Chapter VII: Part 7

Now we come to our syndicate. With which shall we begin? It is hard to choose. Indeed, can you deal with them separately? For the outstanding fact is that they all write alike; that they deal in the same characters, the same backgrounds, and the same situations; and that they have the same point of view. They are like the Pléïade or the seven New Realists. Only they do not know it. At least, they give no sign of intending to be several peas in one pod. Yet you would almost say that none of them had ever read anything but the works of the others. Is there some master-mind behind them, some literary Lloyd George or Dr. Fu-Manchu, who assigns their tasks; who says that Mr. Beresford, not Mr. Walpole, shall write of Jacob Stahl, and that Mr. Mackenzie, not Mr. W. L. George, shall deal with Michael Fane? And does Mr. Walpole sneak off o’ nights to Mr. Beresford and offer to do some _Jacob Stahl_ if Mr. Beresford will take a few chapters of _Fortitude_ off his hands? Does Mr. Mackenzie write a page of _A Prelude to Adventure_ while Mr. Walpole takes a turn at _Sinister Street_? Who does the murders? Is it Mr. Walpole or Mr. Onions? Which one of them has been appointed to frequent the Empire? Does Mr. George investigate female psychology for the group? And what (but this I cannot even guess) does Mr. D. H. Lawrence “cover”?

This may seem to be mere petulance, but it is not. The chief value of fiction is, I take it, to provide us with vicarious experience. A great novelist who sticks to the truth is, above all, informing. We enlarge our own world by reading him. No one, in his own person, can investigate all social _milieux_ in all civilized lands; and the big novels and the big plays are text-books to the humanist. How much intimate knowledge of France should we lose if we lost Balzac; how much intimate knowledge of England if we lost the great Victorians! Did we really, before the war, know anything about the Russian soul and temperament except what we got from the Russian novelists? Most of us get our India from Kipling. There are not wanting people to quarrel with Kipling’s interpretation, even with his description; but the fact remains that a vast number of people know a few simple facts about Indian and Anglo-Indian life that they would never have known without him.

So that it is really not only the monotony, but the wilful extravagance, of the British syndicate that we complain of. Why waste half a dozen authors and a round score of novels to tell us the same thing in the same way? They do not even react differently to the same facts: they react precisely alike. Perhaps that is valuable as reinforcing and emphasizing the stated or implied opinion. But one has the sense that one is never going to learn anything more from any of them; and that is discouraging to the humanist, on vicarious experience bent. Perhaps one should except Mr. Walpole from that charge, to this extent: he gave us something new in _The Dark Forest_. In that book, at least, he made the Russians pleasanter than any of their own novelists (except possibly Turgenev) have succeeded in making them. But even so, if someone should tell us that Mr. Walpole, in the flesh, went to Russia to work with an ambulance corps, and that Mr. Beresford or Mr. Mackenzie wrote _The Dark Forest_ from Mr. Walpole’s notes, who could, from any internal evidence, deny it? If they were all Elizabethans, the scholars would still be wrangling over problems of their collaboration. Their novels would be like the Beaumont-Fletcher-Middleton-Rowley plays.

To begin with, there is always the same young man. Sometimes he has a university education, and then he is the hero of _Sinister Street_ or _The Stranger’s Wedding_; sometimes he has omitted the university, and then he is the hero of _Jacob Stahl_ or _Fortitude_. He has usually decided, when we meet him, that there is nothing in religion; he is usually anxious to do something noble and unconventional; and sooner or later he nearly always encounters very seriously a young woman of, actually or potentially, light morals. Sometimes he is rich and meets her at the Empire; sometimes he is poor and meets her in the slums. Sometimes it is an accident, but usually he might fairly be said to be looking for her. For he is humanitarian, always; either by his gentle nature, or because socialistic arguments have got hold of him; and a good deal of space is always given up to sheer intellectual worrying. It _is_ worrying--it seldom “gets” anywhere; and though Mr. Wells’s people “worry” similarly, and do not always get anywhere, still, with Mr. Wells, you feel as if those men would, perhaps, sometime win through to a philosophy of their own. They go at it in a more mature fashion; and they possess themselves of information. There is something of the hard scientific temper in his men. They are more apt to have got their humanitarianism out of a laboratory than out of their first sight of Piccadilly Circus at night. Mr. Wells’s men, when they are likable at all, are likable for some intellectual quality in them, for their attitude to ideas. When the syndicate’s men are likable, it is for sheer pity, because they are such helpless young fools.

One expects every one in fiction, nowadays, to be an egotist; but one does sometimes sigh for the old days when an egotist knew enough to be polite. No one, I think, could feel any affection for Jacob Stahl; but it is possible to feel affection for Michael Fane, though it is perfectly impossible to feel him important, except as a householder always is important. Perhaps the most charming thing one remembers in any of these novels (they do not abound in charm) is the description of Oxford undergraduate life in _Sinister Street_. And it leads to--what? Michael’s conscientious and pathetic progress among prostitutes and ruffians. Luckily, he does not, in the end, marry Lily; but he is saved from it by mere accident. There was no reason to suppose that destiny would play on his side.

