Told by an Idiot

PART III EDWARDIAN 1 DISCURSIVE THE Edwardians were, as we now think, a brief generation to themselves, set between Victorianism and neo-Georgianism (it is a pity that we should have no better name for the present reign, for “Georgian” belongs by right to a period quite other; royalty having ever been sadly unimaginative in its choice of Christian names). Set between the nineteenth century and the full swing of the twentieth, those brief ten years we call Edwardian seem now like a short spring day. They were a gay and yet an earnest time. A time of social reform on the one hand and social brilliance on the other. The heyday at once of intellectual Fabianism and of extravagant dissipation. The hour of the repertory theatres, the Irish Players, Bernard Shaw and Granville Barker at the Court, Miss Horniman in the provinces, absurd musical comedies that bloomed like gay flowers of a day and died. The onrush of motor cars and the decline of bicycles and the horse; extravagant country-house parties at which royalty consented to be entertained, with royal bonhomie and royal exactions of etiquette.... “Mr. Blank, have we not seen that suit rather often before?” “Lady Dash, surely we remember this wall-paper....” “Lord Somebody, this is a very abominable dinner....” What standards to live up to! There was nothing dowdy about our King Edward. He set the stakes high, and all who could afford it played. Pageants and processions passed in regal splendour. Money nobly flowed. T Ideals changed. The sanctity and domesticity of the Heim was no more a royal fetish. “Respectability,” that good old word, degraded and ill-used for so long, sank into discredit, sank lower in the social scale. No more were unfortunate ladies who had had marital troubles coldly banned from court, for a larger charity (except as to suits, dinners and wall-papers) obtained. Victorian sternness, Victorian prudery and intolerance, still prevailed among some of the older aristocracy, among most of the smaller squirearchy, the professional classes and the petty bourgeoisie; but among most of the wealthy, most of the titled, most of the gay and extravagant classes, a wider liberty grew. In the intervals of social pleasures, Edward the Peacemaker was busy about the Balance of Power in Europe. He did not care about his cousin Wilhelm. He made an Entente with France, and came to an understanding with Russia, so that when the Trouble should come—and experienced royalty knows that from time to time, the Trouble is bound to come—we should not meet it singly. The weak point about ententes is that when the Trouble comes to one’s fellow-members, they do not meet it singly either. Considering this, and considering also the annoyance and alarm they inspire in those not in them, and taking them all round, ententes seem on the whole a pity. But at the time English people were pleased with this one, and Edward was hopefully called the Peacemaker, just as Victoria had been called Good, and Elizabeth Virgin, and Mary Bloody. We love to name our royalties, and we much prefer to name them kindly. Mary must have been, and doubtless was, very bloody indeed before her people bestowed on her that opprobrious title. Other sovereigns—most other sovereigns—have been pretty bloody too, but none of them bloody enough to be so called. A queer time! Perhaps a transition time; for that matter, this is one of the things times always are. The world of fashion led by an elderly royal gentleman bred at the Victorian court of his mother, and retaining queer Victorian traditions that younger gentlemen and ladies did not observe. King Edward, for instance, observed Sunday with some strictness. He thought it right; he felt it should be done. The British Sunday was an institution, and King Edward was all for institutions. A generation was growing up, had already grown up, who did not understand about Sunday in that sense. But you may observe about elderly Victorian persons that, however loosely they may sit to Sunday, they usually have a sense of it. They play or work on it consciously, with a feeling that they are breaking a foolish rule, possibly offending an imaginary public opinion. They seldom quite realise that the rule and the opinion they are thinking of are nearly obsolete. They seldom regard Sunday (with reference to the occupations practised on it), precisely as if it were a weekday. Institutions die hard. They linger long after their informing spirit has died. Anyhow, King Edward VII was a Victorian gentleman long before he was an Edwardian. So he observed Sunday and the lesser proprieties, without self-consciousness. He was like his mother, with a difference. Both had a sense of royal dignity and of the Proper Thing. His subjects, too, had a sense of the Proper Thing: people always have. But the Proper Thing, revered as ever, gradually changed its face, or rather turned a somersault and alighted on its head. Well, the Edwardians, like the Elizabethans, the Jacobeans, the Carolines, the Georgians, the Victorians, and the neo-Georgians, were a mixed lot. This attempt to class them, to stigmatise them with adjectives, is unscientific, sentimental, and wildly incorrect. But, because it is rather more interesting than to admit frankly that they were merely a set of individuals, it will always be done. 2 VIVE LE ROI La reine est morte. Vive le roi. King Edward was proclaimed by heralds, by trumpeters, and with the rolling of drums; and God save the King. Then they