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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 56453 ***
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive. See
+      https://archive.org/details/egregiousenglish00mcnerich
+
+
+
+
+
+THE EGREGIOUS ENGLISH
+
+by
+
+ANGUS McNEILL
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons
+London: Grant Richards
+1903
+
+Copyright, 1902, by
+Angus McNeill
+
+Published, January, 1903
+
+The Knickerbocker Press, New York
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                    PAGE
+
+      I.--Apollo                                1
+
+     II.--The Sportsman                        13
+
+    III.--The Man of Business                  20
+
+     IV.--The Journalist                       28
+
+      V.--The Employed Person                  37
+
+     VI.--Chiffon                              47
+
+    VII.--The Soldier                          59
+
+   VIII.--The Navy                             71
+
+     IX.--The Churches                         79
+
+      X.--The Politician                       90
+
+     XI.--Poets                               103
+
+    XII.--Fiction                             113
+
+   XIII.--Suburbanism                         124
+
+    XIV.--The Man-about-Town                  137
+
+     XV.--Drink                               144
+
+    XVI.--Food                                153
+
+   XVII.--Law and Order                       163
+
+  XVIII.--Education                           171
+
+    XIX.--Recreation                          183
+
+     XX.--Stock Exchange                      192
+
+    XXI.--The Beloved                         199
+
+
+
+
+The Egregious English
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+APOLLO
+
+
+It has become the Englishman's habit, one might almost say the
+Englishman's instinct, to take himself for the head and front of the
+universe. The order of creation began, we are told, in protoplasm.
+It has achieved at length the Englishman. Herein are the culmination
+and ultimate glory of evolutionary processes. Nature, like the
+seventh-standard boy in a board school, "can get no higher." She
+has made the Englishman, and her work therefore is done. For the
+continued progress of the world and all that in it is, the Englishman
+will make due provision. He knows exactly what is wanted, and by
+himself it shall be supplied. There is little that can be considered
+distinguishingly English which does not reflect this point of view. As
+an easy-going, entirely confident, imperturbable piece of arrogance,
+the Englishman has certainly no mammalian compeer. Even in the blackest
+of his troubles he perceives that he is great. "I shall muddle
+through," he says. He is expected and understood to muddle through;
+and, muddle through or not, he invariably believes he has done it.
+Sheer complacency bolsters him up on every hand. At his going forth the
+rest of the world is fain to abase itself in the dust. He is the strong
+man, the white man of white men. He is the rich, clean sportsman, the
+incomparable, the fearless, the intolerable. And by "Englishman" the
+world has learned not to mean "Briton." The world has been taught to
+discriminate. It has regarded the Britannic brotherhood; and though it
+forgets that the Gael and the Celt are Britons, it takes its Englishman
+for a Briton, only with a difference. On the other hand, it is keenly
+sensible of sundry facts--as that it is the Englishman who rules the
+waves and the Englishman upon whose dominions the sun never sets; that
+the British flag is the English flag, the British army the English
+army, and the British navy the English navy, and that Scotland and
+Ireland, with Wales, are English appanages. It would be foolish to
+assert that the Englishman has greatly concerned himself in either the
+promulgation or the acceptance of these notions. But he holds them
+dear, and they are ineradicably planted in his subconsciousness.
+
+One is inclined to think, however, that, while the supremacy and
+superiority of the Englishman have been received without traverse in
+his own dominions, there are those in outer darkness--on the Continent,
+in Ireland, and even in Scotland--who admit no such supremacy and
+no such superiority. Nay, there be persons breathing the breath of
+life who, so far from looking upon the Englishman with the eyes with
+which the early savage must have regarded Captain Cook, look upon him
+with the eyes with which Captain Cook regarded the early savage. In
+Ireland, particularly, hatred of the English has become a deep-grounded
+national characteristic. The French dislike of perfidious Albion may
+be reckoned to a great extent an intermittent matter. It sputters and
+flares when a Fashoda or a Boer War comes along, and it has a way of
+finding its deadliest expression in caricature. But the Irish hatred is
+as persistent and concrete as it is ancient. In Scotland the feeling
+about the English amounts in the main to good-humoured tolerance,
+touched with a certain amazement. The least cultivated of Scotsmen--and
+such a man is quite a different being from the least cultivated of
+Englishmen--will tell you that "thae English" are chiefly notable by
+reason of their profound ignorance and a ridiculous passion for the
+dissipation of money. The Scot of the middle class thinks his neighbour
+is a feckless, foolish person who would pass muster if he could be
+serious, and who has got what he possesses by good luck rather than
+by good management. Up to a point both are right, for the English in
+the mass are at once much more ignorant and much less thrifty than the
+people of Scotland, and their good-nature and happy-go-luckiness are
+things to set a Scot moralising.
+
+Years ago Matthew Arnold put the right names on the two more creditable
+and powerful sections of English society. The aristocracy he set down
+for Barbarians, the middle class for Philistines. The aristocracy were
+inaccessible to ideas, he said; the middle class admired and loved the
+aristocracy. It is so to this day, and so to an extent which is in
+entire consonance with the circumstance that for sheer stupidity the
+Englishman of the upper class is without parallel, while the Englishman
+of the middle class cannot be paralleled for snobbishness. Arnold's
+complaint that neither class was a reading class or at all devoted to
+the higher matters still holds. The great, broad-shouldered, genial
+Englishman whom Tennyson sang and at whom Arnold gibed is still with
+us. That he is as great and as broad-shouldered and as genial as ever
+nobody will deny. And, broadly speaking, his outlook upon life remains
+exactly what it was. To be ruddy and healthy, to go out mornings with
+dogs, to dine hilariously and dance evenings, to be generous to the
+poor, and to honour oneself and the King are the rule of his life if
+he be a Barbarian; and to ape these things and consider them gifts of
+price, if he be a Philistine. Since Arnold, however, the Englishman,
+egregious though he undoubtedly was, has taken unto himself a new and
+altogether alarming demerit. Out of his love of health and ease and
+security and pleasure and well-ordered materialism there has sprung
+up a trouble which is like to cost him exceeding dear--a trouble, in
+fact, which, if he be not careful, will go far to emasculate him, if
+not wholly to destroy him. Of the higher matters, as has been said,
+he has taken but the smallest heed. Writer fellows, painter fellows,
+philosopher Johnnies, and so forth are not of his world, except in
+so far as they may entertain his women-folk, or deck his halls with
+commercial canvas, or assist him in the eking out of his small talk
+before dessert. It is not to be expected of him that he should take to
+his heart persons whom he cannot by any possibility understand. Even
+Arnold could forgive him that failing. It was the build of the man, the
+breed and constitution of him, that justified him. But since, being
+English, he has found his way to the unpardonable sin. It was well
+that he should despise persons who, however much they might think, did
+little and got little for doing it. It was well that brains which could
+not sit a horse, and preferred bed to the moors, and had no rent-roll,
+should be despised. It would have been well, too, if that other kind
+of brains, which, beginning with nothing, ends in millionairedom and
+flagrant barbarianism, might also have continued to be despised and
+to be kept at arm's-length. The great, broad-shouldered, genial
+Englishman, however, has succumbed. Park Lane has become a Ghetto; my
+lord's house parties reek of gentlemen with noses, and names ending
+in "baum"; and the English Houses of Parliament, the finest club in
+Europe, the mother of parliaments, the most dignified assemblage under
+the sun, is just a branch of the Stock Exchange. As the exceedingly
+clever young man who recently wrote a book about the Scot might say,
+this shows what the English really are.
+
+It has been remarked, and possibly not without truth, that the Scot
+keeps the Sabbath and everything else he can lay his hands upon. He
+is credited with being the perfect money-grubber; his desire for
+competence, we have been told by the clever young man before mentioned,
+has blighted his soul and brought him into opprobrium among Turks and
+Chinamen. Well, the Scot does look after money: he desires competence,
+he loves independence; and, when he can get them, ease and pleasure are
+gratifying to him. If he comes off the rock and attains affluence, he
+is not averse to the goodnesses that affluence commands. He will start
+a castle and a carriage and a coat-of-arms with the best of them; he
+will lift up his family and leave his children well provided for. In
+these connections he is just as human as the next man; but he never
+has played and he never will play the English game of lavishness and
+wastefulness and swaggering profusion, and, least of all, will he
+play it on a basis of undesirable association. The Scotsman who has
+compassed wealth, even though he be the son of a mole-catcher or a
+sweetie-wife or a Glasgow beer-seller, can always remember that there
+is such a thing as spiritual integrity. And though he may or may not
+boo and boo and boo in accordance with the good old kindly English
+legend, he certainly will not do it in Jews' houses. This, I take it,
+is where he has some little advantage over Englishmen.
+
+Perhaps no finer indication of the English spirit, and of the greed
+and corruption that have overtaken it, could have been offered than
+has been offered by the trend of recent events in South Africa. To
+go thoroughly over the ground in such an essay as the present is, of
+course, impossible; to state the arguments for both sides would be to
+reproduce writing of which everybody is heartily tired. The battling
+newspapers have said their say, and we are just beginning to feel the
+comfort of a more or less reasonable settlement. All that need be
+said here is that the Englishman has not come out of this war with
+anything like the honour and the glory and the _éclat_ that he has
+been accustomed to expect of himself in similar undertakings. His
+bodily prowess, his hardihood, his Spartan capacity for withstanding
+the rigours of campaigning, his military abilities, and his very
+patriotism have all had to be called in question during the past two
+and a half years. When he went out to the fray, his cry was, "Ha! ha!"
+and the war was to be over in six weeks. He had the finest equipment,
+the finest munitions, the finest men, the finest system, the world had
+seen. He was as fit as a fiddle and as hard as nails, and his love of
+music prompted him to take a piano with him. Then the English and they
+that dwell in outer darkness saw many things. They have been learning
+their lesson ever since. They have learned that in a fight the great,
+broad-shouldered, genial Englishman, instead of being worth three
+Frenchmen, is worth about the fiftieth part of a Boer farmer. They have
+learned that the great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman is not
+above selling spavined horses and stinking beef to the country that
+he loves. And they have learned that when a great, broad-shouldered,
+genial Englishman is discovered in his incompetence or his culpable
+negligence or his dishonour, it is the business of all the other great,
+broad-shouldered, genial Englishmen to get round him and screen him
+from the public gaze and swear that he is a maligned and misunderstood
+man. The incidents of the war alone, without any backing or the
+smallest distortion or exaggeration, have been quite sufficient to show
+that there is something rotten in the condition of the English. It has
+been a tale of shame and ignominy and disaster from beginning to end.
+It has resulted in a peace which practically settles very little, and
+an inquiry with closed doors. Verily Apollo must have a care for his
+reputation in the Pantheon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE SPORTSMAN
+
+
+The Englishman who is not a sportsman dares not mention the
+circumstance. In the counties he must shoot and hunt, or be for
+ever damned. In the towns he must have daily dealings with a
+starting-price bookmaker and hourly news from the race-courses and
+the cricket-pitches, otherwise Englishmen decline to know him. "I am
+a sportsman, sir," is the English shibboleth. "It is the English love
+of manly sports that has made the English paramount in every land and
+on every sea." The Lord Chief Justice of England rowed stroke for his
+college in Oxford _v._ Cambridge in 1815, otherwise he would not be
+Lord Chief Justice of England. At eighteen the Lord Chancellor was
+one of the best sprinters of his day, otherwise he would never have
+dandled his little legs on the Woolsack. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
+is a keen shot, and was one of a party of seven who made the biggest
+bag on record in 1865, otherwise he would never have been Leader of
+the Opposition. Mr. Henry Labouchere is one of our most brilliant
+and daring steeple-chase riders, otherwise he would never have owned
+_Truth_. Mrs. Ormiston Chant is a cricket enthusiast; so are the
+Archbishop of Canterbury, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, and Mr. Tommy Bowles.
+Lord Roberts can take a hand at croquet with the best young woman out
+of Girton, and Mr. John Morley understands a race-horse almost as well
+as he understands the Encyclopædists. In fact, the English eminent are
+either sportsmen or nothing, and all the other English follow suit.
+
+Now and again somebody gets up and points out that betting is a great
+evil; whereupon the Duke of Devonshire opens one eye and says that he
+never had a shilling on a horse in his life. Then everybody says that
+horse-racing is good for the breed of horses, employing large amounts
+of capital and large numbers of honest persons, and on the whole a
+manly and profitable pastime. Incidentally, too, it transpires that
+fox-hunting is an equally noble and English form of sport, and that
+when farmers cease from puppy-walking, Britain may very well drop the
+epithet "Great" from her name. Or perhaps Mr. Kipling, fresh from the
+unpleasant truths of South Africa, conceives a distich or two as to
+flannelled fools and muddied oafs. In response there is an immediate
+and emphatic English howl. Why cannot the little man stick to his
+Recessionals? How dare he call sportsmen like Ranji and Trott and
+Bloggs and Biffkin flannelled fools, much less the Tottenham Hotspurs
+and Sheffield United muddied oafs! Is it not true that the battle of
+Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton? Were not flannelled
+fools and muddied oafs among the first to throw up their home ties and
+fling themselves into the imminent breach when the war broke out? Are
+not cricket and football healthy and admirable old English sports, and
+pleasantly calculated to keep the youth of the country out of much
+worse mischief on Saturday afternoons? And so on right down the line.
+The English are sportsmen. Sport is bred in the bone of them. Less
+than a century ago they were cock-fighting and man-fighting in the
+splendid English way. They would be doing it yet, if their own stupid
+laws did not prevent them. Instead they race horses and pursue the
+fox, watch cricket and football matches, and play tennis and croquet
+and ping-pong. It is sport that keeps England sweet. If it were not
+for sport, the English would cease to have red faces and husky voices
+and check suits. One presumes, too, that if it were not for sport they
+would entirely lose their sense of fair play, their love of honest
+dealing, and that spirit of self-sacrifice which notoriously informs
+all their actions. It is sport that has made the English the justest
+as well as the greatest of the nations. It is sport which keeps her
+unspotted of the lower vices, such as drunkenness, indolence, and
+misspent Saturday afternoons. It is sport which gives her a standard
+of manliness, an all-day press, and a platform upon which prince and
+pauper, the highest and the lowest, meet as common men. Long live sport!
