-Raphælites and the Crimea, Bible orthodoxy and the Tractarians, all the great Victorians. A dim, entrancing period, when papa and mamma were getting married and people were too old-fashioned to see life straight as it was. And to grandpapa ’55 was quite lately, just the other day, and ’80 was like an engine got loose from its train and dashing madly in advance, heading precipitately for a crash.
“I remember,” said grandpapa, “I remember....”
Papa said, “That was the year King’s College asked Maurice to retire because of ‘Theological Essays.’”
What dull things elderly people remembered!
“Next Sunday,” said Vicky, “I shall take Charles to South Place, papa. I hear Mr. Pater is preaching there. Too sweet and quaint; he preaches everywhere. And often the divine Oscar sits under him.”
6 STANLEY AND ROME
Maurice and Stanley were back from Cambridge and Oxford for the Easter vacation, talking, talking, talking. Stanley, in a crimson stockinette jersey, tight like an eel’s skin, and a tight little brown skirt caught in at the knees, her chubby face pink with excitement and health, talked of Oxford, of the river, of lectures, of Mr. Pater and of friendship. Friendship was like dancing flames to Stanley in this her first Oxford year; a radiant, painful apocalypse of joy.
“Are they so splendid?” Rome speculated of these glorious girls. “Is anyone so splendid, ever?”
She sat idly, her hands clasped behind her short silky curls, Mallock’s “New Republic” open at her side. Stanley sat on the edge of a table and swung her legs. How romantic Stanley was! What were girls, what, indeed, were boys either, that such a halo should encircle their foolish heads?
There was proceeding at this time a now long-forgotten campaign called the Woman’s Movement, and on to the gay, youthful fringe of this Stanley and her friends were catching. Women, long suppressed, were emerging; women were to be doctors, lawyers, human beings, everything; women were to have their share of the earth, their share of adventure, to flourish in all the arts, ride perched in hansom cabs, even on monstrous bicycles, find the North Pole....
“Too energetic for me,” Rome commented.
“Oh, but you’ll be a great writer, perhaps.”
“No. Why? There’s nothing I want to write. What’s the use of writing? Too much of that already.... Oh, well, go on about Oxford, Stan. You don’t convince me that it’s anything but a very ordinary place full of quite ordinary people, but I rather like to hear you being absurd.”
Rome’s faint, delicately thin voice expressed acquiescent but not scornful irony. Stanley was a bore sometimes, but an intelligent bore. She went on about Oxford and Mr. Pater and some lectures on art by William Morris that she had been to. Stanley was drunk with beauty; she was plunging deep into the æsthetic movement on whose surface Vicky played.
“You know, Rome,” she puckered her forehead over it, “more and more I feel that the merely æsthetic people are on the wrong tack. Beauty for ourselves can’t be enough; it’s got to be made possible for everyone.... That’s where Vicky and her friends are off it. A lily in a blue vase all to yourself isn’t enough. All this” —she looked round at the Liberty room, the peacock patterns, the willow pattern china, the oak settle— “all this—it’s not fair we should be able to have it when everyone can’t. It’s greedy....”
“Everyone’s greedy.”
“No,” said Stanley, and her eyes glowed, for she was thinking of her splendid friends. “No. Greediness is in everyone, but it can be conquered. Socialism is the way.... I wish you could meet Evelyn Peters. She’s joined the Social Democratic Federation.... I want to ask her here to stay in June. She’s not just an ordinary person, you know. She’s splendid. She’s six years older than me, and enormously cleverer, and she’s read everything and met everyone.... I can’t tell you how I feel about her.”
Obvious, thought Rome, how Stanley felt with her shining eyes and flushed cheeks, and shy, changing voice. In love; that was what Stanley was. Stanley was for ever in and out of love; she had been the same all through her school days. So had Vicky, but with Vicky it was men, and less romantic and earnest. Stanley was always flinging her whole being prostrate in adoring enthusiasm before someone or something, funny child. She was looking at Rome now in shy, gleaming hesitation, wondering if Rome were despising her, laughing at her, but not able to keep Evelyn Peters to herself. To say “Evelyn Peters is my friend” was an exquisite æsthetic joy and made their friendship a more real, achieved thing.
Rome felt a little uncomfortable behind her bland nonchalance; Stanley’s emotions were so strong.
7 GRANDPAPA
When Maurice was there Stanley did not talk about her friends; such talk was not suitable for Maurice, whose own friendships were so different. Often in these days they talked politics. Maurice was a radical.
“Chamberlain’s the man,” he said, “Chamberlain and Dilke. Whiggery’s played out; dead as mutton. Mild liberalism has had its day. Yes, pater, your day is over. The seventies have been the heyday of liberalism. I grant you it’s done well—Education Act, Irish disestablishment, abolition of tests, and so on. Such obvious reforms, you see, that every sane person has had to be a Liberal. That’s watered liberalism down. Now we’ve got to go further, and only the extremists will stick on; the old gang will desert. Radicalism’s the only thing for England now.”
Maurice, pacing the room with his quick little steps, his hands in his pockets, his chin in the air, would talk thus in his crisp, rapid, asseverating voice, even to grandpapa, who had, when he had done the same thing as a schoolboy, ordered him out of the room for impertinence. Grandpapa and Maurice did not, in fact, each really like the other—obstinate age and opinionated youth. Because grandpapa was in the room, Maurice said, “They’ve returned old Bradlaugh for Northampton all right. Now we shall see some fun,” and grandpapa said, “Don’t mention that abominable blasphemer in my presence.”