buried the late queen with royal pomp, and kings, emperors, archdukes and crown princes rode with her to the tomb. King Edward opened Parliament in state. A great king he was for pageantry and for state. He read the Accession Declaration. It was a tactlessly worded declaration in some ways, for it was drawn up in days when Roman Catholicism was not well thought of by the Head of the Church and Defender of the Faith. King Edward did not like it. “His Majesty,” wrote the outraged Catholic peers, “would willingly have been relieved from the necessity of branding with contumelious epithets the religious tenets of any of his subjects.” There were protests not only from Roman Catholics, but from Protestants and agnostics, who all, in the main, thought it rude. But some there were who, though they knew it was rude, knew also that it was right to be rude to Roman Catholics. “They are the king’s subjects as much as others, and belong to a distinguished old church,” the protesters declared. “The thing is an antediluvian piece of ill-breeding.” “Bloody Mary. The Inquisition. No Popery,” was the crude reply. “And are not Roman Catholics always rude to our religion? Why, then, should we not be rude to theirs?” “Roman Catholics,” replied the more polite and sophisticated, “cannot help being a little rude—if you call it so—to other faiths. They are not to blame. It is an article of their faith that theirs is the only true and good church. There is no such article in other faiths. We are not obliged by our religion to believe them wrong, as they are, unfortunately, obliged to believe us wrong. Obviously, then, we should practise the courtesy forbidden to them. It is more generous and dignified. Also, they are as good as we are. All religions are doubtless in the main inaccurate, and one does not differ appreciably from another. And His Majesty ought to preserve a strict impartiality concerning the many and various faiths of his people. The Declaration is ignorant, unstatesmanlike and obscurantist, and smacks of vulgar seventeenth century protestantism. It is a worse scandal than the Thirty-nine Articles.” But “No Popery” was still the cry of the noisy few, and the scandal remained. Reluctantly protesting his firm intention to give no countenance to the religion of some millions of his subjects, and solemnly in the presence of God professing, testifying and declaring that he did make this declaration in the plaine and ordinary sense of the words as they were commonly understood by English Protestants, without any evasion, equivocation or mental reservation whatsoever, without any dispensation from the Pope, either already granted or to be sought later, the king opened his khaki-elected Parliament, which proved as ineffective as parliaments always do. It is of no importance which side is in office in Parliament; any study of the subject must convince the earnest student that all parties are about equally stupid. By some fluke, useful Acts may from time to time get passed by any government that happens to be in power. More often, foolish and injurious Acts get passed. Personality and intelligence in ministers do certainly make some difference; but party, it seems, makes none. The stupid, the inert, the dishonest and the ill-intentioned flourish like bay-trees impartially on both sides of the avenue. Only the very naïf can believe that party matters, in the long run. This first Parliament of the twentieth century proved, perhaps, even more than usually inept, as parliaments elected during war excitements are apt to be. It could deal neither with education, defences, labour, finance nor poisoned beer. 3 PAPA’S NEW FAITH The war scrambled on; a tedious, ineffective guerilla business. The Concentration Camp trouble began, and over its rights and wrongs England was split. Mr. Garden hated the thought of these camps, where Boer women and children, driven from their homes, dwelt in discomfort (so said Miss Emily Hobhouse and others), and fell ill and died. They might be, as their defenders maintained, kindly meant, but it was all very disagreeable. In fact, the whole war preyed on papa’s mind and nerves. More and more it seemed to him a hideous defiance of any possible Christian order of society, a thing wholly outside the sphere of God’s scheme for the world. But, then, of course, nearly everything was that, and always had been. So utterly outside that sphere were most of the world’s happenings that it sometimes seemed to papa as if they could scarcely be happenings, as if they must be evil illusions of our own, outside the great Reality. The more papa brooded over this Reality, the more he became persuaded that it must be absolute and all pervasive, that nothing else really existed. “We make evil by our thought,” said papa. “God knows no evil.... God does not know about the war. Nor about the Concentration Camps....” It will be seen that papa was ripe for the acceptance of a new creed which had recently come across the Atlantic and was becoming fashionable in this country. Christian Science fastened on papa like a mosquito, and bit him hard. It comforted him very much to think that God did not know about the war. He told his grandchildren about this ignorance on the part of the Deity. Imogen pondered it. She had a metaphysical and enquiring mind, and was always interested in God. “What does God think all those soldiers are doing out in Africa, grandpapa?” she asked, after a considering pause. “Or doesn’t he know they’re