+
+Perhaps it is pardonable in a Scot to note that the only forms of
+sport which can be pronounced sane and devoid of offence came out of
+Scotland. The grand instance in point, of course, is the ancient and
+royal game of golf. Without attempting to say a word that would tend
+to exaggerate the value of a pastime which is beloved by all Scotsmen,
+and not without its appreciators even in England, it seems fitting to
+remark that in golf you have a game which, while every whit as healthy,
+as manly, and as invigorating as horse-racing, cricket, football, and
+the rest of them, can never by any chance become the mere kill-time of
+the idle, unparticipating spectator or the prey of the "professional",
+the ready-money bookmaker, and the halfpenny journal. As to other
+Scottish sports, one need not here particularise; but they are all
+healthy and honest in the broadest sense, and with the single exception
+of football, which has been corrupted by the English, they have not
+been allowed to deteriorate into vices. The exploitation of popular
+pastimes by covetous and unprincipled persons is an unmistakable sign
+of national decadence. In England that exploitation goes on without
+let or hindrance and in almost every department. Protest brings merely
+contempt and objurgation upon the head of the protester, and the
+national virility continues to be slowly but surely sapped away. That
+the English notion of sport should permit of the orgies of bloodshed,
+rowdyism, and partisanship which take place in the coverts and on
+football-fields, race-courses, and cricket-grounds serves to indicate
+that, in spite of all that has been said and sung in its praises, the
+English notion of sport is an exceedingly sad and sorry one. It is
+natural that a people given over to display and the getting of money
+for the sake of the more unnecessary luxuries money can buy should in
+a great measure lose its taste for outdoor sports of the primal order.
+The English are losing that taste at a rate which can leave no doubt as
+to the ultimate upshot. In brief, the Englishman as sportsman worth the
+name seems to be disappearing; and in his place England will have the
+adipose, plethoric, mechanical slayer of birds who goes to his shoot
+in a bath-chair, and the cadaverous, undersized, Saturday-afternoon
+zealot, the chief joys of whose existence are the cracking of filberts
+and the kicking of umpires.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE MAN OF BUSINESS
+
+
+The English, all the world has heard, are a nation of shopkeepers.
+They are understood to keep shop and to glory in it. They have kept
+shop, with the other nations for customers, ever since international
+shopkeeping became a possibility. In the beginning, one is afraid,
+their notion of shopkeeping ran neither to fair trade nor honest
+dealing; but gradually there was built up a system of commercial
+equity, the main principle of which was the protection of one
+shopkeeper against another and the security of shopkeepers generally.
+
+In course of time the English man of business arose. He had a silk
+hat and expansive manners. He lived in a suburb and read the _Times_
+on his way to business in the morning. All day at his office he would
+cheat no man, and his word was as good as his bond. His office day was
+a day of quite ten hours, and during those ten hours he sweated like
+the proverbial nigger. At nights he retired to his suburb, and, with
+the wife and children whom he kept there, ate to repletion from the
+joint, washed it down with sherry and port supplied to him by merchants
+of the type of the late Mr. Ruskin's father; and, hey, presto! by
+eleven of the clock he was deep among the feathers. Twice on Sundays he
+went to church and held the plate. To Sunday's midday dinner he invited
+the vicar or a curate, and there was always beef and batter-pudding
+and improving talk, not to mention cabbage and an extra special "glass
+of wine, sir." Other recreations the English man of business had none,
+save and except perhaps an occasional Saturday-afternoon drive in a
+hired chaise with Mrs. Man-of-Business and the children, and a still
+more occasional visit to the theatre. In the long run, by the practice
+of these virtues he amassed wealth. He put his money into good bottoms;
+he owed no man a penny; and as he never robbed anybody and always lived
+miles within his income, he had a conscience so easy that it seemed
+to sleep. Everybody respected him. He was in demand to take the chair
+at the meetings of young men's improvement societies, and to explain
+the secret of his success "free, gratis, and for nothing" to the
+callow young men thereat assembled. He would tell you unctuously that
+he attributed his success (1) to early rising, (2) to never wasting
+time [the split infinitive was his], (3) to always saving at least one
+third of his income, (4) to never going bond for anybody, and (5) to
+marrying Mrs. Man-of-Business--this last, of course, with a chortle.
+So he wagged along and helped to build up the commercial greatness
+and probity and honour of his country. And when he died he had a
+magnificent and costly funeral and was attended to his last long home
+by his weeping relict and sorrowing sons and daughters. Next day there
+was an account of Mr. Man-of-Business's obsequies in the local papers,
+and his sons proceeded to carry on the concern.
+
+That was forty years ago. To-day the English man of business is
+a bird of an entirely different and altogether more entrancing
+feather. Indeed, it is a question whether he has not ceased to be a
+man of business at all. One might perhaps sum him up best by saying
+that he has begun to have notions. Whereas he was once the bulwark
+of the Philistine class, he has now gone over, lock, stock, and
+barrel--particularly barrel--to the Barbarians. He lives in the manner,
+style, and odour of Barbarism; and the ruling ambition of his existence
+is to pass for a "county magnate", a man of birth and leisure, rather
+than for a man of business. So that he has entirely laid aside the
+characteristics which distinguished his early and middle Victorian
+prototype. Breadth, girth, weight, the substantial, the ponderous, are
+not for him. He does not attribute his success to early rising; he does
+not boast that his word is his bond; he does not slap his sides when he
+laughs; he never went to business on a tram-car in his life; and as for
+his owing all he is to Mrs. Man-of-Business, it is to his association
+with that charming bechiffoned, bejewelled little lady that he owes
+all he owes. In other words, the new English man of business has made
+up his mind that, if life is to be made tolerable at all, it must be
+made tolerable through social ways. That is to say, if one's income
+runs to a couple of thousand a year out of a butter business, one
+must live in precisely the manner of persons whose incomes run to two
+thousand a year out of lands and hereditaments. "The glass of fashion
+and the mould of form" for a person who would live is Mayfair. Lords
+and dukes and the landed gentry have houses in Mayfair; their wives
+and female relatives flutter round in flashing equipages and brilliant
+toilettes; there is the theatre, the opera, and other people's houses
+in the evening, the Park on Sundays, the river in the summer, Scotland
+in the autumn, and the Riviera for the winter and early spring. Lords
+and dukes and the landed gentry tread this pretty round, and find both
+pleasure and dignity in it. Why not the head of the old-established
+firm of Margarine, Sons, Bros. & Co.? Why not, indeed? Old Margarine,
+founder of the house, never missed a day at the office for forty years.
+Young Margarine will tell you that, "after all, you know, it is rather
+amusing to drop into the office sometimes and see the fellows sit up."
+All the same, the business is a beastly bore, and there are moments
+when he wishes it at the deuce.
+
+As for Mrs. Margarine, Mrs. Man-of-Business, the erstwhile portly
+mother of daughters and only begetter of her spouse's success, really,
+if you saw her in her boudoir, in her carriage, at Princes, at the
+opera, at Brighton, or at Monte Carlo, you would not recognise her. She
+is young and slim; her hair is of flax; she has rings on her fingers,
+and probably bells on her toes; her diamonds are the envy of duchesses;
+"and as for Margarine, my dear, I never think either about it or him.
+My little boys are at Eton, and Dickie is going into the Guards."
+Sometimes even Mr. and Mrs. Man-of-Business manage to get presented.
+Then, as you may say, their cup runneth over; hand in hand they stand
+upon their Pisgah and stare at the Pacific as it were. There are no
+more worlds to conquer. They come down with a light upon their faces,
+and Margarine, Sons, Bros. & Co. can be hanged. In point of fact,
+Margarine, Sons, Bros. & Co. sooner or later becomes Margarine, Sons,
+Bros. & Co., Limited. Margarine himself drops out, taking with him all
+the money he can get. When he comes to die, if you said "Margarine," he
+would do his best to insult you.
+
+That is all. Of course, I have taken an extreme case, but apparently
+the desire of the latter-day English man of business is wholly in these
+directions. Be he in a great or small way, he is fain to step westward;
+he is fain to live as the Barbarians and to be undistinguishable
+from them. And rather than be beaten he will enter into that kingdom
+piecemeal. Surpluses that would have gone to consolidation and
+extension in the old days now go to personal and feminine expenditure.
+Bond Street captures what the wise would have dumped into Threadneedle
+Street; and instead of resting our hope upon the business methods
+of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Budgett, our heart inclines to the
+excellent precepts of our millionaire friend "Yeth Indeed." Which is to
+say that the English man of business, like the English sportsman, is
+dying out of the land. Whether his loss will be deplored by countless
+thousands is another question. Anyway, he is going.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE JOURNALIST
+
+
+I am dealing here with the English journalist, because in my opinion,
+after the English sportsman and the English man of business, there is
+nothing under the sun so wonderfully English and so fearfully foolish.
+The elegant and austere writer who gave us _The Unspeakable Scot_ has
+said much which he no doubt hoped would lead people to believe that
+the British Press was entirely in the hands of Scotsmen, and that this
+accounted at once for its dulness and its continual advertisement of
+Scottish virtues. For my own part, I have no hesitation in asserting
+that Mr. Crosland's view of the situation is quite a mistaken one.
+In any case, it is obvious that, even if Fleet Street be, as Mr.
+Crosland suggests, eaten up with louts from over the Border, the
+English journalist is not yet wholly extinct, and somewhere in the land
+the remnant of him stands valiantly to its guns. It is well known,
+however, that, as a fact, the remnant very largely outnumbers its
+hated rival, the proportion of Scots to the proportion of Englishmen
+on the staffs of most newspapers being probably no higher than as one
+is to three. So that for the stodginess and flat-footedness of the
+English newspaper--the epithets are Mr. Crosland's own--the Englishman
+is at least equally to blame with the Scot. Mr. Crosland's main
+complaint against the newspaper press of his country is that it lacks
+brilliance. So far as I am aware, it has never before been asserted
+that the function of a newspaper is to be brilliant. News is news all
+over the world. To write brilliantly of a dog-fight or of the suicide
+of a defaulting clerk may be Mr. Crosland's ambition in life, but
+most persons possessing such an ambition would transfer their finical
+attentions from the field of journalism to that of belles-lettres. No
+doubt, if Mr. Crosland had his way, the morning papers, in which the
+soul of the average Englishman so delighteth, would be published from
+the Bodley Head or at the Sign of the Unicorn, or haply at Mr. Grant
+Richards's.
+
+It is not my intention, however, to enter into a sort of ten nights'
+discussion with Mr. Crosland. He has had his say and taken the whipping
+he deserved. My business is with the English journalist; and while I
+shall not descend to personalities in dealing with him, I hope to show
+that his brilliance and liveliness and smartness, though much vaunted,
+are neither a boon nor a blessing either to journalism as a force or
+to society at large. I think that it may be fairly set down for a fact
+that the fine flower and consummate expression of English journalism
+is the halfpenny newspaper. At any rate, nobody would pretend to find
+in the halfpenny newspaper the sententious dulness and flat-footedness
+which are supposed to characterise the journalistic work of the Scot.
+The smartness of the halfpenny press is indeed not even American.
+There is but one epithet for it, and that is English. Broadly speaking,
+its appeal is directly and exclusively to the bathotic. In England
+the bathotic has always had the majority in its grip. The majority
+notoriously has no mind. It is a thing of one emotion, an instrument
+of one stop. On that stop--the bathotic stop--the English journalist
+makes a point of playing. There has been a time in his history when he
+believed in the educative possibilities and duties of his profession.
+He long held with the Scot that the Press was a power, and that it was
+becoming that it should glory in being a power for the betterment of
+the race. After many shrewd searchings and commercial gropings, the
+English journalist discovered that the way to fame and fortune lay in
+the mastery of the bathotic stop. He learned to sing songs of Araby
+in one squalid key every morning, and he has since been able to keep
+a gig and out-circulate everything that considers itself possessed of
+circulation. He has played, as one might say, old Harvey with the
+_Daily Telegraph_. He has put the _Times_ to the shame of being a
+journal that "nobody reads." More than all, he has said flatly to the
+English people, "You are a rabbit-brained crowd, and here for your
+delectation and your coppers is the worst that can be written for you."
+
+When England comes to her day of reckoning, in the hour when she
+shall see her own mischance and is fain to remember the names of her
+destroyers, none of them will seem to her so flagrant and so to be
+deprecated as the English journalist. "Behold," she will say, "the
+monster who convinced me that it was beautiful to split infinitives;
+that it was elegant to begin six paragraphs on one page with the
+blessed statement, 'A dramatic scene was enacted in Mr. Thingamybob's
+court yesterday'; that good books are to be worthily pronounced upon by
+sub-editors in the intervals of waiting for the three o'clock winner;
+and that, so far from being a reproach to one, the bathotic was the
+only honourable and creditable attitude of mind."
+
+If a man wish to perceive to what degraded passes the art of writing
+may come and yet retain the qualities of intelligibility and apparent
+reasonableness, let him peruse the morning papers and die the death.
+The reek and offence of them smells to heaven. They are a sure
+indication of the decadence of the English mind and of the cupidity
+and unscrupulousness of the English journalist. There has been nothing
+like them, nothing to compare with them, for cheapness and futility and
+banality in the history of the world. They are more to be fearful of
+than the pestilence, inasmuch as they spell intellectual debasement,
+the corruption of the public taste, and the defilement of the public
+spirit. Their very literal innocuousness condemns them. It is their
+boast that they may be read in the family without a blush. Their
+assumption of morality and puritanical straitlacedness is admirable.
+Beneath it there lie a licentiousness of purpose, a disregard for
+what is just, and a contempt for what is decent and of good report
+which are calculated to make the angels weep. When one inquires into
+the personnel of the staffs by which these papers are run, one is
+confronted with exactly the kind of man one expects to meet. First
+of all, he is English, and as shallow and flippant and irresponsible
+as only an Englishman can be. The saving touch of seriousness does
+not enter into his composition. He neither reads nor thinks. Beer,
+billiards, and free lunches, free entry to the less edifying places of
+amusement, a minimum of work and a maximum of pay, constitute his ideal
+of the journalist's career, and he is always doing his best to live
+up to it. Of responsibility to anybody save his immediate chief, who,
+after all, is only himself at a little higher salary, he has not the
+smallest notion. His duty is neither by himself nor by the public. All
+that is expected of him is loyalty to his chief and to his paper, and
+it is his pride and joy that this loyalty is invariably forthcoming.
