This New Theology, now—this young man Campbell—he seemed, somehow, nearer to solid earth than did the Higher Thinkers. He might talk of the Divinity of Man, but he did not, as papa, having read his book on the subject, knew, mean anything silly by it, only what all the mystics have meant—the divine spark in the human heart. As to the humanity of God—well, he probably meant no harm by that either. He was but an anthropomorphist, like the rest of us.
The theologians had been hard upon that book of his. It was not, of course, the book of a scholar; all it said had been said much better by Loisy and other Catholic modernists, whom Mr. Campbell palely reflected. But it gave a good, peptonised version, suitable for the unscholarly mind. And its reviewers had been unkind. They had nearly all attacked it. Dr. Robertson Nicoll in the British Weekly had snubbed it at considerable length. The Church Times had said, “The book is one long offence against good taste,” and the Methodist Recorder, “ Frankly, we do not think this book worth reading, and to price it at six shillings is enough to make us join in the Book War.” Theological reviewers were not always fair, as papa, since he had published his own mighty and erudite work on Comparative Religions, had known. For himself, he had liked Mr. Campbell’s book, even though it was rather bright than scholarly, more an appeal to the man in the City Temple than to the student or the theologian. Papa, besides being a student and a theologian, had of late been also on Sundays a man in the City Temple. He had said nothing of it yet to any one; he was trying it. He liked it; there was nothing in it to bewilder or offend. The Divine Immanence: call it Pantheism who chose, it was a beautiful idea. It was in no degree incompatible with the Divine Transcendence; why should it be, since there was also the Divine Ubiquity?
Brooding on these matters, papa finished breakfast somewhat silently, and lit his pipe.
“A beautiful day,” said Rome, smoking her cigarette at the open window. “I shall be out for lunch and tea, papa. I am joining a party of pleasure; we are going to explore, in our cars, to Newlands Corner, where we shall have trials of skill and of speed. You won’t come with me, I suppose?”
“No thank you, dear, I think not. I’m too old for trials of skill and speed; too old, even, for exploring.
Precisely, thought Rome, glancing at him with her indulgent smile, what papa was not and never would be. He would very surely go exploring this morning, searching the riches of the spiritual kingdoms. Much more exciting than Newlands Corner. . . . To papa at seventy-seven, as to Mr. R. J. Campbell at whatever age he might be, theology could still seem new. Rome wondered whether it was an advantage or a misfortune that to her, at forty-eight, all theologies, as most other of the world’s businesses, seemed so very old. The only things that seemed new to her in 1907 were taximeter cabs.
“Well, good-bye, dear, and good luck,” Rome wished her papa.
Of 1907 there is not very much more to record. Two or three items of news may perhaps be mentioned. Maurice’s son, Roger, aged twenty-four, now attached, at his own urgent desire, to the literary side of his father’s paper (He can’t do much harm there, I suppose,” Maurice said, “though he’ll not do any good either; he hasn’t the brains”) published a novel. It was a long novel, and it was about a youth not unlike what Roger conceived himself to be, only his home was different, for his father was a churchwarden and bore the bag in church, and bullied and beat and prayed over his children; fathers in fiction must be like this, not heretical and intelligent journalists. The book conducted the youth from the nursery through his private and public schools (house matches, school politics, vice, expulsions, and so on), through Cambridge (the Union, the river, tobacconists’ assistants, tripos) to journalistic, social and literary London, where it left him, at twenty-four, having just published his first novel, which was a great success.
“God, what tripe,” Maurice commented, but to himself, as he turned the pages. “Exactly what the boy would write, of course. No better, and no worse. Well, poor lad, he’s pleased with it enough. And it will probably be handsomely reviewed. It’s the stuff to give the public all right.” His thoughts strayed to a familiar, rather bitter point. If he had been given (by Amy: how fantastic a thought!) a son with brains; a son with a hard, clear head or an original imagination; a son who, if he wrote at all, wouldn’t produce the stuff to give the public, a son who, like himself, would see the public damned first. . . .
Roger was, as his father had predicted, handsomely reviewed, for the Edwardians rather liked the biography-of-a-young-man type of novel, and loved details of school life. Roger had his feet well on the ladder of successful fiction-writing. Roger would be all right. Meanwhile, his head swelled even larger than before. His father perceived that the innocent youth really believed his reviewers, and conceived himself to be a writer and a clever young man.
The other items I record of the year 1907 I quote from the diary of Imogen for the 16th of March.