Papa said, gently, with his cultured tolerance, “A good deal, I fancy, has been attributed to Bradlaugh of which he has not been guilty.”
“Are you denying,” enquired grandpapa, “that the fellow is a miserable blaspheming atheist and a Malthusian?”
“An atheist,” papa admitted, discreetly passing over the last charge, “no doubt he is. And very undesirably coarse and violent in his methods of controversy and propaganda. But I am not sure that the charge of blasphemy is a fair one, on the evidence we have.”
“Any man,” said grandpapa, sharply, “who denies his Maker blasphemes.”
“In that case,” said Maurice, moodily, “I blaspheme,” and left the room.
Papa apologised for him.
“You must forgive the boy; he is still crude.”
Grandpapa shut his firm mouth tightly, and Rome thought, “He is still cruder.”
Vicky asked lightly, “What is a Malthusian, grandpapa?” and grandpapa, who came of a coarse and outspoken generation, snapped, “A follower of Malthus.”
“And who was Malthus, grandpapa?”
Grandpapa, catching his daughter’s eye, and recollecting that it was the year 1880, not the coarse period of his own youth, hummed and cleared his throat and said, “A very ungentlemanly fellow, my dear.”
And that was all about Malthus that young misses of 1880 needed to know. Or so their elders believed. But in 1880, as now, young misses often knew more than their parents and grandparents supposed. Rome and Stanley, better read in history than Vicky, could have enlightened both her and grandpapa on the theme of Malthus.
8 DISCUSSING RELIGION
It was a good thing that grandpapa’s visit ended next day. Without him Maurice was better-mannered, less truculent. They could then discuss Radicalism, Bradlaugh, blasphemy, beauty, Malthus and the elections, en famille, without prejudice. They were, as a family, immense talkers, inordinate arguers. The only two who did not discuss life at large were Irving and Una; their conversation was and always would be of the lives they personally led, and those led by such animals as they kept. The lives led by others worried them not at all. They recked not of the Woman’s Movement, but Irving amiably held Maurice’s high bicycle while Stanley, divested of her tight skirt and clad in a pair of his knickerbockers, mounted it and pedalled round and round the quiet square. It was Irving who knew that a lower kind of bicycle was on its way, had even been seen in embryo.
“But girls’ll never ride it,” he opined. “That’s jolly certain.”
“Girls will probably be wearing knickerbockers in a year or two,” Stanley, always hopeful, asserted. “For exercise and games and things. Or else a new kind of skirt will come in, short and wide. Our clothes are absurd.”
“Women’s clothes always are,” said Irving, content that this should be so.
Stanley would rush in, happy and bruised, assume again her absurd, caught-in-at-the-knees skirt, and argue desperately with Maurice about Christian socialism. Stanley was a Christian, ardent and practical; that was the effect Oxford was having on her. She privately wondered how papa, having known and loved Oxford, could bear the Ethical Church. But probably the Oxford Anglicanism of papa’s day had not been so inspiring.
Vicky told Stanley that socialism, Christian or un-Christian, was very crude; religion was an affair of art and beauty, not of economics.
“Religion—oh, I don’t know.” Stanley wondered, frowning. “What is religion, Rome?”
Rome, looking up from Samuel Butler, merely said, “How should I know? You’d better ask papa. He should know; he’s writing a book about it.”
“No; I didn’t mean comparative religions. I mean religion....”
“A primitive insurance against disaster,” Maurice defined it. He always looked up and took notice when religion was mentioned; to this family the word was like “rats” to a dog, owing, perhaps, to their many clerical ancestors, perhaps to the fact that they were latish Victorians.
“But it courts disaster....” Stanley was sure of that. “Look where it leads people. Into all sorts of hardships and dangers and sacrifices. Look at Christianity—in the Gospels, I mean.”
“That’s a perversion. Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another.”
“What about the Ethical Church? They don’t believe in another.”
“A perversion too. A mere sop thrown to the religious instinct by people who don’t like to starve it altogether. A morbid absurdity. A house without foundations. If they simply mean, as they appear to, that they think they ought to be good, why meet in South Place and sing about it?”
“Why,” enquired Rome, who never did so, “meet anywhere and sing about anything?”
“Why,” said Maurice, “indeed? A morbid instinct inherent in human nature. Mine, I am glad to say, is untainted by it; so is yours, Rome. Vicky has it badly, and Stanley, who gets everything in turns, has it on and off, but she is young and may get over it.... The queer thing about Stanley is that she’s trying to run two quite incompatible things at the same time. Æsthetics and Christian Socialism—you might as well be a cricketer and a rowing man, or hang Dickens and Whistler together on your walls. The æsthetes may go slumming, in the absurd way Vicky does, but they’ve no use for socialism.”
“I’m not an æsthete,” Stanley cried, finding it out suddenly. “I’m through with that. I’m going in with the socialists all the way. I shall join the Socialist Democratic Federation at once.”
That was Stanley’s headlong manner of entering into movements. She was a great and impetuous joiner.
But Rome, playing with her monocle on its dangling ribbon, looked at all movements with fastidious rejection. Cui, her faintly mocking regard would seem to enquire, bono?