+
+Very occasionally one hears that, in consequence of a change in
+the political policy of a newspaper, the editor of that paper has
+considered it to be his duty to resign his editorship. Probably not
+more than two such resignations have occurred in English journalism
+during the past twenty years. In both instances the self-denying
+editors have been held up by the English papers as sublime examples of
+honour and martyrdom. That there is nothing extraordinary in sticking
+to one's principles, even though it means loss of livelihood, does not
+appear to have dawned upon the lively English mind. Of course, it will
+be said that, if every member of the staff of a newspaper, down even
+to the junior reporters, were allowed to have beliefs and principles,
+and were not expected to write anything in antagonism to them, an
+exceedingly remarkable kind of newspaper would result. Compromise, at
+any rate on established matters, must be the rule of the journalist's
+life. On the other hand, I incline to the opinion that the English
+journalist is far too swift to acquiesce in doubtful procedure, and
+that where the morals, good report, and high character of a paper are
+concerned it is better to have a Scotch staff than an English one.
+Nothing is more characteristic of the English journalist of to-day than
+the circumstance that he is literally without opinions of his own.
+He takes his opinions from his chiefs, just as his chiefs take their
+opinions from their proprietors, or from the wire-pullers with whose
+party the paper happens to be associated. In a sense it is impossible
+that it should be otherwise. Yet you will find that in the main
+Scottish journalists do have opinions of their own, and that somehow
+they manage to be loyal to them. For weal or woe the Scot is immovable
+and unchangeable as the granite of his own hills. You can never get him
+to see that half-measures are either desirable or necessary. He will
+not stretch his conscience nor palter with his soul for any man or any
+man's money. The Englishman is all the other way--that is why he makes
+such a nimble and even brilliant journalist.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE EMPLOYED PERSON
+
+
+The English are a nation of employed persons. Wherever you go, from
+Berwick to Land's End, you will find that in the main the men you
+meet are somebody's employees. The better kind of them possibly write
+"manager" on their cards; some of them even are managing directors;
+others, again, are partners in wealthy houses or heads of such houses.
+Yet, as I have said, they strike you almost to a man as being in
+somebody's employment. Even the most prosperous of them have the
+strained, repressed, furtive look which comes of the long turning of
+other people's little wheels; while the masses, the employed English
+masses, give you, as regards appearance, physique, and habit of mind
+alike, an excellent notion of what a galley-slave must have been. The
+fact of being employed is indeed the only big and abiding fact in the
+average Englishman's life. It has its effect on the whole man from the
+time of his youth to the time of his death; it influences his actions
+and the trend of his thoughts to a far greater extent than any other
+force--love and religion included. In the Englishman's view, to be
+employed is the only road to subsistence, and, if one be ambitious, the
+only road to honour. He must work for somebody, otherwise he cannot
+be happy. The notion of working for himself appals him; and if by any
+chance he be persuaded to take the plunge, the consideration that
+he has no master weighs so heavily upon him that his end is usually
+speedy ruin of one sort or another. That is to say, he either takes
+advantage of his freedom to the extent of doing no work at all, or,
+in the absence of the guiding hand, he loses his judgment and throws
+to the winds the caution that kept him his place. It is a pity, there
+can be no doubt; but the thing is in the English blood. If you are
+an Englishman, you must be employed; if you are unemployed, you are
+unhappy, and worse. For a full century the rich merchants, enterprising
+manufacturers, colliery-owners, mill-owners, and what not, in whom
+the English put their trust, have been preaching and fomenting this
+doctrine by every means in their power. To their aid in spreading
+the glorious truth they have brought the moralists and the Churches:
+"'if a man will not work, neither shall he eat.' 'Servants, obey your
+masters.' Punctuality is the soul of business. Be faithful over a few
+things. Begin at the bottom rung of the ladder. Mr. So-and-so, the
+notorious billionaire, was once a poor working-boy in Manchester.
+Furthermore, if you _don't_ work and at our price--well, to say the
+least of it, God will not love you."
+
+And the English--poor bodies!--carry on their lives accordingly.
+The whole scheme of things is arranged to fit in with the ideas of
+employers as to what work means, under what conditions it should
+be performed, and what should be its rewards. To live in the manner
+pronounced to be respectable by the moralists and the Churches, you
+must take upon yourself exactly the labours, and no others, prescribed
+by the employers. In other words, to keep an eight-roomed house with a
+piano in it, a wife with blouses and four new hats a year, and a little
+family who can go to church on Sunday mornings dressed as well as any
+of them, you must keep Messrs. Reachemdown's books, and pass through
+your hands many thousands of Messrs. Reachemdown's moneys, for a salary
+of £150 a year. When you get old and half blind through years of poring
+over Reachemdown's figures, they will pension you off at a pound a
+week, and get a younger man to do the work for the other £2. You, good,
+easy Englishman, will, in your heart of hearts, be exceedingly grateful
+to Reachemdown & Reachemdown, and count it not the least of your many
+blessings that you have never wanted good work and kind employers.
+You will say to your English son, "My boy, make up your mind to serve
+people well, and in your old age they will never forget you. Always be
+industrious, obliging, and respectful. Remember that a rolling stone
+gathers no moss, and never forsake the substance for the shadow." And
+the chances are that your fine English boy will do exactly what you,
+his fine English father, have done. Indeed, if he be old enough at the
+time of your "retirement," he might very appropriately take your place
+at Reachemdown & Reachemdown's; then he will marry, he will live in a
+house with a piano in it, his wife will have four new hats a year, and
+his children will go to church on Sundays as well dressed as any of
+them.
+
+On the whole, I should be sorry to say that this sort of thing was
+not desirable. If a nation is to be great, it is essential that it
+should contain a large body of workers, and the more industrious and
+dependable and trustworthy that body of workers, the better it is for
+the State and for the pillars and props of the State, the employers
+included. But the point is that the English take too much credit for
+it and get too much ease out of it. It has been complained by Mr.
+Crosland and other masters of elegant English that the Scot goes
+to London and the smaller industrial markets and there enters into
+successful competition with the English employed, and it appears to
+annoy Mr. Crosland that the Scot should not be content with good work,
+say book-keeping from nine to six, good wages, say £150 per annum, and
+kind employers, say Messrs. Reachemdown & Reachemdown, all his life.
+It seems to annoy him, too, that the Scot never acquires that pathetic
+satisfaction in being employed which permeates the beautiful spirit of
+his English competitor. You will meet hoary and bald-headed Englishmen
+who will tell you with a quaver that they have been in the employment
+of one and the same house, man and boy, for over half a century, sir!
+Somehow the Englishman tells you this with a look of pride, and rather
+expects you to regard him as a sort of marvel. It never occurs to
+him that he is really bragging of his own ineptitude,--to use Mr.
+Crosland's favourite abstraction,--his own lack of enterprise. The
+number of Scots who have been in the employment of one house for forty
+years, least of all the number of Scots who brag about it, is probably
+not a round dozen. As a general rule, when a Scot has been in a house
+forty years, it is his house.
+
+Another matter in which the English employee appears to me to err
+mightily is his treatment of his employer. In concerns of great
+magnitude personal relations between employer and employed are often
+impossible, because the employer seldom comes near the place where his
+money is made for him. Quite frequently, however, he is accessible;
+yet the employee knows him not. He would no more think of walking up
+and shaking hands with him than he would think of casting himself from
+the top of the factory chimney-stack. It is the unwritten law of the
+English that the employer is a better man than the employed. For the
+employee to say "How do!" to the employer; for the employee to meet
+the employer in the street and omit to make respectful obeisances;
+for the employee to assert anywhere outside his favourite pot-house
+that Jack's as good as his master, would never do. If you are paid
+wages, you must be grateful and respectful; and though you know quite
+well that your employer is paying you just as little as ever he can,
+you must still respect him. Broadly speaking, we manage these things
+better in Scotland; and, for that matter, the Scot manages them
+better in England. The English employee quirks and crawls before his
+employer, because he knows that his employer can exercise over him
+powers which, if they do not mean exactly life and death, do mean a
+possibly long period of out-of-workness. And out-of-workness is, as a
+rule, the most fearful thing in life that can happen to an Englishman,
+for the simple reason that he never has anything behind him. If he
+has been earning fifty pounds a year, he has spent it all; if he has
+been earning a thousand a year, he has spent it all and more to it.
+With the Scot it is different. No matter how small his earnings, he
+invariably contrives to save a portion of them. When he has saved a
+hundred pounds, he is practically an independent man, for a Scot with
+a hundred pounds at his disposal can defy, and can afford to defy, any
+employer that ever breathed the breath of life. Besides, hundred pounds
+or no hundred pounds, the Scot will not grovel. He does his work and
+his duty, and the rest can go hang. His days are not spent in blissful
+contemplation of the joys of being in good work; he has no anxieties
+as to how long it is going to last; he admits no superiorities; he is
+afraid of no man. Some day, perhaps, the Englishman will learn to take
+a leaf out of his book. The Englishman will learn that to be employed,
+excepting with a view to greater things than subsistence, is to be in
+a condition which borders very closely on degradation. He will learn
+that services rendered and energies expended for long periods of years
+without adequate reward, and with only a pretence at advancement, are a
+discredit and not an honour. He will learn that a man's a man, and that
+it is no man's business to be so faithful to another man that he cannot
+be faithful to himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+CHIFFON
+
+
+It pains me beyond measure to say it, but I think there can be no
+doubt that the accumulated experience and wisdom of mankind goes to
+show that at the bottom of most troubles there is a woman. Since Eve
+and the first debacle, it has been woman all along the line. I do not
+say that it is her fault, but the fact remains. White hands cling
+to the bridle-rein, and the horse proceeds accordingly. It is woman
+that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will. She has a delicate
+finger in everybody's pie. No matter who you are, some woman has got
+you by a little bit of string. Occasionally you are the better for
+being so entangled; but nine times out of ten it is a misfortune for
+you. When one comes to look closely at the decadence of the English,
+and endeavours to account for it in a plain way and without fear
+or prejudice, one cannot help perceiving that here again one has a
+pronounced case of woman, woman, woman. Further,--and once more I
+pray that I may not seem impolite,--the woman with whom you have to
+contend in England, though her hand be full of power, is not, perhaps,
+a woman, after all. I sometimes think that she may be best and most
+properly expressed in the word "Chiffon." Whatever she may have been
+in the past, however sweet, however demure, however capable, however
+beautiful, the Englishwoman of to-day is just a foolish doll, a
+thing of frills and fluff and patchouli, a daughter of vanity, and a
+worshipper of dressmakers. Under her little foot, under her mild, blue,
+greedy eye, the Englishman has become a capering carpet-knight, one
+who dallies at high noon, a buck, a dandy, an unconvinced flippancy,
+the shadow of his former self. Be he father or merely husband of the
+fair, his case is pretty much the same. Both at home (if he can find
+it in his heart to call his conglomeration of cosey-corners home) and
+abroad it is Chiffon that runs him. Chiffon must have a house full of
+fal-lals: so must the Englishman. Chiffon delights in Chippendale that
+a sixteen-stone male person dare not sit upon: so does the Englishman.
+Chiffon must dine late off French kickshaws with champagne to them: so
+must the Englishman. Chiffon must not have more than two children, whom
+she must visit and kiss once a day: it is the same with the Englishman.
+Chiffon does not like the way in which you are running your newspaper:
+the Englishman forthwith runs his newspaper another way. Chiffon does
+not like that cross-eyed clerk of yours; she is sure there is something
+wrong about him; she wouldn't trust him with a hairpin, my dear! He
+gets fired. Chiffon is fond of motor-cars and tiaras of diamonds and
+eight-guinea hats and three or four new frocks a week, and she hates to
+be worried about money matters. "Poor little Chiffon!" says the good,
+kind Englishman; "she shall be happy, even though we drift sweetly
+toward Carey Street. We must keep it up, though the heavens fall; and
+when I come to think of it, I have read somewhere of a man who had only
+£500 year, and is now in receipt of £16,000 simply through marrying
+an expensive wife." Lower down the scale it is just the same: Chiffon
+will have this, Chiffon will have that, and so will the Englishman. It
+is only four-three a yard, and it will make up lovely! The Englishman
+never doubts that it will. Chiffon discovers that Chiffon next door
+has got an oak parlour-organ and a case of birds on the instalment
+system. "She is getting them off a Scotsman," says Chiffon; "and I
+want some too." "Dry those pretty eyes," says the Englishman; "I will
+apply at once for an extra two-bob a week, and it shall be done." The
+children of Chiffon next door are "taking music lessons off a lidy in
+reduced circumstances." Chiffon's children are as good as the children
+of Chiffon next door any day in the week--they, too, shall take music
+lessons. The Englishman concurs.
+
+This, of course, is all when you are married to her. When you are
+Chiffon's _fiancé_ (she would not have you say sweetheart or lover
+for worlds), you enjoy what is commonly called in England a high old
+time. First of all, she will flirt with you till your reason rocks
+upon its throne. Then, when you are about as confused as a little boy
+who has fallen out of a balloon, she brings you to the idiot-point,
+informs you that it is so sudden and that she doesn't quite know
+what you mean, and asks you if you do not think it would have been
+more manly on your part to have spoken first with her papa. Being an
+Englishman, and having nothing better to do, you put up with it and
+go guiltily off to Chiffon's delectable male parent. He inquires into
+your income in pretty much the manner of a person who is going to
+lend you £20 on note of hand only, grunts a bit, asks to be excused
+while he has a word with the missis; comes back, says, "Yes, you can
+have her," and next morning you find yourself on the same old stool,
+in front of the same old shiny desk, wondering what in the name of
+heaven you have done. There is a three-years' courtship, all starch
+and theatre-tickets and bouquets and fretfulness and anxiety; there is
+a wedding pageant, got up specially for the purpose of annoying the
+neighbours; you have a whirling twenty minutes before a company of
+curates, who persist in calling you by the wrong name; you go home in
+shivers; you drink soda-water to prevent you from getting drunk; you
+make a speech in the tone of a man who has just been hung; you find
+yourself feeling rather queer aboard the Dover packet,--and Chiffon
+is yours. Such an experience at a time of life when a man is callow,
+shy, full of nerves, and unversed in the serious matters of life is
+bound to leave its mark upon the character. It takes the heart out of
+most men, and some of them never get it back again. It is an English
+institution and a stupid one. Like many another English institution, it
+has its basis in pretentiousness and display, instead of in the vital
+issues of life. In Scotland we make marriages on different and more
+serious principles. There are no Chiffons in Scotland, whether maids
+or matrons. Consequently in Scotland there are precious few fools.
