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THE
MQLISH
J^EVIEW
%. EdS^d by AUSTIN HARRISON
" ^ FEBRUARY 1921
Poetry
Lena Wrace
Thus to Revisit. . .(vi)
The Trade Slump
England and America
Letters : Posted and Unposted (vi)
A Study
Frank Harris' Portraits
Father to Son
Women in Present-day Politics
Art Through the Medium (A Way Out)
Years of the Unperformed
The Poetry of the Gr^en Man
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THE ENGLISH REVIEW
Edited by Austin Harrison CONTENTS OF THE ONE^HUNDRED^AND^FORTY^SEVENTH NUMBER
1. DOROTHEA STILL H. BRYAN BINNS K. BALBERNIE ADRIAN BURY
2. MAY SINCLAIR
3. FORD MADOX HUEFFER
4. ARTHUR KITSON
5. STORM JAMESON
6. CONSTANCE MALLESON
PAOK
Bellona 97
The Looking-glass 99
A Song of Sighing 100
Content 101
Lena Wrace 103
Thus to Revisit . . . ( vi) 116
The Trade Slump 122
England and America 137
Letters : Posted and
Unposted (vi) 142
[Contents continued on pa</e vi.
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CONTENTS (continued) page
7. JOHN RODKER A Study 147
8. LUCIFER Frank Harris'
Portraits 9. B. MACDONALDHASTINGS Father to Son
149 154
10. CICELY HAMILTON
11. A. STEWART GRAY
12. AUSTIN HARRISON
13. THOMAS MOULT
14.
Women in Present- day Politics 158
Art Through the Medium (A Way Out) 167
Years of the
Unperformed
173
The Poetry of the
Green Man 186
Books
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Civil Militarif t< .\'cii.-al Jai/oi o/~ OLD BOND ST LONDON W
WITH AUSTEN'S COMPLIMENTS
virtuously qualified by H. DENNIS BRADLEY.
AUSTKN is rolling in money- mine and other people's. A hundred million or so, more or less, is nothing to him. Unfortu- nately his flea-bites are our bug- bears.
Austen is magnificently generous — especially to Winnie, Who is cer- tainly the most expensive person in the world to keep, and, strangely enough, one whose waste has never been pinched.
But the dawn of financial disaster looms ahead. And the dreams of our political Arabian Knights must end.
Austen has been taking thousands a year from me as a sleeping partner — 75 pei" cent, of my profits (E.P.D. and super-tax) — and I have deter- mined to evade the clutches of my grasping bedfellow.
Excessive and economically un- sound taxation has crippled British industry and caused unprecedented unemployment, and to fight this prodigal squandering of the nation's resources we must control financial supplies.
If the next Budget is' over ;^8oo, 000,000, it will be a mythical Budget. For the money will not he forthcoming. Prices are now be- yond the spending capacity of the public and innumerable traders are not making profits but losses.
The most dangerous national menace is unemployment. To solve this problem I have determined to forego for the present all personal profits, and produce clothes for my customers at cost prices.
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These prices are quoted for the finest material manufactured, and for tailoring executed by the best craftsmen in England.
It is significant that at a time of the worst slump this country has ever experi- enced, my House is now doing the biggest trade in its history, and the hundreds of men dependent upon it are fully engaged.
Pope and Bradley is not a company, and there are only two partners, myself and Austen — one who works and one who sleeps. To maintain production I am giving up the 25 per cent, of the profits Austen so generously allows me, and he is going to give up the 75 per cent.
Personally, until the E.P.D. is removed, I am not, frankly, interested in the profits, therefore, I am making this offer with Austen's compliments. Here, at least, he will learn a salutary lesson in compulsory economy. And let us hope that he will pass the word to wanton Winnie.
14 OLD BOND STREET W
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THE
ENGLISH REVIEW
February, 1921.
Bellona
By Dorothea Still
Out of the dozing embers of my throne I stretch a hand towards my smould'ring torch; Slowly, my sleep-dimmed eyes make furtive search Into the shrouded souls of little men.
Once more A spark thrown out upon the dusty earth Would catch the tinder of a thousand hearts To feed the greedy fierceness of my lust :
The gore Long since congealed, in thirsty rivulets Would run to newly-risen lakes of blood —
As of yore My starving nostrils lift to scent their prey, My hungry fingers groping for a sword.
Is my name Indeed forgotten, and my ancient fame
Entombed in shame ?
Men shall know Me goddess; and their days shall glow Within the furnace of my reign below.
— Behold, I wake,
My quenchless torch to take !
I stride in glory half across the world : Nay, all awide the earth, and thrust my torch Afire and murky with the steam of blood Into the depth of Heaven's serenity.
97 E
THE ENGLISH REVIEW
My brazen cry Shatters the little people as they run Abroad with cringing haste to spread my flames, Awhile my frenzy rocks the whirling globe.
Triumphant, I Follow the victims worthy of my fire, And shriek my victory in Heaven's face ;
Chant, as I fly My mutilation of the Gods' dear gifts. See, I have fouled their beauty in the muck A.nd smoking devastation of my trail : The shining pride of youth is turned to shame, Strong limbs in bitter travesty of honest age.
Of age, I tear The slowly trembling heart-strings as I pass. The dying odours of a flowering love Send sweetness to my nostrils, and inspire My restless wings to find a stronger foe.
Shivering fear And hollow famine are my serving men To sap the strength of mighty motherhood Till all her power ebbs beneath my feet;
My reeking spear, Swift-driven, finds its truest aim.
With her despair Crying a spent defiance at my hated namxe.
She, too, is hurled Into the bloody triumph of my flame-swept world.
All that is god-like in these mortal souls Is scorched and writhing underneath my heel. I have prevailed. And when the kindly dust Shall cover up the carnage of my reign
And men Tell of my slumber as the sleep of death,
Again My grim, undaunted wakening shall not fail :
Again, I shall prevail.
98
The Looking-glass
By H. Bryan Binns
Comes another day,
But what a face to greet it ! Take the looking-glass away,
That won't meet it. JMow for a new face,
Pray, good Nature ! A new face, a new fac^,
Not any feature
Eyes and nose and mouth will do,
Forehead, cheek, and chin; What I must have early
Is a new look therein.
Old towsel locks.
The damson at my door. Needs none. To-day he's
As merry as before. Doddering he may be.
But robin in the spray, Twirling his song in the twirling twigs
Is not more gay.
When the god comes riding
Over the weald, From Tonbridge to Crowborough,
Field after field, Solitary in the boughs.
One scarlet berry, Robin twitters, and the bare
Damson's just as merry Every new morning
All through February.
99 E2
THE ENGLISH REVIEW
Take the looking-glass ! — To-day,
To-day, I want, Nature, A new face, pray :
For this old is grey : A face like a street
With doors and windows sealed : No face to greet
The sun across the Weald : Glances curtained,
Smiles heavy-shod, Incapable of welcoming
A god. As any old tree or bird,
Robin, ay, or rook — Meets any morning
With a new look.
A Song of Sighing
By K. Balbernie
When I lie on my love's breast I am terribly at rest: And my body to her hand Answers like a quivering strand Of river-willow to the water's quest !
False she is, and I must give
Her the strength by which I live.
False she is, as well I know, •
But I cannot rise and go • • •
Ah, what does Beauty mean that mocks us so?
lOO
Content
By Adrian Bury
Now that all things are mine That build my happiness;
The sun's impassioned shine, The autumn's gaudy dress.
And I may walk abroad
Like the four winds, as free,
Where Nature spreads her hoard Of bloom and field and tree.
While all her sounds now set My heart with love afire,
And in my soul beget
The semblance of a choir,
That flutter of a wing, Amid the waning hedge.
That rustling, furry thing,' Seeking the swampy sedge.
The strange, hoarse, hostile cry Of crows above the heath,
Where the tall pines defy The coming winter's breath.
Since I have drawn two days From that hard treasurer,
Old Time, of miser ways, Life's crooked usurer,
To squander as I will.
Having no other task But all these hours to spill
Like wine out of a flask.
lOI
THE ENGLISH REVIEW
And when the day is done,
And I shall safe return, Will rise another sun —
The fires of home that burn
Within the ancient farm, Now refuge from the wind,
And dark, nocturnal harm. Evils and spells unkind;
And I shall find a board,
With bread and meat and drink; A friend in full accord
With what I do and think.
When fellowship and talk
Will crown a day's content Nor any pleasure balk By adverse argument : —
T seek for nothing more, I covet no man's power;
The merchant's money-store Could not enhance my dower.
But, in felicity.
My heart Qroes forth to those Who sail a stormy sea
And share not my repose.
Those who by fate are cursed. And are distraught of mood,
Whose joy is all dispersed. Who bear a heavy rood.
102
Lena Wrace
By May Sinclair
She arranged herself there, on that divan, and I knew she'd come to tell me all about it. It was wonderful, how, at forty-seven, she could still give that effect of triumph and excess, of something rich and ruinous and beautiful spread out on the brocades. The attitude showed me that her affair with Norman Hippisley was prospering; otherwise she couldn't have afforded the extravagance of it.
" I know what you want," I said. " You want me to congratulate you."
"Yes. I do."
" I congratulate you on your courage."
" Oh, you don't like him," she said placably.
" No, I don't like him at all."
" He likes you," she said. " He thinks no end of your painting.^-
"I'm not denying he's a judge of painting. I'm not even denying he can paint a little himself."
" Better than you, Roly."
" If you allow for the singular, obscene ugliness of his imagination, yes."
" It's beautiful enough when he gets it into paint," she said. " He makes beauty. His own beauty."
" Oh, very much his owii."
"Well, you just go on imitating other people's — God's or somebody's."
She continued with her air of perfect reasonableness. " I know he isn't good-looking. Not half so good-looking as you are. But I like him. I like his slender little body and his clever, faded face. There's a quality about him, a distinction. And look at his eyes. Your mind doesn't come rushing and blazing out of your eyes, my dear."
"No. No. I'm afraid it doesn't rush. And for all the blaze "
" Well, that's wfiat I'm in love with, the rush, Roly,
103
THE ENGLISH REVIEW
and the blaze. And I'm in love, for the first time " (she underlined it) " with a man."
"Come," I said, "come!"
" Oh, / know. I know you're thinking of Lawson Young- and Dicky Harper."
" I was."
" Well, but they don't count. I wasn't in love with Lawson. It was his career. If he hadn't been a Cabinet Minister; if he hadn't been so desperately gone on me; if he hadn't said it all depended on me "
"Yes," I said. " I can see how it would go to your head."
" It didn't. It went to my heart." She was quite serious and solemn. " I held him in my hands, Roly. And he held England. I couldn't let him drop, could I ? I had to think of England."
It was wonderful — Lena Wrace thinking that she thought of England.
I' said " Of course. But for your political foresight and your virtuous action we should never have had Tariff Reform."-
" We should never have had anything," she said. " And look at him now. Look how he's crumpled up since he left me. It's pitiful."
" It is. I'm afraid Mrs. Withers doesn't care about Tariff Reform."
"Poor thing. No. Don't imagine I'm jealous of her, Roly. She hasn't got him. I mean she hasn't got what I had."
" All the same he left you. And you weren't ecstati- cally happy with him the last year or two."
" I daresay I'd have done better to have married you, if that's what you mean."
It wasn't what I meant. But she'd always^ entertained the illusion that she could marry me any minute if she wanted to ; and I hadn't the heart to take it from her since it seemed to console her for the way, the really very infamous way he had left her.
So I said, " Much better."
" It would have been so nice, so safe," she said. " But I never played for safety." Then she made one of her quick turns.
104
LENA WRACE
" Frances Archdale ought to marry you. Why doesn't sheP'i
"How should I know? Frances's reasons would be exquisite. I suppose I didn't appeal to her sense of fitness."
" Sense of fiddlesticks. She just hasn't got any tem- perament, that girl.''
"Any temperament for me, you mean."
" I mean pure cussedness," said Lena.
" Perhaps. But, you see, if I were unfortunate enough she probably would marry me. If I lost my eyesight or a leg or an arm, if I couldn't sell any more pictures "
" If you can understand Frances, you can understand me. That's how I felt about Dicky. I wasn't in love with him. I was sorry for him. I knew he'd go to pieces if I wasn't there to keep him together. Perhaps it's the maternal instinct."
"Perhaps," I said. Lena's reasons for her behaviour amused me; they were never exquisite, like Frances's, but she was anxious that you should think they were.
" So you see," she said, " they don't count, and Norry really is the first."
I reflected that he would be also, probably, the last. She had, no doubt, to make the most of him. But it was preposterous that she should waste so much good passion; preposterous that she should imagine for one moment she could keep the fellow. I had to warn her.
" Of course, if you care to take the risk of him " I
said. " He won't stick to you, Lena."
"Why shouldn't he?"
I couldn't tell her. I couldn't say, " Because you're thirteen years older than he is." That would have been cruel. And it would have been absurd, too, when she could so easily look not a year older than his desiccated thirty-four. It only took a little success like this, her actual triumph in securing him.
So I said, " Because it isn't in him. He's a bounder and a rotter." Which was true.
" Not a bounder, Roly, dear. His father's Sir Gilbert Hippisley. Hippisleys of Leicestershire."
"A moral bounder, Lena. A slimy eel. Slips and
105 E*
THE ENGLISH REVIEW
wriggles out of things. You'll never hold him. You're not his first affair, you know."
" I don't care," she said, " as long as I'm his last."
I could only stand and stare at that; her monstrous assumption of his fidelity. Why, he couldn't even be faithful to one art. He wrote as well as he painted, and he acted as well as he wrote, and he was never really happy with a talent till he had debauched it.
" The others," she said, " don't bother me a bit. He's slipped and wriggled out of their clutches, if you like. . . . Yet there was something about all of them. Distinguished. That's it. He's so awfully fine and fastidious about the women he takes up with. It flatters you, makes you feel so sure of yourself. You know he wouldn't take up with you if you weren't fine and fastidious, too — one of his great ladies. . . . You think I'm a snob, Roly? "
" I think you don't mind coming after Lady Willersey."
" Well," she said, " if you have to come after somebody •"
" True." I asked her if she was giving me her reasons.
" Yes, if you want them. / don't. I'm content to love out of all reason."
And she did. She loved extravagantly, unintelligibly, out of all reason; yet irrefutably. To the end. There's a sort of reason in that, isn't there } She had the sad logic of her passions.
She got up and gathered herself together in her sombre, violent beauty and in its glittering sheath, her red fox skins, all her savage splendour, leaving a scent of crushed orris root in the warmth of her lair.
Well, she managed to hold him, tight, for a year, fairly intact. I can't for the life of me imagine how she could have cared for the fellow, with his face all dried and frayed with make-up. There was something lithe and sinuous about him that may, of course, have appealed to her. And I understand his infatuatioii. He was decadent, exhausted; and there would be moments when he found her primitive violence stimulating, before it wore him out.
They kept up the menage for two astounding years.
Well, not so very astounding, if you come to think of it. There was Lena's money, left her by old Weinberger,
1 06
LENA WRACE
her maternal uncle. You've got to reckon with Lena's money. Not that she, poor soul, ever reckoned with it; she was absolutely free from that taint, and she couldn't conceive other people reckoning. Only, instinctively, she knew. She knew how to hold Hippisley. She knew there were things he couldn't resist, things like wines and motor- cars he could be faithful to. From the very beginning she built for permanence, for eternity. She took a house in Avenue Road, with a studio for Hippisley in the garden; she bought a motor-car and engaged an inestimable cook. Lena's dinners, in those years, were exquisite affairs, and she took care to ask the right people, people who would be useful to Hippisley, dealers whom old Weinberger had known, and journalists, and editors, and publishers. And all his friends and her own; even friends' friends. Her hospitality was boundless and eccentric, and Hippisley liked that sort of thing. He thrived in a liberal air, an air of gorgeous spending, though he sported a supercilious smile at the fioritura, the luscious excess of it. He had never had too much, poor devil, of his own. I've seen the little fellow swaggering about at her parties, with his sharp, frayed face, looking fine and fastidious,; safeguarding himself with twinklings and gestures that gave the dear woman away. I've seen him, in goggles and a magnificent fur-lined coat, shouting to her chauffeur, giving counter- orders to her own, while she sat snuggling up in the corner of the car, smiling at his mastery.
It went on till poor Lena was forty-nine. Then, as she said, she began to " shake in her shoes." I told her it didn't matter so long as she didn't let him see her shaking. That depressed her, because she knew she couldn't hide it; there was nothing secret in her nature ; she had always let " them " see. And they were bothering her — " the others " — more than "a bit." She was jealous of every one of them, of any woman he said more than five words to. Jealous of the models, first of all, before she found out that they didn't matter ; he was so used to. them. She would stick there, in his studio, while they sat, until one day he got furious and turned her out of it. But she'd seen enough to set her mind at rest. He was fine and fastidious, and the models were all " common."
" And their figures, Roly, you should have seen them
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when they were undressed. Of course, you have seen them. Well, there isn't — is there .'^"
And there wasn't. Hippisley had grown out of models just as he had grown out of cheap Burgundy. And he'd left the stage, because he was tired of it; so there was, mercifully, no danger from that quarter. What she dreaded was the moment when he'd "take" to writing again, for then he'd have to have a secretary. Also she was jealous of his writing, because it absorbed more of his attention than his painting, and exhausted him more, left her less of him.
And that year, their third year, he flung up his painting and was, as she expressed it, " at it " again. Worse than ever. And he wanted a secretary.
She took care to find him one. One who wouldn't be dangerous. "You should just see her, Roly." She brought her in to tea one day for me to look at and say whether she would " do."
I wasn't sure — what can you be sure of .^ — but I could see why Lena thought she would. She was a little un- healthy thing, dark and sallow and sulky, with thin lips that showed a lack of temperament, and she had just that touch of " commonness " — a stiffness and preciseness like a board school teacher — which Lena relied on to put him off. She wore a shabby brown skirt and a yellowish blouse. Her name was Ethel Reeves.
Lena had secured safety, she said, in the house. But what was the good of that, when outside it he was going about everywhere with Sybil Fermor ?
She came and told me all about it, with a sort of hope that I'd say something either consoling or revealing, some- thing that she could go on.
" You know him, Roly," she said.
I reminded her that she hadn't always given me that credit.
"/ know how he spends his time," she said.
" How do you know? "
" Well, for one thing, Ethel tells me."
" How does she know?"
" She — she posts the letters."
" Does she read them ? "
"She needn't. He's too transparent."
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LENA WRACE
" Lena, do you use her to spy on him ? " I said.
" Well," she retorted, " if he uses her "
I asked^ her if it hadn't struck her that Sybil Fermor might be using him ?
" Do you mean — as a paravent? Or," she revised it, "a parachute? "
" For Bertie Granville," I elucidated. " A parachute, by all means."
She considered it. " It won't work," she said. " If it's her reputation she's thinking of, wouldn't Norry be worse ? "
I said that was the beauty of him, if Letty Granville's attention was to be diverted.
" Oh, Roly," she said, "do you really think it's that? "
I said I did, and she powdered her nose and said I was a dear, and I'd bucked her up no end, and went away quite happy.
Letty Granville's divorce suit proved to her that I was right.
The next time I saw her she told me she'd been mistaken about Sybil Fermor. It was Lady Hermione Nevin. Norry had been using Sybil as a " paravent " for her. I said she was 'wrong" again. Didn't she know that Hermione was engaged to Billy Craven ? They were head over ears in love with each other. I asked her what on earth had made her think of her? And she said Lady Hermione had paid him thirty guineas for a picture. That looked, she said, as if she was pretty far gone on him. (She tended to disparage Hippisley's talents. Jealousy again.)