“Indomitable launched, Glasgow. Largest and quickest cruiser in the world. 17,250 tons. 41,000 h.p. 25 knots. Invincible and Inflexible, same type, building. Finished book, began to type it. Got guinea prize from Saturday Westminster for poem.”
21
Whither?
And so to the last years of Edwardianism. In them that gay, eager, cultivated period listed gently to the political left. The Socialist budget, as it was called by its opponents, “the end of all things,” as Lord Rosebery a little optimistically called it, agitated the country. Old Age Pensions were at last established, to the disgust of Tories, who had, however, when members of Parliament, to be careful how they expressed their disgust, for fear of their needy constituents. “Whither are we drifting?” inquired the Conservative Press, in anger and fear. “Here is Socialism unabashed: the thin end of the wedge which shall at last undermine the integrity and liberty of our Constitution.” Here were sixty millions a year, not insurance, but a free dole, squandered on supporting old persons who might just as well be supported in workhouses. What would that come to in Dreadnoughts? Anyhow, we had got to lay down six or seven Dreadnoughts a year for the present, if we were to be to Germany in the ratio of two keels to one, which was assuredly essential. “They are ringing their bells; they will soon be wringing their hands,” said the Tory leaders. The radical element in the government strengthened; Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman died, and in Mr. Asquith’s ministry Mr. Lloyd George was Chancellor of the Exchequer. But it remained, on the whole, a Liberal-Imperialist government, and left most of the radicalism to Labour, whose parliamentary strength was increasing and unifying. Wherever we were drifting, it was not towards extreme radicalism.
As to Ireland, a bill was passed to reduce her docks, thistles, and noxious weeds: no other bill.
Parliamentary affairs and party politics were no more exciting and no more tedious (for that last is impossible) than usual. Of more interest were the first flying machines that really flew, the drawings of Mr. Augustus John, exhibited at the New English Art Club and condemned by critics (except those who liked the kind of thing) as essays in a savage and childish archaism, and deliberate insults to our intelligence (whither, indeed, art was drifting, when such drawings could be praised?), and the establishment of the White City at Shepherd’s Bush, with the Franco-British Exhibition (sadly dull), and flip-flaps, switchbacks, wiggle-woggles, and scenic railways (most exciting, and an insidious snare for pocket-money; you could get rid there in one evening of the careful hoardings of weeks; also, if you were as weak in the stomach as Imogen, you felt repentant after a few goes). Thither President Fallières, on a visit to King Edward was taken, to enjoy the Franco-British exhibition and cement the entente cordiale, which, however, needed it less then than now, for the Edwardians were on the whole most enthusiastic about this international understanding. “There is no longer a Channel,” they said, publicly and politely; but in their hearts, for they were no more foolish than we, they still gave thanks for this useful, if unpleasing, strip of sea.
To forge faster the other link in the Triple Entente
, that only possible guarantee for a world peace, King Edward visited the Tsar of all the Russias, at Reval. So there we were, grasping these two great military powers firmly by the hand, ready to face any emergency. We had got ahead of Germany in this matter of Russia. For all the European Powers, discreetly averting their eyes from the chronic bloodstains on the bear’s savage claws, were courting her for her legions. To have the bear at their beck and call—that was what every one wanted, against the emergencies which might arise. And never was a time when emergencies seemed more imminent, more dangerous, more frequent, such a state of simmering unrest was Europe’s in the days of Edward the Peacemaker. Of the Kaiser Wilhelm and his Uncle Bertie it has been said that their relations “lapsed into comparative calm only when they were apart from one another.” Their subjects feared and hated each other; the press in each country stirred up terror of invasion by the other; “the German invasion,” “the English invasion”—these phrases were bandied about in two jealous, frightened empires. The German spy scare, the British spy scare, these fevers were worked up in the jingo press of two countries. “You English are mad, mad, mad,” said William. “I strive without ceasing to improve relations and you retort that I am your arch-enemy. You make it very hard for me.”
For that matter, nations always make it hard for one another; it is their function. We did make it hard for Germany, but Germany made it harder for us, and France made it hardest for every one.
Anyhow, here was the Triple Entente, full-armed, to meet the Triple Alliance, and some one or other would see to it that they did meet before long.