+Hard heads, sound sense, high spirits, indomitable will, inexhaustible
+energy, are not the offspring of mammas who know more about cosmetics
+than about swaddling-clothes, and who suckle their children out of
+patent-food tins. One of the rebukers of Mr. Crosland has pointed out
+with some pertinence that the Scotswoman approximates more closely to
+the Wise Man's view of what a good wife should be than almost any other
+kind of woman in the world. Here, as Mr. Crosland would say, is Solomon:
+
+ Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.
+
+ The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall
+ have no need of spoil.
+
+ She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.
+
+ She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.
+
+ She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth her food from afar.
+
+ She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her
+ household, and a portion to her maidens.
+
+ She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands
+ she planteth a vineyard.
+
+ She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms.
+
+ She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth not out
+ by night.
+
+ She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff.
+
+ She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her
+ hands to the needy.
+
+ She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household
+ are clothed with scarlet.
+
+ Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of
+ the land.
+
+ She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the
+ merchant.
+
+ Strength and honour are her clothing: and she shall rejoice in time to
+ come.
+
+ She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of
+ kindness.
+
+ She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the
+ bread of idleness.
+
+ Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he
+ praiseth her.
+
+Yes, Mr. Crosland, it _is_ "very, very, very Scotch." What poor little
+Chiffon would think of it, if it were put before her as a standard of
+wifely qualification and duty, nobody but the Englishman knows. Perhaps
+she would shrug her shoulders and say, "How absurd!" Perhaps she would
+not understand it at all.
+
+The Englishwoman's love of petty display and cheap fripperies, her
+desire to outshine the neighbours and to put all she has on her back,
+and to pass everywhere for a woman of means and station, no doubt
+had its beginning in a laudable anxiety to make the best of things.
+Unfortunately, however, the tendency has been developed out of reason,
+to the neglect of the qualities which make a woman the inspiration
+and strength of a man's life. To dress, and to talking and thinking
+about it, the Englishwoman devotes unconscionable hours. The bare
+business of robing and disrobing takes up pretty well half her waking
+day. Her transference from the bath to the breakfast-table cannot be
+accomplished under fifty minutes. Before she will appear in the open
+she will make yet another toilet. She is a full twenty minutes tidying
+herself before lunch. In the afternoon there is an hour of getting into
+tea-gowns; and, crowning rite of all, my lady "strips" for dinner.
+From morn to dewy eve her little mind is busy with dress. The shopping,
+over which she makes such a fuss, is almost invariably a matter of new
+frocks, new hats, new shoes, new feathers, matching this, exchanging
+that, sitting on high stools before pomatumed counter-skippers, and
+dissipating, in the purchase of sheer superfluities, gold that men have
+toiled for. Her visiting is equally an unmitigatedly dressy matter;
+she goes to see her friends' frocks, not her friends, and it is the
+delight of her soul to turn up in toilettes which render her friends
+frankly and miserably envious. Of the real purport of clothes she knows
+nothing; and if you endeavour to explain it to her, she will charge
+you with the wish to make an old frump of her before her time. As for
+the expense of it all, she never bothers her pretty head about money
+matters; she tells you in the most childlike way that her account at
+the bank seems to be perpetually overdrawn, but that "Randall is a
+dear, kind boy, though he does swear a bit when some of the bills come
+in. Besides," she says, "I am sure it helps him in his profession to
+have a well-dressed wife."
+
+And the pity of it is, that quite frequently the person upon which
+these adornments are lavished is really not worth the embellishment,
+and would indeed be far better served and make a far better show in
+the least elaborate of garments. For, notoriously, the physique of the
+Englishwoman of the middle and upper classes is not now what it was.
+In height, in figure, in suppleness and grace of build, the Scottish
+woman can give her English sister many points. In the matter of facial
+beauty, too, the Englishwoman cannot be said particularly to shine. At
+a Drawing-Room, at the opera, the beauty of England spreads itself for
+your gaze; and the amazing lack both of beauty and the promise of it
+appals you. If we are to believe the society papers, there is not an
+ugly nor a plain-featured woman of means in all broad England. Every
+week the English illustrated journals give you pages of photographs,
+beneath which you may read in entrancing capital letters, "The
+beautiful Miss Snooks," or "Lady Beertap's two beautiful daughters."
+Yet the merest glance at those photographs convinces you that Miss
+Snooks is about as good-looking as the average kitchen-wench, while the
+two beautiful daughters of Lady Beertap have faces like the backs of
+cabs. The fact is, that the so-called English beauty is a rare thing
+and a fragile thing. Fully seventy-five per cent. of Englishwomen are
+not beautiful to look upon. Of the other twenty-five per cent., one
+here and there--perhaps one in a thousand--could stand beside the Venus
+of Milo without blenching. For the rest, they have a girlish prettiness
+which accompanies them into their thirtieth year, and sickens slowly
+into a sourness. At forty, little Chiffon, who was so pretty at twenty,
+has crow's-feet and flat cheeks, and a distinct tendency to the
+nut-cracker type of profile.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE SOLDIER
+
+
+"With a tow-row-row-row-row-row for the British Grenadiers!" Which,
+of course, means the English Grenadiers, inasmuch as there never were
+any Scottish Grenadiers. To-day, however, the English do not sing this
+song. Their grandfathers delighted in it, and the tune still survives
+as a soldier-man's march. But when the modern English wish to celebrate
+the English soldier vocally, they do it in their own decadent, bathotic
+way. They have an idiot-song called _Tommy Atkins_. The chorus of it
+goes somewhat in this wise:
+
+    Oh! Tommy, Tommy Atkins,
+      You're a good 'un, heart and hand;
+    You're a credit to your nation
+      And to your native land.
+
+    May your hand be ever ready!
+      May your heart be ever true!
+    God bless you, Tommy Atkins!
+      Here's your country's love to you!
+
+And since the outbreak of the late war, at any rate, the English do not
+speak of soldiers, but of Tommies; and the principal English poet has
+gone farther, and dubbed them Absent-Minded Beggars. Since the outbreak
+of the war, too, it has been necessary to issue from time to time words
+of caution to the great English public. Lord Roberts--"Little Bobs,"
+I suppose, I should call him, in the choice English fashion--has on
+two or three occasions deemed it advisable to let it be known that
+his desire was that the great English public should discontinue the
+practice of treating Cape-bound or returned Tommies to alcoholic
+stimulants, and substitute therefor mineral waters or cocoa. This was
+very wise on Little Bobs's part, and it has no doubt saved at least
+two Cape-bound or returned Tommies from the degradation of an almighty
+drunk. I mention this because it illustrates in an exceedingly quaint
+way the attitude of the English towards the soldier. When there is
+war toward, the soldier is absolutely the most popular kind of man in
+England. In peace-time an English soldier is commonly credited with
+being socially vile and unpresentable. There is a popular conundrum
+which runs, "What is the difference between a soldier and a meerschaum
+pipe?" and the answer, I regret to say, is, "One is the scum of the
+earth, and the other the scum of the sea." Tommy's place in the piping
+times of peace is just at the bottom of the social ladder; there he
+must stay, and drink four ale, and smoke cheap shag, and sit at the
+back of the gallery in places of amusement. Then war comes along, and
+the English bosom expands to the sound of the distant drum, and to
+the rumour of still more distant carnage. Who is it that's a-working
+this 'ere blooming war? Blest if it ain't our old friend Tommy Atkins!
+Fetch him out of the four-ale bar at once. The nation's heroes have
+no business in four-ale bars. The saloon bar is the place for them,
+and the barmaid shall smile upon them, and they shall have free drinks
+and free cigars till all's blue; for they are the nation's heroes, and
+they deserve well of their country. Furthermore, if they wish to visit
+those great and glorious centres of enlightened entertainment commonly
+called the Halls, they shall no longer be stuffed obscurely away in the
+rear portion of the gallery, but they shall come out into the light of
+things; they shall come blushingly and amid acclaim into the pit or the
+stalls, or, for that matter, into any part of the 'ouse.
+
+Throughout the war this has been so. It was so till yesterday. But
+the ancient English smugness has begun to assert itself once more;
+and Tommy--dear Tommy, God-bless-you Tommy, in fact--finds staring
+him in the face, as of yore, "Soldiers in uniform not served in this
+compartment"; "Soldiers in uniform cannot be admitted to any part of
+this theatre except the gallery." The English Kipling hit the whole
+matter off in his vulgar way when he wrote _Tommy_:
+
+  I went into a theatre as sober as could be;
+  They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;
+  They sent me to a gallery, or round the music-'alls;
+  But when it comes to fightin'--Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!
+
+  For it's Tommy this and Tommy that, an' "Tommy, wait outside";
+  But it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide--
+  The troopship's on the tide, my boys--the troopship's on the tide
+  Oh! it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide.
+
+We were told that this war, if it were doing England no other good,
+was at least bringing her to a right understanding of the soldier-man.
+It was teaching her to take him by the hand, to recognise in him a
+creditable son and an essential factor in the State. It has ended in
+the way in which pretty well every English revival does end--namely, in
+smoke. Though England has as much need of the soldier and is as much
+dependent upon him for peace and security as any other nation, she has
+never been able--excepting, as I have said, in time of war--to bring
+her greedy mind to the pass of doing him the smallest honour or of
+rendering to him that measure of social credit which is obviously his
+by right.
+
+That the English Tommy is not altogether a delectable person, however,
+goes, I think, without saying. According to General Buller and other
+more or less competent authorities, the men in South Africa were
+splendid. I do not doubt it in the least. On the other hand, the
+"returns" from that country have not struck one as reaching a high
+standard of savouriness or manliness; and, however splendid he may
+have been as a campaigner, as an ex-campaigner the English Tommy has
+scarcely shone; so that in a sense the changed attitude of the English
+public mind towards him is not to be wondered at.
+
+Elsewhere in this essay I have pointed out that the late war has not
+reflected any too much credit upon that chiefest of snobs--the English
+military officer. To go into the army has long been considered good
+form among the English Barbarians, and to be an officer in a swagger
+regiment may be reckoned one of the best passports to English society.
+It gives a man a tone, and puts him on a footing with the highest,
+because an officer is a gentleman in a very special sense. But it
+is well known that, during the past half-century or so, the English
+Barbarians have been too prone to put their sons into the army for
+social considerations only, and without regard to their qualification
+or call for the profession of arms. And in the long result it has come
+to pass that the English army is officered by men who know as little
+as possible and care a great deal less about their profession, and are
+compelled to leave the instruction, and as often as not the leadership,
+of their men to non-commissioned officers. Over and over again in the
+South African campaign it was the commissioned officer who blundered
+and brought about disaster, and the non-commissioned officers and the
+horse sense of the rank and file that saved whatever of the situation
+there might be left to save. Probably the true history of the British
+reverses, major and minor, in South Africa will never be made public.
+But I believe it can be shown that in almost every instance it was
+the incapacity or remissness of the English commissioned officer
+which lay at the root of the trouble. The fact is, that the monocled
+mountebank who is in the army, don't you know, seldom or never
+understands his job. He is too busy messing, and dancing, and flirting,
+and philandering, and racing, and gambling, and speeding the time
+merrily, ever to learn it. That the honour of Britain, and the lives
+of Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen, should be in his listless, damp
+hand for even as long as five minutes is an intolerable scandal. That
+he should haw and haw, and yaw and yaw, on the barrack-square, and
+take a salary out of the public purse for doing it, shows exactly how
+persistently stupid the English can be. Of course, the common reply
+to any attack upon these shallow-pated incompetents is that you must
+have gentlemen for the King's commissions, and that the pay the King's
+commissions carry is so inadequate that no gentleman unpossessed of
+private means can afford to take one. This is a very pretty argument
+and exceedingly English. The money will not run to capable men;
+therefore let us fling it away on fools. Army reform, sweeping changes
+at the War Office, new army regulations, an army on a business footing,
+and so on and so forth, are always being clamoured for by the English
+people, and always being promised by the English Government. But
+until the day when the granting of commissions and promotion are as
+little dependent upon social influence and the influence of money as
+advancement in the law or advancement in the arts, the English army
+will remain just where it is and just as rotten as it is.
+
+For downright childishness the modern English soldier, whether he be
+officer or file-man, has perhaps no compeer. When the South African War
+broke out, Tommy and his officers were men of scarlet and pipe-clay and
+gold lace and magnificent head-dresses. Also all drill was in close
+order; you were to shove in your infantry first, supported by your
+artillery, and deliver your last brilliant stroke with your cavalry.
+The men should go into the fray with bands playing, flags flying, and
+dressed as for parade. You commenced operations with move No. 1; the
+enemy would assuredly reply with move No. 2; you would then rush in
+with move No. 3; there would be a famous victory, and the streets of
+London would be illuminated at great expense. In South Africa matters
+did not quite pan out that way; the enemy declined absolutely to play
+the stereotyped war-game, for the very simple reason that they did
+not know it, and that South Africa is not quite of the contour of a
+chess-board. And so the English had to change their cherished system,
+and to learn to ride, and to throw their pretty uniforms into the
+old-clothes baskets, and to get out of their old drill into a drill
+which was no drill at all, and to give up resting their last hope on
+the British square, and to get accustomed to deadly conflict with an
+enemy whom they never saw and who never took the trouble to inform
+them whether they had beaten him or not. It was all very trying and all
+very bewildering, and it is to the credit of the English army that in
+the course of a year or two it did actually manage to understand the
+precise nature of the work cut out for it and made some show of dealing
+with it in a workman-like way.