I said it looked as if he had the iciest reasons for cul- tivating Lady Hermione. And again she told me I was a dear. " You don't know, Roly, what a comfort you are to me."
Then Barbara Vining turned up out of nowhere, and from the first minute Lena gave herself up for lost.
" I'm done for," she said. " I'd fight her if it was any good fighting. But what chance have I ? At forty-nine against nineteen, and that face?"
The face was adorable, if you adore a child's face on a woman's body. Small and pink; a soft, innocent fore- head; fawn skin hair, a fawn's nose, a fawn's mouth, a fawn's eyes. You saw her at Lena's garden parties staring at Hippisley over the rim of her plate while she browsed
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on Lena's cakes and ices, or bounding about Lena's tennis- court with the sash ribbons flying from her little butt end. Oh, yes; she had her there. As much as he wanted. And there would be Ethel Reeves, in a new blouse, looking on from a back seat, subtle and sullen, or handing round cups and plates without speaking to anybody, like a servant. I used to think she spied on them for Lena. They were always mouching about the garden together or sitting secretly in corners ; Lena even had her to stay with them, let him take her for long drives in her car. She knew when she was beaten.
I said, "Why do you let him do it, Lena? Why don't you turn them both neck and crop out of the house?"
" Because I want him in it. I want him at any cost. And I want him to have what he wants, too, even if it's Barbara. I want him to be happy. . . . I'm making a virtue of necessity. It can be done, Roly, if you give up beautifully."
I put it to her it wasn't giving up beautifully to fret herself into an unbecoming illness, to carry her disaster on her face. She would come to me looking more ruined than ruinous, haggard and ashy, her eyes all shrunk and hot with crying, and stand before the glass, looking at herself and dabbing on powder in an utter abandonment to misery.
" I know," she moaned. " As if losing him wasn't enough, I must go and lose my looks. I know crying's simply suicidal at my age, yet I keep on at it. I'm doing for myself. I'm digging my own grave, Roly. A little deeper every day."
Then she said suddenly, " Do you know, you're the only man in London I could come to looking like this."
I said, "Isn't that a bit unkind of you? It sounds as though you thought I didn't matter."
She broke down on that. " Can't you see it's because I know / don't any more. Notody cares whether my nose is red or not. But you're not a brute. You don't let me feel I don't matter. I know I never did matter to you, Roly, but the effect's soothing, all the same. . . . Ethel says if she were me she wouldn't stand it. To have it going on under my nose. Ethel is so high-minded. I suppose it's easy to be high-minded if you've always looked like that. And if you've never had anybody. She doesn't
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know what it is. I tell you, I'd rather have Norry there with Barbara than not have him at all."
I thought and said that would just about suit Hip- pisley's book. He'd rather be there than anywhere else, since he had to be somewhere. To be sure, she irritated him with her perpetual clinging, and wore him out. I've seen him wince at the sound of her voice in the room. He'd say things to her; not often, but just enough to see how far he could go. He was afraid of going too far. He wasn't prepared to give up the comfort of Lena's house, the opulence and peace. There wasn't one of Lena's wines he could have turned his back on. After all, when she worried him he could keep himself locked up in the studio away from her.
There was Ethel Reeves; but Lena didn't worry about his being locked up with her. She was very kind to Hip- pisley's secretary. Since she wasn't dangerous, she liked to see her there, well housed, eating rich food and getting stronger and stronger every day.
I must say my heart bled for Lena when I thought of young Barbara. It was still bleeding when one afternoon she walked in with her old triumphant look; she wore her hat with an air crane, and the powder on her face was even and intact, like the first pure fall of snow. She looked ten years younger, and I judged that Hippisley's affair with Barbara was at an end.
Well — it had never had a beginning; nor the ghost of a beginning. It had never happened at all. She had come to tell me that ; that there was nothing in it ! nothing but her jealousy; the miserable, damnable jealousy that had made her think things. She said it would be a lesson to her to trust him in the future not to go falling In love. For, she argued, if he hadn't done it this time with Barbara, He'd never do it.
I asked her how she knew he hadn't, this time, when appearances all pointed that way? And she said that Bar- bara had come and told her. Somebody, it seemed, had been telling Barbara it was known that she'd taken Hip- pisley from Lena, and that Lena was crying herself into a nervous breakdown. And the child had s^one straight to Lena and told her it was a beastly lie. She hadn't taken Hippisley. She liked ragging with him and all that, and
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being seen about with him at parties, because he was a celebrity, and it made the other women, the women he wouldn't talk to, furious. But as for taking him, why, she wouldn't take him from anybody as a gift. She didn't want him, a scrubby old thing like that" She didn't like that dragged look about his mouth, and the way the skin wrinkled on his eyelids. There was a sincerity about Barbara that would have blasted Hippisley if he'd known.
Besides, she wouldn't have hurt Lena for the world. She wouldn't have spoken to Norry if she'd dreamed that Lena minded. But Lena had seemed so remarkably not to mind. When she came to that part of it she cried.
Lena said that was all very well, and it didn't matter whether Barbara was in love with Norry or not ; but how did she know Norry wasn't in love with her} And Barbara replied amazingly that of course she knew. They'd been alone together.
When I remarked that it was precisely that, Lena said No. That was nothing in itself; but it would prove one w^ay or another ; and it seemed that when Norry found him- self alone with Barbara, he used to yawn.
After that Lena settled down to a period of felicity. She'd come to me, excited and exulting, bringing her poor little happiness with her like a new toy. She'd sit there looking at it, turning it over and over, and holding it up to me to show how beautiful it was.
She pointed out to me that I had been wrong and she right about him, from the beginning. She knew him.
" And to think what a fool, w^hat a damned silly fool I was, with my jealousy. When all those years there was never anybody but me. Do you remember Sybil Fermor, and Lady Hermione — and Barbara? To think I should have so clean forgotten what he was like. . . . Don't you think, Roly, there must be something in me, after all, to have kept him all those years ? "
I said there must indeed have been, to have inspired so remarkable a passion. For Hippisley was making love to her all over again. Their happy relations were proclaimed, not only by her own engaging frankness, but still more by the marvellous renaissance of her beauty. She had given up her habit of jealousy, as she had given up eating sweets, because both were murderous to her complexion. Not
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that Hippisley gave her any cause. He had ceased to cultivate the society of young and pretty ladies, and devoted himself with almost ostentatious fidelity to Lena. Their affair had become irreproachable with time; it had the permanence of a successful marriage without the unflattering element of legal obligation. And he had kept his secretary. Lena had left off being afraid either that Ethel would leave or that Hippisley would put some dan- gerous woman in her place.
There was no change in Ethel, except that she looked rather more subtle and less sullen. Lena ignored her subtlety as she had ignored her sulks. She had no more use for her as a confidante and spy, and Ethel lived in a back den off Hippisley's study with her Remington, and displayed a convenient apathy in allowing herself to be ignored.
"Really," Lena would say, in the unusual moments when she thought of her, " if it wasn't for the clicking, you wouldn't know she was there."
And as a secretary, she maintained, up to the last, an admirable efficiency.
Up to the last.
It was Hippisley's death that ended it. You know how it happened — suddenly, of heart failure, in Paris. He'd gone there with Furnival to get material for that book they were doing together. Lena was literally "prostrated" with the shock ; and Ethel Reeves had to go over to Paris to bring back his papers and his body.
It was the day after the funeral that it all came out. Lena and Ethel were sitting up together over the papers and the letters, turning out his bureau. I suppose that, in the grand immunity his death conferred on her, poor Lena had become provokingly possessive. I can hear her saying to Ethel that there had never been anybody but her, all those years. Praising his faithfulness; holding out her dead happiness, and apologising to Ethel for talking about it when Ethel didn^t understand, never having had any.
She must have said something like that, to bring it on herself, just then, of all moments.
And I can see Ethel Reeves, sitting at his table, stolidly sorting out his papers, wishing that Lena 'd go away and leave her to her work. And her sullen eyes firing out
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questions, asking her what she wanted, what she had to do with Norman Hippisley's papers, what she was there for, fussing about, when it was all over ?
What she wanted — what she had come for — was her letters. They were locked up in his bureau in the secret drawer.
She told me what had happened then. Ethel lifted her sullen, subtle eyes and said, " You think he kept them? "
She said she knew he'd kept them. They were in that drawer.
And Ethel said, " Well, then, he didn't. They aren't. He burnt them. We burnt them. . . . We could, at least, get rid of them ! "
Then she threw it at her. She had been Hippisley's mistress for three years.
When Lena asked for proofs of the incredible assertion she had her letters to show.
Oh, it was her moment. She must have been looking out for it, saving up for it, all those years; gloating over her exquisite secret, her return for all the slighting and ignoring. That was what had made her poisonous, the fact that Lena hadn't reckoned with her, hadn t thought her dangerous, hadn't been afraid to leave Hippisley with her, the rich, arrogant contempt in her assumption that Ethel would " do," and her comfortable confidences. It had made her amorous and malignant. It stimulated her to the attempt.
I think she must have hated Lena more vehemently than she loved Hippisley. She couldn't, then, have had much reliance on her power to capture ; but her hatred was a perpetual suggestion. Supposing — supposing she were to try and take him?
Then she had tried.
I daresay she hadn't much difficulty. Hippisley wasn't quite so fine and fastidious as Lena thought him. I've no doubt he liked Ethel's unwholesomeness, just as he had liked the touch of morbidity in Lena.
And the spying? That had been all part of the game; his and Ethel's. They played for safety, if you like. They had had to throw Lena off the scent. They used Sybil Fermor and Lady Hermione and Barbara Vining one after the other as their "paravents." Finally, they had
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used Lena. That was their cleverest stroke. It brought them a permanent security. For, you see, Hippisley wasn't going to give up his free quarters, his studio, the dinners and the motor car, if he could help it. Not for Ethel. And Ethel knew it. They insured her, too.
Can't you see her, letting herself go in an ecstasy of revenge, winding up with a hysterical youp ? " You ? You thought it was you? It was me — me — ME. . . . You thought what we meant you to think."
Lena still comes and talks to me. To hear h^r you would suppose that Lawson Young and Dicky Harper never existed, that her passion for Norman Hippisley was the unique, solitary manifestation of her soul. It certainly burnt with the intensest flame. It certainly consumed her. What's left of her's all shrivelled, warped, as she writhed in her fire.
Yesterday she said to me, "Roly, I'm glad he's dead. Safe from her clutches."
She'll cling for a little while to this last illusion : that he had been reluctant; but I doubt if she really believes it now.
For, you see, Ethel flourishes. In passion, you know, nothing succeeds like success ; and her affair with Norman Hippisley advertised her, so that very soon it ranked as the first of a series of successes. She goes about dressed in stained glass Futurist muslins, and contrives provocative effects out of a tilted nose, and sulky eyes, and sallowness set off by a black velvet band on the forehead, and a black scarf of hair dragged tight from a raking backward peak.
I saw her the other night sketching a frivolous gesture
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Thus to Revisit* . . . (vi
By Ford Madox Hueffer The Battle of the Poets.
1 WISH 1 could take for granted the Reader's acceptance of the doctrine that Poetry is a matter of the writer's attitude towards life, and has nothing in the world to do — nothing whatever in the world to do — w4th whether the lines in which this attitude is put before him be long or short; rhymed or unrhymed ; cadenced or interrupted by allitera- tions or assonances. One cannot expect to dictate the use of words to a race ; but it would be of immense service to humanity if the Anglo-Saxon world could agree that all creative literature is Poetry; that prose is a form as well adapted for the utterance of poetry as verse. It would be a good thing, because then Anglo-Saxondom would come at last into the comity of all other nations.
In France the novelist or essayist is Un Poete; in Ger- many the novelist or essayist is Ein Dichter\ in Italy Poesia finds room for all creative writing. It is only in Anglo-Saxondom that Poetry is something silly, impractic- able and rhymed, Prose being a thing w^hich will help you by its commercial instruction to prosper in your career, to pass examinations, to improve your memory, or increase your salary. That is a very lamentable division.
It is a very lamentable division because a race which, by a mere accident of dialect, arbitrarily walls off poetry from its intimate life has only a very mediocre chance of conferring upon its component inhabitants even reasonable happiness, and remains a standing menace to the civilisa- tion of its neighbours. That is an aspect of the matter to which we may return. Let us for the moment put it that it is a good thing for men to have, at any rate, some of the comprehension of life that poets have : that it is a bad thing for men to be walled off from the practice of that imagina- tive sympathy that is the stuff of Poetry.
* Copyright in U.S.A. by the Dial Co., 13th St., New York.
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THUS TO REVISIT . . .
I will hazard a diagram or so.
Diagram A. Left Centre Right
Factual Theoretic Prose (space) Verse Tendential Rhetorical Instruction Instruction J | Verse Propaganda
I Poetry
Or, if you will imagine that you see the above words as representing a political situation, putting it in this way, the image may become clearer :
Diagram B. Left Centre Right
Revolutionary Radicals Whigs (space) Conserva- Irrecon- Governing
Labour
tives cilable Aristocrats
Tories
Or, again
A Coalition Government
Diagram C. Left Centre Right
Pure Documented Creative (space) Creative Vers Patriotic Statistics History Prose Verse d' Occasion Songs
with Bias | |
Literature
Let me now, taking my courage in my hands and, as it
were, creeping about between the mighty legs of the great
— and the usually very touchy — ones of the earth, unite
these diagrams, and illustrate them with modern instances.
See Diagram D.
The perspicacious Reader, accustomed to penetrate the wiles of authors, looking at Diagram D and perceiving between the divisions of Prose and Verse the word " space," will perceive, here, my little joke . . .
For I will take it that every reader, perspicacious or obtuse, even if he objects to my calling Mr. Hudson's book " Poetry," because it happens to contain no rhymes, carries in his head some such chart or mental arrangement of the books he reads.
Many — the ergoteurs ! — will object to points of detail : many others will object that the truly good books of to-day,
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or of all time, are the Tendential works of Verse : the verses of Messrs. Kipling, Tupper and Isaac Watts; or the histories so documented as to express bias of one kind or another — such histories as Mr. Belloc writes to emphasise, or as Gibbon wrote to depreciate, the Church of Rome and the Empire of Charlemagne; or, again, to press the jmatter a little more home, such fruits of tendential labours as those of Mommsen, formidably and indefatigably delving amongst the annals of Rome to prove that the
Diagram D (incomplete).
Prose
Verse
I
Pure
Factual
(i) Treasury
Minute Cotuiitions of EmphvmaU
in H.M.
Civil Service
1913
Organised
Factua (ii) Mr. Graham Wallas' Life of Place
Instruction
Creative
(iii) Mr. Hud- son's Purple Latid
I
Creative
(iv) Mr. Yeats' Innisfree
Poetry
Tendential Propagandist
(v) Mr. Kipling's (vi) Songs // . . . We don't want to
lose you
Song of Hate or
Marseillaise
Rhetoric
Observation
i) Recorded
(ii) Hybrid
(iii) Rendered
I
(iv) Restrained
(v and vi) Lnrestrained
Literature.
Empire of the Hohenzollerns alone was to inherit the earth. And no one is going to deny the claims of certain tendential works to be accounted to the fields of Literature, which is Poetry.
No one wants to deny to Demosthenes or to Cicero their places even on Parnassus, and he would be a rash man who denied to the History of the Great Rebellion or to Prometheus Unbound their claims to such provincial im- mortality as these islands can afford. The one is a monument of Toryism, the other of Revolutionary Radicalism. Or, to take in yet another branch : Urn Burial will probably retain its place as a " work of permanent interest," though its writer intended it as at once a work of factual importance and of moral suasion. Yet its " facts" to-day appear absurd and few will be found to be guided by the moral point of view of the author of Religio Medici. Nevertheless no sane being will deny to Clarendon or Browne the names of great prose-writers, or to Shelley that of an English great poet. In short,
118
THUS TO REVISIT . . .
just as politicians of courage and distinction, to remedy particular abuses or at the dictates of con- science, will forsake the benches on which usually they sit and speak in favour of a Government or an Opposition with whom they are normally at bitter variance, so a work of biassed documentation may, by reason of the passion or the logical honesty of its author, become a work of great poetry — or a mere patriotic song pass into the undying ranks, amongst the inspired lyrics of the world. It is perhaps just a matter of passion.
Or perhaps it isn't. Let us say that The W earing of the Green, H en wlad fy Nadhau, and the Marseillaise have passed from the classification of merely opportunist patriotism, so that they represent for every soul in the Western world that side of the personality that detests stupid oppression. For we are all^ — ^every soul of us — conscious of stupid oppression in this world, whether the oppression be material or spiritual — whether it be applied by dogmatists or freethinkers, by kings or by republics, by great trusts or by leaders of unions. So that that side of the brain desires its cause to be emotionally put. Poetry, on the other hand, would seem to be most surely attained to by practised minds advisedly seeking illustrations of a frame of mind.
"Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade, And I shall have some peace there, . . ."
is at once an expression of a more universal human aspira- tion and a more composed piece of selection than the state- ments that they are hanging men and women, or that the day of glory has dawned. So that, on the whole, we may postulate that a poem written, with a source of emotion, but with a cool head, has a greater — an infinitely greater — chance of being poetry. Nevertheless, in certain white heats of passion, in certain fanaticisms of propagandists, immortalities have been achieved, and universal appeals made. It is possible that white heats of passion so quicken — or so obscure — men's eyes that at times they see only the essentials. The statement that they are killing men and women is a little matter in the great scale of things — more particularly for those who have never seen violent death on a large scale. But the addition "for the wearing of the green" is an addition of supreme genius, coming like a
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flash to an agonised soul. It is thus, if you are near a sudden death, that you see things.
And the factual propagandist, or the factual biographic, work of prose, even as the propagandist or tendential piece of verse, may pass over into the division of literature — by virtue perhaps of its very inaccuracy. I do not know how high the reader may be inclined to rate George Borrow. I do not really know how high I rate him myself; but rate him high or low, you cannot get away from the conviction that most of his facts are nonsense, whether in the Bible in Spain or in Lavengro — and that when they- are not nonsense they are mendacities. Similarly with the bio- graphic. Professor Dowden tells us that when Tre- lawney wrote his Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron he was inspired by a passion for Mary Shelley; that when, later, he elaborated these into the Records, he was inspired by hatred for Mary Shelley, the lady having refused to crown his flame. Professor Dowden tells us that Trelawney was a liar, that speeches he attributes to his subjects, in inverted commas, cannot have been spoken by Shelley, Byron, or Wordsworth. And, indeed, Tre- lawney was a liar, and the speeches cannot have been delivered just as they are recorded. Nevertheless, the Vv'ise man, if he wishes to love Shelley, will read no other record of that frail life — or, indeed, if he wishes to know the true truth about Shelley. For, inspired by passion or by love despised, liar or inventor of unspoken speeches, Trelawney gives us the one — and the very beautiful — picture that humanity will cling to, and in which humanity will believe.
Facts, in short, are all very well'. But what is the whole of Mommsen to
"Accedebat hue ebrietas et imprudentia locorum, etiam interdiu obscura. ..."
And what are all the dreary, dreary labours of Somerset House, the Board of Trade, and the Museum cataloguing staff — all the chatter about Harriet, the analyses of the poet's tradesmen's bills that for ever pour from the press to
" On my coming out, whilst dressing, Shelley said, mournfully, * Why can't I swim, it seems so very easy? ' I answered, 'Because you think you can't. If you determine, you will; take a header off this bank. . . .' He doffed his jacket and trousers, kicked off his shoes and socks, and plunged in, and there he lay, stretched out on the bottom like a conger eel, not making the least effort to save himself. . . ."