soldiers?” “He knows they are unhappy people following an evil illusion, my child,” her grandpapa told her. “You see, there is no war really—not on God’s plane. There couldn’t be.” Imogen pondered it again, corrugating her forehead. She dearly liked to understand things. “Will God know about the peace, when it comes?” “He will know his children have stopped imagining the evil of war. And he will be very glad.” “Doesn’t he know about the soldiers who are killed? What does he think they’ve died of?” “He knows they are slain by their evil imaginings and those of their enemies. You see, God knows his children believe themselves to be at war, and that as long as they go on believing it they will hurt each other and themselves.” It seemed to Imogen that, in that case, God knew all that was really necessary about the war. “Are you the only person, besides God, who doesn’t believe in the war, grandpapa?” she presently enquired. “No, my child. There are others.... Perhaps one day, when you are older, you will understand more about it, and try and think all evil and all pain out of existence.” “P’raps.” Imogen was dubious. She did not quite get the idea. “Of course I’d like it, grandpapa, because then I shouldn’t get hurt any more.” She rubbed the back of her head, onto which she had fallen that afternoon while roller skating round the square. Her grandfather had told her that God didn’t know she had fallen and hurt herself, and, in fact, that she was not really hurt at all. God didn’t know a great deal about roller skates, Imogen concluded, if he didn’t know that people who used them very frequently did fall. But perhaps he didn’t know there were any roller skates; perhaps roller skates were another evil illusion of ours, like the war. Not a bad illusion; one we had better keep, bruises and all. But perhaps, thought Imogen, who liked to think things out thoroughly, it was really that God didn’t know that the contact of the human head with another hard substance caused pain. After all, people who have never tried don’t know that. Babies don’t.... Imogen began to be afraid she was blaspheming. She put the problem later to her mother, but Vicky was less interested than her youngest daughter in metaphysical problems, and merely said, “Oh, Jennie darling, you needn’t puzzle your head about what grandpapa tells you. Things that suit learned old gentlemen like him don’t always do for little girls like you. Anyhow, don’t ever you get thinking that it won’t hurt you when you tumble on your head, because it always will. You’ll never get rid of that illusion, you may be sure. What you’ve got to learn is not to be so careless, and not to spend all your time climbing and racketing about. So long as you’ll do that you’ll get tumbles, and they’ll hurt, and don’t you forget it.” Imogen sighed a little. Her mother was so practical. You asked her for doctrine and she gave you advice. Being married, and particularly being a mother, often makes women like that. They know that doctrine is no use, and cherish the illusion that advice is. “Papa is very happy in this new no-evil religion he has,” mamma said to Rome. “It suits him very well. Better than theosophy did, I think.” Papa’s new religion might, from her placid, casual, considering tone, have been a new suit of clothes. Papa’s daughter-in-law, Amy, screamed with mirth over it. Christian Science seemed to her an excellent joke. “Oh, you’re not really hurt,” she would say if her daughter Iris came in from hockey with a black eye. “It’s all an illusion! What do you want embrocation for? I’ll tell your grandpapa of you....” “Christian Science,” Maurice said to her at last, gloomily contemptuous, “is not much more absurd than other religions. Suppose you were to take another for your hourly jokes to-day, just for the sake of a change. It makes no difference which; you don’t begin to understand any of them, and you can, no doubt, get a good laugh out of them all, if you try.” Amy said, “There you go, as usual! I suppose you’ll be saying you’re a Christian Science crank next. Anyway, I don’t know what you want to speak to me in that way for, just because I like a little fun.” “I don’t want to speak to you in any way,” replied Maurice. 4 ON EDUCATION Stanley, turning forty this year, was sturdier than of old, softer and broader of face, blunt-nosed, chubby, maternal, her deep blue eyes more ardent and intent. Now that her children, who were ten and eight, both went to day schools, she had taken up her old jobs, and was working for Women’s Trade Unions, going every day to an office, sitting on committees, speaking on platforms. Phases come and phases go, and particularly with Stanley, who inherited much from her papa. Stanley was in these days a stop-the-war, pacificist Little Englander, anti-militarist, anti-Chamberlain, anti-Concentration Camp. She would shortly be a Fabian, but had not quite got there yet. She was, of course, a suffragist, but suffragists in 1901 were still a very forlorn outpost; they were considered crankish and unpractical dreamers. She also spoke and wrote on Prison Reform, Democratic Education, Divorce Reform, Clean Milk and Health Food. She was an admirer of Mr. Eustace Miles’ views on food, Mr. G. B. Shaw’s drama and social ethics, Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s romantic Christianity, and no one’s political opinions. She believed in the future of the world, which was to be splendidly managed by the children now growing up, who were to be