+
+Here was a lesson for us, and we learned it. An Englishman, you know,
+can learn anything when he makes up his mind to it. And he has learned
+this South African lesson thoroughly well; so well, indeed, that it
+looks like being the only lesson he will be able to repeat any time
+in the next half-century. For what has he done? Well, to judge by
+appearances, we must reason this way: "I was not prepared for this
+South African business. It was a new thing to me. It gave me a new
+notion of the whole art and practice of war. The old authorities were
+clean out of it. Therefore I solemnly abjure the old authorities. For
+the future I wear slouch-hats and khaki and puttees and a jacket full
+of pockets, and I drill for the express notion that I may some day
+meet a Boer farmer. The entire sartorial and general aspect of my army
+shall be remodelled on lines which might induce one to think that the
+sole enemy of mankind was Mr. Kruger, and the great military centre of
+the world was Pretoria." It does not seem to occur to the poor body
+that his next great trial is not in the least likely to overtake him
+in South Africa. He has had to fight on the Continent of Europe before
+to-day, and I shall not be surprised if he has to do it again before
+many years have passed over his head. Yet, wherever his next large
+fighting has to be done, you will find that he will sail into it in his
+good old infantile, stupid English way, armed cap-a-pie for the special
+destruction of Boers. It is just gross want of sense, and that is all
+that can be said for it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE NAVY
+
+
+Since Trafalgar, the English navy has been the apple of the
+Englishman's eye. He holds that the English power is a sea-power;
+that these leviathans afloat, the King's ships, are his first line of
+defence; and that so long as he keeps the English navy up to the mark
+he can defy the world. His method of keeping it up to the mark is most
+singular. It consists of tinkering with old ships generation after
+generation, laying down new ones which seemingly never get finished,
+and of being chronically short of men. The naval critics of England
+may be divided sharply into two camps. In the one we have a number
+of gentlemen who are naval critics simply because they happen to be
+connected with newspapers. These young persons are naturally anxious
+to do the best that can be done for their papers and for themselves.
+They recognise that if they are to be in a position to obtain immediate
+and first-hand information--not to say exclusive information--as
+to naval doings, they must stand well with the Admiralty and the
+authorities. The Admiralty and the authorities are not in need of
+adverse critics. What they like and what they will have are smily, wily
+reporters, who will swear with the official word, see with the official
+eye, and take the rest for granted. In the other camp of naval critics
+you have a bright collection of book-compilers, naval architects,
+and patent-mongers, all of whom have some sort of fad to exploit or
+some private axe to grind. Hence the amiable English taxpayer knows
+just as much at the present moment about his navy as he knew three
+years ago about his army. In spite of the perfervid assurances of Mr.
+Kipling, and of the ill-written, anti-scare manifestoes of the morning
+papers, the English taxpayer knows in his heart that all is not so
+well as it might be with the English navy. What is wrong the English
+taxpayer cannot tell you; but there it is, and he has a sort of feeling
+that, when the big sea-tussle comes, the English navy, being tried,
+will be found wanting. Herein I think he shows great prescience. The
+superstition to the effect that the English rule the waves has of late
+begun to be known for what it is. There are nowadays other Richmonds
+in the field, all bent on doing a little wave-ruling on their own
+account. And after the first start of surprise and astonishment, the
+sleepy, slack, undiscerning Englishman has just let things go on as
+they were, and has just dilly-dallied what time the new wave-rulers
+were building and equipping the finest battle-ships that modern science
+can put afloat, and making arrangements for the acquisition of as much
+naval supremacy as they can lay their hands on. And whether the English
+navy be or be not as efficient as the Admiralty and the admirals would
+have us believe, it is quite certain that, in consequence of budding
+wave-rulers, the English navy is not, on the whole, so formidable a
+weapon or so impregnable a defence as it ought to be. The fact is,
+that in the matter of naval strength, offensive and defensive, the
+English are just a quarter of a century behind. They slept whilst their
+good friends the French, the Russians, and the Germans were climbing
+upward in the dark; and when they woke it was to perceive that another
+navy had sprung into existence by the side of the English navy, and
+that the task of catching up, of putting the old navy into a position
+of absolute supremacy over the new, was well-nigh an impossible one.
+You cannot build line-of-battle ships in an hour. Furthermore, the
+yards of England, though capable of extraordinary achievements, are
+not capable of a greater output than the yards of France, Russia, and
+Germany conjoined. Half a century ago the English had a distinct and
+preponderating start. When the other powers began to show increased
+activity in the matter of shipbuilding, the English said, "It is of
+no consequence; let 'em build." They threw their start clean away. The
+probabilities are that they will never be able to regain it.
+
+Quite apart from the large general question, however, and granting
+that on paper England's sea-power is equal to that of any three powers
+combined, it cannot have escaped the attention of the interested that
+the foreign naval experts view our whole flotilla with a singular calm,
+and appear to be quite amused when we talk of naval efficiency and
+advancement. It is pretty certain that this calm and this amusement are
+not based entirely in either ignorance or arrogance. Ships built and
+fitted in Continental yards may lack the advantage of being English
+built, but they are fighting-ships nevertheless, and they have not much
+to lose by comparison with the best English fighting-ships, even when
+the comparison is made by English experts. Indeed, it is very much
+open to question whether some of the Continental ships are not a long
+way ahead of some of the best English ships in destructive power and
+possibilities for fight. Of course the common reply to this is, that
+it is no good having a fine machine unless you have the right man to
+handle it. And Jack, of course,--the honest English Jack,--is the only
+man in the world that really knows how to handle fighting-ships. Well,
+it may be so, or it may not be so. The Englishman will undoubtedly keep
+his engines going and stick to his guns till chaos engulfs him. It
+seems possible, too, that he has made himself thoroughly familiar with
+every detail of the machine he has got to work, and that he knows his
+business in a way which leaves precious little room for more intimate
+knowledge. In spite of all this, however, it cannot be denied that the
+Continental navy-man is slowly but surely creeping up to the English
+standard. That as a rule he is a man of better family than the English
+navy-man, that his conditions of service are more favourable, and
+that his food and accommodation are better, are all in his favour.
+He may lack the steadiness and the grit of the old original English
+hearts of oak. Still, he is coming on and making progress; whereas the
+old original English hearts of oak do not appear to be getting much
+"forrader." Besides, it is well known that the English do not possess
+anything like enough of them, and those whom they do possess have such
+a love for the service that they take particularly good care to warn
+would-be recruits off it.
+
+From time immemorial the English have made a point of treating the
+saviours of their country meanly and shabbily. In the Crimea the
+English troops were half-starved and went about in rags, while a lot
+of broad-shouldered, genial Englishmen made fortunes out of army
+contracts. It was the same in the Transvaal, and it will be the same
+whenever England is at war. In peace-time she does manage to keep her
+soldiers and sailors decently dressed, but it is notorious that she
+nips them in the paunch, and that the roast beef and plum-pudding and
+flagons of October which are supposed to be the meat and drink of John
+Bull are not considered good for his brave defenders. A beef-fed army
+and a beef-fed navy are what Englishmen believe they get for their
+money. The rank and file of the army and navy are better informed. With
+a navy that is undersized, undermanned, underfed, and underpaid, the
+English chances of triumph, when her real strength is put to the test,
+are problematical. Meanwhile, we may comfort ourselves with Mr. Kipling
+and the _Daily Telegraph_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE CHURCHES
+
+
+The English have one sauce. But the number of their religions is as the
+sands of the sea. Roughly speaking, they divide themselves religiously
+into two classes--Anglicans and Nonconformists. The Anglicans, one may
+say, are reformed Catholics; the Nonconformists, reformed Anglicans.
+Apparently all English religions--with the exception, of course, of
+the Catholic religion, which is not counted--date from or since the
+Reformation. We know what the Reformation means in Scotland, though
+the English notion of it seems to be a trifle vague. We also know in
+Scotland what religion means. I doubt if the English have any such
+knowledge. One has only to visit an average Anglican or Nonconformist
+church on the Sabbath to perceive that in England religion is under
+a cloud and has almost ceased to be a spiritual matter. In the first
+place, you will notice that the congregation is for the most part
+composed of women and children. Englishmen are too busy or too bored to
+go to church on the Sabbath. What little faith, what little religious
+fervour or feeling, they ever possessed has been knocked out of them,
+and they no longer go to church. And this change has been accomplished,
+not by the failure of dogmas, not by the spread of free-thought, not
+by secularists, anti-clericalists, or philosophers, but simply by an
+indolent clergy on the one hand and cheap railway fares on the other.
+The mediocre preacher and the new-fangled English week-end have emptied
+the churches of England's manhood. The women and children are left, a
+puling, bemused crowd, and to these the English shepherds and pastors
+blate their cheap ritual and read their ill-considered sermons.
+
+It is curious to note how easily an English parson or Nonconformist
+minister can make a reputation for greatness as a preacher. Let him
+be just a little more competent than the average, and people flock
+to hear him. I doubt if there is a really great preacher alive in
+England to-day. Yet there are three or four who pass for great, and
+who are supposed to be in line with St. Paul, John Knox, and Wesley.
+To give instances would be invidious, but I have no hesitation in
+asserting that the preachments offered in London at the three or four
+great churches which are supposed to enshrine orators are, as a rule,
+exceedingly feeble efforts, tricked out with gauds and mannerisms,
+packed with trite sentiment, and utterly devoid of doctrine,
+inspiration, and value. There are not three bishops on the English
+bench that can furnish forth a sermon worth going fifty yards to hear.
+There is not a Nonconformist minister who has a soul above stodginess,
+convention, and a convenient if threadbare Scriptural tag. The
+Salvation Army, perhaps, have the fervour and the courage, but they
+lack wisdom, and they have no art. The Congregationalists have some of
+the wisdom and a touch of the art, but they have no fervour. Indeed,
+wherever you turn you find that the recognised English religionists
+have given themselves up to a decadent, Hebraic emotion, and let the
+solid things of the spirit--the Hebraic culture, the Hebraic vision,
+the Hebraic passion--pass by them.
+
+Gradually the churches of this remarkable country are ceasing to
+have anything to do with religion at all. "Religion be hanged!" say
+those that run them. "Religion no longer appeals to the wayward,
+stony-hearted, over-driven, half-educated English populace. What is
+wanted is social brightness and warmth, the religion of brotherhood
+and the full belly; so that we will give magic-lantern entertainments
+in our churches on the Lord's Day, we will go in 'bald-headed' for
+pleasant Sunday afternoons, hot coffee and veal-and-ham pies, and
+screws of tobacco given away at the doors, wrapped up in a tract,
+which you are at liberty either to read or to light your pipe with."
+As for the English priests that had the authority of God, they are no
+longer sure whether they have that authority or not. Of course, they
+believe they have it in a sacerdotal, canonical, and private way; but
+not one of them dare stand up and swear by his powers publicly. The
+bishops are all for peace and quietness. "If you please, we are your
+friends, and not your masters," say they to their clergy; and their
+clergy, to use an English vulgarism, "wink the other eye." And the
+clergy, too, in turn are the friends and not the masters of common
+men; they are so much your friends, indeed, that, providing you mount
+a silk hat on Sunday and put a penny on the plate, you can depend
+upon a friendly shake of the hand and a kindly grin of recognition
+six days in the week, even though you happen to be a bookmaker or the
+keeper of a bucket-shop. For the Nonconformist clergy, if clergy they
+may be called, they speak humorously at tea-parties, they enter into
+hat-trimming competitions at bazaars, and they play principal guest
+at the tables of over-fed tradesmen. There is not a man amongst them
+who can say boo to a goose. There is not a man amongst them who as a
+social unit is worth the £150 a year and a manse, with £10 per annum
+for each child, that a glozing, unintellectual English congregation
+hands over to him. Out of the ease and security and respectability
+and _dolce far niente_ which the Church of England provides for a
+considerable proportion of her priests, she has managed to evolve
+a few scholars, a few men of letters, perhaps an odd saint or two,
+and an odd man of temperament and mark. But what have the English
+Nonconformists produced? Dr. Horton and Dr. Parker, and that G.R. Sims
+of religionists, the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes. To this distinguished
+triumvirate--though the English Nonconformists will hold up pious hands
+of horror at the notion--one may add that valiant thumper of the pulpit
+drum, General Booth, who is doing a work in religious decadence and
+bathoticism which it will take centuries to undo. Want of heart and
+want of mind, coupled with the blessed spirit of tolerance, have indeed
+played havoc with the English Churches.
+
+The loosening of the grip of the Church on English society has, of
+course, not been without its results on English morals and on English
+society at large. There is a general feeling abroad that religion is
+played out, that the system of Hebrew ethics which has been drilled
+into the English blood by generations of the faithful was all very
+well for the faithful, but is altogether impracticable and out of
+harmony with the present intelligent times. You will find Englishmen
+nowadays complaining that the taint of spiritualism, asceticism, and
+ethical faith which they have inherited from their people is a source
+of hindrance to them in the matter of their commercial or social
+progress, and their lives are spent in an endeavour to eradicate or to
+triumph over that taint. The Archbishop of Canterbury could not run
+a tea-shop by the rules laid down in the Sermon on the Mount, they
+will tell you; and, what is worse, the Archbishop of Canterbury agrees
+with them. "Take all thou hast, and give it to the poor" is out of the
+question even for Dr. Horton. Since those blessed words were said, we
+are told, the Poor Law has sprung up; we give all that is necessary
+for pauperism in the poor-rate; and, thanks to the excellence of our
+social system, it is now impossible for man, woman, or child to die
+of starvation, provided only that they will work. I have heard it
+stated by an English Nonconformist minister that his chief complaint
+against the Roman Catholic community in his district was their habit
+of being over-liberal to the poor. "No man is refused," observed my
+Nonconformist friend, "no matter how dissolute or idle or irreligious
+he may be."