I20
THUS TO REVISIT . . .
The lives of poets are dry dust, unless they are written by poets — as Trelawney was — and poets have other things to do than to write other poets' lives. So the terrible half- time civil servants continue to murder, for us, our only saviours. For, just as Shakespeare and Jesus were murdered for my friend Marwood by one set of pedants, so was Shelley murdered for me by . . . So that I have hardly ever been able to read a line that came from the pen of this beautiful spirit ... It is only Trelawney who makes me love him. . . .
That, indeed, is the function of poetry — to add to bare, passionate statements the words : " For the wearing of the green ! " ; or to make us, by a sudden flash of genius .... and there he lay, stretched out on the bottom, like a conger eel . . . love our neighbours, whom the dull procession of the years, the dullness of our pastors, the dead dullness of our masters, the dust-dry dullness of those set in literary authority over us, had rendered distasteful . . .
I have said enough, I trust, to make it plain to the mos* minutely cavilling of readers that, in propounding my diagrams, I am not trying to impose any hard and fast — any biologist's — classification. It is obvious that division shades into division, and that here is set up the merest wire skeleton, which the reader must cl'othe with his own flesh or sculptor's wax. As far as I am concerned, the question of Immortality, of T.iterarv Permanence, of Genius . ... in short, of poetry ! . . . this question is simply one of per- sonality. Facts are of no importance, and dwelling on facts leads at best to death — at worst to barbarism. In the truest sense, it was Mommsen's accumulations that caused what occurred near Gemmenich at six o'clock on the morning of the 4th of Angus?, 19 14 . . . But if I, as a Tory, a believer in physical force, an ultimate militarist, am ever forced to throw up my rifle and refuse to fire across a barricade — it will be because Trelawney made Shelley live — and Shelley might be on the other side of the barricade !
Expression, then, is the crying need of humanity — and he wKo sins against any form of expression is . . . Satan. Let us now complete Diagram D.
{J^o he continued^ 121
The Trade Slump*
By Arthur Kitson
The present trade slump is not an entirely surprising or unexpected event to certain people. It had been predicted by two or three writers and economists, and particularly by certain financiers more than a year ago, when business was booming, and when there seemed a long period of pros- perity before us. I myself ventured to prophesy over four years ago what would happen, but I made the fulfilment of this prophecy conditional upon the adoption of a certain financial policy, a policy which the great money-lenders were threatening to re-establish. Two or three professors also gave reasons why we must expect a long period of business disaster. But they, like their employers the financiers, and like the boy who, having ignited the fuse of a fire-cracker, said there was soon going to be an explosion, were prophe- sying on what they knew to be "a sure thing." Apart from these instances, it is both amusing and amazing to read the varied reasons offered by our journals — reasons which have no earthly connection with the subject. We are told by one of our City editors that trade moves in cycles, and a period of trade depression is now overdue ! Which reminds one of the anxious mother who said she feared there was something unnatural about her last child, as, unlike the others, it had never had the measles. Another writer says that wars are always succeeded by bad trade, and there is no use in worrying about it, and he leaves it at that. Another seeks to revive the late Professor Jevons' theory of sun spots. Jevons, you may remember, tried to show some connection between sun spots and bad harvests. And as the failure of the crops would unquestionably have an adverse influence upon trade in general, he hoped to place the blame upon the shoulders of Providence.
Providence has, no doubt, a good deal to answer for,
* An address delivered before the Business Club of Birmingham.
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but it is not responsible for our foolish national politics and economics. And unfortunately for Jevons' theory, several of these periods of industrial depression have been those during which the harvests have been most abundant. Trade and commerce are created and controlled by human agencies, and for every economic or poli- tical event there is an economic or a political cause. Herbert Spencer once said that human intelligence is marked by our ability to detect causes, and if we apply this rule to our politicians, our press and our professors, we shall be compelled to regard them — in the realm of economic science — of a somewhat low order. These economic questions are regarded by the general public with both awe and superstition — thanks to the foolish opinions offered by our nev^spapers. I maintain, and shall en- deavour to prove, that the present trade slump was unneces- sary, and has been deliberately created by the Government's irrational policies, and I hold the present Chancellor of the Exchequer and his Treasury officials mainly responsible for the ruin and misery which the country is now beginning to experience. I contend that the Government have the means and power to stop the slump from going any further, and can, by reversing their policy, restore our trade to its former prosperous condition.
Let us first inquire whether there was anything con- nected with our industrial and trade conditions after peace was declared likely to lead to our present disasters. There are three prime factors essential for trade prosperity. The first is a great demand for goods. The second is the means for manufacturing, producing, and supplying such goods, and the third is the necessary means of exchange to enable those desiring goods to purchase them. In other words, these three factors are demand, supply and credit. Wars usually create an enormous demand for the replacement of property destroyed. Periods succeeding wars — far from being periods of trade depression — ought logically to be periods of trade revival and prosperity. The war that we have just experienced has left the world poorer in many respects, and we know that there has been, and there still is, an enormous unsatisfied demand for commodities of every description. We have only to consider the housing question or the question of clothing, the food supplies, and
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the supply of a thousand-and-one articles of manufacture which the public require, to realise that, so far as the public necessities are concerned, there is every reason why business should be in a very prosperous condition. For demand is the parent of industry. So far as this factor is concerned, there is certainly no reason for the trade slump.
Let us look on the other side, and see how matters stand in regard to the factors of production. First, we have labour. In spite of the unrest in labour circles there is a crying demand for work on the part of thousands, and the percentage of unemployed has risen during the last few months to an enormous extent. During the war we had practically no involuntary idleness. Everybody who wanted work could get it. So long as the main business of the world was the destruction of life and property there seemed to be no dearth of willing hands, and there was employment for all ; but now that we have entered a period of reconstruction — of recreating wealth — our whole political and economic system seems to fail us. The cause of the trade slump is therefore not due to labour. I admit that the continued unrest and the cry for higher and higher wages does to a certain degree unsettle conditions and pre- vent that continued progress which is necessary for main- taining trade prosperity. But, in my opinion, this unrest is itself a result of the main cause of this trade depression.
Another factor in production is raw material, or what in economics is called " the land," and here Nature has cer- tainly not rebelled. We have only to plant the. seed and to till the soil, as in previous years, to get abundant harvests, and we have only to dig into the earth in order to extract the necessary m.etals, coal, and minerals essential for the manufacture of all kinds of products.
Another factor is capital. Here again there is no shortage sufficient to cause depression in business. On the contrary, capital — in the form of machinery, tools and plant — is actually rotting for lack of employment. It has become the fashion for some writers to explain present events by saying that we are, as a nation, very much poorer than we were prior to the war, and that we have been living on our capital. This statement is not wholly true. In fact, it is, in the main, entirely false. By capital we usually mean the means of production — i.e., the means that have
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been created by labour and raw material. Now, it is a fact that not only were we able to carry on the war during those four critical years, but that during that period we built up numerous gigantic works, and the majority of those that were in existence prior to the war were greatly extended. We increased the number of our machines, lathes, looms, tools, etc., so that when the war ended we were able to turn out a far greater volume of goods than at any period in our history, and those who talk about the war having brought us to the verge of bankruptcy are talking nonsense. Not only did we wage a war in which we lost hundreds of thousands of precious lives, and blew away hundreds of millions of pounds' worth of munitions, and carry on a work of destruction to a terrible degree, but we actually paid for the war during the period of the war ! The debts with which we are now burdened are solely due to the ridiculous and insane financial policy that was pursued by our ignorant rulers. Owing to the fact that our financial system is based upon the most childish theories, and upon fallacies which have been again and again exposed, we find ourselves to-day burdened with a colossal debt — due mainly to a number of our own people, who were invited to exchange their inferior credit for the far superior national credit, and upon which our generous rulers undertook to pay high interest charges !
I have already shown (in A Fraudulent Standard) how the war might have been financed without incurring this huge debt, and so have avoided these appalling interest charges. Investigation proves that, so far as the factors of production are concerned, and so far as the demand for goods is concerned, there is not the slightest reason why the present slump in trade should have occurred. Where, then, is the trouble 1 Modern industry has been made to depend, not only upon the factors that we have already mentioned, but also upon another, namely, the factor of credit which enters into exchange. Every business to-day is based upon the credit which its owners can command, and this has to be established with some banking house. Hence any injury to credit affects the whole economic structure. We do business as long as the money holds out. Money or credit (which is practically the same thing) may be likened to the water that flows through a canal, and which carries vessels
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from one place to another. Similarly, credit causes the flow of goods from one part of the country to another, and when credit gets scarce, it is like the water in the canal running out, so that the vessels are stranded. Scarcely had the war ceased when certain financiers started an agita- tion against our paper currency which had enabled us to carry on successfully the war, and to maintain our in- dustries, and they were determined to reduce the volume of currency. For a short time the Chancellor of the Exchequer seemed to be able to keep himself free from their pernicious influence, but it appears that ultimately, with the connivance of the Treasury and Inland Revenue officials, and under the influence of certain professors, Mr. Chamberlain allowed himself to be driven to the adoption of their policy.
In a recent speech Mr. Chamberlain spoke as follows : —
"That brings me to the fact that I require co-operation in every quarter in order to maintain the policy, on which the Government have set their hearts, of first stopping further inflation and then beginning gradually to deflate. I need tlie co-operation of the financial community. What has happened is that as fast as I have stopped creating credit they have been creating credit, and that the extent of the advances made to trade and to private individuals is such as to endanger and to reduce the amount of Treasury Bills. I cannot view without some concern the extra- ordinary expansion of business in the promotion of companies. If I was sure that all this money really resulted in increased production I should find some consolation, but I am convinced that the time has come when a part of it only creates increased competition for the limited supplies of labour and material which are all that are available."
And his only remedy for this evil is to ruin trade and industry indiscriminately, and throw thousands of workers on the streets to beg or starve ! This is the policy that some of us foresaw would be attempted by the money- lending interests, and it is this same policy which has been pursued after every war, and which I maintain is the real cause of these periodical trade slumps. Had the Govern- ment carried out their original promises, had they resisted the demands of the usurers, and had the banks continued to support industry as they did during the war, the present condition of affairs would never have happened. Now, let me give you a few extracts from a work I wrote in 191 6, and which was published under the title of A Fraudulent Standard : —
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" Introduction and a Warning.
"The basis upon which all our industries, trade, and commerce are conducted is the legally established ' standard of value,' represented by the golden sovereign or 'pound,' which is supposed to 'measure' the values of all labour products.
"As will hereinafter be shown, this ' standard ' is founded upon a most egregious fallacy, and although it occupies a position in the domain of trade of similar importance to that of the standards of length, weight, and capacity in the industrial world, unlike them it is extremely variable, and purposely made so by the great financiers of this and foreign countries, who are able to juggle with prices to an almost unlimited extent, and by so doing reap enormous fortunes from the producing classes. It has placed the fortunes of all engaged in trade and industry wholly at the mercy of the world's money dealers. These men exercise, by means of the legal privileges accorded to gold and the banking profession, far greater influence over economic conditions than any potentate, ruler, or government. They have the power to stimulate industrial prosperity and to destroy it by increasing or diminishing the available gold or currency supplies, as well as by the mere manipulation of credit. They are the world's real autocrats. "Just now a few of their number are contemplating the most gigantic ' deal ' that has probably ever been conceived, and one which if perpetrated by any other class of the community, even on a very much smaller scale, would be denounced as barefaced robbery.
"And it is in regard to this projected crime particularly that I desire immediately to sound a note of warning to the British public, as well as to those of all our Allies engaged in the present war. This ' deal ' is nothing less than doubling the national and, incidentally, all other debts by doubling the present value of our monetary units !
"The object of this is to double the value of their War Loan invest- ments, regardless of the terribly disastrous industrial and social results which must ensue. This robbery will be accomplished, if it is not checked in time by public sentiment, in a perfectly legal manner by a complacent Chancellor under the guise of a measure for the public welfare for the sole purpose of removing ' inflation ' and reducing prices which have risen mainly through the creation of the very currency and credit constituting the War Loans. The measure will aim at restoring what our money-dealers term our ' good, sound, honest gold currency ' by destroying the Treasury notes and reducing bank credit to its pre-war proportions. The effect will naturally be to double the purchasing power of the pound at the expense of every wage-earner, producer, merchant, manufacturer, tradesman, and taxpayer in the country.
"The great banking and financial companies that have invested large sums in the War Loans will thus, by the mere stroke of the pen, enor- mously add to their fortunes without any further expense or effort on their part"
" Let us, however, clearly understand what this conspiracy means to our social and industrial conditions. You cannot increase the purchasing power of money without decreasing the value of all goods and services proportionately. If the moneylenders are granted their demands for the ' dear ' pound, the merchant, the manufacturer, the farmer, the wage- earner will all be compelled to sacrifice the value of their goods and services to a similar extent.
"If the gold currency is restored and prices put back to where they were four or five years ago, wages will have to go down with them.
" You cannot reduce prices generally, as certain politicians are urging, and retain the same banking facilities and the same currency circulation. Now mark what will inevitably follow such an attetnpt. To reduce prices you must reduce the volume of the currency, irftluding bank credit. This means reducing banking accommodation, over-drafts, loans, etc., and con-
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sequently curtailing trade and depressing industry. It means reducing employment and both wages and salaries. Tliis will add to the depression by reducing still further the demand for goods, since the wage-earners are the great consuming classes, and if you reduce their wages you reduce their power of purchasing commodities — in short, reducing prices or, what is the same thing, raising the value of money means trade depression, lock- outs, strikes, emigration, starvation, pauperism, riots, with the possibility of civil war I
"The crime proposed is not a novel one. It has been perpetrated in all countries usually during their most serious crises. Moreover, the men who do these things are usually the pillars of society, whose names figure in the highest circles, who support many of our national charities, and, after plunging hundreds of thousands into social want and misery, ease their consciences by donating a mere fraction of their ill-gotten gains to some church, hospital, or orphan asylum 1
"At present the country is indignant over the disclosures regarding profiteering. But the fortunes made by all the shipowners and commodity merchants since the war started are a mere pittance compared to the profits which the financial magnates will win by raising the value of the monetary pound. Si"^!*!
" It may be asked, ' Will not the Government, and Parliament par- ticularly, watch the people's interests and protect them from this threatened financial raid? '
"The answer is that neither Parliament nor the Government will move a finger to save the public unless the public protest is made so effective as to engender fear in the minds of the majority of the members. This is not so much the result of corruption or any lack of honesty on the part of the average politician as to his incredible inertia.
"When the opening of the great conflict suddenly rent the veil which had served to hide the truth from the British public, it brought us all to the realisation of our two greatest dangers : the one foreign and the other domestic.
"The former was our mortal enemy, with the organised and well- drilled hatred, ambition, and unscrupulousness of his seventy million sub- jects under the leadership of a clever, cunning, bloodthirsty fiend utterly devoid of any moral or humane sentiment I
"The other was the lofty and appalling conceit, ignorance, inefficiency, and apathy of our so-called governing classes, comprising all shades of party politics. And of these two the latter will most probably prove to have been the more dangerous and costly in the long run."
How literally these predictions are being fulfilled may be seen from the industrial depression that has now set in.
The same events are now happening in America, and from the same cause. Only last week I received a letter from a friend in one of the Western States, in which he writes as follows : —
"The deflation advocated by our financiers and professors has been perpetrated to a considerable degree, and in this region there is almost no money at all. And this is probably the richest farming area in America. The banks have refused credit to almost all comers, regardless of their solvency, since June, just at the season when expansion of credit has been urgently needed for harvesting and moving crops. This contraction has been exaggerated by a suit by the Associated Mortgage Banks against the Federal Reserve Farm Loan Banks, by which the farm loans at 5^ per cent, were stopped. The regular banks and mortgage companies don't like
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competition at 5^ per cent., the regular bank interest here being 10 per cent.
"Professor Kemmerer* et al. consider the welfare of the people of much less importance than maintaining a certain large percentage of gold reserve, and while predicting an indefinite period of depression as a con- sequence of deflation, yet hold deflation necessary. In writing to him on Sunday I expressed surprise that, with a clear realisation of the awful results of credit contraction, he could approve of it. I held that such a measure is wholesale murder and much worse, as it always dooms thousands of men and women to suicide, hundreds of thousands of women to prostitution, transforms multitudes of home-owners into tenants and tramps, wipes out the savings of old people, adding them to the army of paupers, and brings about an appalling aggregate of human misery 1 And there is absolutely no excuse for it, as the paper-money of this country is absolutely inconvertible; nobody can obtain gold coin for even a gold certificate, which is a warehouse receipt ; gold has gone out of commission as money, and the people at large have no use for it, wouldn't buy it if they had the money, so the gold in cold storage is immune from them. The only parties who ever ' loot ' the national reserves are the financial concerns that profess most pious concern for their maintenance. Instead of destroying the country on the pretence of protecting the gold, it should be just as easy here as in France to refuse gold to would-be looters."
Precisely the same deflation policy is being pursued in India, Africa, and in Australia, and with similar results. ,The Times of India actually boasts of this policy, which means industrial ruin and revolution.
The following is from the Daily Mail : —
"The Times of India, in comparing the financial strength of the country with that of other countries, lays stress on the seriousness of the problem which the latter have to face in the volume of paper currency, unsecured otherwise than on the general credit of the State. Since the war, it is claimed, the Indian paper currency has ' returned to a state of health to which we know no parallel in any of the belligerent States.' After drawing attention to the decrease of the circulation and the increase in the metallic reserve, the journal continues : ' These are great and wel- come changes; they indicate a financial strength in relation to the paper currency which the strongest aod wealthiest State might envy.'"
What have been the results of these financial changes which the Times of India welcomes so vociferously ? The public of India are reducing their demands for goods, and orders sent to this country are being cancelled wholesale. The ^ndian docks are glutted with goods, which the natives are I able to take through refusal of the banks to supply fur- ther credit. Unemployment is general, trade is depressed, and revolution is in sight ! And this is the same complaint we are receiving from all our Colonies !
What excuse do these so-called deflationists offer for their mad policy ? They tell us that high prices are wholly
* Professor of Economics at Princeton University, New Jersey, a strong advocate of deflation.