The chief European emergency which arose at the moment was an attack of megalomania on the part of Servia, in 1909. The Serbs had the madness to dream of a greater Servia, which should unite the scattered peoples of their race—“a dream,” said the English press, “as hopeless as that of Poland rediviva. Greater Servia will either be realised under the sceptre of the Hapsburgs, or will not be realised at all.” The awkwardness of the situation, so far as we are concerned, was that Russia was, as usual, backing her mad little militant friend, and had to be dissuaded with great tact from upsetting the apple cart. However, a joint note to Servia from the Powers quieted her for the time being, and the lid was shut down temporarily on the seething European kettle of fish.
Other intriguing matters of this year were the building, in British dockyards, of three huge battleships for Brazil, which disgusted others than young Imogen Carrington; the Olympic games in July; the publication of various not unamusing books; and the deaths of two old men, Algernon Swinburne and George Meredith. Our two greatest Grand Old Men had departed from us, and no more would pilgrims alight at the Pines, Putney, or go exploring to Box Hill. The office of our literary G.O.M. was filled now only by Mr. Thomas Hardy, for Mr. Henry James was still an American. Sometimes one speculates, aghast, what would happen should we ever be left with no candidates for that honourable post—that is to say, with no celebrated literary man or woman (for there might, though improbably, be a G.O.W. some day) over seventy years of age, no Master for the younger writers to greet on the festival of his birth. It would be an undignified state of affairs indeed, and one need not anticipate it at present, for behind Mr. Hardy there looms more than one candidate of respectable claims.
The closing years of this reign were brightened further by Commander Peary and Dr. Cook, who both maintained that they had discovered the North Pole. It was ultimately decided that only the Commander had done so, as the doctor had had the misfortune to mislay his papers in Greenland; but his was a sporting venture, and deserving of all applause, and he had a good run for his money.
And so an end to Edwardianism. The new Georgianism dawned on a nervous, gay, absorbed nation, experimenting in new but cautious legislation, alive on the whole, to new literature and new art, alive wholly to whatever enjoyment it could find, and thoroughly tied up in Continental politics, so that when that mine was fired we should go up with it sky-high.
Part IV Georgian
First Period: Circus
1
The Happy Georgians
The first Georgian years, the years between 1910 and 1914, are now commonly thought of as gay, as very happy, hectic, whirling, butterfly years, punctuated, indeed, by the too exciting doings of dock and transport strikers, Ulstermen, suffragists, the Titanic, and Mr. Lloyd George, but, all the same, gay years. Like other generalisations about periods, this is a delusion. Those years only seem especially gay to us because, since July, 1914, the years have not been gay at all. Really they were quite ordinary years. In fact, it is folly to speak of these insensate seasonal periods as happy or the reverse. It is only animate creatures which can be that, and it is unlikely that all, or the majority, of animate creatures should be visited by circumstances making for pleasurable emotion or the reverse at the same time as one another, except in the case of some great public event. Some early Georgians were gay, some sad, some bored, some tepid and indifferent, as at any other time.
Nevertheless, it so happened that the persons in this so-called narrative were all quite sufficiently happy during this period. They were all having, in their several ways, a fairly good time.
2
Papa
Mr. Garden’s way was, it need scarcely be said, a spiritual way. He was now over eighty, and his was the garnered fruit of a long life of spiritual adventure. He had believed so much, he had believed so often, he had fought with doubt so ardently and with such repeated success, he had explored every avenue of faith with such adventurous zeal, that he had at last reached a table-land from whence he could survey all creeds with loving, impartial pleasure. Even Mr. Campbell’s New Theology had not enmeshed him for long; he passed through it and out of it, and it took its place among the ranks of Creeds I Have Believed.
And now, in some strange, transcendent manner, he believed them all. Nothing is true but thinking makes it so; papa thought all these faiths, and for him they were all true. What, after all, is truth? An unanswerable riddle, to which papa replied, “The truth for each soul is that faith by which it holds.” So truth, for papa, was many-splendoured, many-faced. God must exist, he knew, or he could not have believed in Him so often and so much. The sunset of life was to papa very lovely, as he journeyed westward into it, murmuring, “I believe . . . I believe. . . .” Catholicism (Roman and Anglo), Evangelicism, Ethicism, Unitarianism, Latitudinarian Anglicism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Christian Science, Irvingitism, even poor Flossie and her chat, he did very happily and earnestly believe. He believed in a mighty sacramental Church that was the voice of God and the store-house of grace; he believed that he was saved through private intercourse and contract with his Lord; he believed in the Church established in this country, and that it should be infinitely adaptable to the new knowledge and demands of men; he believed that the world was (very likely) to be ended in a short time by the second coming of Christ; he believed that God was love, and evil a monstrous illusion; he believed that God permitted the veil between this world and the next to be rent by the meanest and most trivial of His creatures, if they had the knack. Indeed, papa might be said to have learnt the art of believing anything.