This excursion into the underworld has become, in English fiction, almost as much _de rigueur_ for a young gentleman as the grand tour used to be. Sometimes it is curiosity that urges him; but it is more apt to be a kind of humanitarian sympathy. The adventure is not new: one remembers, after all, Richard Feverel. But the temper in which it is taken is new. Richard was a chivalrous young fool; but then Mrs. Mount was something out of the ordinary. He did not, at first, dream what she was; and when he found out, she was able to lure him to think well of her. These young gentlemen we are considering do not have to be lured to think well of the young women they altruistically encounter. They know before they meet them what they are going to be. They cultivate them because they are that, or are obviously going to be that. They prefer the girl of the lower classes; prefer marriage with her or free love with her, as the case may be. They find her more interesting, just as a settlement-worker finds the slums more interesting. The difference between them and the settlement-worker is that they are not out to convert her to religion or even to better manners. They are perfectly naïve in their refusal to perceive differences. They have a preconceived notion to the effect that there are no differences; and to that notion they often sacrifice themselves. Sometimes they sacrifice the girl.

You see, they do not think much of marriage, these young men. Jacob Stahl insists on going off to a solitary cottage with Betty Gale, unblessed. (Of course, he does have a wife in the background.) He never quite forgives her for wanting to be a legal wife. Though, characteristically enough, by the time she has reconciled herself to the irregularity (as any decent woman would have somehow to do, if she were going to endure it) his wife dies, and he insists on Betty’s marrying him so that they can have children. Ann Veronica over again! But, indeed, Mr. Beresford has it in for marriage anyhow. I know of nothing more pathetic in modern fiction than the way Dick Lynneker, brought up among gentle-folk, successful in his own career, in love with a girl of his own class, has to cast about in his mind for some way of squaring that conventional situation with his radicalism. Up to that time, his only chance has been in approving of his sister’s elopement with the village carpenter. Now he is in love himself, and there is no obstacle, social or financial, to his happiness. But he has not protested against convention all his young life, only to sit down and be comfortable now in a conventional situation. Listen:

“‘I never tried to fight against my love for you, dear, after that first day at Oakstone,’ he went on. ‘I hadn’t ever cared before for anyone like this. I’ve never had any sort of love-affair. And now, I want....’”

“She clung to him eagerly.” ‘What do you want, darling?’ she asked, and then added inconsequently, ‘I feel such a little thing.’

“He drew her down to her knees and knelt before her in the darkness.” ‘I want our love to be all our own. I don’t want it talked about and stared at. If we get married, it must be as quietly as possible--and it must be afterwards, if you know what I mean, dear? That legal business isn’t for us at all; it’s only a kind of registration. Our love hasn’t anything to do with anyone else. We must make our vows without witnesses. Do you know what I mean, dear? Don’t you feel like that, too?’

“He felt her heart throbbing violently against his; and they clung to each other like two frightened children.” There, in the stillness and the darkness, the world had vanished and they were alone; and afraid; and yet passionately desirous to draw closer together.

“‘Oh! Dickie, I do love you so,’ she whispered, as she put her lips to his.”

Mr. Beresford never tells us whether or not Dick put his idea through. Sybil was the niece of a bishop. But then, Mr. Beresford made her. Perhaps Dick succeeded. The implication certainly is that he was going to succeed.

Now, I honestly think that pathetic. Not nearly so shocking as it is pathetic. For the author is looking for the realities of life in the wrong place. Every lover knows the sense of shrinking from a public ceremony. I doubt if any two people deeply in love with each other would choose, for their own sakes, a “wedding.” Dick Lynneker need not think that his great idea is new. But look at the mad egotism of it! Take it that the legal or the ecclesiastical ceremony is merely a heavy price that one has to pay. Is that happiness not worth paying for? Generations of lovers have thought that it was. Suppose, even, that you think it not so much too heavy as the wrong kind of payment--something unjustly, shamelessly exacted of you, that should never have been exacted at all; a sort of Oriental “squeeze.” Other lovers, in other times, have had a kindred sense of desecration; but they have realized that society, from its point of view, had a right to demand of them this public acknowledgment. They have realized, too, that no public act of this kind could really touch or affect their private sense of their private sacrament.

These modern folk are neither unselfish enough to make their little salute to organized society cheerfully, nor strong enough to realize that the merely conventional tribute cannot hurt their private sanctities. There is no such unselfishness or strength possible to a person like Dick Lynneker. If we must face free love, we must face it, I suppose. But nothing in heaven or earth need make us face a compromise like Dick’s. Defy all ritual and symbolism if you must. But, for sheer topsy-turviness, commend me to his notion of insisting on the consummation’s preceding, instead of following, the ceremony! There is quite as much superstition in one order of things as in the other. Dick Lynneker is bound, quite as much as his family, by prejudices. After all, the black mass is only the real mass reversed.