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the result of our paper currency. They tell us that our currency has become inflated during the war, and that it we want to have prices down" to a normal scale, we must reduce the volume of the purchasing-power of the people. The money that was issued during the war was absolutely essential to carry on the manufactures of the country and particularly the supply of munitions. A man who makes shells and guns has to be paid his weekly wage precisely the same as the man who makes saucepans, kettles or lamps for household use. It takes just as much currency to finance the munitions of war as it does the munitions of peace. But there is this difference that, when you have manufactured your war munitions, you send them away and destroy them, so that you have nothing to represent the money which was used in making them except the smoke of battle. On the other hand, when you make the munitions of peace you have substantial wealth to represent the wages paid. Consequently, the currency that is used for makmg munitions of War does tend necessarily to raise the scale of prices of ordinary commodities. But what other method could you adopt for carrying on a war.^^ If we had not resorted to paper money, we could not have made munitions, and we should to-day have been under the con- trol of Germany ! The money that was so issued for muni- tions was paid for in labour and material, and necessarily became a debt, and this debt is represented by the increase in the scale of prices. But you cannot get rid of this without doing injustice to millions, and this proposal to deflate the currency is nothing more than a repudiation on the part of the Government of the debt which is due to the producing classes, and to the working classes particularly. But is it really true to-day that our currency is inflated ? What is currency inflation ? It means an over-supply of general purchasing power. It means that "the facilities for purchasing goods are greater than the quantity of goods available, and the means for producing goods themselves. Is this true? Supposing someone were to tell you that there was an inflation of the sugar supplies. How would you disprove this statement? Naturally, by pointing to the present price of sugar, and to confectionery, in which the supply of sugar enters very largely. Apply the same test to the currency and to credit. If there was an over-supply
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of currency, the rate of interest would be low, and it would be comparatively easy to get money. Instead of this, it is a fact that the rate at which money is loaned to-day is higher than it has been for a century with but one or two slight exceptions. Indeed, we are paying more for our money to-day than our forefathers did 150 years ago. Ask the average merchant and manufacturer what troubles him most to-day, and he will tell you that it is the lack of credit facilities, and the difficulty of collectmg accounts, and this has been the case for some months past, and it is getting worse. If credit were easier and cheaper, far more goods would be turned out than is now^ possible. And the value of the goods would exceed the nominal value of the credit necessary for their production. And by such increase in production, we should soon see a gradual fall in prices — the only safe and rational method for " deflating " the price level. Is it not a fact that the hardest problem that the country has to face at the present time is how to raise money ? And yet, we have professors and financial writers coolly telling us that our currency is inflated, and that the supplies must be contracted ! One wonders with what form of lunacy these men have become afflicted !
Of course, this deflation policy hits all classes except the moneylenders and the salaried people, who gain by the increase in the value of their money and credit, and this is the real object of the deflation movement. It is one of the most infatnous examples of wholesale robbery on record, for it means that with the deflation of currency every debt incurred during the war is inflated. Every pound that was borrowed during the war, whether by the Government or by individuals, and which is still owing is being inflated by the deflationists. Take, for example, the War Loan and the National Debt, which now amounts to over £7,000,000,000. This debt was incurred in what the deflationists call " cheap pounds." They tell us that our present pound is only worth 8s. of the pre-war pound. If this is so, then in re- paying the debt, and in paying interest on the loans, the taxpayers should only pay pounds of the same Value as those borrowed, but the moneylenders are not satisfied with this. They tell us that we must revert to our gold standard, so as to raise the value of the pound to 20s., the result being that those who lent money to the Government and bought
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war bonds are to receive not merely the interest agreed upon but they are to be actually paid pounds worth two and a-half times those with which they bought these bonds ! This is the game that is being quietly but persistently played by the great financiers. This is the swindle which our Press, like the Ti?nes, the Daily Mail, the Morning Post, the financial journals, the professors, and our politi- cians are supporting !
It means that, in place of repaying the debt according to the dictates of justice and fairness, the taxpayers of this country are to be swindled to the extent of more than double the amount that the Government borrowed ! The same applies to debts incurred, and loans contracted by business firms and by private individuals during the war. It includes debentures, mortgages, and all similar forms of indebtedness. It means that if a man borrowed a sum equivalent to one year's labour, he will have to givQ from two to three years of his labour to repay it in addition to the interest charges. This policy is being pursued, not only in this country, but throughout the world, and this is the policy that has always been pursued by what is called " High Finance." And it will create universal failures and bankruptcies ! It will mean the downfall' of this country ! This policy was pursued after the Napoleonic wars through the connivance of the head of Lloyds Bank, the notorious Lord Overstone. He amassed a vast fortune out of the misfortunes that he was able to inflict upon the country through the ignorance of Sir Robert Peel, who was then Prime Minister. It was pursued by the American and European financiers after the American Civil War, so that the American people actually paid their war debt three and four times over, apart from the interest charges, through the deflation policy pursued by the connivance of the American politicians.
I do not wish to insinuate that all the ofiicials and Ministers who are responsible for this policy are knowingly perpetrating this gigantic fraud on the public. I believe that many of them are absolutely ignorant of the effects of their policy.
A story is told of Disraeli during his term as Prime Minister. When asked by the late Lord Rosslyn whether he did not have great difficulty in selecting a suitable man
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for the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, he replied that that was the easiest office of all to fill. He said : "All I have to do is to select a man who is very ignorant, and has a bad temper." He added : " He must necessarily have I bad temper, so as to be able to say ' No ' to the numerous applications made him for money, and he must also remain ignorant of finance, otherwise he might do his thinking for himself, and so upset his department chiefs." This was not a mere fanciful description of the qualities that our Chancellors have possessed. On the contrary, it is a very accurate description of the majority of them. And thfs is the terrible danger that we are in to-day, namely, the appalling ignorance of our Government officials who have control of our finance and of our trade policy. Sir Robert Peel was regarded by his own father as a " financial lunatic," and, judging from some of his correspondence, it is evident that he had grave doubts regarding the wisdom of his financial policy and particularly of his Bank Charter Act of 1844.
It is related of one of our recent pre-war Chancellors that during a meeting of the City bankers he told them it was his ambition to raise British credit to the highest point. "I want," he said, " to raise our credit to 5 per cent., and keep it there." Noticing a smile on the faces of the bankers, he asked if there was anything impossible in his statement. He was then informed that British credit was already much higher, that it was not even 4 per cent. " That," said the Chancellor, " is what I complain of. I want to raise it to 5 per cent." !
In the hands of men of this character how is it possible to have anything like a sound system of finance ? I main- tain that the trouble with trade at the present time, and the main cause of the trade slump throughout the world, is the contraction of the currency and of credit which is being carried out at the instigation of the moneylenders ! And unless the business men of this country combine to put a stop to it, we shall have a long period of industrial stagna- tion, with bankruptcies, ruin and social misery !
We have been told by certain " authorities " that we must retrace our steps and go back to our pre-war con- ditions in order to get trade into its normal channels. What was the condition of affairs prior to the war? We
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had millions of people on the verge of starvation, unem- ployment was rife, our banks were supporting and building up German industries, which were crippling British indus- tries. Our home industries were neglected, whilst foreign investments were sought after, and the best use that we could make of our young people was to send them either to our Colonies or to America. Germany was undermining us in every direction, and, as Professor Hauser says in his well-known work entitled Germany^s Commercial Grip 071 the World, " if Germany had only pursued her policy of peaceful penetration, the wealth of the British Empire and of the world would have been within her grasp within the next twenty years ! *'
Mr. Lloyd George and bis Government are very much like a railway directorate who, by changing their engine- drivers and stokers, try to make the public think they are going to take them to a new country whilst running them over the same old railroad tracks. A mere change of locomotive drivers does not effect any change in the route. The Government has set up scores of Committees to inquire into the industrial situation after the war, and the men put on these commissions have had little or no imagination whatever, and their ideas and ideals are merely those of pre-war times. For instance, in the matter of finance. The men chosen to advise the Government are bankers and moneylenders who are quite satisfied with pre-war con- ditions. Thev could ask nothing better than the con- ditions prevailing at that time which placed the whole of . the country's industries at their mercy. Why should they seek to alter conditions.'* Similarly in other departments. The men who are most interested in preventing any change are the men that Mr. Lloyd George seems to have selected as his advisers. Is it any wonder that we have all this labour unrest and disappointment?
There is one remedy for the present trade slump, a remedy which would prove instantly effective. If the Government will announce that it is prepared to support the banks and to advise the banks to support industry by offering credit facilities to all sound industrial enterprises, and to refuse credit to sfeculators and gamblers, if they will instruct them to carry out the sacred promises they have made to accept
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war bonds as a basis for credit up to 90 per cent, of their full face value and reduce the bank rate to 4 per cent., the present trade depression would instantly cease, and we should have a revival of that prosperity which we had a year ago. But what about prices? Would not prices continue to advance? The Government would be quite justified in fixing a limit to prices in every industry, as it has done in connection with various food supplies. There is no reason at all why the Government should not, after proper consultation with the leaders of industry, set a limit which would save the country from further exorbitant charges. As soon as industry had overtaken the demand for commodities, the trend of prices upwards would cease, and would commence to go down. This is the true remedy for high prices, namely to increase the suf flies of com- modities. But even if prices are not fixed by the Govern- ment, is it not infinitely better for a country to suffer from a high price level than for millions to be engulfed in miserv and starvation, and run the risk of revolution and Bol- shevism— for this is the danger to which we are now ex- posed ? The working man of this countrv will never con- sent to go through another such period as the " hungry forties," which was the direct result of the same policy of deflation pursued under Sir Robert Peel.
It should also be remembered that these periods of depression do not last for merely two or three years. When our politicians talk of *' retracing our steps," have they considered the time that it will take for trade and industry to regain their normal conditions? A deflation period with its disastrous effects started about 1 8 19, and continued without interruption until 1850, a period of about thirty years, and it was the discoveries of gold in Australia and California, w^hich permitted the increase in the currency and therefore in credit, that saved England at that time from perishing as an Industrial power. The same thing happened In America after the Civil War. The insane deflationists created a period of industrial miserv and stagnation that lasted from 1870 until 1897.
If our present financial and trade policy Is pursued, even though we escape the horrors of a revolution, we shall not recover our industrial position under twenty-five or thirty
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years. Is this an experience that any sane man can look iforward to without a shudder?
There is another side of this question which should not be overlooked, and that is the moral issue. To-day we are employinc^ both the military and the police to track down a francr of incendiaries and assassins who have been terror- ising the inhabitants of our unfortunate sister island. The men who have instio^ated this policy of terrorism are said by their admirers to be men of high ideals whose aim is the political freedom of their countrymen. But whatever their ideals and ultimate objects may be, the law rightly judges them by their actions, and makes them responsible for the effects of their teachings. If the same law were applied to our politicians, financiers, journalists and economic pro- fessors, a number of well-known public men would to-day be awaiting their trial in the criminal court for conspiracy against the public welfare. Indeed, if we judge the mag- nitude of a crime by its results, we must pronounce a policy which reduces millions of people to penurv, which bankrupts thousands, drives scores to suicide and thousands more to lives of shame, and endangers the safety of an Empire, as an infinitely greater crime than anything now being witnessed in Ireland ! The policy of currency deflation is one of starvation, of murder, of incendiarism, of industrial ruin and social misery ! " You take my house when you do take the prop that doth sustain mv house ; you take my life when you do take the means whereby I live ! "
..." I am not looking for a crash," said Professor Kemmerer, " I am looking for a long period of trade depression ! " Knowing, as that Professor evidently does, the terrible effects of the policy he is so strenuously advocating, I say that he and all the others engaged in the same wicked task ought to be charged with criminal con- spiracy, and held responsible for the disasters and crimes which their teachings are now breeding, and which will presently ripen into action. Deflation, like Bolshevism, spells anarchy. " The children born of it are fire and sword, red ruin, and the breaking up of laws." It is the patriotic duty of every good citizen to fight this suicidal policy to the bitter end !
136
England and America
By Storm Jameson I — The Post- War Situation
The question of an American and British entente has its roots in a necessity as stern as any that ever confronted the human race. It carries with it a demand upon the clear vision and statecraft of our leaders paralleled only by the demands made by the war upon those unequal faculties. It involves consequences of world-wide magnitude.
In the first place, it is as well to note that there is no lack of goodwill on either side of the Atlantic. It is, however, a goodwill hampered and confused by ignorance on the one hand, and on the other by occasions of discord which have their roots partly in a traditional distrust and partly in certain divergences between the home policy of the two nations. These are not fundamental, but might become the occasion of severe strain.
The ignorance is only partly wilful. There are Americans who, having persuaded themselves, or been persuaded, that this country is worn-out and dying, strangled in its own red tape, came to England and stayed here months without seeking or finding the slightest evi- dence to the contrary. We believe them to be in the minority of American opinion.
On the side of Britain, the ignorance is partly or even largely a matter of indifference. It is also mixed with the wilful ignorance of distrust. The most disquieting symp- tom in the present British attitude to America is, indeed, this half-latent distrust, of which the other face is fear. Fear is the most deadly weapon in the armoury of war- makers. It is easy to declare roundly that war between this country and America is unthinkable. That statement argues nothing so much as imaginative incapacity on the part of the sentimentalists who make it. It is equally easy to envisage a situation in which these latent suspicions,
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fomented by an unwise and suicidal trade war, would become active causes of aggression.
We have put a finger on the danger spot. The effect of war on the world's markets now leaves us face to face with a situation which, properly mishandled, may well land the world into another internecine feud. The world's stores have been depleted and destroyed, and the cry for increased production to make up the leeway arid make good the damage appears at first sight so entirely justified, that the dangers involved in a trade policy directed solely towards increased production are overlooked or minimised.
Increased production is not enough as an unsupported trade policy. Let us have this quite clear. The export trade in manufactured goods is paid for largely by raw materials for the manufacture of further goods for export, and the profits on the transaction return to the hands of the big traders involved. The inequitable distribution of these profits is the cause of a social confusion that leaves the people of one country suffering the need of goods which they have assisted to produce for sale abroad. Now, unless our future social policy is directed towards a radical betterment of purchasing power among the vast masses of the people constituting the home markets, we are working simply to produce an artificially inflated export trade, the profits from which are used to inflate it still further. And, moreover, the inflation is aggravated by the production of high-priced luxuries intended for the classes which can afford to buy. The lower and middle classes are catered for still more inadequately. Prices go up to offset this. The higher cost of living is itself added to prices, which continue to rise. The consumption of goods by the home markets shrinks yet again. The circle is closed.
The situation is certain to be further complicated by domestic troubles, due to the unstable conditions of a social order based on the enrichment of a few. These domestic troubles not seldom achieve a bitterness that makes a kind of wry sense out of the nonsensical vision of European diplomats solemnly debating : " War abroad, or revolution at home ; which shall we choose ? "
Let us have the international position quite clear. The vast resources of America are barely scratched : she has a genius for organisation and a passion for trade rivalry.
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The signs are not wanting that the big manufacturers are preparing a world trade campaign. Turning to her near neighbours, we find Japan stretching economic feelers towards the unexploited millions and natural resources of China — that annoyingly helpless country. Turning to the Old World, we have Great Britain, with her centuries of trading experience and goodwill, and in the Colonies a vast area of natural wealth, so far quite inade- quately utilised.
We have, therefore, the traders of three great Powers — of limitless ambition and unreckoned potentialities — view- ing the world's markets, turning longing eyes to the raw material centres, and lying awake o' nights wondering how to get themselves their raw material cheap and yet cheaper. They have even been known to wake from their dreams into international crises. Trade follows the flag, don't you know !
To babble of a League of Nations, and in the same moment to contemplate England engaged in a competitive trade war with America on the existing basis of unrestricted competition and mal-distribution of the resultant profits, argues a state of mind so helplessly muddled as to absolve the babblers from any suggestion of malice aforethought.
Every war since the mediaeval dynastic wars has been in a sense a trade war — that is to say, a war for markets. All post-war " difficulties " are inextricably entangled with questions of markets and raw materials. And so long as a handful of men in America and England are allowed to control the destinies of each nation in the interest of vast individual fortunes — ^just so long will there be danger of strain and dispute over markets and oil-wells and other inflammable things, and just so long will these economic autocrats be tempted, having permitted a financial crisis to arise, to raise a storm in which the League of Nations will be rent and scattered like thistledown in the wind.
Under any circumstances that permit of the continued accumulation of vast profits in a few hands, increased pro- duction is a crime against international peace. The fact of the matter is that the root of the problem does not lie in this question of production but in the question of distri- buting the fruits of production. If a way can be found of creating a greater demand for goods in existing markets,
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one incentive to going to war for the privilege of exploiting the barely tapped markets of Russia, China, India, etc., will have been removed.*
Examine from this point of view the necessity for stimulating the home demand. It is obvious that no policy of increased production can benefit the vast producing classes of this country except by increasmg their pur- chasing power — that is to say, by arranging for an equitable distribution of the profits from our export trade. This eases the international situation in two ways. It opens the way to unlimited expansion of the home market; and it carries with it a change in the status of the lower and middle classes that cannot but be a steadying influence in any international crisis.
We believe that the Governments of England and America can be forced to take steps towards increasing the purchasing power of the bulk of the population. No credit is due to them for this. They are perfectly willing to allow the profits of increased production to return to the hands of the big traders, and be used for the production of luxuries, and the generation of more profits in a compe- titive trade war of the old kind, carried on in the old spirit that should have died under the knife of war. They can, however, be compelled to adopt a social policy directed towards increasing the purchasing power of the individual. They can, that is to say, prepare to expand the home market and make increased production a social duty as well as an economic one.
They will do no more than they are forced to do.
Now a social-economic policy at home that is to be of real use in keeping peace abroad must be a very radical one indeed. Any social policy — however excellent in other respects — that leaves the way open for the great financiers of the world to indulge in a headlong race for markets and spheres of influence is absolutely useless as a bulwark
* China is hardly in a position to buy extensively. Her industries, for which she will require iron, steel, and electrical hardware, will have to be financed from outside. India and Persia are more hopeful markets. The South American trade belongs naturally to the States, and in time, when American salesmen learn their way about that market, will undoubtedly do so. As regards Russia, we have wasted men and millions on ruining our trade prospects there, but the economic dominion of Russia is abso- lutely necessary to us if we decide to compete with America in the good old way.
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against war. The foundations of that bulwark must be laid very deep. It will not be enough merely to case social conditions a little. The system under which the profits of tlie community's efforts to increase production are dis- tributed must provide for the increasing expansion of the communal demand. There must be a real power of control vested in the worker classes of the peoples. A League of Nations sitting at Geneva is every whit as exposed to the insidious influence of the big financiers as ever a House of Commons or a Senate or a Chamber of Deputies was so exposed. It functions autocratically.
A League of Peoples — that is to say, a League of Peoples so organised among themselves that every class in the community has its share in the control of the national trade — will be able to function democratically. An edu- cated, well-fed, and responsible-minded democracy is unlikely to make war, because it is not susceptible to every wind that blows from a high financial quarter, as are the under-educated, irresponsible pseudo-democracies of the passing era.
It is not possible to conceive of a whole nation of bloody-minded profiteers. A handful of men, functionally de-humanised by their absolute power over millions of men and credit, are capable of plunging a nation into the throes of an international crisis with thc-intention of capturing an oil-well centre. A whole nation, functioning through its industries, controlled jointly by all the parties to industry, is not thus capable.
There are only two peoples in the world to-day capable of a social policy sufficiently radical to make it difficult — increasingly difficult to the point of impossibility — for wars to be made for world markets. These are America and England. There will be no world-peace without a com- plete amity between England and America. There will be no lasting amity between them except one that is based on understanding between the people of the two countries, and not on pacts between their financiers.
For the sake of the peace so recently and hardily achieved, it is imperative to reach this understanding.
{To he continued^ 141
Letters ; Posted and Unposted (vi
By Constance Malleson 26
Edwardes Square,
January 14th, 1919.
My Dear,
You did look an angel this morning ! But I hate meet- ing you with other people. I think I'd almost rather not see you at all. Are you as well and as energetic as you look? I expect it's really very good for you to have such a lot of work to do. Time to think and worry is apt to be bad for one.
As I write, I am looking out through the window, and I am wondering if you too are feeling the glory of the day and of the divine sunlight. In the Square, the funny civet- cat tree trunks are all bathed in mellow light, and through the rich earth, infinite quantities of young shoots are pushing their fresh green noses.
I feel, deep down, that you are now really restarted with your work. In the spring it will come to complete fulfil- ment. I bless you . . . and love you. I hope for you, my dear, and dream for you.