+
+Then in the large question of the employment of human flesh and blood
+to make money for you, the modern Englishman finds that he must either
+tear the effects of his religious bringing-up out of his heart, or
+forego the possibility of becoming really rich, don't you know. It is
+all a matter of supply and demand; and if the mass of humanity live
+starved lives and die daily in order that I may be fat and warm and
+cultured and possessed of surpluses at banks, it is not my fault. You
+must really blame supply and demand. With this fine phrase on his lips,
+the English capitalist confutes all the philosophies and sets his foot
+on the majority of the decencies of life. Of course, I shall be told
+that the prince and chief of all hide-bound industrial capitalists is
+Mr. Andrew Carnegie, who happens to be a Scot. And I cheerfully admit
+that Mr. Carnegie is a very serious case in point. But for our one Mr.
+Carnegie, the English have fifty Mr. Carnegies. They may not be so
+rich or so famous; but there they are, and the blood and spirit of the
+English people suffer accordingly. The religion of the wealthy does not
+prevent them from grinding the face of the poor; and the religion of
+the middle classes is of pretty much the same order. It is at the hands
+of the English middle classes that the English poor suffer a further
+and a bitterer depredation. For when you have earned money hardly, you
+want good goods for it; and the English middle classes, who are nearly
+all shopkeepers, either directly or indirectly, make a point of palming
+off on you the very worst goods the law will allow them to sell.
+
+And, in spite of all, the churches continue to open their doors, new
+churches continue to be built, million-pound funds are raised, the
+missionary speeds over the blue wave to the succour of the 'eathen,
+and English women and children have their pleasant Sunday afternoons,
+and bishops keep high-stepping horses; Church and State are grappled
+together with hooks of steel, and England is a Christian country.
+Till the churches get out of their slippers and their sloth and their
+tea-bibbing and their tolerance, matters will go on in the same old
+futile, scandalous way. If they are to have charge and direction of
+the soul of man, they must remember that the soul of man is a greater
+thing than ease, and a greater thing than the Church; they must not
+play with the immortal part of humanity, and they must not trifle
+with the things which they believe to be of God. In no other country
+save England would such churches and such priests as the English now
+possess be tolerated or supported; it is the English decadence which
+has rendered Englishmen blind to the stupidity and banality of their
+pastors and spiritual guides, and it is the English easy-heartedness
+which permits the game of cant and cadge and sham to go on unchecked.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE POLITICIAN
+
+
+The flower and exemplar of well-nigh everything that is choicely and
+brutally English may be summed up in the English politician. Such a
+tub-thumper, such a master of claptrap and the arts and feints and
+fetches of oratory, has never been known before since the world began.
+He is English, and therefore he knows his business. He has made a study
+of it as a business, and without regard to its more serious issues. His
+position is, that, if he would do himself well, he must tie himself
+hand and foot to some party, and serve that party through thick and
+thin. Then in the end, and with good luck, will come reward. You may
+be born in a chandler's shop. By birth, therefore, you belong to the
+very lower English middle class. Through the practice of a number of
+commercial virtues, and with the help of considerable speculation
+outside your own business, you become wealthy. Now, wealth without
+honour is nothing to an Englishman. He cannot brook that his wealth,
+his shining, glorious superfluity, should be hidden under a bushel.
+Therefore he seeks municipal honours; he becomes a town councillor, an
+alderman, a mayor even.
+
+But these, after all, are not the summits; they lead at best only to
+a common knighthood, and any fool can get knighted if he wants to. So
+you determine to seek Parliamentary honours. You subscribe liberally
+to the funds of your party, and by-and-by a constituency is found
+for you to contest. You lose the fight and subscribe again; another
+constituency is found for you, and you win by the skin of your teeth or
+with a plumping majority, as the case may be. You are now a full-blown
+member of Parliament; it is worth the money and much better than being
+a mayor. Up to this time you have been an orator of sorts. You have
+held forth from schoolroom platforms and the tops of waggons what time
+the assembled populace shouted and threw up its sweaty nightcaps. You
+have been carried shoulder high behind brass bands rendering _See, the
+Conquering Hero Comes_. Now however, you are really in Parliament; and
+for the nonce--for several years, in fact--you must give up talking.
+There is plenty for you to do; you may put questions on the paper,
+you may get a look in at committee work, you may show electors round
+the Houses, and you may go on subscribing liberally to the party
+funds. When you have subscribed enough, it is just within the bounds
+of possibility that the heads of the party--the Front Bench people,
+as it were--will begin to discover that there is virtue in you. You
+will be encouraged to make a speech or two at the slackest part of
+debates, and some fine day you may be entrusted with the fortunes of
+a little Bill which your party wishes to rush through. All the while
+you are subscribing liberally to the party funds. After many years,
+when you are least expecting it, the bottom seems to fall out of the
+universe--that is to say, there is a General Election. You have to
+fight your seat; you win; you come nobly back; behold, your party is in
+power. Then comes the grand moment of your life. You are shovelled into
+the Cabinet on account of services rendered. From this point, if you
+possess any ability at all, you can have things pretty much your own
+way; and if your ambition has been to hear yourself called "My lord"
+before you die, and to see your wife in the Peeresses' Gallery on great
+occasions, and your sons swanking about town with "Hon." before their
+names, you can manage it. It is a slow job, and it involves many years
+of hard work and lavish expenditure; but it is politically possible in
+England for a man to be born on the flags and to die properly set forth
+in Burke and Debrett.
+
+I do not say for a moment that the end and aim of every English
+politician is the peerage; but I do say that, as a rule, his labours
+are directed towards some end of honour or emolument, and seldom or
+never to the good of the State. It is ambition, and not patriotism,
+that fires his bosom; it is self-aggrandisement, and not a desire
+for the welfare of the English people, that keeps him going; and it
+is party, and not principle, that guides and rules his legislative
+actions. Of course, the great art of being a politician is to hide
+these facts from the public. If you went down to your constituency
+like an honest man and said, "Gentlemen, I wish you to return me to
+Parliament in order that I may make a high position for myself, in
+order that I may become a man of rank and the founder of a family,"
+your constituency would hurl dead cats at you. Therefore you go down
+with an altogether different tale: "I am going to the House of Commons,
+gentlemen, in your interests and not in mine. It will cost me large
+sums of money; besides which, as your member, I shall be expected to
+subscribe to all the local cricket clubs. But I have the best interests
+of Muckington at heart; and, if you honour me by making me your
+representative, money is no object."
+
+It is a wonderful business, and a great and a glorious. One stands in
+astonishment before the bright English intelligence which takes so
+much on promise and gets so little performed. An English party never
+goes into power with the intention of doing more than half of what it
+has promised to do. At election times its great business is to capture
+votes: these must be had at any price short of rank bribery. And, once
+landed with the blest, the party immediately settles down, not to the
+work of carrying out its promises, but to the far more serious business
+of keeping itself in power. From the point of view of the careless
+lay-observer, the House of Commons is an assemblage for the discussion
+of Imperial affairs, with a view to their being managed in the best
+possible way. To the politician it is just an arena in which two sets
+of greedy men meet to annoy, thwart, ridicule, and bring about the
+downfall of each other.
+
+The amount of interest the Englishman is supposed to take in this
+amazing assemblage and its doings makes it plain that the Englishman
+himself is well-nigh as foolish and well-nigh as oblique as the person
+whom he elects to represent him. Next to royalty itself there is nobody
+in England who can command so much attention and such a prominent
+place in the picture as the politician. If he be a Cabinet Minister
+of any standing, it is impossible for him to walk through the streets
+either of London or of any of the English provincial towns without
+being immediately recognised and "respectfully saluted"; whereas, if he
+happens to have come to any metropolitan district or provincial town
+on political business bent, he may depend upon being received at the
+proper point by the local authorities, supported by a guard of honour
+of the local Volunteers, and he may also depend upon more or less of
+an ovation on his way to and from the place of meeting.
+
+Year in and year out, too, the illustrated papers of every degree
+blossom with his latest photograph. Mr. So-and-so in his new motorcar;
+Mr. So-and-so playing golf; Mr. So-and-so and the King; Mr. So-and-so
+addressing the mob from the railway train,--these are pictures in which
+every Englishman has delighted from his youth up, and in which he will
+always find great artistic and moral satisfaction. As for the journals
+which live out of the personal paragraph, they must give--or imagine
+they must give--pride of place to the politician, or perish. Little
+anecdotes of the sayings and doings of the politically great are always
+marketable. It is not necessary that they should have the slightest
+foundation in truth; but they must be neat, reasonably amusing, and
+flattering to the personage involved.
+
+It is when one turns to the English daily papers, however, that one
+begins to understand what an extraordinary hold the political interest
+has upon the English public mind. It is well known that, in the main,
+the debates in the House of Commons are quite dull, colourless, and
+somnolent functions. Half of them take place in the presence only of
+the Speaker and a quorum. That is to say, nine nights out of ten,
+members spend the greater portion of their time in the smoke-rooms,
+dining-rooms, and lobbies, and not in the House itself, the simple
+reason being that, as a rule, the debates are not interesting. When
+some reputable champion of either party gets on his legs, or when
+some wag is up, members manage to attend in force; but it is only
+at these moments that they do so. Yet, if you pick up an English
+morning newspaper, you will find six columns of that sheet devoted to
+a report of the proceedings in Parliament; another three columns of
+descriptive matter bearing on the same proceedings; and, out of four or
+five leaders, three at least deal with the political question of the
+moment. Even when Parliament is not sitting, the first leader is never
+by any chance other than political. From the point of view of the
+dull English mind, nothing more important than a political happening
+can happen in this world. Mr. Somebody has called Mr. Somebody else
+a liar across the floor of the House of Commons. It is essential
+for the well-being of the country at large that the episode should
+be reported with a separate subhead and great circumstance in the
+Parliamentary report; that the scene should be described by the lively
+and picturesque pen of the writer of the Parliamentary sketch; that
+the appearance of the gentleman who called the other gentleman a liar
+should be dwelt upon in the notes; that instances of other gentlemen
+having called gentlemen liars across the floor of the House should
+also be given in the notes; and, finally, that a rotund and windy
+leader should be written, wherein is discussed gravely the general
+advisability of gentlemen calling other gentlemen liars across the
+floor of the House; wherein one is assured that, in spite of occasional
+regrettable instances of the kind, the English Parliament is the most
+decorous and dignified assemblage under the sun; and wherein we cannot
+refrain from paying our tribute of respectful admiration to the Right
+Honourable the Speaker, whose tact, good sense, and gentleman-like
+spirit, coupled with the firmness, resolution, and knowledge of the
+procedure of the House becoming to his high position, invariably enable
+him to still the storm and to repress the angry passions of our heated
+legislators before any great harm has been done. So that a gentleman
+who calls another gentleman a liar across the floor of the House of
+Commons really renders a great service to Englishmen, inasmuch as he
+provides them with a gratuitous entertainment, about which they may
+read, talk, and argue for at least twenty-four hours.
+
+Recognising their own love of politics and political strife, and
+knowing in their hearts that the talk in the House of Commons--not to
+mention the House of Lords--is, generally speaking, of the flattest
+and flabbiest, one would imagine that the wise English would be at
+some pains to take measures calculated to brighten up the Parliamentary
+debates and render them of real interest. But no such precautions are
+taken. When a would-be member of Parliament is heckled, he is never
+by any chance asked if he is prepared, at the psychological moment,
+to pull the nose of one of the right honourable gentlemen opposite.
+Any member of Parliament who, in the middle of a dull debate, would
+walk across the floor and box the ears of, say, Mr. Balfour, or Lord
+Hugh Cecil, would thereby earn for himself the distinction of being
+the best-discussed and best-described man in England for quite half
+a week. Considering the small amount of exertion required for such a
+proceeding, and the very large amount of notoriety which would accrue
+to the person who ventured on it, one wonders that it has never been
+done.
+
+In spite of the abnormal share of publicity and applause which is
+extended to the English politician, however, the solemn fact remains
+that he is seldom a person of any real force, capacity, understanding,
+or character. Commonplace, mediocre, insincere, inept, are the epithets
+which best describe him. He passes through the legislative chamber or
+chambers, says his say in undistinguished speeches, casts his vote,
+earns his place, his pension, or his peerage, and passes beyond our
+echo and our hail. The daily papers manufacture for him an obituary
+notice varying in length from five lines to a couple of columns, and
+nobody wants to hear anything more about him. As a matter of fact, he
+has left the world neither wiser nor wittier nor happier than he found
+it. If he has made one phrase or uttered one sentiment that sticks in
+men's minds, he is fortunate. Neither history nor posterity will have
+anything to say about him, though in his day he kicked up some fuss and
+took up a lot of room. In short, politics as a career in England is
+not a career for solid, serious men. It merely serves the turn of the
+specious, the shallow, the incompetent, and the vainglorious.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+POETS
+
+
+It may be set down as an axiom that a nation which is in the proper
+enjoyment of all its faculties, which is healthy, wealthy, wise, and
+properly conditioned, must be producing a certain amount of poetry.
+From the beginning this has been so; it will be so to the end. When
+England was at her highest, when the best in her was having full play,
+she produced poets. Right down into the Victorian Era she went on
+producing them. Then she took to the Stock Exchange and an ostentatious
+way of life, and the supply of poets fell off. If we except Mr.
+Swinburne, who does not belong rightfully to this present time,
+there is not a poet of any parts exercising his function in England
+to-day. Furthermore, any bookseller will tell you that the demand for
+poetry-books by new writers has practically ceased to exist.
+
+These statements will be called sweeping by a certain school of
+critics, and I shall be asked to cast my eye round the English nest of
+singing-birds, and to answer and say whether Mr. So-and-so be not a
+poet, and Mr. So-and-so, and Mr. So-and-so, and Mr. So-and-so. I shall
+also be asked to say if I am prepared to deny that of Mr. So-and-so's
+last volume of verse three hundred copies were actually sold to
+the booksellers. For the propounders of such questions I have one
+answer--namely, it may be so.
+
+In the meantime let us do our best to find an English poet who is worth
+the name, and who is prescriptively entitled to be mentioned in the
+category which begins with Chaucer and ends with Mr. Swinburne. Shall
+we try Mr. Rudyard Kipling? Tested by sales and the amount of dust he
+has managed to kick up, Mr. Kipling should be a poet of parts. He is
+still young, and, happily, among the living; but it cannot be denied
+that as a poet he has already outlived his reputation. Two years ago he
+could set the English-speaking nations humming or reciting whatever he
+chose to put into metre. Some of his little things looked like lasting.