I have dwelt on this instance because it seems to me typical, in its way, of the work of the whole group of English novelists. Except for Mr. Arnold Bennett, who seems to be satisfied with the mean and low-minded people of whom he feels that the world consists, they are all protesting. But they have nothing to suggest. When their own fitful attempts to set things straight result in failure or disaster, they blame the _status quo_. It never occurs to them to blame their own way of going about the business of changing things. A little study of history or even of sociology would teach them what not to waste their time on. But their only use for the past is to “curse it out.” “Les grands-pères ont toujours tort.” Yet they themselves go down like ninepins, knocked over by the same forces that, for a few thousand years at least, have been antagonizing the idealism and altruism of men. As I said before, one has some sympathy with Mr. Wells; for his people (his men, at least, since he does not think much better of women than does Arnold Bennett) are trying to inform themselves, trying to think it all out in terms of reason. The syndicate is not trying to think anything out. It rests content with replying to every affirmation of history: “You lie.” That is not argument: it is the mere sticking out of tongues. The conventionally accepted thing _must_ be wrong; and that is all there is to it.

Take the matter of their whole attitude to sex--which is, by and large, the question they are most pre-occupied with. A certain person, a scholar and a gentleman, was pointing out to me, the other day, the accuracy of Chaucer’s treatment of Troilus. Troilus lets Cressida go, not because he does not love her passionately, but because the chivalrous Code demands it of him, demands that he should protect her reputation. Pandar cannot move him from his knightly duty. If ever a hero loved exuberantly, it was Troilus. Yet the inhibition works. Chaucer knew what he was talking about. Whereas, as my interlocutor went on to say, with these contemporary authors, the lack of inhibition seems to be the index of emotion. They ask you to take lawlessness for depth of feeling. The decorously behaved, according to them, are only the passionless. That is plain bad psychology. For if love is the real thing, it takes perpetually into account the duty to the beloved. Love will bring out the scruples of a comparatively unscrupulous person. No real lover wants to put the beloved “up against” anything disagreeable. And this being brave for someone else is not a natural expression of love. You may be brave to the rack and the gridiron for yourself; but being vicariously brave to the rack and the gridiron is a mean, modern kind of courage. Suppose you do not believe in the social order: the social order, none the less, is powerful enough to make a decent man want its approval for the woman he loves. He does not wish to have her inconvenienced--not if he loves her.

But the woman who does not wish to run up against the social order gets scant sympathy from the modern British hero. She ought to want to run counter to it; and if he has anything to say about it, she will jolly well have to. I do not know how other people feel about Betty Gale, but I am exceedingly sorry for her. I am sufficiently sorry for the girl who married Mr. Onions’s murderer, the hero of _The Debit Account_ and _In Accordance with the Evidence_. I am even sorry for Pauline in _Plashers Mead_; though, frankly, I think Mr. Mackenzie is fairer to his characters than any of the others. These young women (I am speaking, you see, at the moment, of the respectable ones) have such selfish, cantankerous, and muddle-headed gentlemen to deal with!

Our authors do succeed in making their conventional folk disagreeable. That is, they make the hero acutely perceptive of the conventional vices. But if ever there was a case of the beam and the mote! Look at a fair list of them: the hero of _The Invisible Event_, of _The Strangers’ Wedding_, of _Round the Corner_, of _Plashers Mead_, of _The Debit Account_. Was there ever a more vaporing bunch of egotists anywhere? A great deal of fun has been poked at the heroes of the romantic period: the Manfreds and Laras, the Heathcliffs and Rochesters. Their revolts against society have been jests for the critics to split their sides over, these fifty years. But they were dignified creatures in comparison, and they had far more sense of fact. They knew, for example, when they bucked society, what they were bucking. They knew the process was not going to be entirely comfortable, and they did not complain of discomfort, because they saw a reason why it should be made hot for them. They simply felt that they had a _quid pro quo_. They had, as I have said elsewhere, the Satanic charm; they had also some of the Satanic logic. These heroes have been, for many decades, considered the wildest travesties of humanity. But, indeed, they are far more comprehensible than the young men in the modern British novels. A young woman in love with Lara might well expect the worst; but at least she would know what to expect. Lara would never have shilly-shallied about among the conventions like Dick Lynneker, or Capes, or Jacob Stahl, changing his mind from chapter to chapter, and never knowing precisely what he did want, anyhow. Lara would have known what he wanted and why. He would not even have hesitated to attribute to himself an evil motive, if he had one. But none of these young men would attribute to himself an evil motive. Whatever they want must be right; and if eventually they want the exact opposite, then that must be right, too. The bewildered woman follows in their wake.

That is why, by and large, they are so corrupting. Yes, more corrupting than the effervescent geniuses of the nineties. You might be shocked by Dorian Gray, or by Aubrey Beardsley’s gentlemen and ladies; but you were never tricked into imagining that it was “up to you” to look like an Aubrey Beardsley drawing or to behave like Dorian Gray. The shining lights of the nineties lived to _épater le bourgeois_--and they did it. On the whole, that was greatly to the credit of _le bourgeois_. People who would rather die than show themselves _épatés_ (there are always a lot of such folk) were very entertained. I dare say some of these authors and poets did harm in their day. But they did not do it by deluding the public into thinking that they were virtuous: they did it by being witty at the expense of virtue. Our novelists are not witty at the expense of virtue (or at the expense of anything else, be it said in passing). They perform all their antics in the very name of virtue. They are right, and everyone else is wrong.