4L. ^U ^L ^
^ TT TT vP
But I myself — I become every day more like the lady in the Boarding House. (" She had no work to keep her sane, or love to make her mad.") My new job has fallen through ! Yet — there's always a certain satisfaction in go- ing on, on through the emptiness, just because I am I.
27
Edwardes Square,
January i^th, 19 19.
Dear,
It is very cold to-night, here in my room — and I would like to be sitting wrapped in my new fu^ry coat, hearing
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your words. I've christened my coat " Dolon," because it is just the sort of grey wolfish hide that Dolon wore when he stole out along the ground, through the darkness of the enemy camp, towards the *' Ships of Argolis."
Good night, Dear One. I take your two hands in mine, and kiss them.
28
Edwardes Square,
January 16th, 1919.
Here are the lines I was trying to remember : — The Lover in Winter Plaineth for the Spring.
16^^ Century (?)
O western wind, when wilt thou blow That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms And I in my bed again !
29
Edwardes Square,
January lyth, 1919.
I have just met Maynard in St. Martin's Lane. He's told me about your new job. Good ! Dear, things are shaping well. You are on the very threshold of an infinite stretch of possibilities. It's like standing in the little stone porch of the " Cat and Fiddle," and gazing out across an endless and empty splendour of wide moorland, waiting. Cast your personality into the world — there's a harsh and vivid magnetism about you, which comes, I think, of an intense imagination; a streak of something divine, some- thing that pierces through the dreams which hover mist-like behind your eyes.
God, how I'd love to see you among your own wild hills ! And I'd love you to know my part of Ireland. I'd love you to feel the generosity of the land, and its wild love of freedom. Racing along the sands of Mullaghmore, one goes mad with the sound of the sea, and the smell of the tawny golden seaweed. O, one is made clean and holy in the drenching spray of great Atlantic breakers, as they crash and roar and cry along the broken shores of Ireland.
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Edwardes Square,
January igth, 1919.
It's funny, but I hate to let a day go past without writing- you a line; but on Sunday at Little Ashford they don't have a post out. The last time I was there was in 19 1 6, the week after Dennis and I were married.
It was most amazingly beautiful in the country this week-end. I had almost forgotten that one could find such peace anywhere. There's something I've been wanting to say to you all last week : if for any reason, at any time, you don't want my love any more, will you tell me — please?
My heart flames high, Beloved. I want to throw my arms about your neck, and I want to curl into the hollow of your arm. I want to stroke your neck and your shoulders, and bury my lips in the soft warmth of your skin.
I dine out, I dance at Desti's, but more often than not, other men only remind me the more of you.
31
Edwardes Square,
January 20th, 19 19.
Blessed One,
I long to know how you are, what you're thinking, what you're feeling. You know, I would give many days off my life if you could be standing here in my sitting-room to-night; if I could put my arms about your shoulders, if I could kiss your dear eyes, and if I could make you know a little of the whole deep tenderness of my love.
32
Edwardes Square,
January 2Jst, 1919
Dear One,
It was good to see your handwriting this morning. O, so good !
How have you crept into my heart? I'm not able to understand it. If I stop writing, and look out into the Square, and let my thoughts dwell on vou, then my heart will suddenly beat faster, and my breath come with difficulty. . . . You will let me know if you'd like to dine
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any night, but I expect you are too busy. Except for your little line this morning, it's just ten days since I've seen you alone, or heard from you. My dear, I wish I could be more real help to you; but my thoughts do surround you with all love and tenderness, and when you want me, I'm here. Your work will go right. You have in you the power and the inspiration. Work of yours will always have breadth and depth, and will be alight with the splendour of your imagination.
^ ^ ^ j^
T^ T? TT Tv
I've been wondering if you've got a floor rug for your new studio. There's one here I want you to have ; it came from Kirmdn.
Bless you, dear.
MOYA.
33
Edwardes Square,
January 22nd, 1919.
Yesterday, you wore the old brown suit you used always to wear for those first rehearsals. Five months ago ! Fve
been writing to you for five months I haven't always
written every day, but quite often. Queer, unposted letters !
Sometimes now, when I go out with my daily line to you, I, absurdly enough, kiss the envelope before I slip it into the big red letter-box; then, afraid that someone has seen, I slip guiltily through the dusk, while my rebel heart is singing a strange small song of joy.
34
Edwardes Square,
January 2^th, 1919.
Dear One,
I do thank you for your honesty. I love you for it, and I am very, very fond of you. You said once : " Can't you just kiss and forget?" I want now to forget, so that in time I can again kiss you. There has been much that is rare and precious between us. I don't want to throw it all away. I shall pack my boxes, and I shall go away on tour, and I shall grow very happy as Spring sweeps over field and hill. I shall walk out from the towns. And the song
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of the birds, and the moist smell of the earth, will loosen the pain about my heart. I am glad that through tliis bad time I have given you the real me — all of me. And I take comfort in the thought that in time, things will heal, and leave hardly a scar.
Good-bye, my Love that might have been.
35
Edwardrs Square,
February yth, 1919.
Dear,
I was odious yesterday Forgive. Things have
been more difficult than you know, so forgive.
Herewith, a peace offering . . . For you I have
wanted to plunder all the heavens and all the stars. I
have wanted to lay at your feet all beauty and. all joy. I
have wanted not to see you content, but to see you creating
and striving, to see you glorious; and not even to see, my
dear, only to know you so.
# # # #
I want to feel the swift brushing of your lips against mine, the touch of your hands. I want to be near you in deep w^ays. I want to see you grow and grow.
It's absurd, but I think I still love you; and yet . . . Anyhow, we part good friends.
(To be concluded.)
146
A Study
By John Rodker
In the middle of a carefully successful life, John Ferguson had occasion to meet his partner at the Royal Agricultural Hall for an exhibition of woollens. Arriving ten minutes early, he decided to wait, and as Islington was new to him, strolled along the High Street. A window crammed with photographs brought him up short. On a background of red velvet they were arranged in patterns of squares, hearts, and crowns ; and long, oblong cards said in gold " 2s. 6d. a dozen." These faces were very vivid. Each had a re- markable vitality of its own. Ferguson thought they must have been taken in a very fierce light. Shop-girls in decollete, enormous artificial roses at the corsage, a broad band across the fluffed hair, proclaimed themselves the sirens of their alleys. Others were so pathetically chlorotic that Fergusori imagined them already as messages from the dead. There were sailors with smiling eyes and twisted mouths, youths fashionably extravagant in material of such poor quality that it seemed an indecency, soldiers with stiff coifs standing as tight as lead. The modelling of each face had been suppressed by the strong light, but the eyes were in terrible detail.
Though Ferguson's appointment was past, he could not take his gaze from the fatuity of these eyes or their misery. He noticed brawny workmen sitting easily, knees wide apart, and cap on head, with benevolent expressions and fierce eyes. Two friends, a life-long devotion in, the hand resting on his friend's shoulder, made him feel sick. Such poor creatures desecrated friendship. Yet he could not tell why he was so impressed.
He was not an amateur in humanity like his wife, but he felt he would like to have some of these faces by him. He bought four dozen.
At home he decided not to show the cards to his wife.
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She would tease him about it to his friends, make it her jumping-off board, for however remote a topic, for quite the next six months. She might even start a craze for the collection of photographs of this sort among her artistic friends, or a club called the Amateurs of Humanity.
The photographs became to him what Port Said photo- graphs are to other men, the earnest of a fiercer life. These grim or fatuous faces, chlorotic grimaces, or sly invitations excited and disgusted him, but he always went back to his baths in humanity.
The thought that these people did not wash rather pleased him ; he was disgusted by his wife's use of bath salts, and tried to explain why. She wept a good deal in secret, wondering what had come over him.
Meanwhile Ferguson looked at his typist with specula- tive eyes.
His character changed. He became ambitious, worked feverishly, doubled, trebled his income. His staff began to fear him. He was no longer good-humouredly tolerant or superior. He felt he was one of them, and very small deviations were met with dismissal.
Then one evening the cards were jjone. His wife explained that in looking for a paper-knife she had found the photographs of a large number of beastly people. Were they relatives whose existence had been kept secret from her? He laughed, feeling he would be very cross. She wanted him to explain them — he would not. How could she have understood? Seeing his rage, she began to cry, and confessed she had burnt them. They were so ugly — not even good photographs — made the house feel bad. ^ '^ .,
He made haste to comfort her. If she cried any more, she would go into hysterics, and that was always the devil.
The next day he thought that, since the mischief was done, he did not mind. In a little he became his old self, carefully prosperous, kindly tolerant. He never bought another set of photographs, but he looked back on this fierce activity as one recalls a golden age or a jealous mistress.
He found life very flat.
148
Frank Harris' Portraits
By Lucifer
Some years ago I was motoring with Frank Harris on the Cornici road, and as we approached a lonely, strangely romantic building, built right down to and everi over- hanging the sea, Harris pointed excitedly and stood up. " That is my hotel. I sank my all in that. It is gone." Naturally, I was interested. Harris the critic, the Shake- spearean (not scholar) interpreter, the splendid editor, the whilom financier, the man with the great voice, picked out in the 'nineties by a society-leader as capable of rising to the Premiership " if only he could restrain himself " ; Harris the dueller of Fleet Street, the philosopher of pity, the fierce Elizabethan born three hundred years out of his time — I never imagined he was in the hotel business : I stared at the picturesque, baroque, theatrical-looking erection in astonishment, and then I noted that it was shut off from all approach; it just stood, beetling over the Mediterranean, quite superb in its insulation, its honeymoon inaccessibility, on rock, a thing of defiance, like the man, a hotel which had no communications, a lure, a delusiori, and into that splendid fastness, for so it seemed, the literary-critic had put his money, as a man at Monte Carlo might stake his all on the throw of a croupier.
The thing was so inexpressibly comic that we laughed. " So I am on the road once more," Harris said, and he has been on the via dura ever since. It was my first lesson in finance. "To make money," Harris went on, "you must be sure of the details." That is the lesson. The artist is not a financier. He crashes. In the City the question is the flaw. Find the flaw. Concentrate on the flaw. Only when no flaw can be found is speculation scientific. Harris, no doubt with the Dark Lady of the Sonnets in his mind, saw only the position, the sheer beauty of the spot,
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the majestic solitude of his hotel, buttressed against the blue water, completely, as advertisements would say, " self- contained."
I pictured his entry — the house-warming. From Paris there came a wonderful chef. Sicilian waiters, a Neapolitan band, a staff, a Swiss porter, probably a Scottish housekeeper, and, of course, Germans, then Harris, in a top-hat, the English milord — all clambering painfully with alpenstocks into the silent building flanking the sea, and then frantic travellers, would-be guests, invites, gesticulating from the heights of the Cornici road, inquiring the way down, seeking a path, a lift, a mule-track, some means of approach, finally in despair making the steep descent, to find themselves — marooned; in a hotel where food could not be procured because, because in this paradisiacal abode, where all things bright and beautiful abounded, the one thing needful was lacking; there was no road; it was a hotel minus com- munications, a dream-palace.
And then the flight. First the chef, followed by the waiters. Finally, Harris, alone in his glory, gazing out from the terrace across the waters, taking a last farewell of his investment muted in the evening silence. The climb back to the road. The frenzied look-back. The drive anywhere, away from the enchanted place. The night of tears, the morrow, then — Shakespeare again.
I could not help recalling this scene on reading Con- temporary Portraits, by Frank Harris, published in New York (sole agent here, E. Pearson, 88, Abbey Road, N.W., price £i is., postage i^d. extra). They are little jets of luminous spray. As pen-pictures, they could not be better done, for Harris is mellow; he has grown suave; he has obviously been at pains to paint as a work of love or art, and as an analyser he certainly has no superior. His subjects are politicians and writers, and the politicians he treats generously. His portrait of Mr. Balfour is not so subtle as the terrible likeness drawn by the " Gentleman with the Duster " ; he admires Clemenceau immensely, he is admirably just towards our own Premier ; curiously enough. Viscount Grey is the most soigne and well-balanced estimate of all.
No two men could be more unlike than Grey, the product of birth, class, tradition, and race, and Harris, the
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FRANK HARRIS' PORTRAITS
universalist, the man of pity, the adventurer, the plunger into life's manifold surexcitations. It is a kindly, dignified portrait. Harris has understood his subject, as he under- stands the combative greatness of Clemenceau. On Mr. Balfour, he is not so sure. One feels he might awfully like to be asked to dinner by that inscrutable prince of culture. One thinks of the story narrated about the two in Mrs. Asquith's autobiography.
The best things are on other writers. Here Harris lets fly. Clearly his speciality is George Moore, whom he fails to appreciate. He lectures him for failings in grammar. The physical description of Moore is a master- piece of gall. Harris has no pity for the man who rejects pity. He does not seem to understand that Moore is rhythm incarnate, the child discoverer, the merchant of word-beauty, and so The Brook Kerith leaves him cold, rouses him to professional indignation that Moore should attempt the recreation of his creator without a linguistic knowledge of the Talmud. All which is rather petty. For George Moore is a consummate artist. It matters little whether he has anything new to say — who has? — he cer- tainly hasn't a " Jewish" nose. Moore and Harris are poles apart, like England and Ireland. They are dog and cat. When Moore purrs, Harris barks. When Harris wags his tail, Moore extends a claw. Harris understands Bernard Shaw far better, because Shaw is more English.
He cannot get away from Shaw, who, as in the book on Oscar Wilde, figures as a Greek chorus, eventually con- tributing a chapter to show how Harris ought to have done it. This is excellent fun. Harris takes himself with pontifical seriousness. Shaw just slings ink. Yet Harris is no doubt right in ascribing to Shaw an English hardness curious in an Irishm.an, and a want of passion derivative of orthodox Puritanism. This it is, more than the knicker- bockers, that has saved Shaw from ever being found out. He presides, like Mr. Balfour, in and over any Govern- ment. Criticism can find no loophole. When tremend- ously in earnest, we think he is joking; when he jokes we almost weep, and so he occupies the first pulpit in England, regardless of the Lambeth concordance or the prospective Catholicisation of England. He has got so far that no man now trusts his own or any other opinion on the enigma. He was against Paul Kruger. He un-
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frocked Shakespeare's doll women. He is a capitalist- socialist, and yet not a Sinn Feiner. He has made so many people laugh that society will never forgive him, and yet it seems doubtful whether he is a humorist, like Sterne, or Dickens, or Moliere, or Jacobs, or Cervantes; his quality is wit, his strength is sincerity, his gift is moderation. He is the Campanile of modern letters, the matchbox of every literary aspirant; to Harris he is both spiritual home and buffeting basis.
Perhaps the best thing in the volume is the memory of Dowson, which reveals Harris as the great sympathiser. He touches off Kipling as the songster of national preju- dice; he shows us facets of Pater, Pierre Loti, Dreisser and Herbert Spencer, who could not stand the noise of Harris' voice. These things are chunks of life, corona of coronas.
All his life Harris has suffered from the volume of his voice-organ, which somehow acts as an irritant upon his fellow-creatures. I believe he started out on a box in Hyde Park. His voice is remarkable. As a politician, he could have leapt upwards, if only, as the lady remarked, he could restrain himself. To Herbert Spencer, even with an ear- trumpet, this stentorian weapon was an infliction, and Harris certainly scores in his account of the pallid philo- sopher petulantly explaining that he " could not endure contradiction." Were Harris to begin life again, I would suggest, not hotels, but voice modulation. His oratory and contradictoriness have been a perpetual source of trouble; Harris was a born actor who never acted, a made politician who never descended to the hustings ; he might have been our " Billy Sunday," or the first lieutenant of the Salvation Army, When he recites his own stories audiences weep, and yet in conversation his tempest rouses all the conflicting winds, and silently his listeners slink away.
I shall never forget such a scene. Harris was lunchine a man who had written a deathless poem, and, full of admiration, was hurling praise at him across an excellent steak at the Cafe Royal. Suddenly the recipient of this eloquent praise rose, put on his coat and — left. He could not stand it.
Like Herbert Spencer, the poet slunk off, leaving us speechless. "What have I done?" said Harris. Poor Middleton, the poet, who was with us, answered sadly :
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FRANK HARRIS' PORTRAITS f
" You were too emphatic, Harris," and so it seemed. Once more the voice had defeated the heart. Probably, if Harris had talked reservedly about the weather, we should have had an eventless but profitable lunch.
This book is eminently enjoyable. It tingles. Harris has the supreme gift of lust of life and a dauntless self- assertion. Stung, he can sting back, yet always he is the searcher after truth, after his fashion. We get a clear cold bath from his pen, and it invigorates. The great are public property. We want to know how they look, what they do in ordinary circumstances, how they sneeze or put on their boots. Harris is master of his job. He is the psycho- analyst of Fleet Street, with a deep human understanding. The man who could put his fortune in an inaccessible hotel is clearly the child-artist, the very spirit of contradiction. He might have been Prime Minister or a Labour leader. He chose to be a financier. Surely the old Roman was a wise man who wrote : " Stick to your last." We can only be one thing in this life. He has now returned to his books. His subject is humanity at large. There he stands out, like his former hotel, serene and quiet, over- looking the waters of Time.
15:
Father to Son
The Letters of Three Generations
By Basil Macdonald Hastings
The attitude of father to son, and that of son to father, are reputed to have varied considerably throughout the ages, and more especially has it been impressed upon us that latter-day relations differ from those of Victorian days as violently as chalk from cheese. We have been told that father and son nowadays are " pals " rather than parent and child, at any rate from the day when the boy first goes to the public school. It may be imagined that this impression is obtained from the undoubted improvement in youthful savoiT faire. The public school is now a delightful home compared to what it was fifty years ago, and the newcomer finds joy in it. This inspires in the boy a great friendli- ness towards the parent who sent him there, and at one of the crises of his life the boy feels ease whereas his father at a similar moment endured misery. In the father there is hereby induced a respect for his son instead of a pity, but whether the parental attitude in a disciplinary sense has varied, there is good reason to doubt.
In the writer's possession are three interesting series of letters. The first series are written by a father of 1862 to his son on the occasion of his first going to a public school. The second series are written by that son in 1892, when he in turn had a boy similarly situated. And the third series by the grandson of the first father, dated 1920, are of course in process of writing. It must be pointed out that the letters are genuine, and it should be borne in mind that heredity accounts in all probability for the occasional similarity of topic. Here are three of the letters, one from each series. -' ' ';
1862. " I have read again and again your last letter — that cry of agony at being separated from those who love you
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and whom you love so much. I am grieved to the heart to think of your unhappiness. I hope you will try your best to overcome your feelings as you cannot but be convinced that what we have done has been for your benefit. Remember that to remain at college does not mean that you are to be separated from those you love. It is only for a time. Soon you will be united with those who will rejoice at your progress and improvement. Whatever advantages a boy may possess at home, he can never learn so well as at school, nor can his mind and manners be so well formed as when he is amongst strangers whose care It is to guide and direct his youthful efforts and energies. This ought to have weight with you, for you are not so ignorant as not to be able to reason on such matters. You must not think I am angry. I only grieve for you that the deep affection of your heart makes you the victim of such suffering.
" You make an excuse about writing with a quill pen. There is no need for that. It is the best sort of pen, and the writing looks much better and more free than when done with a steel pen. And I don't like excuses about writing generally. Write as well as you can. This will shew that you respect the person you are writing to. Above all, be natural. Avoid affectation and long words.