+Already the majority of them are forgotten. To the next generation,
+if he be known at all, he will be known as the author of three
+pieces--_Recessional_, the _L'Envoi_ appended to _Life's Handicap_, and
+_Mandalay_. What is to become of such verses as the following?
+
+  'Ave you 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor,
+    With a hairy gold crown on 'er 'ead?
+  She 'as ships on the foam--she 'as millions at 'ome,
+    An' she pays us poor beggars in red.
+        ('Ow poor beggars in red!)
+
+  There's 'er nick on the cavalry 'orses,
+    There's 'er mark on the medical stores--
+  An' 'er troopers you'll find with a fair wind be'ind
+    That takes us to various wars.
+        (Poor beggars! barbarious wars!)
+
+  Then 'ere's to the Widow at Windsor,
+    An' 'ere's to the stores and the guns,
+  The men an' the 'orses what makes up the forces
+    O' Missis Victorier's sons.
+        (Poor beggars! Victorier's sons!)
+
+At the time of their appearance these lines and the like of them
+were vastly admired; everybody read them, most people praised them.
+They were supposed to stir the English blood like a blast of martial
+trumpets. Here at length was the poet England had been waiting for.
+There could be no mistake about him; he had the authentic voice, the
+incommunicable fire, the master-touch. He had come to stay. At the
+present moment the bulk of his metrical work is just about as dead and
+forgotten as the coster-songs of yesteryear. He has not even made a
+cult; nobody quotes him, nobody believes in him as a poetical master,
+nobody wants to hear any more of him. His imitators have all gone back
+to the imitation of better men. If a copy of verses have a flavour
+of Kipling about it nowadays, editors drop it as they would drop a
+hot coal. So much for the poet of empire, the poet of the people, the
+metrical patron of Thomas Atkins, Esq.
+
+Another poet of empire--Mr. W.E. Henley--has fared very little better.
+"What can I do for England?" is, I believe, still in request among the
+makers of a certain class of anthology; but English poetry in the bulk
+is just the same as if Mr. Henley had never been. Even the balderdash
+about "my indomitable soul" has fallen out of the _usus loquendi_ of
+young men's Christian associations and young men's debating societies.
+_The Song of the Sword_ is sung no longer; _For England's Sake_ has
+gone the way of all truculent war-poetry; and out of _Hawthorn and
+Lavender_ perhaps a couple of lyrics remain. Mr. Henley attacked Burns
+when Burns had been a century dead. Who will consider it worth while to
+attack Mr. Henley in, say, the year 2002?
+
+Possibly the real, true English poet who will in due course put on the
+laurel of Mr. Austin is Mr. Stephen Phillips. Yet Mr. Stephen Phillips
+is a purveyor of metrical notions for the stage, and in his last great
+work--_Ulysses_--I find him writing as follows:
+
+  ATHENE. Father, whose oath in hollow hell is heard,
+  Whose act is lightning after thunder-word,
+  A boon! a boon! that I compassion find
+  For one, the most unhappy of mankind.
+
+  ZEUS. How is he named?
+
+  ATHENE.        Ulysses. He who planned
+  To take the towered city of Troy-land--
+  A mighty spearsman, and a seaman wise,
+  A hunter, and at need a lord of lies.
+  With woven wiles he stole the Trojan town
+  Which ten years' battle could not batter down:
+  Oft hath he made sweet sacrifice to thee.
+
+  ZEUS (_nodding benevolently_). I mind me of the savoury smell.
+
+  ATHENE.                   Yet he,
+  When all the other captains had won home,
+  Was whirled about the wilderness of foam:
+  For the wind and the wave have driven him evermore,
+  Mocked by the green of some receding shore.
+  Yet over wind and wave he had his will,
+  Blistered and buffeted, unbaffled still.
+  Ever the snare was set, ever in vain--
+  The Lotus Island and the Siren strain;
+  Through Scylla and Charybdis hath he run,
+  Sleeplessly plunging to the setting sun.
+  Who hath so suffered, or so far hath sailed,
+  So much encountered, and so little quailed?
+
+Which is exactly the kind of poetry one requires for the cavern scene
+of a New Year's pantomime.
+
+Possibly, again, the real, true English poet is Mr. William Watson,
+with his tiresome mimicry of Wordsworth and his high-and-dry style of
+lyrical architecture. Mr. Watson is believed to have done great things,
+but his rôle now appears to be one of austere silence; he is what the
+old writers would have termed a costive poet. And if his _Collected
+Poems_ are to be the end of him, his end will not be long deferred.
+Or, possibly, the one and only poet our England of to-day would wish
+to boast is Mr. Arthur Symons. Mr. Symons writes just the kind of
+poetry one might expect of a versifier who, in early youth, had loved a
+cigarette-smoking ballet-girl, and could never bring himself to repress
+his passion. Here is a sample of Mr. Arthur Symons at his choicest:
+
+    The feverish room and that white bed,
+      The tumbled skirts upon a chair,
+      The novel flung half open where
+    Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints are spread.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    And you, half dressed and half awake,
+      Your slant eyes strangely watching me;
+      And I, who watch you drowsily,
+    With eyes that, having slept not, ache:
+
+    This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?)
+      Will rise, a ghost of memory, if
+      Ever again my handkerchief
+    Is scented with White Heliotrope.
+
+No doubt, if the English continue to descend the moral Avernus at their
+present rate of speed, Mr. Symons will become, by sheer process of
+time, the representative poet of the nation. It is part of a poet's
+duty to look into the future, and Mr. Symons appears to have taken the
+next two or three generations of Englishmen by the forelock. May he
+have the reward which is his due!
+
+For the rest, they all mean well, and they all aim high; but one is
+afraid that nothing will come of them. There are Francis Thompson, and
+Laurence Housman, and Henry Newbolt, and Laurence Binyon, and F.B.
+Money-Coutts, and Arthur Christopher Benson, and Victor Plarr--amiable
+performers all, but each a standing example of poetical shortcoming.
+Perhaps one ought not to mention Mr. John Davidson and Mr. W.B. Yeats,
+because Mr. Davidson is a Scot, and Mr. Yeats, putatively, at any rate,
+an Irishman. In some respects these twain may be considered the pick
+of the basket. I am constrained to admit, however, that neither of them
+has as yet fulfilled his earlier promise.
+
+So that, on the whole, England is practically without poets of marked
+or extraordinary attainments. The reason is not far to seek. She is
+losing the breed of noble bloods; her greed, her luxuriousness, her
+excesses, her contempt for all but the material, are beginning to find
+her out. Her youths, who should be fired by the brightest emotions, are
+bidden not to be fools, and taught that the whole duty of man is to be
+washed and combed and financially successful. Consequently that section
+of English adolescence which, in the nature of things, begins with
+poetry and gladness very speedily throws up the sponge. Consecration
+to the muse is no longer thought of among Englishmen. They cannot be
+content to be published and take their chance. The dismal shibboleth,
+"Poetry does not pay," wears them all down. What is the good of
+writing verses which bring you neither reputation nor emolument? One
+must live, and to live like a gentleman by honest toil, and devote
+one's leisure instead of one's life to poetry, is the better part.
+Meanwhile, England jogs along quite comfortably. She can get Keats for
+a shilling, and Shakespeare for sixpence. Why should she worry herself
+for a moment with the new men?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+FICTION
+
+
+After much patient thinking, the English have come to the conclusion
+that there is but one branch of literary art, and that its name is
+Fiction. And by fiction the English really mean the six-shilling novel.
+I do not think it is too much to say, that since the six-shilling novel
+was first thrust upon our delighted attention it has never brought
+within its covers six shillings' worth of reading. The high priest
+and the high priestess who serve to the right and left of the altar
+of six-shillingism are, as every one knows, Mr. Hall Caine and Miss
+Marie Corelli. Each of them wears a golden ephod, with a breastplate of
+jewels arranged to spell out the magic figures, One Hundred Thousand.
+All the other priests of the Tabernacle look with awe and envy upon
+these two, because the other priests' breastplates have hard work to
+spell out fifty thousand, and some of them do not even achieve one
+thousand five hundred. Burnt-offerings of Caine and Corelli therefore
+fill the place with savour. A pair of sorrier writers never was on sea
+or land. Everybody knows it, nobody denies it, and nobody seems sad
+about it. The six-shilling novel is an established English institution.
+Caine and Corelli are its prop and stay, and the rest do their best to
+keep in the running and pick up the minor money-bags.
+
+The perusal of six-shilling fiction is practically a sort of mania. It
+has seized in its grip the fairest England has to show, particularly
+matrons, the younger women, and stockbrokers. For the Englishwoman the
+daily round would lose its saltness did she not have handy the newest
+six-shilling novel by Mr. Caine, Miss Corelli, or the next literary
+bawler in the market-place. There are shops called "libraries," to
+which the Englishwoman repairs for her supplies of literary pabulum.
+Here the six-shilling novel has a great time. Strapped together
+in sixes, or packed in boxes of dozens, it is handed forth to the
+carriages of its fair devourers, and taken right away to its repose
+in the cultured homes of Bayswater and Kensington. From morning till
+night many Englishwomen do little but read this precious stuff. What
+they get out of it amounts in the long run to hysteria and anæmia. It
+brings about a general deadening of the mind and a general jaggedness
+of the emotions, coupled with an utter incapacity to take any save an
+exaggerated view of the facts of life. Discontent, disillusionment,
+ennui, boredom, ill-temper, a sharp tongue, and a cynical spirit are
+other symptoms which the six-shilling novel is prone to evoke. The
+habit is worse than opium or haschisch or tea cigarettes. It is just
+the devil, and that is all you need say about it. The persons employed
+in the opium traffic are supposed to be very wicked. To my mind, the
+persons employed in the fiction traffic are as wicked as wicked can
+be. When the foul disease began first to make its ravages obvious,
+there were not wanting persons who would have checked it and provided
+remedies for it. These persons squeaked somewhat, and nothing more
+has been heard of them. So the thing goes on unrestrained, and even
+applauded by press and pulpit alike; and the Englishwoman has become
+a confirmed, inveterate, and incurable fiction-reader. If a man have
+an enemy to whom he would do an abiding injury, let him persuade that
+enemy to obtain the six more popular six-shilling novels of the moment,
+and read them through. If the man's enemy sticks to his bargain--at
+which, however, he will probably shy in the middle of the second
+volume--the chances are that he gets up from that reading a broken and
+spiritless man. His brain will be as saggy as a sponge full of treacle,
+and his vision as unreliable as that of the alcoholist who always saw
+two cabs, and invariably got into the one that was not there.
+
+Seriously, however, what is there about this English fiction--or,
+for that matter, about Scottish fiction--that men and women should
+buy it and devour it to the exclusion of all other literary fare?
+It is ill-written, it is not original, it is not like life, it is
+not beautiful, it is not inspiring, it does not touch the profound
+emotions, it means nothing, and it ends nowhere. The reason of its
+popularity is, that it appeals to an indolent habit of mind, and, as a
+general rule, is calculated to excite the passions, and particularly to
+open up questions which experience has shown to be best left alone. In
+nine cases out of ten, where a popular work of fiction is concerned,
+it is always possible to put one's finger on the chapter or passages
+on which its popularity is based; and in nine cases out of ten that
+chapter or those passages have to do with sexual matters. The questions
+which arise out of the relation of man and woman are no doubt vitally
+important and most interesting; but that they should be discussed in
+an unscientific, irresponsible, and catch-penny way by everybody who
+can trail a pen is something of a scandal. If an author can succeed in
+inventing a sexual situation which could not by any possible chance
+exist for a moment in real life, or if he can put a glow and a gloss on
+the tritenesses of love and lust, his success as a fictionist is to all
+intents and purposes assured. What is sometimes spoken of as wholesome
+fiction scarcely exists--anyway, nobody reads it. It is the carefully
+constructed book about sex that sells and is read. Such a book need
+not be flagrant, as was once thought to be the case; it can be "a work
+of art"--a thing of veiled suggestion, delicate, unobjectionable, and
+seemingly meet to be read.
+
+One has hesitation in asserting that such books ought not to be written
+or ought not to be circulated. It is difficult to justify any attitude
+of intolerance in such a matter; yet the fact remains that the maids
+and matrons of England, together with the men who have the leisure and
+sufficient lack of brains to read fiction, are being stuffed season by
+season and year by year with about the most undesirable kind of sexual
+philosophy that could well be placed before them. Of any Englishwoman
+of the leisured class above the age of sixteen years it may be said,
+as was said of the late Professor Jowett in a different sense, "What
+I don't know isn't knowledge." And the instructor in all cases is a
+fictionist. If a man took his notion of business, or politics, or art,
+out of six-shilling novels, he would be set down for a fool. Yet most
+Englishwomen get their view of love and the married relation from these
+extraordinary works, and it is taken for granted that nobody is a penny
+the worse. For my own part, I should incline to the opinion that the
+only persons who are a penny, not to say six shillings, the worse, are
+the English middle and upper classes as a body.
+
+Much has been said in derision of what the English call the Kailyard
+school of fiction--Kailyard fiction being, I need scarcely say, a
+brand of fiction written by Scotsmen usually in Scotland, and sold in
+the English and the American markets. Everybody of taste and judgment
+cheerfully admits that Kailyarders are not persons of genius. For
+the delectation of the Southerner they have made a Scotland of their
+own, the which, however, is not Scotland. They have made a Scottish
+sentiment, a Scottish point of view, a Scottish humour, a Scottish
+pathos, and even a Scottish dialect, which may be reckoned quite
+doubtful. At the same time, one looks in vain to the Kailyarders for
+anything that is worse than slobber--anything really noxious and
+dreadful, that is to say. One might read Kailyard for ever and a day
+without coming to great moral grief. Indeed, I would point out that,
+on the whole, the Kailyard system of ethics partakes somewhat of the
+character of the system of ethics which used to be unfolded in the
+melodrama of our grandfathers' days. Virtue rewarded, vice punished,
+is the moral upshot of it. And in any case, and let it be as bad
+and as meretricious and as greatly to be deprecated as one will, we
+must always remember that the Kailyard book is a work invented and
+manufactured, not for Scotsmen, but for the Anglo-Saxon--the Englishman
+and his offshoots.