Now the _révolté_ with a programme we can endure, for we have often, during the muddled history of civilization, had to endure him. Sometimes he does a lot of damage; sometimes he does a lot of good. The point is that, in either case, his emotional force has been at the service of his programme. The trouble with these people is that they have no programme. They are _révoltés_ because they are dissatisfied or in hard luck, and they hit wildly. They have not the brains to think anything out. Our friends of the nineties thought that nothing was sacred--except, perhaps, beauty. These folk know nothing about beauty--even Mr. Galsworthy, who may set you down on a hillside to look at a lovely landscape, and leave you there for several pages, but who spends his time during those pages in infecting that natural loveliness with notions of agrarian reform. The only thing that is sacred to these young folk is their own impulses; which makes them about as satisfactory to deal with as the wild gun in _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_. Since their own impulses chop and change--and are always sacred--you can do nothing except express perfect confidence in their temperaments. You are not to know them by their fruits; you are to judge them by their good intentions--for which you must take their own word.

Nor are they “ineffectual angels.” If they only were! They are guilty of a lot of very ignoble impulses, and proceed often to gratify them. So did the romantic hero-villains, you may say. Ah, but here is the difference. The romantic hero-villains were proud, sometimes, of their sin; but they called it sin, even while they boasted of it. So did the æsthetes of the nineties. If it had not been sin, there would have been no fun in it. A very lamentable point of view, doubtless; but less dangerous to society than the contemporary mode. For while you still call it sin, you are accepting the categories, if not the judgments, of society. You will not hurt society much while you accept its categories. What these young men and young women do is to call anything virtuous that they happen to want to do. They have not even the logic of Satanists, perceiving evil and preferring it. The thing that is evil is the thing that makes them suffer; the thing that is good is the thing that pleases them. When free love is convenient, free love, only, is virtuous; marriage becomes virtuous the moment marriage becomes convenient. As you never know when obstacles are going to appear or disappear--as convenience is often in the hands of mere fortuitous fate--there is no test left. You must, I repeat, have blind faith in their temperaments. I do not think this is too hard a saying.

As for the women who match and mate with the men: they do not give us much more hope. They are, to speak plainly, an unlovely lot. You may be as sorry as you like for them, but pity is not praise. Mr. Wells’s women are too apt to be selfish and treacherous; Mr. Bennett’s opinion is evidently that no woman can be decent unless she is a fool--like Constance, say, in _The Old Wives’ Tale_. (I know there is Alice Challis; but I fancy Alice is only a symbol of what every man wants and never gets.) And look, for a moment, at the women described by the syndicate. They are cheap: hard without being strong; cold without being pure; sentimental without being kind. There is the sensual type--Madeline Paignton, the aristocratic wanton, or Lily Haden, who cannot be continent for a few weeks, even for the sake of wealth and a husband; there is all the crew of light women among whom the heroes make their humanitarian progress. There is the intellectual (God save the mark!) type: the heroine of _Gray Youth_, or even Rachel Beaminster, whose mental energy all goes into revolt. If Mr. Walpole had made the Duchess of Wrexe a human being, in whose reality we could believe, we might have more sympathy with Rachel’s spiteful traffickings with the family ne’er-do-well. But we should have to be far sunk in fetishism to believe in the Duchess; she is a mere Mumbo-Jumbo; and her family seems about as intelligent as the first circles of Dahomey. Compare her, for an instant, with Lady Kew. No, a tyranny like that is an invented tyranny; it has nothing to do with life. The Duchess of Wrexe (to borrow a term from the anthropologists) has no _mana_ at all. Rachel’s revolt is absurd; and simply shows up Rachel as a very disagreeable and headstrong person. True, there is always something to make their revolts absurd. They seem not to be dealing with facts at all, these young people; probably because they are all sentimentalists, and for a sentimentalist a delusion is as good as a fact, any day. A wicked giant is, by definition, anything you happen to be tilting at--even if in real life he is a windmill.

You may say that two facts these characters do often deal with: poverty and the sex instinct. Yes, they are sometimes poor, and have a hard time. But they have just as hard a time when they are not poor. Poverty is not the root of all evil, logically exposed as such, as it so often is in the work of George Gissing. Not one of this group of authors has ever achieved the cumulative, inevitable tragedy of _New Grub Street_, for example: a far better indictment of some of the ills of the social order than all this modern mouthing. Indeed, not one of them is able to make anything seem inevitable. If they would only let the indictment be pitiless and let it stand; let us draw our own conclusions! And as for poverty, have you noticed that even when these young men are as poor as the hero of Mr. Onions’s trilogy, they get over it? They never end in poverty. Yet their grievances are not disposed of when they become rich. By that time, they are worried about something else. They have the complaining habit. Rich or poor, married or unmarried, they are always, one foresees, going to complain. These authors convince one that their Utopia would be a hell on earth. They cannot reason; they cannot even dream convincingly. They are in a state of pitiful intellectual poverty--or, at least, penuriousness; for, if they have wealth, they certainly do not distribute it.