" I would send you a paper now and then, but I think you would not be allowed to have it. There are so many objectionable things published in journals now. You never received the number of Dickens I sent vou. I sup- pose your superiors think it objectionable reading.
" We are all going to the Exhibition to-morrow. It is to be kept open till the end of October, I believe, and there is some talk of having it lit up at night by gas. If this proposal is adopted, it is expected that vast numbers will visit the great collection in the evenings."
1892.
" I have received your letter of the 19th September. I understand how you feel and assure you that my feelings
were just as poignant when I first went to , I would
have great anxiety about you if I did not recall how very soon my own home-sickness wore off, and how happy and interested I very shortly became. Your mother and I are
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selfish enough to be glad that it has hurt you so to be separated from us. We both know — and I more par- ticularly— that you will be vastly happier than you could ever be at home. Of course, if you find your position intolerable, I will take you away. But I am confident that in a few weeks, in a few days, perhaps, you will have dis- covered as a very perfect place indeed.
" Certainly, put your name down for the elocution examination. It does not matter that you have had no practice. It would have an electrical effect if you were to recite the stories of St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke and St. John, articulating each syllable with a determination that not one person in the theatre should miss hearing a single word. This method of articulate pronunciation, slowly mouthing every word, is sure to 'fetch' the examiner, and the oddness of the subject, historical narrative — not poetry, would excite his sympathy.
" There were several inaccuracies in your letter, words left out, etc. It is a good plan to read your letters through after writing them, and weigh every sentence, word and syllable, with a view to stating all facts precisely, and your views generally. Never sacrifice perspicuity to brevity. ^
" Our seventeenth cat has departed. What will be, in order of succession, the number of the cat installed here when you return ? Time and the event alone will show."
1920.
"Of course, is topping. Wasn't I there? You
begin your letter by saying ' I have tons to tell you.' But the only information conveyed to me is that shredded wheat may be bought at the tuck-shop as well as sweets, that jam is not obtainable, but that brown sugar and cocoa are. My dear boy, I am not interested in sweets. I ate my last candy seventeen years ago. It came out of a slot machine at a railway station, where I had to spend an otherwise foodless night. Don't talk to me of toffee or chatter even of chocolate. As for shredded wheat I reel at the prospect of its contiguity. Brown sugar is beastly stuff that attracts wasps, and cocoa makes me stammer. (Do you remember the niggers at Broadstairs singing, ' I do like a cup of c-c-cocoa'?)
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" You say : ' I'm sorry I didn't write, but I can't, for I never get a chance, but as soon as I do I shall write, because I like it. There is so much to tell ! ' Very well. I take you at your word. When you are able to snatch an hour from your crowded day, tell me if there are any buildings still standing beside the tuck-shop. Tell me if the boys go anywhere else all day but to the tuck-shop. Tell me not when the tuck-shop is open, but when it is shut. Tell me what you do between, say, shredded-wheat time and jam- time, between jam-time and sweet-time, and, above all, how you employ yourself after cocoa p.m.
" Your letter concludes in minatory terms : ' You are allowed to send me a certain amount of cakes and sweets, but not a great amount to make you ill. The only reason they stop it is because if everybody was getting huge cakes every day we'd all be ill.' Well, my son, I know one boy who will not get a huge cake every day. I had quite made up my mind to send you a 14-pounder every week-day and a 20-pounder on Sundays, but your warning came just in time. I have cancelled the order for the cakes, and am happy to think I have so provided an anticipatory pro- phylactic for any prospective megrims.
" You will probably discover some money in this letter. I want you to understand that I do not send it. The cash, if there, has been screwed out of the housekeeping money by your sentimental mother, and should, properly speaking, have been expended on table delicacies for your harassed father."
So three fathers, of three generations, have written. There are those who will see great differences between them, but the writer can see none at all. Apart from a greater easiness in approach, the present-day attitude of father to son and of son to father is identical in all essentials with that in the middle sixties. It is, has been, and always will be.
157
Women in Present-day Politics
By Cicely Hamilton
Woman, as a citizen, has so far made little definite impres- sion upon public affairs; the nation's politics, to all appearance, is still a masculine preserve. The woman elector who records her vote at the next general election will record it for a man-devised programme, for a party run on masculine traditions — traditions as yet scarcely influ- enced by the new element in citizenship.
Quite apart from inexperience there are valid excuses for her apathy and lack of initiative. Democracy, all the world over, has lost faith in itself and its methods. Further, the official entry of women into politics took place at an unfortunate moment ; at a moment, that is to say, when the much-demanded vote had declined in value — since representative institutions and all that they stand for had practically ceased to exist. While the war lasted represen- tative institutions lapsed — in fact, if not in law; their methods of criticism, discussion and compromise being incompatible with the rapidity and secrecy demanded by the national danger, they were — (as always) — set aside till the national danger had passed. Set aside firmly and inevitably; in accordance with the unwritten provisions of the real " Social Contract."
The real " Social Contract," by virtue of which govern- ments exist and human beings submit to their ordinances, is, in all its provisions, a compromise between the will to self-direction and the need for personal security. That we may be reasonably certain of life, health and property, that we may sleep sound o' nights without fear of sudden violence, we resign the desirable privilege of doing in all things as we please, of spending all our gains as we will; paying for the security afforded by police protection, decent drains, and the like, by parting with a measure of our pleasant right of self-direction. Rates and taxes are merely another name for forced labour, forced abstinence,
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loss of freedom; such forced labour and abstinence being the price exacted for security provided by the State. The fundamental justification of all forms of government lies neither in the Divine Right of Peoples or of Kings, but in the power of Peoples or Kings to furnish good value in security for the measure of freedom surrendered. And a stable condition of government is the result not only oi reasonable security but of a general conviction on the pari: of the community that it is not being asked to pay too high a price in loss of self-direction — forced labour and abstinence — for the measure of security provided.
Security — like butter — has a higher value in seasons when it is not plentiful ; in times of real danger (as during the war) the price exacted for it in loss of self-direction would be refused in days of peace. Free institutions — that is to say, our system of Parliamentary representation and criticism — ^were bartered for security in 19 14, and bartered without protest or resentment. The power of the purse for which Hampden died, the right of free speech for which Wilkes fought an oligarchy — these and other safeguards of a people's liberties went by the board before the first British soldier had set foot on the quay at Boulogne. For the time being security, threatened, had gone up in price ; and political liberties were cheapened — a drug in the market. An immediate change in values had been brought about by the peril of the European war.
We were still suffering from the effects of that change in values when Parliament, in its wisdom, saw fit to grant the franchise to women. A few years earlier " Votes for Women " was a cry to rouse partisan passion in adherents and opponents alike; but it is safe to say that at the moment the measure enfranchising women became law of the land a large proportion of those concerned would have been stirred to far greater emotion by the news that Big Bertha had exploded or that bacon had gone down three- pence. And this lack of immediate enthusiasm or protest, so far from being reprehensible, showed a praiseworthy sense of proportion; food and the destruction of enemy armaments were of far more importance at the moment than the status of women or the ballot-box.
If political values have not yet attained their pre-war level they have altered considerably since the day our
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enfranchisement was granted; and what it imports us to know is, how far the initial — and in the circumstances natural — indifference of women to the fact of her citizen- ship is wearing off? How soon, and after what fashion, will women make themselves felt as a factor in public affairs? Not only in those public affairs which definitely concern the province of home and children, but in those general matters which affect all citizens alike ? . . . Have they, on such questions, a point of view which will influence and modify the aims of existing parties? Or will they merely swell the ranks of existing parties, accepting their masculine tradition?
i As regards what may be termed purely feminine politics, there is a fairly definite programme which is supported by feminists practically all the world over ; a programme whose root-demand and principle is equality of status in matters political and personal. Equal suffrage, without " fancy " discriminations — such as that on the ground of age ; equal rights in marriage and in the guardianship of legitimate children. That is to say, abolition of all legal sanction to the idea of a wife as property. And the programme, where sexual offences are concerned, may be summed up briefly as a demand that the law shall not penalise the offender who happens to be easiest to catch. . . . That simple principle has, so far, guided male legislation on the subject.
On the economic side of the charter is the claim for " equal pay for equal work " ; its application, a demand that the principle shall be carried into practice in the Civil Ser- vice; the Government, as employer, giving to its fellow- employers a lead in the right direction. With this claim is bound up another : that employment in all grades of the Civil Service shall be open to women as to men, the State thus affirming the principle of equality of opportunity.
All these demands have been pressed in the past and are bound to be pressed in the future ; for behind some of them, at least — such as that for equality of opportunity — stands not only the conscious purpose of those who desire the advancement of women and resent their disabilities, but the semi-conscious yet very definite revolt against domes- ticity in all its forms — the life bounded by the home. The war only brought to a head the distaste of women of every class for duties connected with the household; with the
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younger generation of women workers domestic service and private teaching had long been looked on as work fit only for those who could get nothing better. For good or for evil, that fact is bound to colour woman's political out- look— to an extent that is not yet realised by the man who sees in her a home-lioving animal, to be satisfied with measures affecting the welfare of the family. It must be remembered, in fairness, that the home has not only been woman's kingdom — it has been her prison as well ; hence there is nothing unnatural — rather the reverse — in her eagerness to be free of its duties, to seek her livelihood else- where. The reaction, it may be, will wear itself out; but in the meantime it is a force to be reckoned with — in the life industrial and social and, through these, in the life political.
And be it noted that the revolt against domestic careers is not confined to these islands; it would seem to be a characteristic of the women of civilised races. In Austria, a few months ago, I was told of the difficulty of obtaining cooks and housemaids — in Austria where large industry is practically at a standstill, and any sort of living hard to get. The problem may not be so acute as it is here — but it is a problem all the same. And the cry in all new countries for domestic help is not only a post-war cry. Nor is the spirit which prompts the objection to household service confined to one sex only; it reveals itself in men in the stubborn refusal to work on the land — a refusal which swells the tale of the unemployed in American cities while farmers seek in vain for labour and demand the immigrant who will con- descend to toil in the fields. The phenomenon apparently results from a growing gregariousness in the race; due partly, perhaps, to our mode of education — in crowds — but more largely to the use of machinery. Steam and elec- tricity are potent herding factors; we live where we can feed the machine, and the machine, in turn, feeds us. Hence the majority of men and women have learned to dread quiet of all things; they seek to work noisily, in numerous company, to exist in the stir of a crowd.
It may be taken for granted that the natural tendency of the woman of to-day is to refuse work that is domestic, so long as any other is open to her ; and that this tendency, in politics as elsewhere, will eventually clash with the masculine endeavour to keep her in her proper sphere.
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The clash may be sharp in the near future; as Europe realises her inability to maintain a pre-war population, and the struggle for life grows keener, very definite efforts will certainly be made to oust women's labour from all in- dustries that are not domestic. Nor is it likely that the process will cease when demand and supply have balanced each other in the domestic service market. Statesman- ship, masculine as well as feminine, may have to reckon with an attempt, more or less instinctive, more or less deliberate, to exclude her from any calling that might give her economic independence.
The resulting situation may not be easy to handle. If the war improved the position of the male trade unionist financially, it also weakened it morally. "Skilled " trades, under pressure of necessity, were mastered, often with rapidity and ease, by diluted feminine labour; and the fiction that years of a man's life must be devoted to the acquiring of a particular mechanical process was exploded once for all. To the women of every belligerent country has been revealed the fact that in many walks of the life industrial they can do just as well as their brothers; and they cannot be expected to turn down the page of their his- tory on which that experience is written, or recognise, when they need to earn their bread, that the regulations which exclude them from making their living as they will, are anything but harsh and arbitrary. While the male worker, also pressed by the need to earn his bread, is bound to assert his right to a monopoly of the trades he holds — and even, as the pressure grows harder, to attempt to enlarge his preserve . . . Masculine as well as feminine states- manship will have to take long views on the subject; con- sidering, amongst other problems, the complicated problem of the birth-rate. How far — given need for decreasing population — is it advisable to drive women into matrimony and less reputable forms of dependence on men by depriv- ing them of other means of livelihood ?
There are certain current questions on which women, if they were not apathetic towards public affairs, would cer- tainly have made themselves heard. One of these is the housing difficulty; since lack of decent accommodation presses far more hardly on the still considerable body of home-keeping women than it does on the average man.
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The full wretchedness of overcrowding is borne by the wife and mother. Yet no woman's organisation, so far as I know, has ventured on even a polite remonstrance with those who have failed to deliver the necessary goods. The non-party attitude may be carried too far ; any representa- tive body of women would have at least the moral right to propose what are known as "conversations " on the subject with the monopolists of the bricklaying industry. " Con- versations " in which could be set forth with frankriess the point of view of that class of consumer which suffers above all others from restriction in housing supply.
The omission to make any such move is the more regret- table because it is plain that legislation in the future will tend more and more to become a matter of arrangement between the interests of organised bodies. In our modern and complicated society it is inevitable that Parliament should delegate many of its former functions to forms of representation which have made and are making them- selves a part of the life of the State. Measures affecting particular trades and interests are put forward only after consultation with those interests ; Parliament, representing the general public, reserving to itself little but the right of revision and criticism. In the controversy with the build- ing unions the ex-Service man has intervened — his interests being plainly affected by refusal to admit him to the trade ; but (so far as I know) women's organisations have not yet pressed their claim for the special corisideration which is also due to them. Yet it is a claim that, put forward, would be upheld by the public. sense of justice.
In the same way it is to be doubted if any considerable body of women has as yet grasped the fact that they have a special right to be consulted in the matter of the hospital system, that the threatened failure of the voluntary hos- pital concerns women, as a class, even more than it concerns their men. The closing of hospitals means inevitably an increase in the amount of nursing that will have to be done in the home by the average amateur woman ; who will suffer not only by being deprived of proper care in her own times of sickness, but by the extra labour, the work and worry involved by the sickness of others. . . . The moral right of the housekeeping woman to special consideration and hearing when hospital arrangements are under discussion is
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so clear and patent that it has, one imagines, only to be stated in order to be frankly admitted; yet it would seem to be unlikely that the right will be urged when the medical profession makes its bargain with the Ministry of Health.
The medical profession, like every other, has its post- war difficulties — difficulties that amount to a crisis. It is faced with the fact that the classes which formerly paid doctors' fees and subscriptions to hospitals — including the medical schools where the doctor obtains his training — can no longer afford to do both. The hospitals, no doubt, could be saved from bankruptcy by the more general ad- mission of the paying patient; but the admission of the paying patient would mean not only a blow to the lucrative nursing home industry but an immediate loss of fees to the medical profession as a whole. That is the position, econo- mically, as regards the medical profession; which, as a body, must desire — naturally — to keep the paying patient out of the general hospital. It must desire to keep the general hospital on a non-paying basis, and to supplement its falling income by assistance out of rates or taxes.
Whatever the ultimate decision and bargain, the women of the classes affected unfavourably will' always be the greatest sufferers; as the closing of wards, under present conditions, adds sick nursing to the duties of one class of woman, so continued refusal to provide accommodation for the paying patient adds sick nursing to the duties of the woman of the struggling middle class — the class which cannot afford the expense of a nursing home, and will be hit by the hospital rate. In these circumstances, the right to be consulted is clear; were it claimed it would hardly be denied. The fact that it has not been claimed is merely another proof of our apathy in public affairs, our lack of under- standing foresight as to how they will affect our private lives.
There is another claim that should be made — and made with a steady insistence. In all industrial disputes that affect our actual conditions of living — the price of necessi- ties, of housing, fire and food — the women of the house- keeping class should be represented during the negotiations for a settlement. Progress in politics, as in every other sphere, means adaptation to environment; and our political
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environment is not what it was before the days of the fre- quent industrial blockade. The root-principle of indus- trial blockade — like that of international blockade — is the use of the non-combatant as an auxiliary fighting force ; the non-combatant — the consumer — is deprived of necessaries, in' the hope that, having suffered enough from the want of them, he Mall clamour for the peape that means relief, and force the Government to consent to the price that is asked for it. In every industrial conflict on a large scale, the consumer is used, as a weapon ; and it is the housekeeping class whose hardships are most effective in producing the iresults desired. It is placed, in such conflicts, in the position of a semi-belligerent. The housekeeping interest, therefore, has a right to insist that, as it is a combatant — however unwillingly — it shall be represented at the settle- ment. Having been enlisted in the service of a belligerent, and used as an auxiliary, it must be admitted as a party to the making of peace.
A right — even though it be but the right to concern yourself with your own affairs — is seldom conceded unasked ; we cannot therefore expect that the housekeeping- interest will be recognised as a party to industrial warfare and peace-making unless it demands such recognition. At the same time it is more than possible that the demand, once made, would not meet with great opposition ; the politician, of whatever party, who looked beyond the gain of the moment, and was not prejudiced against the interference of women merely because they are women, might see in the intervention of the housekeeping interest an influence that would make for understanding. The housekeeping in- terest is common to all classes ; the foundations of its pros- perity, in all ranks of life, are laid upon the same commo- dities. Being so constituted, its advantage advantages others — even those who oppose its desires in the name of a party or cause.
There would be no immediate or startling results from the innovation ; man would still be a fighting animal. But the representation of the housekeeping interest during " conversations " or negotiations would be a reminder of that domestic, individual side of life which man, as a rule, thrusts out of his memory when fired and possessed by the collective spirit, the spirit that makes for conflict. Men
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fight when they have limited their interests, and are con- scious only of one aspect of their lives — when they are coal- owners, railwaymen, Englishmen, Germans only — not human beings of many interests, with lives of more thari one aspect. The result of the interposition might be valuable to more than the housekeeper. . . And there would be a result upon public opinion — also gradual but none the less valuable — from reports on the various agreements arrived at; published in the widespread housekeeping interest, 'with a view to pointing out in what manner the peace-terms affected it.
To recapitulate the idea underlying these suggestions : our system of government is undergoing modification — and feminine statesmanship will have to watch keenly the rise of new forms of authority. The tendency towards govern- ment by trades and interests may become something more than a threat to women in general if coupled with the other tendency to exclude them from important trades and m- terests, from the callings that count politically. Citizen- ship— the right of the vote — may exist only as a nominal privilege, if the power of Parliament has been largely superseded by institutions where the needs of women count for little.
And there is another point to be remembered when considering this possible exclusion from rising forms of authority. It is this : though we do not yet know whether women will stand effectively for peace, it is deadly certain that no other agency does. In the interests of humanity — if only as a last poor hope — they should be brought in con- tact with every form of conflict, and tried. And if, as a result of that trial, the fighting instinct is in any way curbed or checked — then, whether they will it or repel it, authority should be thrust into their hands.
i66
Art Through the Medium
(A Way Out)
By Alex. Stewart Gray
This title I am forced to use as a warning or pointer to readers. For in making notes of the pictures, I am disgusted to find they are only pictures of my thoughts for the time, and therefore that they are best explained by the painfully personal line the notes have taken.
They read something like this : —
If our Tower of Babel is arriving at its evolutionary stopping place (as seems likely from our Editor's review of last month), then what I have to say about painting will be of real interest; because when the superstitions that have created centralisation and specialisation have exploded, the remnant of us with legs left to carry our patches will have to find its way back to Everything, and begin the building of the New Jerusalem, " four-square."
All over the desolate places of the world will we be spread, whilst the most demanding of our instant attention is Teutonised England, say from the Humber to the Solent. And that Great Re-creation started, then Art will regain her throne. For harmony we will resurrect Time from her sepulchre of clocks and calendars in debris. Moons and moods will suffice to restore us to material essentials, seed- time and harvest.