Irving said it was pleasant to find that papa was once again an Irvingite. Indeed, the creeds after which he had named his children now all flourished in papa’s soul. No longer did he shake his head when he remembered in what spiritual moods he had named Una, or Rome, or sigh after that lost exultation of the soul commemorated in Vicky. Had another child been given to him now he would have named it Verity, in acknowledgement of the fact that nearly everything was true.
What wonder, then, that papa was a happy Georgian?
3
Vicky
Vicky, dashing full-sail through her fifties, was a happy Georgian too. She was handsome in her maturity, and merry. People she loved, and parties, and gossip, and bridge, and her husband and children, and the infants of her daughter Phyllis, and food and drink and clothes, and Ascot, and going abroad, and new
novels from Mudie’s, and theatres and concerts and meetings and causes, and talk, talk, talk. Life, she held, is good as you get on in it; a broad, sunny and amusing stream, having its tiresome worries, no doubt, but, in the main, certainly a comedy. Vicky as an early Georgian was a generously fashioned matron, broader and fuller than of old, with her fair skin little damaged by time, and not much gray in her chestnut hair, which she wore piled in a mass of waves and curls, in the manner of early Georgian matrons. A delightful woman, with an unfailing zest for life. You couldn’t exactly discuss things with her, but she could and did discuss them with you. She would tell you what she thought about the world and its ways in a flow of merry comment, skimming from one topic to another with an agile irrelevance that grew with the years. A merry, skimming matron; certainly a happy Georgian.
4
Maurice
Maurice had not, since he married Amy, been a happy Victorian or Edwardian, and he did not become an exactly happy Georgian, but he was happier than before. In his fifties he was no nearer accepting the world as he found it than he had ever been. It still appeared to him to be a hell of a place. He was, in his fifties, a lean, small, bitter man, his light hair graying on the temples and receding from the forehead, his sensitive mouth and long jaw sardonically, cynically set. He was popular in London, for all his bitter tongue and pen; he and his paper were by now an institution, known for their brilliance, clarity, hard, unsentimental intolerance, and honesty. You might disagree with Maurice Garden; you might even think that he had an evil temper and a habit of mild intoxication; but you had to respect two things about him, his intelligence and his sincerity. Tosh and slush he would not stand, whether it might be about the Empire, about the poor suffragists in prison who would not eat, about White Slaves (whom his paper called, briefly and precisely, prostitutes, holding that the colour of their skins was an irrelevant point to raise when considering the amelioration of their lot), about the poor tax-robbed upper classes, or the poor labour-ground lower. He would print no correspondence couched in sentimental terms; if people desired to write about the sufferings, say, of birds deprived of their feathers for hats, they had to put it in a few concise words, and to say precisely what steps they wished to see taken about it. No superfluous wailings or tears were permitted, on any topic, to the writers in the Gadfly. The editor had a good deal of trouble with the literary side of his paper, which inclined, in his opinion, to roll logs, to be slavishly in the fashion in the matter of admiring the right people, to accept weak articles and rubbishy poems from people with budding or full-blown reputations, and, generally, to be like most literary papers. His son, Roger, he did not for long permit to adorn the literary staff: to do so would have been, in view of the calibre of Roger’s intelligence, gross nepotism. Roger had to get another literary job on a less fastidious paper; meanwhile, to his father’s disgust, he continued to produce novels, and even began on verse, so that he appeared in current anthologies of contemporary poetry. Also, he got married. So did his sister, Iris. That settled, and his children well off his hands, Maurice felt that his only and dubious link with family life was snapped, and that he was free to go his own way. He left his wife, offering to provide her with any material she preferred for a divorce, from a mistress to a black eye. Amy accepted the offer, and these two victims of a singularly unfortunate entanglement found rest from one another at last. It was, Amy complained, too late for her to marry again; of course, Maurice, selfish pig, had waited till it was too late for her but not for him. But Maurice had no inclination to remarry; he had had more than enough of that business. The only woman he had ever seriously loved had married ten years ago, ending deliberately an unhappy, passionate and fruitless relationship. Maurice’s thoughts were not now woman-ward; he lived for his job, and for interest in the bitter comedy of affairs that the world played before him. His silly, common, nagging wife, his silly, ordinary, disappointing children, no more oppressed him; they could, for him, now go their own silly ways. He was free.
Told by an Idiot Page 23