The sex instinct is, on the whole, their long suit. I do not think there is much more to be said about their treatment of it. They have not painted for us a nobler, or a more romantic, or a more passionate love between man and woman, than have some of their predecessors. I cannot see that these novelists give us anything new in the way of human information--except, perhaps, just one thing.

That one thing can best be described as a new theory--no, not a theory, a kind of Futurist presentment--of human types. There are just two possible things to do with the heroes and heroines of the new school; either to say that, as human beings, they do not exist; or to assume that they do exist and to lament the fact. The kinder, I believe, is to say that they do not exist. It is also the easier conclusion. For they are not consistent with themselves; they pass kaleidoscopically from one state of being to its opposite; as mortals, they are incalculable, and as literary creations they are unconvincing. “I don’t believe there’s any sich a person,” is the natural reply to their presented cases. The authors have not the power of assuring us of the real existence of their characters. Life is not in them. If it is not a fault of vision, then it is a fault of technique. I have spoken of the complete unreality of the Duchess of Wrexe; but she is no more unreal than Dick Lynneker, or the hero of Mr. Onions’s trilogy. You can believe in far viler and wickeder people, if you must; you can believe in Moll Flanders or Carker or Long John Silver. It is not moral but intellectual squeamishness that makes it difficult to accept them. Psychologically speaking, they are freaks in side-shows. Mr. Bennett presents us with a whole gallery of ignoble folk; but one is inclined to believe in some of them, at least. Indeed, one is inclined to believe, thanks to Mr. Bennett, that the Five Towns are almost entirely populated with such (which may be hard on the Five Towns, but that is Mr. Bennett’s look-out). The syndicate has not Mr. Bennett’s technique.

Yet this is just where the very fact of the syndicate gives one pause. Since there are so many novelists in England doing precisely the same kind of inconsistent, unconvincing, unlovable person, there may well be some genuine type that they are trying to describe. Almost never, it seems to me, do they “get it across”; but there must be people wandering about the English landscape who have given the syndicate the idea. We hardly believe that their portraits are accurate; for their portraits are not psychologically possible. But one comes to believe in prototypes. The syndicate would not all, at a given signal, have gone off their heads in exactly the same way. They must have some warrant in fact. If the prototypes of Jacob Stahl and of Dick Lynneker, of Rachel Beaminster and of the heroine of _Gray Youth_ exist, these books are, in a sense, a portent. The Five Towns might be responsible for Hilda Lessways, but the Five Towns are not responsible for the girl in _Gray Youth_. One does not feel that the syndicate gives one more than circumstantial evidence, but of that, there is an almost overwhelming amount. This is depressing. Perhaps, eventually, Mr. Compton Mackenzie will resign from the syndicate and really tell us something. At present he too is bound by their conventions. But in _Plashers Mead_, tiresome as it is with the reiterant egotism of half-fledged youth, he does “get it across.” Certain people whose opinion is worth much more than mine, tell me that Mr. Walpole has got it across in _The Dark Forest_. I must admit, in my own case, the strict limitations of western Europe: it will take more than Mr. Walpole to make Russians credible to me. He seems to me no more plausible than Dostoievsky, and far, far short of Turgenev. And, after all, I am not sure that Nijinsky is not a better expositor than either.

It has been much more difficult than I dreamed, to deal with these gentlemen at all. The work of one shifts and plays into the work of the other so maddeningly that it is hard, not only to treat of them individually, but to treat of them even as a group. You think you have a line on Mr. Walpole, and you find him melting into Mr. Beresford or Mr. Onions. Everyone knows what a miserable business a composite photograph is. No feature is really defined. These authors differentiate themselves just enough by detail of plot and setting and diction, to avoid a grand inclusive charge of plagiarism. You cannot say that one has filched a page from another, because there is no telling who began it. But I believe that, as far as style is concerned, if you inserted six consecutive pages written severally by the six of them, in any chapter of any book, no one would ever know the difference. Of course, you would have to allow for different names of characters, and some havoc might be played with continuity of plot--if there happened to be any plot in that chapter. But the style would, I am sure, stand the test. Mr. Mackenzie forces his vocabulary as the others do not (he prides himself, I fancy, particularly on the number of his metaphors for the moon); but apart from Mr. Mackenzie’s occasional exoticism, they write alike. They have the same rhythms, the same sentence-structure, the same syntactical habits. It is clever, nervous writing, but it is not the grand style. They are not memorable: they do not stand out, any one of them, or any one of their works, as a mental experience. The only adventure to be got from them is to read them all, and then, forgetting (as you inevitably do) who is who and which is which, analyze the effect of the group. It is a hazy and perplexing effect--as I fear I have too meticulously said.

For in the long run, one’s main feeling about the younger English writers is one of sheer disappointment. They have their reputation: people are always telling you that this one or that one is really important. I cannot believe that they are. As portrayers of life, they do not convince--a matter partly of muddle-headedness and partly of technique in the narrower sense. Moreover, they are dull. Mr. Bennett may not convince in the end, because in the end one becomes aware of his moral myopia; but he is not usually dull. He writes better than they do--that is what it comes to. If there were only one of them, we might put up with him; but how can we put up with six of him? There is not time. As for their attack on convention, whatever it may be, they will have to do it better to get any serious attention paid to them. You need seasoned troops to attack that fortress--or at least bigger guns. The only person who thinks that anything, no matter what, is better than the _status quo_, is the anarchist. Most of us are not anarchists; and while most of us are willing to have things improved, if necessary, at our own expense, we want some assurance that they will be improved. And if we must make blind experiments--as the reformers all want us to--let us at least know the object of the experiment. These writers do not seem to know what they would like to achieve if they could.