Yes, the period of prophecy when " time will cease " draws to a close, is " accomplished." We will have plenty of Time for art — Time when we each grow our own dinner, and the girls spin the wool that has cost us nothing but a morning's sheep-shearing, when the boys, tired of journeys round the world in their own school -made flying cars, carve our porticoes to heaven out of the ribs of our own walnut trees. Then we will have Time, and we will worship Truth all day and all days save the 2^ — the 2^ hours that Alfred
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Russel Wallace allows us at the super-truth of producing the bodily sustenance of an average family.
By which opening I mean to say it is difficult for me to concentrate for the subtleties I would like to indicate in this article, whilst chivied, were it only by the vibrations of a multitude chivied to support the shoddy externals de rigueur for their securing potatoes-and-point from under the wheels of the omnipresent barrow of fiction-made finance, with its counter-irritants of trades unions and direct action and lock-outs. And if it is difficult for the enthusiast amongst his offspring, what of the reader who has to find the two bob whilst the Government floats its cargo of profiteer pilots on credits obtained on condition that rents and prices will be main- tained at an iniquitous and artificially inflated level .''
Which must assuredly come to an end, as we must begin the subject to which we are appointed, viz., "Art as a Way Out," which warrants another introduction, this time more personal — personal that the pictures may be understood.
To those of us filled with that egotism which we secretly call " The Divine Infiatus," some way out is a necessity. Thus, if we are not planning railways to the moon on the material plane, we are making roads to the New Jerusalem.
For my part, things material ever required the sauce of adventure. Hence, at the railway-to-the-moon business, I laid a trail of stars and stripes, ending in that familiar discomfort w^hich leads us to avowals of permanent self- disgust and repentance — a position arrived at partly by the conviction that the day when an individual could survive, let-go "experiment," in the commercial system was past ' — a fact admitted even by the chairman of a London Unionist Association in cold print only a few weeks ago.
But in the Repentance Department (with the aid of burned bridges, no doubt) I have enjoyed a vivifying sur- prise at a persevering, if wide-circled, consistency. I learned as a preliminary to contemplate and to radiate in a hermit's cave. That lasted for three years, and as a result, after long fastings, I came to see that the allegorical theft of Esau's birthright is " the matter with Society." That theft is the fundamental fraud upon which Society rears her high places, and till that fraud is atoned for there can be no New Jerusalem four-square. To advertise my joy at
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recovering this " lost coin," I sold all that remained, and made a bid for Parliament as a " Restore the Right-to-Dig " candidate for the Tonbridge Division of Kent; which brought me sympathetic notoriety in such volume that I was glad to steal away from my hut in the woods under snow by night, and become a pilgrim without purse or scrip except the newly acquired power to plough and sow, reap and mow, not as a master but as a casual hand — a very different test of qualification, dear friends, please to re- member who try. In the course of that any whither journey of years I learned, in the West Countrie, that a village apothecary required the total reward of a then heavy day's pitching into a travelling mill for drawing one troublesome tooth in twenty seconds, and many other, things that are unobserved by the crowned complacency by which we were then overwhelmed did I learn — knowledges obtained at a great price — yet worth the money. For they are in the pictures staring us in the face, many of them — cheerful yet resigned — they are not " party pictures,' Heaven be thanked in the midst of our hell. Knowledges worth the price — for they gave me power to voice the sub- consciousness of the People. They loosed my tongue so that I could inspire them to action — to grab land and demonstrate from Liverpool City to the middle of York- shire, till the local powers were forced to volunteer experi- mental stations, the results of which stand up in judgment against England to-day. To grab land and thereby to sow the germs of national regeneration by English miracles, the chief of which is the showing that men and women who had never before thought of the land except as I some- times think of making " a book " or a burglar's skeleton-key — who had thought of the land only as a " farmers' affair " — of demonstrating that these, with a mere noddage of direction, could grow as much in one year as they could eat in five — and with joy — and build themselves a 12-bedded bungalow with a 40-foot tomato-house (and fill it with ripe tomatoes) and a range of stables, hen-houses, and goat-sheds in their wet off-days, all of one short season. This miracle was followed up by a three and a-half years' Hunger March to educate the mass on the result and their rights. This was successfully interluded with a fasting on the King's doorstep, by way of protest, a couple of
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attempts to get nominated as an " unemployed " candidate for Parliament and short seasons of contemplation at the conclusion of airings in the royal equipage called " Black Maria."
I thereby discovered how much I had gained by abandon- ing " the legal " profession — how I had escaped from a land of myths and fictions that I might feast on facts, partly accounting for the next miracle (seen only by myself). It was England's power of co-operation — the power of all classes to co-operate in taking a red tape fraud upon the community lying down — its power to allow the red tape- worm to smash the Constitution over the bridges of their noses and keep smiling. I refer, of course, to the laws that provide for each of us in need, the birth-right out of 2,300,000 ear-marked acres, and the comfortable means to make it a going concern, a right which is withheld in the interests of " The Commercial Policy of the Nation " (Parliamentary Blue Books 365 of 1895 ^^^d 321 of 1896). Hence my " Prodigal Son " and its activities in the sanctified triangle. To conclude this seeming misappro- priation of your space, let me note that the two bye-elections on the march noted were at Croydon and Stratford-on- Avon, and that to such of the residents of Croydon as could afford a penny, I handed, personally, my election address. It was a song, of which I have recovered from the daily press this kindly reported and supremely topical stanza :
No longer Him denied, Rather we open wide for him The Sanctuary of Earth, Our fathers' Laws provide.
Then with Righteousness for
breastplate. First under his vine and fig tree. Let England to the world hand The Peace Key.
N B. — (A copy of the original'will much oblige.)
For the electors of the Stratford Division, I secured by some forgotten mystery, an election address, to which was attached the National Land Scheme, which had been waste- papered by the Times, but which, if put in operation then, would have saved us our present indecently prolonged so- journ in hell. With that I walked the Shakespeare country, flanked by the little remnants of my third army, buoyed by the hope that some day the derelict countrysides would echo with the laughter of English children, and not the snort of plutocrat's pulsators mocking the sighs of the bowmen who linger in the ruined homesteads and
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ART THROUGH THE MEDIUM
mildewed orchards of the waterlogged vale and velvet upland they had reclaimed in pride now turned to sadness. Sadness, for I know, by being a painter, that they do sigh and that our less earth-fictioned children will be able to more than paint them as I do from the vibrations of their small minds and stout hearts grown stalwart with that grief which makes a sojourn in rural England a heaviness. Our wood-wandered Willie-annes will see them face to face.
So do I try to "wing up" your readers to think of painting as more than a precedent-ruled craft — to look upon it as a gift common as song, as a vehicle of God since the Stone Age at least, when presumably there were no schools or precedents to speak of. To look upon it as open to all; to the simple and childlike in spirit, a gift more valuable than to the strong, and especially to those strong who " glory in the works of their own hands."
Through our " Abies " of to-morrow, believe me, the message of the place and the person will, to quote Mr. Augustus John, " be made flesh," they will be tran- substantiated upon the canvas.
Now I have given, simply as a key, some few things I feel about painting, and I would include in the thought the joy I experience in thereby discovering much of the " truth behind the myth," particularly behind the " blood of Jesus " atmosphere in which my child mind was swaddled and at which adolescence revolted — which teaching is summed up in the words covering my pictures — " of myself I can do nothing."
And the chance that opened to me this gateway to the joy of reunion with my forebears, and the opportunity of expressing it, was D.O.R.A. That ulcer by which a pre- doomed Czardom was transplanted for new life and vigour into the corpse of the machine-murdered multitude that had tolerated their soldiers, who had hoisted their flag at Cabul, Khartoum and Pretoria, to wander in rags begging their constitutional sanctuary of the land and the means to use it to pass on unheeded, was the weapon that drove me to painting as a Way out. In this way : —
The effervescence to which I have already referred got vent in the parks and squares of London long after the Hunger March had fizzled and the home weaving power of civilisation's debris had been equally efficiently demon-
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strated. At such places, town and country, I wordpainted the full picture of all I have here indicated as a call, for my relief (in many ways), and the educative amusement of the people. But D.O.R.A. made it impossible to speak, except under the protection of a recruiting Suffragette or a registered sky-pilot. Thus I was driven to paint the message, and, thank God, I have to some extent succeeded. By faith I have arrived till I have got on one canvas the whole journey of evolution from Jonah's parting with the whale to the Celt slaying the fatted calf of a Deutscho-Semitic commer- cialism and awaking his over-guzzled brethren — all on one canvas that secures the schoolman's appreciation, I have arrived till the natural expression of these truths and aspirations thereafter are regarded as " art " admired by artists for "design," " tone," " pattern," and other things of which I can hope to know nothing. But in the day of unsealing I think it will be found that the first half-dozen larger works — visualisations of passing events done in a sort of agony of Faith — are the copestone of the little mole-hill of my Way-out.
172
Years of the Unperformed
By Austin Harrison
" I see tremendous entrances and exits — I see new combinations — I see the solidarity of races ;
"Have the old forces played their parts? Are the acts suitable to them closed?
" I see Freedom, completely armed, and victorious, and very haughty, with Law by her side, both issuing forth against the idea of caste ;
" — What historic denouements are there we so rapidly approach?
" I see men marching" and countermarching by swift millions !
" I see the frontiers and boundaries of the old aristocracies broken ;
"1 see the landmarks of European kings removed;
" I see this day the People beginning their landmarks, all others giving way;
"Are all nations communing? Is there going to be but one head to the globe ?
"Is humanity forming en masse? — for, lo ! tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim ;
"The Earth, restive, confronts a new era, perhaps a general divine war;
"Unborn things, things soon to be, project their shapes around me;
"This incredible rush and heat. . . .
"The performed America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me.
"The unperformed, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me." Walt Whitman;
They spurned old Walt in his day — he was immodest, they said — ^even as we branded Byron and Shelley after the Napoleonic wars, but now the words of the seer catch the live fire of reality, and in most uncomfortable and soul- searching truth, " performed Europe grows dim, retiring into shadow." Of a certainty 192 1 will be a climacteric, an epochal year. All Europe will come down to earth with a bang. The pigmy reputations of politicians floated into spurious greatness on the blood and heroism of the Peoples in arms will get, for the first time, a true perspective. It will be the testing time. We are about to be " proved." In place of words, facts will matter. Instead of promises, results will decide. The lower elements that in the stress
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and delirium of war climbed into power, abused and degraded it, will be placed and found out. The " fruits " of world devastation will be reaped in world chaos.
When the war stopped in 1918, civilisation, as we knew it, had its sporting chance. Mr. Wilson, steeped in Walt Whitman, representing the only real credit continent extant, held up, as it were, the Bible of a clean peace, a fresh orientation, at least, a formula of world deliverance, but the little men who ruled their victorious Peoples re- jected him, as always mere force repudiates intelligence. The " proud soul of victory " became their motto. They thought they saw glory. Vain, ignorant, selfish and grasp- ing, they had neither the courage to think nor the intelli- gence to fear. " We take, you take " was their creed. They have taken. What.'^ They seized the " performed " shadows. They conceived themselves as Mark Antonys. Fear was their master, greed their goal. Those v/ho warned them, they kicked out. Stopped here, they lied there. Finally, they set up a Europe which politically is a bastard, and economically a pawnshop, and then, havin?:^ broken America's President, they returned to break up themselves. To-day, it is the turn of France. Lied to, deceived, duped and doped by her politicians, France, concentrated in the curiously narrow insu- lation of the " city of light," cannot understand either the fruits or the prospects. Where is the promised gold.'* Ou sont Ics neiges d^antan? What have we won to? Who is to pay? How are we to pay? And all — positively all' — that the politicians answer is the feeble, fatuous chatter about " the Treaty integral."
Give her the Treaty integral, and this year Europe will go down. Already, Poland, Austria, Russia, and all the " midwife " states, or fighting antennse of Imperialist France, are insolvent, drifting into hopeless breakdown, unable to trade, compelled to wage economic war the one with the other. Actually compelled to, for war was their geographical justification. And so, instead of peace, Europe is a cockpit of fierce, implacable hatreds, held up literally by the catholic conservatism of Central Europe, which is the sole bulwark against anarchist cataclysm. The
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YEARS OF THE UNPERFORMED
performance cannot work. There is no longer a trading Europe — there is no purchasing power. We who live by selling, thus find ourselves " for it." The trade winds serve no purpose if there is no trade. Over-populated, luxury-producing, parasitic-living Europe has no longer an equation. As industrialism cracks, the world's economic mechanism suspends its rotations. The world's " slump " has begun. What is victory without bread ? Everywhere the men who fought are hungry, everywhere the men who stoked the war are resplendent. It is the old world dis- torted into a social inequity, which is an offence to humanity. We begin to cry out, to revolt. We refuse to pay taxes, what then ? Already the Coalition is a sinking ship. There could be two hundred " Dovers " to-morrow. As the Polish mark nears the 3,000 exchange in the £, Lenin and President Harding discount the " performed years."
We can still save ourselves, because at the worst we can always sell out. To rail at the Premier at this juncture would be unpatriotic; the situation is far too serious for personal motive ; we ought to try to assist him. The hue and cry of economy is right, but in this matter we have an international responsibility, and our prime duty is to save France. We ought now to let off France her indemnity to us, arid so initiate the " writing off " movement indis- pensable to trading recovery. That done, we could con- fidently approach America, who has the gold. The real need of the hour is a working economic Federation of Europe ratified by peace with Russia. It is here that the Premier betrays the fundamental weakness of his character. Dictator, he cannot dictate. Lord Curzon, thinking like a Tetrarch, competes, because to him Persia is the boundary of his imagination, and no doubt the Siberian concession gentry. Then there is Mr. Churchill, who fancies himself in "oils" and a Pickelhaube. Lastly, there is Fear, with which is incorporated Labour. Of course, Mr. Lloyd George is entirely to blame for the machinations of his own spectres. He conjured them up, he must now sup with them. But in reality they are only poor ghosts. They neither think nor feel. They are mostly war flotations. The Premier could silence the lot with a single straight con-
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structive act, which he will now either have to perform W himself quit. That act is the making of a real peace.
His decrringolade has begun — the intrigues, placemen and dogs of office and ambition will do the rest. We, the new poor, the aristocracy of unperformed England, have a greater task, a nobler duty — the honour of our country. As the old world dies in agony, the call is to the artists of creation, to all who think, and can sift the scoriae of dead values which to-day blight and smother the nation's vision. It is we who will build up the new England, not the poli- ticians, not any political Party, not yet, at any rate, the League of Nations, for the foundation of such an instru- ment will derive from the mind, never from a mere mechanism. For our health a new attitude is necessary. We have to break through the chains of our bondage, to find the voice which can pierce the discords of brazen falsities. There, Ireland blocks all enterprise and sanity. Before the world, we stand as prisoners, like our own Government in Phoenix Park. We have no spiritual force left. We talk as hypocrites. We act as financial fools. Our performance is not even military. We are cutting away the foundations of our own imperial design — for a policeman's catechism. It is the blind, stupid obstinacy of the fatalist conqueror, such the Kaiser seeking world domi- nation, such the Grand Duke, with his fatal insistence : "LI the Grand Duke, will enter Berlin " — words which cost the Tsar's life and Russia's freedom. Yet still we cry out for the bludgeon. It is war, not policy. It is King Charles's " ship money " again — similarly it will be the mission of England's true aristocracy to defend the right.
We have nothing to lose. We cannot educate our children in our modern . schools for profiteers. Years of crushing taxation lie before us. Financiers control pro- duction, prices and distribution, and they are always blind men. They play not for money but for power. We are moving to-day into a world of financially-controlled distri- bution. Prices have no restraining law, as law has no restraining policy. If we do not buy, it is not because we refuse the financiers' prices — there is no herd intelligence — it is because we cannot buy. And to-day, at last, the
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YEARS OF THE UNPERFORMED
gamblers scent the danger. The shops are selling out. Why? Because Europe cannot buy their stocks ; they need cash for the taxes ; they have to unload anyhow on the home public. And when, by advertisement, cheapness and prizes — a curious commentary on the reason of prices — the shops manage to reduce their goods, prices will all — go up again. Must go up. Next time the ramp will be more frenzied. The Government is afraid to let go its " corner '* in raw; how then could it get the money to pay for Mr. Churchill's escapades, Lord Curzon's megalomania, and the rest of the false promises, from houses to education? How can it guarantee the military domination of France, if it can no longer be a State profiteer, and so contrive a balance sheet? When we vote for Sir T. Poison as an anti-squandermaniac, do we at all realise that national economy is entirely dependent upon policy? Is Sir T. Poison for Mesopotamia, Persia, or war with Russia and Ireland? If so, and he probably is for war with Russia and Ireland and tacitly for a mandatory annexation of Persia, we are simply exchanging names. Will he in Parliament tell Mr. Lloyd George to make peace? If not, he is only another ditto, and his election only an incident of waste. I don't for a moment suppose he understands that England must decline, if Europe declines; that our trade must fall if others cannot buy, that to howl at the Coalition while supporting the Coalition's foreign policy is just futility, which the Premier any morning could stampede with another grasshopper mendacity.
It is outside that the work will be done, the axe sharpened, eventually the tree felled. Ireland is the key to European peace, and all economic recovery, because through Ireland we shall unite or divide with America. The little island is the master-key of world politics. Did Sir T. Poison put that in the forefront at Dover? If not, he is only a variant. We have elected another policeman. The truth is, we cannot economise if the Treaty integral is our policy. Every unemployed man in these islands owes it to the Treaty of Paris, which smashed Europe's purchasing power; and, more, smashed our selling power, as we are now discovering through the fact that Germany, with an absurd exchange, can outsell us
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in every market. Hence producers are stopping pro- duction, unemployment is chronic, and threatens to become automatic. The great lie of " super-production " is re- vealed— Germany gets the orders, we get the unemploy-^ ment. We have an army of unemployed because the producers are deprived of a market. Britain, which could do a roaring business to-day, is hamstrung; she can only buy, on mere credit or inflation. Even our coal trade is being ousted by America, all for the mellifluous sound of the phrase, the " Treaty integral."
Where we do need a Treaty integral is with America, for without it we shall crash. The idea that we could be the banker and insurance agency for France " over all," is expressed to-day in misery and unemployment. France is self-supporting; she can rub along, so long as our credit is behind her, but we, who must sell or decline, cannot live upon gesture; we live on busmess; our over-populated Britain thrives on exports, on credit, on parasitical in- dustries, and if these assets are removed a large part of our population will be cast into pauperisation. We are not, and cannot be, in modern conditions, France's " flaming sword." We are by circumstances the world's peace equilibrium, and if we cannot regain that position of balance our own integral wealth will be destroyed, is being destroyed, as Mr. Keynes informed Mr. Lloyd George would be the case. Parliament, controlling nothing, means nothing. It was elected to rectify a myth, it exists on that myth. It will go when that myth is exposed, when the Federation of British Industries begins to study economics, and Labour begins to desire responsibility instead of un- employment. The only real thing to-day is economics — the re-starting of Europe's buying pow^r, the restoration of credit, the re-establishment of confidence, the pre-condition of which is peace, implicit and explicit.
The credit question can be solved, as it was solved in war. As the only real basis of credit is the nation integral, so now trade could be resumed on a world basis of credit. The ludicrous exchanges could be stabilised for market purposes, as they were in war, say for a period of ten years, but this can only be done through and with the New World.
