After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The final treaty reflected the fear of France, with its 40 millions of inhabitants, that it would once again be threatened by Germany with its 65 millions. France took Alsace-Lorraine. It wanted the coal-rich Saar basin, which was under League of Nations trusteeship until 1935, when a plebiscite returned it to Germany. It failed to persuade America or Britain to agree to the creation of a new Rhineland state, but it insisted upon the Rhineland being occupied by French forces for fifteen years from the signature of the treaty. Heavy reparations were exacted from the German taxpayers, all payable to France.

  If you were French, the treaty looked as if it had not gone far enough, though it was reasonable. If you were German, it must have seemed like an agenda for a new war. The reparation settlement in particular was seen by Clemenceau and the other French delegates as dependent upon having an international policeman to enforce it. But this was not to be. On 19 November 1919 the United States Senate rejected the treaty of Versailles. It came formally into force on 10 January 1920 without American endorsement. America, which in the person of the Princeton professor had come across the ocean with apparently evangelical zeal to impart its democratic values, retreated once more into isolationism. The League of Nations, which had been President Wilson’s dream-child, was not an organization which the Americans ever went so far as to join. In 1920, the election year, the American people showed what they thought of President Wilson’s foreign policy. The Republicans carried every state outside the South, and took Tennessee. The governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, was Vice President, and the presidency passed from the hands of Woodrow Wilson to those of a nondescript, idle Ohio senator, Warren Gamaliel Harding. The American electorate had pulled down the shutters. The white man’s burden, whether Asian, African or European, was not one it wished to carry.

  Clemenceau could see where this would inevitably lead. Ten years after the war, he wrote rhetorically to the Americans:

  Your intervention in the War, which you came out of lightly, since it cost you 56,000 lives* instead of our 1,364,000 killed, had appeared to you nevertheless, as an excessive display of solidarity. And either by organizing a League of Nations, which was to furnish the solution to all the problems of international security by magic, or by simply withdrawing from the European schemes, you found yourselves freed from all difficulties by means of a ‘separate peace’. [Clemenceau is here referring to the fact that having rejected the Versailles Treaty, America drew up a separate peace treaty with Germany.] The nations of the world, although separated by natural or artificial frontiers, have but one planet at their disposal, a planet all the elements of which are in a state of solidarity, and far from man being the exception to the rule, he finds, even in his innermost activities, that he is the supreme witness to universal solidarity. Behind your barriers of ice, and of sun, you may be able perhaps for a time to isolate yourself from your planetary fellow-citizens, although I find you in the Philippines, where you do not belong geographically.10

  The phrase about ‘power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’ was one which, as we have seen, would be written for use in Stanley Baldwin’s rhetoric by his cousin Rudyard Kipling. It referred to the power of the Press, but it could be applied to American foreign policy in the decade after the First World War.

  Like the Press, the USA did well out of the war. Every country in Europe emerged from the war financially ruined. The United States, however, was immeasurably enriched, not least by European debts, owing to various US institutions, to the tune of £2,000 million.11

  Europe was to begin its new life of peace and democracy deeply in debt, and the fact was inevitably going to be muddled with the contentious matter of German reparations. By 1922, Arthur Balfour, Lord President of the Council, was delegated to send a polite note reminding the European allies of their debts – in all some £1,300 million to Britain from Russia and France, and £1,450 million owing from Germany in reparation. There was no hope of recovering this debt, of course, even though Britain was forced to honour its £850 million debt to the United States. When Balfour gingerly suggested cancelling all these debts in ‘one great transaction’, he received an abrupt response from the new president, Calvin Coolidge* – ‘They hired the money, didn’t they?’12

  As the years rolled forward to 1929, and the Wall Street Crash, this uneasy and unsatisfactory relationship became a habit. European anti-Americanism and American unilateralism were in unholy alliance. But much as both wished to establish the difference between America and the rest of the world, the war had made the link. The debts were real. They hired the money. Wise old Henry James, as we saw when we closed the pages of The Golden Bowl, had seen it all in the relationship between the dissolute old European prince and the impassive financier Mr Verver.