What they chiefly breed in one is hopelessness. If this is the best that England can do for us in the way of fiction, we must either encourage our native product, or eschew fiction and take to “serious” reading. These men are too dull. The time is ripe, once more, I believe, for a few big picaresque novels: something in the mode of the _Satyricon_, and _Gil Blas_, and _Huckleberry Finn_. For I do not think that people will put up forever with being bored--especially as they are not boring us in the interests of virtue.

To be sure--though it is some time since I began this essay--I have still not read D. H. Lawrence.

THE REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS OF RUDYARD KIPLING

It looks Chestertonian as I write it. As if a world of concrete things were to be gathered into the titular abstraction; or as if Kipling’s rightness were presently to be proved remarkable in that it is all wrong.

And yet, I think, Chesterton or no Chesterton--where is he, by the way?--I mean precisely what I have set down: Rudyard Kipling’s remarkable rightness. Right, because time has sustained him against scoffers; remarkable, because no one originally expected that particular kind of rightness from him.

This is not to be a discursive or an exhaustive discussion of Kipling’s utterances on planetary or even racial questions. I have not annotated his complete works with his “rightness” in mind. Indeed, to treat him exhaustively would be a very difficult task; for the sum of his wisdom is made up, not of a few big “works,” but of an infinite number of significant brevities. My only excuse for dealing with him at all is that I have lived a long time with the prose and verse of Kipling, and that my knowledge of him has reached what Henry James called the point of saturation. I will not pretend that I have read every word he has ever printed in the Allahabad _Pioneer_ or even in the London _Times_; but I know him very well. I belong to the generation that took its Kipling hard. My friends who are five years older or five years younger never took him quite so hard as that. They knew other gods.

Rudyard Kipling, in his later life, has suffered under two great disadvantages: his insistence on a political point of view which was unpopular, and the gradual diminishing of his flow of masterpieces. The dullest people will tell you smartly that he is “written out”; the cleverest will tell you that he was precocious, but always cheap, if not vulgar. Perhaps someone will fling “The Female of the Species” at you. This paper is not to be a catalogue of Kipling’s virtues, nor yet of his achievements. But I should like you to consider with me for a few moments that little volume of verse, _The Five Nations_. I take _The Five Nations_ purposely, for it is the Kipling of _The Five Nations_ that I mean. Not the better known Kipling of the _Barrack-Room Ballads_ or _The Seven Seas_. But supremely the Kipling I refer to.

Two things changed the Kipling we first knew: renewed residence in England, and the Boer War. Of course, he was always an imperialist; he always loved Lord Roberts--as long ago as the _Plain Tales_, when Kipling was at once younger and cleverer than anyone else. But he saw these things, then, from the angle of India; he was an imperialist only in embryo. He cared more for the British army--in red--than for the British navy; and Anzacs were not within his vision.

Then--by devious paths--he returned to England; and England held him as it held the man and the woman in “An Habitation Enforced.” The Boer War came; and _The Five Nations_ tells how he reacted. He has gone on very consistently from that day, developing, but never swerving from the path of his conviction. England did not listen to him: the Liberals of the first decade of the twentieth-century did not propose to listen to anyone who wrote short stories for the sake of the plot, and verse for the sake of a Tory idea. They were much too serious in Great Britain, in those days, to hearken to Rudyard Kipling. And, so far as I know, neither Lord Roberts nor Kipling ever said, “I told you so.”

Yet listen to “The Lesson”:

It was our fault, and our very great fault--and now we must turn it
to use;
We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse!

How one has heard that rough-and-ready poem reviled--in the early nineteen-hundreds! Even now one recalls abusive editorials in American newspapers about the poem which mentioned

... the flannelled fools at the wicket ... the muddied oafs at the
goals.

“Oblige me by referring to the files.” I remember those taunting comments very well. Not an editor but was so sane that he could make his little mock of Kipling as an extremist. But if you will get out _The Five Nations_ and read “The Islanders” through soberly, you will curse those editors for fools. “Preparedness” is so familiar to us all now, not only as a word but even as an idea, that we can hardly believe intelligent people were calling a man names fifteen years ago for stating axioms. We are always thinking the days of Galileo are over. But they are not; they never will be; the human race instinctively and always has it in for Galileo. Kipling could get an audience for tales and ballads and jungle-books; but the moment he tried to speak nationally, he could not get an audience. Even now, they would rather read H. G. Wells.

Do ye wait for the spattered shrapnel ere ye learn how a gun is laid?
For the low red glare to southward when the raided coast towns burn?
“(Light ye shall have on that lesson, but little time to learn.)”

“Yes, thanks,” came the sarcastic answer from all the wise British millions; “we jolly well _do_ wait.” And they “jolly well” did; and a dozen years later it all came true, and their sarcasm was put where it belonged. That is, if they had the sense to see it.