splendidly educated for that purpose. “But how improbable,” Rome mildly expostulated, “that they should manage it any better or any worse than everyone else has. Your maternal pride carries you away, my dear. Parents can never be clear-sighted; often have I observed it. Blessed, as the Bible says somewhere, are the barren and they that have not brought forth, for they are the only people with any chance of looking at the world with clear and detached eyes. And even they haven’t much.... But why do you think the present young will do so unusually well with the future?” “Of course,” Stanley replied, “they won’t do it of themselves. Only so far as they are educated up to it.” “Well, I can’t see that educational methods are improving noticeably. Obviously democratic education is not at present to be encouraged by our governing classes. Look at the Cockerton case....” “It will come,” said Stanley. “This new Bill won’t go far, but it will do something. Meanwhile, those parents who have thought it out at all are doing rather better by their children than parents used to do. At least we can tell them the truth.” “So far as you see it yourselves. Is that, in most cases, saying much?” “No, very little. But—to take a trivial thing—we can at least, for instance, tell them the truth about such things as the birth of life. That’s something. Billy and Molly already know as much as they need about that.” “Well, they don’t actually need very much yet, do they? I’m sure it won’t hurt them to know anything of that sort, but I don’t see exactly how it’s going to help them to manage the world any better. Because, when the time comes for doing that, they’d know about the birth of life in any case. Boys always seem to pick it up at school, whatever else they don’t learn. However, I admit that I think you bring up Billy and Molly very well.” “It’s facing facts,” said Stanley, “that I want to teach them. The art of not being afraid of life. They’ve got to do their share in cleaning up the world, and before they can do that they’ve got to face it squarely. One wants to do away with muffling things up, whatever they are. That’s why I tell them everything they ask, so far as I know it, and a lot they don’t. The knowledge doesn’t matter either way, but the atmosphere of daylight does. I want them to feel there are no facts that can’t be talked about.” “But, my dear, what a social training! Because, you know, there are. Anyhow in drawing-rooms, and places where they chat.” “They’ll learn all that soon enough,” Stanley placidly said. “The world is as vulgar as it is mainly because of its prudery. I’m giving my children weapons against that.” She had given them also a weapon against their cousins, the children of Vicky, who had not been told Facts. Anyhow Imogen hadn’t. Her sisters were older, and boys, as Rome had said, do seem to pick things up at school. But Imogen at thirteen was still in the ignorance thought by Vicky suitable to her years. So, when she exasperated her cousin Billy by her superior proficiency in climbing, running, gymnastics, and all active games—a proficiency natural to her three years’ seniority but growing tiresome during a whole afternoon spent in trials of skill—Billy could at least retort, “I know something you don’t. I know how babies come.” “Don’t care how they come,” Imogen returned, astride on a higher bough of the aspen tree than her cousin could attain to. “They’re no use anyhow, the little fools. Who wants babies?” Billy, having meditated on this unanswerable question, amended his vaunt. “Well, I know how puppies come, too. So there.” Imogen was stumped. You can’t say that puppies are no use. She could think of no retort but the ancient one of sex insult. “Boys are always bothering about stupid things like how babies come. As if it mattered. I’d rather know the displacement and horse-power and knots of all the battleships and first-class cruisers.” “You don’t.” “I do.” “Bet you a bull’s-eye you don’t.” “Done. A pink one. Ask any you like.” “Well, what’s the Terrible?” “14,200 tons; 25,000 horse-power; 22.4 knots. That’s an easy one.” “The Powerful.” “Same, of course. No, she only makes 22.1 knots. Stupid to ask twins.” Billy considered. He did not like to own it, but he could not remember at the moment any other ships of His Majesty’s fleet. “Well, what’s the biggest, anyhow?” “The Dominion and the King Edward VII. 16,350 tons; 18,000 horse-power; 18.5 knots.” “I don’t know that any of that’s true.” “You can look in ‘Brassey’ and find out, then.” “I don’t care. Anyone can mug up ‘Brassey.’ Anyhow girls can’t go into the navy.” Imogen jogged up and down on the light swinging branch, whistling through her teeth, pretending not to hear. “And anyhow,” added the taunter below, “you’d be no use on a ship, ’cause you’d be sick.” “I wouldn’t.” “You would.” “I wouldn’t.” “You would.” “You’re sick yourself if you smoke a woodbine.” “So are you. You’re sick if you squash a fly. Girls are. They can’t dissect a rabbit. I can.” The sex war was in full swing. “Boys crib at their lessons. Boys don’t wash their necks.” “Nor do girls. You’re dirty now. Girls don’t play footer at school.” “Hockey’s as good. Boys are greedy pigs; they spend their pennies on tuck.” “Who bought eight bull’s-eyes this afternoon and sucked six?” “Oh, well.” Imogen collapsed into sudden good temper. “Don’t let’s rot. Why did the gooseberry fool?” To change the subject further, she swung herself backwards and hung from the branch by her knees, her