  There is something singularly appropriate in the fact that the greatest American poet should have found work in the colonial and foreign department of Lloyd’s Bank in London. He took the post in March 1917 and occupied it until November 1925. When the peace treaty was signed, his job was specifically concerned with debts, and the claims of the bank on the Germans.13

  Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1963) was born in St Louis, Missouri, the son of a businessman and a teacher. He was the youngest of seven children, and his family ‘zealously guarded’ its New England connections. It was his ambition, as a student, to become a professor of philosophy. He reacted against the pragmatists, such as Harvard’s most famous philosopher William James, and went to Europe, first Paris, then Oxford, to study for his doctoral thesis on the work of an English Idealist. ‘Experience and the Objects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley’ was its subject. Although this type of philosophy was precisely what Bertrand Russell had chosen to reject, he found the young graduate student charming when he himself was a visiting professor at Harvard. He described Eliot as ‘the only one who was civilized’.14

  Eliot himself rejected an academic career, Harvard, Boston and its bourgeois ways, and ultimately America. At the beginning of the war he found himself in London and decided to settle there. He married an Englishwoman, Vivien Haigh-Wood – and was disastrously unhappy. He taught in schools – first High Wycombe Grammar School, and then Highgate Junior School in North London, where one of his pupils was John Betjeman.

  I bound my verse into a book,

  The Best of Betjeman, and handed it

  To one who, I was told, liked poetry –

  The American master, Mr Eliot.

  That dear good man, with Prufrock in his head

  And Sweeney waiting to be agonized,

  I wonder what he thought? He never says

  When now we meet, across the port and cheese.15

  Though Eliot never said, it is easy to guess what he thought.

  When studying in Paris, he had told his friend Conrad Aiken that he hoped to find the ‘truth of his time’.16 His own poetry, as it evolved after that time, was to express this truth instinctually, as philosophy could not. At the Harvard Philosophical Society in 1913 or 1914, Eliot had complained that ‘no radical is so radical as to be a conservative’.17 He was a figure of profound paradox. No poet could have been more modern, or indeed revolutionary. When he arrived in London, he was writing Symbolist poetry which owed nothing to the English lyric tradition. His fellow American, Ezra Pound, naturally, took him up and paraded him as ‘a kind of collector’s piece’,18 but when in 1912 Aiken had shown Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to a London editor considered to be interested in new developments in literature, Harold Monro, he had dismissed it as absolutely insane, the morbid ravings of a madman.

  Prufrock is partly based on the hesitant and uncertain figures in Henry James’s late stories, holding back from the brink of life and terrified of experience. He is also Eliot himself. He is also, which is why Eliot became a pivotally central poet from the moment the poem was written, twentieth-century humankind. The blood-red sky at the poem’s beginning is a sunset which recalls a patient on
an operating table, torn open. Just such slits of red do occur at sunset, and on operating tables, but it is the mind of Eliot which puts them together in his haunting hymn of loss. For the sun is setting, as the women talk of Michelangelo, on European civilization. Philosophy can draw no conclusions, it can only stammer and hesitate. Nor is there room or a place any longer for heroism. Even that most dithering and uncertain of heroes, Hamlet, has no place on this stage. In the age of Asquith, and Bonar Law, and Woodrow Wilson, there were only attendant lords. The poem has a hypnotic music. It says more than it seems to say, and it closes the door for ever on the tired old literary traditions of England.

  There is much in common between Eliot’s brand of modernism and Pound’s. But there were deep divisions between the two men, even before Eliot formally embraced, what is implicit even in his blasphemous lyrics, the Christian religion. ‘Christianity has become a sort of Prussianism and will have to go’ was Pound’s view. European culture, together with its creeds and churches, was in ruins, and it was the poets’ task to pick around in it for images and melodies which they might be able to use, rather as contemporary artists such as Picasso might use pieces of old newspaper in a collage. But for Eliot, such an approach was never wholly satisfactory. He was a philosopher manqué, after all. ‘I confess I am seldom interested in what Pound … is saying’, he would write in 1928, ‘but only in the way he says it.’19