Will ye pray them or preach them, or print them, or ballot them back
from your shore?
Will your workmen issue a mandate to bid them strike no more?

Well: it very nearly came to that. But I suggest that you re-read “The Islanders.” I cannot quote any more. Every word of “The Islanders” is true to make one weep; and it was the storm-centre of _The Five Nations_. How many thousands of people felt that, in writing “The Islanders,” Kipling had destroyed his own reputation! Doubtless the Germans would have felt the same way about “The Parting of the Columns”; though, if they had read it and had taken the trouble to believe it, it would have saved them a good many millions spent in propaganda. But the Germans were quite as stupid as the British public.

There has been more than one reason, as I have said, for the waning of Kipling’s popularity. In the first place, he does not give us so many good stories as once, in the full flush of his genius, he did. That is a perfectly legitimate reason. Then, too, he has had an unlucky trick of seeing ahead. When “The Edge of the Evening” was first published (in 1913), it passed for hysteria. Only “fools” believed in German spies--in 1913. But there are other causes more insidious and more potent. He stands, not only politically for the highest type of Toryism--at least, one fancies he does--but for a lot of other outdated things: pious attachment to the soil; romantic love, enduring, clean outside and in; the beauty of childhood and the bitterer beauty of parenthood; patriotism unshrinking and unashamed; loathing of the mob and the mob’s madness and meanness; the continuity of the English political tradition, from Magna Charta down; religious toleration; scrupulous perception of differences between race and race, type and type; the White Man’s Burden. And I doubt if, even now, he is an ardent believer in Woman Suffrage.

Almost any one of these attitudes would have been enough to damn him with the British democracy. One quite understands that _The Five Nations_ would not have been Mr. Lloyd George’s _vade mecum_. One perfectly sees why Mr. Asquith, following the usual tradition, passed Kipling over for the Laureateship in favor of a gentleman whom few people had heard of and no one could read. (“The Widow at Windsor” probably shocked Balliol as much as it shocked Queen Victoria.) No Kipling-lover, for that matter, particularly wanted Kipling to be Laureate. One even realizes--though this time with amusement--why he is _persona non grata_ to the “brittle intellectuals who crack beneath a strain.” The intellectuals say that he is good at times for children, and often for the vulgar, and take their refuge in not taking him seriously. The intellectuals have been Russianizing themselves, in these last years; and Kipling’s laughter at that phenomenon must have been unholy. They could scarcely afford to feel him remarkably right, it would prove them so remarkably wrong.

As I say, one quite understands why the gorged and flattered workingman, the demagogue, and the “brittle intellectual” have not read him or listened to him; but it is none the less a mystery that some one should not have listened to him and seen that he was eminently sane on many vital points. There is, after all, no one living in England who writes so well, who is so nearly master of the English language. But one has to conclude that his audience has made up its mind only to be amused during a train-journey.

There was a merry little international correspondence in 1914 or 1915 over “The Truce of the Bear.” What did Mr. Kipling say _now_? It was all a great joke on him. People also raked up “The Man Who Was.” I believe Mr. Kipling never replied to his humorous questioners, or, if he did, it was to the effect that a man, like a government, might change his foreign policy with changing conditions. Still, everybody was very much amused, and for some reason (it can have been only his unpopularity) very much pleased. Perhaps they had not forgiven some of the other poems in _The Five Nations_, and looked to discredit Kipling by pitching on “The Truce of the Bear” as they had once pitched on “The Islanders.” With Russia driving back the Teutons on the eastern front, I do not see that Kipling, as a patriot, could proceed to defend his ancient position very loudly. But I do not remember--here I speak under correction, for his war-poems are very elusive--that even since 1914 he has written of Russia as he has written of France. And I have often wondered if, in the last months, he has not taken a very private comfort in his own refrain of years ago:

Make ye no truce with Adam-zad, the bear that walks like a man.

He may at least feel that he was essentially right about Russia, if incidentally wrong. If I am not mistaken, “The Truce of the Bear” was written on the occasion of the invitation to the first Hague Conference. We took it that it was the Tsar whom England was to mistrust. Very likely. But I cannot help believing that Kipling had a private suspicion that the Hague Conference was all tommy-rot. Which, obviously, it was, pragmatically judged. The sheer decency and competence of certain Russian generals did save the world in the first year of the war: let us never forget it. There never was a Russian steam-roller, but the Germans thought there was going to be one. Let us, as I say, never forget it. But for the last year, the Russian people has been behaving allegorically in the sense of the poem.

‘When he stands up like a tired man, tottering near and near;
When he stands up as pleading, in wavering, man-brute guise....

When he shows as seeking quarter, with paws like hands in prayer,
That is the time of peril--the time of the Truce of the Bear!’