short mop of curls swinging upside down, the blood singing in her head. Billy, a nice but not very clever little boy, said, “Because the raspberry syrup,” and truce was signed. Who, as Imogen had asked, cared how babies came? 5 PING-PONG Everywhere people ping-ponged. One would have thought there was no war on. Instead of doing their bits, as we did in a more recent and more serious war, they all ping-ponged, and, when not ping-ponging, asked, “Why did the razor-bill raise her bill? Why did the coal scuttle? What did Anthony Hope?” and answered, “Because the woodpecker would peck her. Because the table had cedar legs. To see the salad dressing,” and anything else of that kind they could think of. Some people, mostly elderly people, could only answer vaguely to everything, “Because the razor-bill razor-bill,” and change the subject, thinking how stupid riddles in these days were. Some people excelled at riddles, others at ping-pong, others again at pit, which meant shouting “oats, oats, oats,” or something similar, until they were hoarse. No one would have thought there was a war on. Indeed, there scarcely was a war on, now. Not a war to matter. Only rounding up, and blockhouses, and cordons, and guerilla fighting. Irving Garden had had enteric, and was invalided home. He meant to return to South Africa directly peace should be signed, to investigate a good thing he had heard of in the Rand. His nephews and nieces, with whom he was always popular, worshipped at his shrine. He had wonderfully funny stories of the war to tell them. But he preferred to ask them such questions as, “What made Charing Cross?” and to supply them with such answers as, “Teaching London Bridge. Am I right?” Such questions, such answers, they found so funny as to be almost painful. Imogen and Tony would giggle until tears came into their eyes. Certainly Uncle Irving was amusing. And clever. He drove himself and other people about in a grey car that travelled like the wind and was cursed like the devil by pedestrians and horse-drivers on the roads. His brother Maurice cursed him, but good-temperedly, for he liked Irving, and, further, he despised the unenterprising Public for fools. That was why no section of the community gave Maurice and his paper their entire confidence. He attacked what he and those who agreed with him held for evils, but would round, with a contemptuous gesture, on those whose grievances he voiced. He ridiculed the present inefficiency, and ridiculed also the ideals of those who cried for improvement. He threw himself into the struggle for educational reform, and sneered at all reforms proposed as inadequate, pedestrian or absurd. He condemned employers as greedy, and Trade Unions as retrograde. He jeered at the inefficiency of the conduct of what remained of the war, at the stupid brutality of concentration camps, at the sentimentality of the Pro-Boer party (as they were still called), at the militarism of the Tory militants, the imperialism of the Liberals, and the sentimental radical humanitarianism of Mr. Lloyd George and his party. He addressed Stop-the-War meetings until they were broken up with violence by earnest representatives of the Continue-the-War party, and suffered much physical damage in the ensuing conflicts; yet the Stop-the-War party did not really trust him. They suspected him of desiring, though without hope, to stop not only the war but all human activities, and indeed the very universe itself; and this is to go further than is generally approved. The Continue-the-War party has risen and fallen with every war; but the Continue-the-World party has a kind of solid permanency, and something of the universal in its ideals. Not to be of it is to be out of sympathy with the great majority of one’s fellows. At any time and in any country, but perhaps particularly in England in the early years of the twentieth century, when there was a good deal of enthusiasm for continuance and progress. The early Edwardians were not, as we are to-day, dispirited and discouraged with the course of the world, though they were vexed about the Boer War and the consequent economic depression of the country. They did not, for the most part, feel that life was a bad business and the future outlook too dark and menacing to be worth encouraging. On the contrary, they believed in Life with a capital L. The young were bitten by the dry reforming zeal of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, or the gay faith in life of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, or the bounding scientific hopefulness of Mr. H. G. Wells, or the sharp social and ethical criticism of Mr. George Bernard Shaw. Stanley Croft, young for ever in mind, was bitten by all these and much more. Imperialism left slain behind, she embraced with ardour the fantastic ideal of the cleaning up of England. After the war; then indeed they would proceed furiously with the building of Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. And meanwhile the war went on, and times were bad, and everywhere people ping-ponged. A lack of seriousness was complained of. It always is complained of in this country, which is not, indeed, a very serious one, but always contains some serious persons to complain of the others. “The ping-pong spirit,” the graver press called the national lightness; and clergymen took up the phrase and preached about it. The public, they said, were like street gamins, loafing about on the watch for any new distraction.