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YEARS OF THE UNPERFORMED
Ireland blocks the way. We are like Richard offering his " kingdom for a horse." Nothing happens. Nothing will happen but decline, until we think as peacemakers instead of as policemen, and if we do not get a new orientation before the Republican President begins his task of making peace, w;e shall find we are losing the integrity of the Colonies, a poor price to pay for the " integral Treaty," for the Colonial will no longer be governed by fourth- form patronage plus Mr. Balfour, as we are discovering in the case of Canada. A totally fresh imperial idea is needed, or we shall disintegrate. Here again economics control. Government does not understand the Colonial view, does not try to understand it. The law is muddle. That is the position we have reached. It is the Premier's predicament. His supporters are in revolt. He can readjust their declining allegiance in a week, if he has the courage. Has he? At Chequer's Park, he overlooks the little church where Cromwell raised the flag. But the " bauble " is his own, and as yet he alone can remove it.
And so old Walt was right. Performed Europe is played out. The millions have done the marching and counter-marching. Empires and kingdoms have gone ; what remains are remnants. Man in his greatness survives. If his genius is idea, what is to be the new idea? Have we only won to an imitation Russian police service, or shall we create, if not a new world, one at least that can function? More need not be coveted for the nonce. At present nothing functions, whether Government or business. Eng- land to-day is a winged bird, she cannot take flight. We are tied to European stagnation. We have no politics or economics, no leadership, no community of interest, no freeing mind. We await the new poet. Even about gold, we don't know. " We shall come through," the usual apothecaries of dope tell us. No doubt. But at what price ? Will it be worth while ? Educational reform is scrapped ; houses are " off " ; all social legislation will be scrapped to pay for the paper militarism to which we are engaged. The " new world " will be a tax and rate-payer's mad-house. Now that we have embarked upon Protection, we shall have dear things and, abroad, we shall have to wage economic war. Our wealth was built up on the
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monopoly of Free Trade — we have abandoned that mono- poly. The kitchen is to-day the heartbreak concern of every housewife. And women have the vote. They will use it, according to the pressure on the home. When the women decide to get cheaper prices, the Coalition will fall, for it has no magnificence as the step-father of a million unemployed, and the moment the barons of the Press spot a likely substitute. Chequers will get a new occupant. This year may witness the event.
It is full time. If the customary spring Russian offen- sive is started from Roumania, or via Turkey or Poland, with an exchange at 5,000 marks to the £, the die will be cast, for without Russia we must assuredly all go down to- gether with our " laddered " mechanism. Nobody will be able to buy from anyone else. Austria already faces utter collapse, as the result of peace which is designedly war. Yet no one seems to care. A strangely foolish callousness. Because of dying Austria, the satellite States around her are decaying too; they are not economic units, they are military outposts. Trade is their sole chance of survival. But they dare not trade. They were created to fight. They are France's boxing-partners. And because of their plight, the furnaces all over England are shutting down, and the return of the maintenance wage is the price.
No doles or palliatives will avail, because the cause of our distress is Europe's distress, safely guaranteed by the Treaty integral. Yet already France knows this. She also has unemployment, stagnant markets, creeping paralysis; her franc is a relativity, Vhomme qui rit is be- p'inninsf to realise that the world is lauo^hinor at France's morbid fear of her late enemy; also that the Catholic Bavarian (Napoleonic) secession policy is unlikely to prosper, now that new Balkanised Europe is forming a hegemony of its own, the motto of which is : "Save us from our creators." Enter M. Briand. His return was auto- matic. It is the pendulum. The Poincare school has killed itself. M. Briand is too shrewd a rtian to nibble at Dead Sea apples. He won't chatter about the " Treaty integral." He and our Premier will probably have a sensible talk. I should love to listen behind the arras to
YEARS OF THE UNPERFORMED
Mr. Lloyd George's arguments why the Treaty must be modified, and to watch the Frenchman's amused counten- ance, but at least we can picture the scene. In reality, France has no pointers ; she is quite negotiable, because entirely dependent upon our credit, and if, every time the other side talk big, wave flags, or threaten high explosives, Mr. Lloyd George will pronounce the word " bankruptcy " and prepare to go home, he will be able to accomplish some- thing definite, and so alleviate the serious position here, which won't bother much about scraps of paper when two millions of people howl for work and bread. Newspaper reports about French hostility to British policy are largely exaggerations. What is fierce is Parisian journalism, but France outside now awaits results. All that France wants is something to look forward to; at present she has only "indemnities." She owes us one; Dr. Lenin is inflexible on the Russian side ; as it is, she is selling back to Germany the coal delivered by Germany ! who has frustrated the Ruhr occupation by not defaulting, comically enough thereby reducing the price of coal in Paris — France having a surfeit, Mr. Lloyd George can have some fun over that. With M. Briand he ought to be able to bring home some prospects of selling markets, thus relieving part of the home unemployment.
The exchange problem is political, conditioned by the war attitude of France towards Europe, and fear of Bolshevism. It is a fallacy to suppose that the true monetary value of the Polish mark is 2,500 to the £, or of the German, 260 to the £, or that the flights of Czecho- slovak or Roumanian currencies represent a scientific ex- change disparity. The index is political, as we saw the other day over Venizelos. When he fell, the Greek drachma soared — the politico-umbilical cord of credit had snapped. Were peace made with Russia, the rouble would get a decent quotation in a week. Were the Damocles sword policy of France to be removed, the German mark would snap back to at least the rate of the Italian lira. The whole economic position is artificial, the result of the Treaty, and the staggering imbecility of Governments. Remove the military clutch, with its throttle-holld over all Europe implied and necessitated by the new war-zone map, and all
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the exchanges would drop to at any rate a trading pur- chasing power, and the sun would return to these islands. To-day, Bradford is unhappy. Why.^^ Because her wares can't be sold. Czech mills also are shutting down. Probe deeper, and the reason is because Europe cannot buy on the exchanges; probe again, and the reason of the ex- changes, and of our decline and threatening suffocation, is the attitude of France : who holds Europe in pawn, who refuses to permit recovery, who has actually created a Balkanised Europe which must fight or die — i.e., which cannot trade.
It is high time the public understood this. All Central Europe is to-day a network of tariff barriers and gendarme restrictions, rendering trade an impossibility. Railway trucks carrying goods are seized at the frontier. The Czechs have too much coal, they refuse Austria any coal. The new creations are all engaged in savage racial re- criminations, persecutions and dislocations; the whole centre is a cauldron of animosities, and all trade com- munications are at a standstill. Such is the end of the perfect day at Versailles.
It cannot* go on, because now its repercussions are undermining our very life, and, if it is not altered, we too will be reduced to barter. The question of credit is thus politics. So long as the Treaty integral is upheld in its present form of economic destruction, Europe cannot buy, ^therefore we shall' decline. To restore credit, confidence or sound economic conditions must be established. The exchanges merely reflect bankers' rather timid opinion. It is not, as commonly supposed, a question of the gold standard, for we are not on the gold standard, and were it not for our loyalty towards France, the franc would probably fly to a lOO on the £. The exchange is only a mechanism. Take Roumania, with her oil and crops, in fact, a perfectly solvent unit. Why is her exchange so bad? Simply because of policy, her proximity to Russia, fear of socialism, the fact that she is the fighting satellite of France, who any day may call upon her to have a whack at unseating Trotsky. Poland, with a pandemonium of currencies, is different, yet here too it is Poland's war that
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YEARS OF THE UNPERFORMED
has sky-rocketted her exchange. She would drop 2,000 points, if Poland made peace, and became sensible. The whole question depends upon policy, which is 70 per cent, adjustable.
If M. Briand wants, he can rectify all the exchanges to-morrow, not by artificial stabilisation, but by making trade integral. Even the Balkanised creations are fed up, for instead of progress disintegration has begun, com- munism has crept in ; as they can't sell, so they cannot buy. Already they are questioning their respective nativities, talking about a "bloc " integral, a hegemony of victory, an imperial Balkanised currency, like Mr. Darling here. France holds the stakes. In a week she can release the favouring breezes of trade, and in that week British producers would probably get orders worth ;{^300,ooo,ooo, and unemployment would cease. If Labour and the Anti- Waste Party — it is already such — would back up the Premier to support a policy of European restoration, instead of a Field-Marshal policy of strangulation, all the factories in England would hum for at least a couple of years, and with plenty, order and contentment would accrue. Our false economics are quite adjustable. Europe has emerged on the whole well, but since the armistice, Europe has decayed, that is the key-fact. Our solvency is the issue. If politicians are too dense or too jaundiced to save the situation, traders should agree to trade with Europe on a mutually fixed exchange rate, and leave the mart to the speculators. As it is, the moment M. Briand assumed office, the exchanges all recovered. Politics. Less fear — more confidence. That is all there is in it.
It is a crime to the England that fought that to-day, with all Europe dying for want of the things we could deliver, there should be a "slump." Slump in what? There is no slump. Politicians have erected a non- economic Europe, that is the slump, consequently our super-production gluts the market. Now, it is America's exporting problem. If, of course, we would rather sink to the level of Holland than that Germans should buy our iron, or wool, or tea, or coal, or cotton, or trousers, or
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magnetos, or opera-glasses, good; let us sing the hymn of hate, and prepare to emigrate, those of us that have sufficient to satisfy the American authorities, seeing that Canada only wants ploughmen and Australian wool is a surfeit, held up by the Government because Europe cannot buy it. Everything really lies in our favour.
The law in this world is balance, and so we find that killing German finance means — just what its authors did not intend — presenting Germany with monopolist markets. On their exchange, Germany, if she cannot buy, is unques- tionably capturmg our trade; we are giving her back the goose we thought we had slain. As for the indemnities, obviously without a monetary value, German finance is worthless, and she can never pay. She might easily pay £150,000,000 a year, say, for ten years, which money should be given to France. But her commerce must be free ; she must first have an exchange value. It is difficult to believe that M. Briand will fail to understand such an elementary truism, but if he does fail, then we shall have continued and cumulative depression until, in exasperation, British business starts trading on its own rate of exchange with Europe, say at a flat rate, on the ratio of the franc, or something awkward happens to compel common sense. Never ought we to be so rich, so happy, so proud, so sure of ourselves, yet never have we stood in deadlier peril. Before all, we want a Finance Minister, a man of imagina- tion, who can get away from conventions ; we should begin by funding the floating debt on a loan at 4^- per cent., free (of taxation. Expedients won't suffice. The world's distri- bution is disjointed. To right that, circulation is necessary — freedom of circulation. That means peace. Peace is still a long way from Tipperary. India is boycotting us. Tanks perform in Ireland ; Lord Robert Cecil is expected to " cross the floor." There is an opposition again. It is the bright star in the firmament.
Threateningly, on the horizon, the " unperformed " years of empire cast deepening shadows. Imagination is needed. Are we to have an Ireland in India? Are we to continue our alliance with Japan, in the face of Canadian opposition? What is to be our Canadian policy?
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YEARS OF THE UNPERFORMED
Kiplingese won't help. A great new imperialism is im- perative, if continuity is to be upheld, and though America, who to-day scientifically boasts of an army " poison corps " ■ — she may possess a Kadaver corps — is not going politically to " do the beautiful things " to us that wild Irishmen imagine, her trade policy will unmistakably bump up against ours if, saddled with Japanese imperialism, we place capital ships before capital, and Sir Percy Scott's " director-firing " behind the funnels, the answer to which will no doubt be the Jones Canal retaliation. In Europe what we have to decide is this. Shall we risk the economic break-up of Europe, or liberate her? There is no other policy. Trotsky, of course, prays night and day that Mr. Churchill may spill some more blood, knowing that every month of decline makes recovery more and more unlikely. Russia will not starve now. It is thus a race or contest of starvation limits. All communists are hoping for this smash. It would torpedo us. No gold basis then. Let Bolshevism reach the Rhine, and we shall never build that Channel tunnel.
This year, for sure, we shall fructify or definitely write ourselves down. Financiers are cheery. Those who hold Roubles are optimistic, it is the gold fanciers who are the real pessimists, because their object is the control of credit, which to-day, in the parlous state of trade, implies an anti- production policy which again means long and dangerous crises. As a lady said to me the other evening : " Why not open trade, then someone could go and murder Lenin?" Has Mr. Churchill thought of that? Or Dublin Castle? Murder or no murder, Russia will have to be opened, or we must prepare to make way for the other Government. Report hints at Sir Robert Home. It is a canard. What the Premier cannot "wangle," he will not be able to. Anyhow, Lord Reading goes to India talking, like D'Annunzio, about "justice." We perforce hold our breaths — the famous Protocols don't appear to be acting. " Unperformed Europe and America advance." Will the intelligence of England have anything to say? That is our vital question.
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The Poetry of the Green Man
By Thomas Moult
A HUNDRED and one years ago, at the invitation of Taylor and Hessey, the publishers for John Keats, thete came to London a Northamptonshire peasant, garbed in green smock and gaiters. Even in our day it would be an uncommon sort of journey for a Northamptonshire peasant to make, what of inconvenient transit and purse-licking charges; but in 1820 his appearance in the Strand was something of a sensation, so that he had to borrow a great overcoat from the aforementioned Mr. Taylor to hide his dress. Human nature being what it has been always, we may hazard without much risk that green smock and gaiters were the cause of his being lionised in the London literary circles and "trotted from one drawing-room to another," rather than the fact that his name was John Clare, author of Poems Descriptive of Rural SLife and Scenery, a volume whose publication had preceded his arrival. The poet would be recognised, it is true, and talked about; but only as the "peasant" poet. Those who know anything of these " literary " circles and drawing-rooms in their modern equivalents will feel that if the poems were read at all it would be for such passages as —
When my apron would hang low Me he sought through frost and snow, When it puckered up with shame And I sought him, he never came — —
leaving to Charles Lamb, Thomas Hood, and the men of The London Magazine (who met Clare and, from his clothes, Mr. Blunden tells us, called him The Green Man), the appreciation of other lines, like —
The night-wind now, with sooty wings, In the cotter's chimney sings.
While Clare's rusticity was still the topic of the town his poems went into four editions. On the other hand, the later poetry of John Keats, who had neither smock nor gaiters,
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THE POETRY OF THE GREEN MAN
took more than twenty years to run through a single edition of five hundred copies, issued though it was by Taylor and Hessey a few months afterwards. The raiment of man, none the less, becomes moth-eaten sooner or later; his nomenclature, whether it be of peasant or lordship, loses novelty; and the day came when the relative merits of John Keats and John Clare were no longer obscured or exag- gerated according to a whimsical fashion. The conviction that spread slowly through the world regarding the poet of the Lamia volume need not be dwelt on in this month of the centenary of his death; the opinion formed with such haste and irresponsibility in the case of Clare is one that concerns us much more nearly at the moment. It dwindled so miserably that when the news came from his obscurity of exile in a lunatic asylum the London literary circles needed much prodding of memories before they recalled those peasant poems and the green smock and gaiters. It might be thought that a volume of poetry issuing from an asylum would have intrigued the drawing- room denizens afresh; but of demand for such there was none. Only to-day, eighty-five years afterwards, has the work'of Clare's tragic later life been rescued. Two young poets have accomplished it.* History repeats itself, even in respect of poetry; and we must presume, in despite of optimistic inclination, that whatever of worth is being created in conditions of tragic obscurity at the present will, a hundred years hence, be in process of salvage after the same ironical manner. Our optimism returns as we think that the spirit which inspires that far-ahead purpose will be equally fine, and the labour no less (it could not be more) of love.
Sir Sidney Colvin once wrote a passage in which he speaks of " John Clare, the distressed peasant poet, in whom many kindly people fancied they had discerned an English Burns." When we consider that this disparaging tone was widely adopted notwithstanding that two of Clare's finest pieces, Autumn and Summer Images, were to be read in the volumes issued during his lifetime, we are set wondering whether the neglect that fell on the poet was due
* ]ohn Clare : Poems. Chiefly from Manuscript. Selected and edited by Edmund Blunden and Alan ' Porter. (Richard Cobden-Sanderson.) 105. 6d. net.
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to some other reason than lack of discernment. For the quality of these pieces is obvious enough — and especially so after we are set in a receptive and sympathetic attitude by the excellent biographical introduction.
. . . And oft as morninj^ from her lattice peeps To beckon up the .sun, 1 seek with thee
To drink the dewy breath
Of fields left fragrant then,
In solitudes, where no frequented paths
But what thy own foot makes betray thy home,
Stealing obtrusive there
To meditate thy end :
There is something of the Keats influence, perhaps, as well as that of Collins, in this fine opening to the ode to Autumn, but no one would be justified in belittling or overlooking the poem on that account, any more than we could pass by La Belle Dame Sans Merci because Keats remembered William Browne and Wordsworth while he wrote two of its most effective lines, or Dryden at a passage in Isabella. But take this from Stimmer Images :
There the gay river, laughing as it goes. Plashes with easy wave its flaggy sides,
And, to the calm of heart, in calmness shows >
What pleasure there abides
To trace its sedgy banks, from trouble free ;
and (because we need to break off at the foregoing point before an imperfection), a stanza even more beautifully sustained : —
To note on hedgerow baulks, in moisture sprent, The jetty snail creep from the mossy thorn.
With earnest heed and tremulous intent, Frail brother of the morn,
That from the tiny bents and misted leaves Withdraws his timid horn,
And fearful vision weaves.
In each of these, just as we have already detected his influence, we recognise somethinor of the quality of Keats himself — but with a difference. We are almost forced, for once, into forgetfulness of the psychological distinction it is necessary to make, as regards the bulk of their poetry, between the fancy that characterises Clare's work and the imagination of the work of Keats. The distinction is a vital one, and probably accounts for the neglect of Clare, which appears to have increased in direct ratio to the growth of appreciation in the case of Keats. We might almost
THE POETRY OF THE GREEN MAN
declare his fault to be that he observed too much. Amongst the externals he wandered his life through. His interest lay with attractive anomalies rather than with their destiny and relation to the universal scheme.
The maple with its tassel flowers of green, That turns to red a staghorn-shaped seed, Just spreading out its scolloped leaves is seen, Of yellowish hue, yet beautifully green;
Passages of this kind recall Richard Jeiferies at his most descriptive — and his worst. " Here and there upon the bank wild gooseberry and currant bushes may be found, planted by birds carrying off ripe fruit from the garden. A wild gooseberry may sometimes be seen growing out of the decaying ' touchwood ' on the top of a hollow withy- pollard. Wild apple-trees, too, are not uncommon in the hedges. . . ." Just as Jefferies rarely forgot that he was the gamekeeper and naturalist conspiring together within him to prevent his writing any other book to compare with his own Story of My Heart.
A poet of the higher order, whose vision is of such in- tensity as to be always imaginative, regards natural objects merely as the symbols by which he expresses his aesthetic conception; never using them in his poetry for their own sake.. When Wordsworth wrote his sonnet on Westminster Bridge he forgot that there was any such bridge as that named specifically in his title, any such place as London. And Keats, in his ode To Autumn, gets right away from the season's physical facts — as physical facts. The gather- ing together and presentation of John Clare's poems in this worthy form has enriched English poetry of another order than Wordsworth's, another order than Keats'. More and more as his strangely happy, strangely sad, life went on, Clare was leaving the world of the second order for theirs, and had those who forgot the man possessed the advantage, as we now have it, of studying his later production, they would have revived their interest in him no longer as a peasant, but, probably for the first time, as a poet. The difference in the position to-day of Clare and of Keats is that the author of Poems Descriptive of Rural Life re- membered too long his own green smock and gaiters, while the poet of Isabella forgot, early enough, even that he was John Keats.
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