Eyeless, noseless, and lipless, asking a dole at the door,
Matun, the old blind beggar, he tells it o’er and o’er;
Fumbling and feeling the rifles, warming his hands at the flame,
Hearing our careless white men talk of the morrow’s game;

Over and over the story, ending as he began:--
‘_There is no truce with Adam-zad--the bear that looks like a man!_’

I should be particularly sorry to say anything that German propagandists would like to have said. It is perfectly impossible for the average person to know what is the proper and what the improper attitude to take to Russia at the moment. Even those in high places might be forgiven for being perplexed. What the average person perceives is that the Russians are behaving very much, and very vividly, like “the bear that looks like a man.” Certainly they stood up at Brest-Litovsk “in wavering, man-brute guise.”

The only point of all which is that the folk who made so merry, a few years ago, over “The Truce of the Bear” had better find another joke. One does not base the rightness of Kipling on his merely having been a little less ridiculous, in a given instance, than his contemporaries wanted to think him.

I wonder, too--still as I turn the pages of _The Five Nations_--if there is not a tonic value to-day in the poem called “Sussex.”

God gave all men all earth to love,
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Beloved over all;
That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
So we, in godlike mood,
May of our love create our earth
And see that it is good.

So one shall Baltic pines content,
As one some Surrey glade,
Or one the palm-grove’s droned lament
Before Levuka’s trade.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground--in a fair ground--
Yea, Sussex by the sea!

So to the land our hearts we give
Till the sure magic strike,
And Memory, Use, and Love make live
Us and our fields alike--
That deeper than our speech and thought,
Beyond our reason’s sway,
Clay of the pit whence we were wrought
Yearns to its fellow-clay.

The windy internationalism to which we are so often invited, nowadays, to listen, would deny it--might even call it “_chauvinisme de clocher_.” The reply is that people actually do feel as Kipling says they do. He has always tended to serve (in his own phrase) the God of Things as They Are. Granted, for the sake of argument, that it would be good for you to love all men and all countries alike, the fact remains that you do not. If that is your duty, most decent people do not perform their duty; their fathers did not, and their children will not. Even the most radical internationalists wish to substitute class-consciousness for patriotism--on the whole, a less enlightened chauvinism than the other. And, judging from the present war, they have not been able to pull even that off.

As for saying that one has the same sense of personal insult in seeing a foreign land invaded as in seeing one’s own, that is nonsense. France has been the home of the spirit to many of us; the thought of an invaded France is of a bitterness hardly to be borne. But though one has lived in it and loved it, one is not so angry, in the very depths of one, at Teuton occupation of France as one would be at Teuton occupation of one’s own soil. I will not say what German invasion of my own New England would be to me. “Ten generations of New England ancestors” would rise up to curse the enemy. But even an invaded Oshkosh (and Oshkosh is a mere name to me) would be to me, an American, an even deadlier insult than an invaded Paris. I should take it more personally, I know. And if that can be so for us, in our far-flung, heterogeneous republic, what must be the case with the children of homogeneous France? If I know that I should feel that way about Oshkosh, what must the Kentish man feel about Kent, the Devonshire man about Devon, the Englishman about England? Did not all sane Americans between Bangor and San Diego react in precisely similar fashion to Herr Zimmermann’s plans for Texas? I have never even been in Texas, but Texas belongs to me and I belong to it.

No: say what you please, geography is the great human science; it is more intimate than biology. And Kipling has had the sense to see it because he really knows something about the _genus homo_. It was a delightful phrase of the Frenchman’s that charmed our youth--“the passion for the planet”; but are we not a little undeceived now? Do we not at last realize that the only real “man without a country” is the cosmopolite? If there be such a person.

I can almost hear someone quoting ironically,

But there is neither East nor West, border nor breed nor birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends
of the earth.

That is very taking; and in a sense it is true, thank Heaven. But I fancy Kipling would want to modify it now. At least he would like to write a foot-note containing a careful definition of the word “strong.” It would not apply to the average German.

Kipling was called, for many years, by the pacifist-Liberals, a jingo. All imperialists were, _ex officio_, jingoes. Some of these people have got into their heads, by this time, the conception of a “preparedness” that makes for peace, and realize the difference between a real jingo and a man who wants to avert war in the only way possible when a considerable portion of the world remains militaristic. We all know by this time that, if England had been prepared in 1914, there would have been no war in 1914; that, very probably, if Sir Edward Grey had been empowered to say, at the proper instant, that England would fight, there would have been no war in 1914. Had “The Army of a Dream” been there, the mailed fist would not have been shaken at the world. But that is ancient history. It is to be hoped that not every one who preached preparedness in the old days is now stigmatized as a jingo. If anyone still thinks of Kipling vaguely as a war-mad imperialist, let him read “The Settler”:

Earth where we rode to slay or be slain,
Our love shall redeem unto life;
We will gather and lead to her lips again
The waters of ancient strife,
From the far and fiercely guarded streams
And the pools where we lay in wait,
Till the corn cover our evil dreams
And the young corn our hate.

That is not the accent of the dyed-in-the-wool jingo.

And here again--still out of _The Five Nations_--the “Half-Ballad of Waterval”:

_They_’ll never know the shame that brands--
Black shame no livin’ down makes white,
The mockin’ from the sentry-stands,
The women’s laugh, the gaoler’s spite.
We are too bloomin’ much polite,
But that is ’ow I’d ’ave us be ...
Since I ’ave learned at Waterval
The meanin’ of captivity.