  Eliot saw the ruin, the desolation, the moral emptiness of Europe, as Pound did. His lyrics focus on a horrified vision of cities in which ugly, predatory people copulate, swindle and smell. It is a contemporary Inferno into which he gazed. But it was to the author of the Inferno, as much as to any of his contemporaries, that Eliot looked for a solution. Dante had provided a synthesis between his own personal sorrows and loves, the destructive wars of Europe, the collapse of Church and State, and a philosophy by which to live. He had done so in tight, formal verse which was entirely new, and yet resonated with classical literature and the liturgy of the Church. Dante was a poet who could hold up a mirror and tell ‘the truth of his time’. Poets, in Eliot’s belief, could still do that. He accepted Pound’s friendship, and though he did not know it at the time, he benefited, as so many did, from Pound’s generosity. Pound paid for Eliot’s poetry to be published in Chicago in 1915. It was not published in England until 1917, by Harriet Shaw Weaver in The Egoist, and later by a small husband-and-wife publishing team called the Hogarth Press. The husband, Leonard Woolf, was a somewhat dry left-wing economist and progressive thinker. His bony, intense, beautiful wife Virginia was the daughter of the Victorian man of letters Sir Leslie Stephen, whose first wife was daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray. It was to the Woolfs and their friends that Eliot first read aloud ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. They cautiously published 250 copies, at half a crown each. They were charmed by the young man, in his ‘four piece suit’. Virginia Woolf’s prose was as beautiful as her face, but like many twentieth-century English writers, she had nothing to write about. Their radicalism, which was surface radicalism, could not understand that here was someone ‘so radical as to be a conservative’ in the deepest sense – setting out to recover the coherence of Dante’s vision from the devastations of European culture visited upon it by science and industry and the nineteenth century and the war.

  * Wilhelm was the Kaiser’s heir, Rupprecht heir to the now defunct kingdom of Bavaria.

  * Michael Howard in The First World War, p. 146, gives American war dead as 115,000; Martin Gilbert in The First World War, p. 541, has the figure of 48,000. The Encyclopaedia Americana has 109,740 and the Encyclopaedia Britannica 116,516

  * Coolidge became president upon Harding’s death in 1923 and was re-elected in 1924.

  14

  Protons – Massacres – Bombs. Ireland and Iraq

  Nature is not static. The nature of things is not peace but agitation. Charles Darwin, drawing on the economic theories of Thomas Malthus, had constructed for his Victorian contemporaries an evolutionary theory of life itself being based on struggle, conflict, selfishness. Twentieth-century physics told an impersonal story, but it was no less disturbed, and disturbing. Matter itself was destabilized. Atoms, which were tiny specks of emptiness containing one energetic nucleus, were not the smallest constituent parts into which matter could be divided. Shortly after he became the Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge in 1919, Ernest Rutherford would pursue his researches further into the nature of nitrogen atoms. By bombarding them with alpha particles, he discovered that the impact knocked out hydrogen nuclei, which he called protons. Barely a quarter of a century elapsed between this fascinating discovery and the nuclear obliteration of two Japanese cities. Even to Rutherford and his fellow physicists, the terrible implications of his discovery were not immediately apparent.1 But they did not take place in a peaceful world. They took place in a world where the poet W. B. Yeats, as if he had peered through Rutherford’s microscope, saw that ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’. Beyond the calm of the Cavendish laboratory, the world, though some of its nations had signed up to a so-called armistice, was very far from being at peace. The fighting men did not simply pack up their old kitbags and return to a stable homeland. All over the world, following the First World War, there was trouble.

  The Islamic world had suffered a terrible blow with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire – a blow which to this day many Muslims regret and which the followers of al-Qaeda are still committed to avenge or reverse. In French, Italian and British African territories where there were Muslims, their mosques and clerics called for reprisals. They were labelled ‘fanatics’, of course, by the ruling authorities. What could be more fanatical than their objection to being ruled by Western secularists who had no sympathy with their culture, religion or history? There was a deep fear on the part of the British that there would be a united Islamic resistance to the British Empire. This had been the dream of the influential Islamic thinker Jamaluddin al-Afghani (1839–97), whose followers hoped to throw the British out of Egypt, India and Nigeria. The Khalifat Movement in India was seen as the greatest threat to British rule since the uprising in 1857–9.2 It fizzled out, but when it threatened to engulf India at the same time as unrest in Egypt, some of the elder statesmen felt cause for concern. Arthur Balfour, when Egypt appeared to be on the point of eruption in March 1919, wrote to the high commissioner:

  The Egyptian unrest is doubtless part of a world movement which takes different forms in different places, but is plainly discernible in every continent and in every country. We are only at the beginning of our troubles and it is doubtful whether, and how far, the forces of an orderly civilization are going to deal effectively with those of social and international disintegration.3

  This was the central political problem of the postwar generation – chaos or order? And if order, order of what kind, and at what cost to human liberty? The ingredients for revolution – hunger, injustice, an unstable economy, and a much-weakened autocratic government – were present in almost all the nations of the world in 1918–19. Probably there was a degree of pure chance which determined which nations did or did not opt for outright civil war and revolution, and which chose to muddle along. And one element of chance was how ill the populations felt. As the war drew to an end, the world suffered ‘the greatest single demographic shock mankind has ever experienced, the most deadly pestilence since the Black Death’.4 Influenza swept round the world, greatly exacerbated by the unwonted movements of ships, troops, supplies, merchant vessels, politicians, refugees, which the war had occasioned. It probably killed 50 million worldwide. Two-thirds of Sierra Leone’s population caught flu, with 1,000 dying in Freetown alone. At San Francisco Hospital in California, 3,509 cases were admitted, with 25 per cent mortality. It was a deadly viral pneumonia, soon wiping out soldiers and civilians at a rate which even General Haig and Clemenceau would have found difficult to match. Twenty-four thousand US soldiers died of flu, compared
with the 34,000 who died in battle. In all, 675,000 Americans died of it, and 200,000 in Britain. Then, as quickly and mysteriously as it had come, the flu vanished, and the world was fit enough to resume death by violent means.

  A month after Balfour wrote to the Egyptian high commissioner that he foresaw universal anarchy, there occurred the worst bloodshed in India for seventy years, and an event took place which hindsight can see quite clearly as the beginning of the end of British rule. Rioting broke out in Amritsar, a glorious pilgrim-city in the Punjab, famed for its Sikh Golden Temple, in April 1919. At one point, 40,000 people were out on the streets. There was looting, and burning, and Christian churches were pulled down. Marcia Sherwood, a missionary doctor who had worked in Amritsar for fifteen years, mounted her bicycle and tried to ride to each of the five schools where she worked with the intention of sending her 600 female students (Muslim and Hindu) to their homes. She was set upon by a mob, and heard discordant cries of ‘Kill her, she is English’, and ‘No, she is one of God’s chosen who is educating our children.’ She was badly beaten and left for dead as the crowd yelled: ‘Victory to Gandhi.’ (Gandhi was in Bombay at the time, totally unaware of what was happening in the Punjab.) Some Hindu shopkeepers rescued Dr Sherwood, and she would have been killed but for their courage. Very badly battered, she was taken to the Fort.

  There were some other European deaths during the riots, many Indian injuries, and much wreckage of property. The response of the local British military commander, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, was, first to proclaim a curfew, and to announce that any person found leaving their house after 8 pm would be shot. This announcement led to a furious riot, with thousands of people banging kerosene tins and shouting: ‘An end to the British Raj.’ A great crowd collected near the Temple in the enclosed square called the Jalianwala Bagh, for it was Baisakhi Day, the beginning of one of the most important Sikh festivals. With a mixed troop of Gurkhas, Sikhs and British soldiers, Dyer marched to the edge of the crowd and gave orders to fire. As the crowd panicked, and tried to escape the garden enclosure where they were such easy targets, the soldiers continued to fire with accuracy and determination. The superintendent of police, Mr R. Plomer, told Dyer that he was teaching the crowd a lesson it would not forget. From where Dyer was standing, on a platform of stamped-down earth looking down on the Temple gardens, he could see the corpses piling up like carcasses in an abattoir. By the time he ordered a ceasefire, 1,650 rounds of .303 ammunition had been fired, 379 had been killed, and many more injured.