+
+Some months back a considerable hubbub arose in English literary
+circles because M. Jules Verne had been saying to an interviewer,
+at Amiens of all places in the world! that the novel as a form of
+literary expression was doomed, and would gradually die out of popular
+favour. It is safe to say that, in the eyes of sundry critics of
+pretty well every nationality, the novel has been doomed any time this
+last fifty years. Yet the novel comes up smiling every time. Since it
+was reduced in price to six shillings in England it has undoubtedly
+deteriorated, not only as a piece of writing, but also in the matter
+of ethical intention. So long as it remains the prey of some of its
+latter-day exploiters, so long will it continue to deteriorate. So
+long as the English mind continues to be feeble and unwholesome, and
+to yearn for artificial thrills and undesirable emotions, so long will
+English fiction continue to be of its present decadent quality. As the
+capitalist says, it is all a question of supply and demand. The great
+aim of writers of fiction, or at any rate of ninety-nine per cent. of
+them, is to produce an article that will sell. You must turn out what
+the public want, and they will assuredly buy it. The knack of hitting
+the public taste looks easy to acquire, and the fictionist strives
+after it with all his might. Many are called to make fortunes out of
+novel-writing: few are chosen. But nobody can examine the work of those
+few without perceiving that for weal or woe--principally for woe--they
+know their business.
+
+Of course, it goes without saying that a very considerable amount of
+fiction is published in England which is just as mild and just as
+innocuous as tinned milk. To this puling variety of fiction, however,
+the English do not appear to be very greatly drawn. It crops up with
+great regularity every publishing season, it is solemnly reviewed in
+the critical journals, and it even stands shoulder by shoulder with
+stronger meat in the bookshops. But the fact remains that it does
+not sell; to see "Second Edition" on it is the rarest occurrence. In
+fine, the English will have their fiction spiced, and highly spiced,
+or not at all. Mealy mouthed writers, over-reticent, over-blushful,
+over-austere writers, they do not want; neither have they any
+admiration for a writer who is plagued with a feeling for style, and
+who may be reckoned an artist in the collocation of words. Their
+much-vaunted Meredith has never had the sale of a Crockett or a Barrie
+or a Hocking, or, for that matter, of a J.K. Jerome. The English have
+little or no literary taste, little or no literary acumen, and they
+expect their fictionists to give them anything and everything save what
+is edifying.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+SUBURBANISM
+
+
+Of old--that is to say, twenty years ago--the great majority of the
+English people suffered from a mental and general disability which was
+termed "provincialism." If you hailed from Manchester, or Liverpool,
+or Birmingham, or Edinburgh, or Glasgow, the kind gentlemen in London
+who size people up and put them in their places assured you that you
+were a provincial, and that you would have to rub shoulders a great
+deal with the world--by which they meant London--before you could
+rightly consider yourself qualified to exist. Against the epithet
+"provincial," however, not a few persons rebelled, when it was applied
+flatly to themselves. Most men of feeling felt hurt when you called
+them provincial. In the world of letters and journalism to call a
+man provincial was the last and unkindest cut of all, and it usually
+settled him, just as to say that he has no sense of humour settles
+him to-day. Then up rose Thomas Carlyle and Robert Buchanan and a few
+lesser lights, who said, "You call us provincials: provincials we
+undoubtedly are, and we glory in the character." This rather baffled,
+not to say amazed, the lily-fingered London assessors, and gradually
+the term "provincial," as a term of opprobrium, passed out of use.
+
+It is admitted now on all hands that the provincial is a very useful
+kind of fellow; and when the metropolis feels itself running short of
+talent and energy, the provincial is invariably invited to look in.
+Latterly, however, the Londoner and the dweller in English provincial
+cities have begun to exhibit a distinctly modern disorder, which may be
+called, for want of a better term, "suburbanism." In London, which may
+be taken as the type of all English cities, suburbanism is pretty well
+rampant. It has its origin in what the Americans would call "location."
+A man's daily work lies, say, in the City or in the central quarters of
+London. For various reasons--such, for example, as considerations of
+health, expenditure, and custom--it is practically impossible for him
+to live near his work. He must live somewhere; so he goes to Balham,
+or Tooting, or Clapham, or Brondesbury, or Highgate, or Willesden, or
+Finchley, or Crouch End, or Hampstead, or some other suburban retreat.
+London is ringed round with these residential quarters, these little
+towns outside the walls. A visitor to any one of them is at once struck
+with its striking and painful similarity to all the others. There is
+a railway station belonging to one of the metropolitan lines; there
+is a High Street, fronted with lofty and rather gaudy shops; there is
+a reasonable sprinkling of churches and chapels; there is a brand-new
+red-brick theatre; and the rest is row on row and row on row of villa
+residences, each with its dreary palisading and attenuated grass-plot
+in front, and its curious annex of kitchen, or scullery, behind. Miles
+and miles of these villas exist in every metropolitan suburb worth the
+name; and though the rents and sizes of them may vary, they are all
+built to one architectural formula, and all pinchbeck, ostentatious,
+and unlovely. No person of judgment, nobody possessed of a ray of the
+philosophic spirit, can gaze upon them without concluding at once that
+the English do not know how to live. Take a street of these villas, big
+or little, and what do you find? You note, first, that nearly every
+house, be it occupied by clerk, Jew financier, or professional man,
+has got a highfalutin name of its own. The County Council or local
+authority has already bestowed upon it a number. But this is not enough
+for your suburbanist, who must needs appropriate for his house a name
+which will look swagger on his letter-paper. Hence No. 2, Sandringham
+Road, Tooting, is not No. 2, Sandringham Road, Tooting, at all; but
+The Laurels, if you please. No. 4--not to be outdone--is Holmwood;
+No. 6 is Hazledene; No. 8, The Pines; No. 10, Sutherland House; and
+so forth. Then, again, if you walk down a street and keep your eye on
+the front windows of this thoroughfare of mansions, you will note that
+every one of those windows has cheap lace curtains to it, and that
+immediately behind the centre of the window there is a little table,
+upon which loving hands have placed a green high-art vase, containing a
+plant of sorts. And right back in the dimness of the parlour there is a
+sideboard with a high mirrored back.
+
+If you made acquaintance with half a dozen of the occupiers of these
+houses, and were invited into the half dozen front rooms, you would
+find in each, in addition to the sideboard before mentioned, a piano
+of questionable manufacture, a brass music-stool with a red velvet
+cushion, an over-mantel with mirrored panels, a "saddle-bag suite,"
+consisting of lady's and gent's and six ordinary chairs and a couch;
+a centre-table with a velvet-pile cloth upon it, a bamboo bookcase
+containing a Corelli and a Hall Caine or so, together with some
+sixpenny Dickenses picked up at drapers' bargain-sales, Nuttall's
+_Dictionary_, _Mrs. Beeton's House Book_, a Bible, a Prayer Book,
+some hymn-books, a work-basketful of socks waiting to be darned, and
+a little pile of music, chiefly pirated. At night, when Spriggs comes
+home to The Laurels, he has an apology for late dinner, gets into
+his slippers, and retires with Mrs. Spriggs, and perhaps his elder
+daughter, into that parlour. There he reads a halfpenny newspaper till
+there is nothing left in it to read; then he talks to Mrs. Spriggs
+about that beast So-and-so, his employer; and Mrs. Spriggs tells him
+not to grumble so much, and asks the elder daughter why she doesn't
+play a chune to 'liven us up a bit. "Yes," says Spriggs, "what is the
+good of having a piano, and me buying you music every Saturday, if you
+never play?" Whereupon the elder daughter rattles through _Dolly Gray_,
+_The Honeysuckle and the Bee_, and _Everybody's Loved by Some One_;
+and Spriggs beats time with his foot till he grows weary, and thinks we
+had better have supper and get off to bed.
+
+This kind of thing is going on right down both sides of Sandringham
+Road--at Holmwood, at Hazledene, at The Pines, and at Sutherland House,
+as well as at The Laurels--every week-day evening between the hours of
+eight and midnight. In point of fact, it is going on all over Tooting.
+It is the suburban notion of an 'appy evening at home; and, hallowed as
+it is by wont and custom, everybody in Tooting takes it to be the best
+that life can offer after business hours. Perhaps it is. Just before
+supper, or haply a little afterwards, however, Spriggs says that he
+believes he will take a little stroll "round the houses." He puts on
+a straw hat in summer and a tweed cap in winter, and proceeds gravely
+down the Sandringham Road until he reaches a break in the long array
+of villas, and is aware of a rather flaring public-house. Into the
+saloon bar of this hostelry he walks staidly, nods to the company,
+and asks the barmaid for a drop of the usual. "Let me see," says that
+sweet lady; "Johnny Walker, is n't it?" "Well, you know it is," says
+Spriggs, as he hands over threepence. With the glass of whisky in his
+hand he retires to the nearest red plush settee, and looks listlessly
+at the illustrated papers on the little table in front of him, drinks
+somewhat slowly, smokes a pipe, exchanges a word about the weather with
+the landlord of the establishment, says there's time for another before
+closing time, has another, and at twelve-thirty trots off home.
+
+The seven or eight other men in the saloon bar being respectively the
+occupiers of Holmwood, Hazledene, The Pines, Sutherland House, etc.,
+have done almost exactly as Spriggs has done in the way of drinks and
+nods and illustrated papers and having a final at twenty minutes past
+twelve. But during the whole evening they have not exchanged a rational
+word with one another. They have nothing to talk about; therefore they
+have not talked. They are neighbours, and they know it; but they all
+hold themselves to be so much superior to one another that they have
+scorned to speak to each other, except in the most cursory and casual
+way. Next morning, at a few minutes to nine o'clock, they will all be
+scooting anxiously along the Sandringham Road with set faces, damp
+brows, and a fear at their hearts that they are going to miss their
+train. They will travel in packed carriages, half of them standing up,
+while the other half growls, to Ludgate Hill or Moorgate Street, as the
+case may be, and then rush off again to their respective offices, in
+fear and trembling this time lest they should be three minutes late and
+the "governor" might notice it.
+
+This is the life of the males in the Sandringham Road year in and
+year out. Through living in the same houses, in the midst of the
+same furniture, listening to the same pianos, drinking at the same
+public-houses, going to business in the same trains, they become as
+like one another as peas. They are all anxious, all dull, all short of
+sleep, all short of money. In brief, they have become suburbanized.
+The monotony and snobbery and listlessness of their home life are
+reflected in their conduct of the working-day's affairs. There is not a
+man amongst them who has a soul above his job. Each of them sticks at
+business, not because he loves it or likes it, but simply because he
+knows that, if he were discovered in a remissness, he would get what he
+calls "the sack." Each of them "lunches"--oh, this English lunch!--at
+the bar of a public-house on a glass of bitter beer and a penny Welsh
+rare-bit. Each of them feels a bit chippy and not a little sleepy of
+an afternoon, and each of them races for his train in the evening,
+chock-full of worry and bad-temper. You must live in the suburbs if you
+are to live in London at all, and there is no escape from it.
+
+The lines of the female suburbians are cast in more or less pleasant
+places. They do not need to go to town every day. There are shops
+galore, filled with just the goods they want, round the corner; and
+there is always the next female on both sides to gossip with. For,
+unlike the male suburbian, the female suburbian will talk to her
+neighbours. Her conversation is of babes, and butchers' meat, and the
+piece at the theatre, and the bargains at the stores in the High Road,
+and "him." He, or "him," means the good lady's husband. She never by
+any chance refers to him either by his Christian name, or his surname,
+or as "my husband." It is always, "He said to me this morning," or, "As
+I was saying to him before he went to business,"--which, I take it,
+is a peculiarly English habit. The female suburbian goes out to tea
+sometimes, usually at the house of some suburban relative. Her dress is
+a curious blend of ostentation and economy. She will be in the fashion;
+and, being an Englishwoman, "expense is no object," providing she can
+get the money. She has no notion of thrift; she is perennially in
+arrears with the milk and the insurance man; and when money gets very
+tight indeed, she lectures her husband on his wicked inability to make
+more than he is getting. The whole life, whether for male or female, is
+dreary, harried, unrelieved, and destructive of everything that tends
+to make life affable and tolerable.
+
+In view of the obvious evils suburbanism has brought about in the
+English metropolis, it might have been expected that the English
+provincial cities would have done their best to avoid similar troubles
+in their own areas. So far from this being the case, however, the craze
+for suburbanism is making itself apparent wherever one turns. City
+and borough councils lead the way by erecting, at the public expense,
+artisans' and clerks' dwellings well out of the town. They hold that
+fresh air, the open country, and cheap railway fares are all that is
+wanted to make the English citizen's life a perennial joy to him.
+Yet the dwellings they erect are of the shoddiest and least homelike
+kind, the fresh-air which is to do the worker and the children so
+much good is a doubtful quantity, and the cheap railway fares are
+bragged about without regard to the time taken up in travelling and the
+hurry and anxiety to catch trains. Suburbanism as a stereotyped and
+soul-deadening institution is of purely English origin. In no other
+country in the world do convention and what other people will say so
+rule the lives of men as they do in England. Suburbanism is in many
+ways the most obvious of the many products of English convention. It
+is at once an indication of brainlessness, want of intelligence, and
+incipient decay. Apparently there is to be no limit to it. Outside
+London new suburbs spring up almost weekly. But their newness brings no
+changes in its train. Each new suburb is mapped out and built exactly
+on the lines of the old ones; each is destined for the reception of
+exactly the same kind of stupid people; each will be the living-ground
+of generations of people still more stupid.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE MAN-ABOUT-TOWN
+
+
+The English man-about-town--and I am not acquainted with any other
+sort--is, to put it mildly, a devil of a fellow. Who he may be, how
+he gets a living, whether he gets a living, how and why he became a
+man-about-town, and whether, after all, he is really a man-about-town,
+are matters which are wrapt in mystery. Everybody knows him, yet nobody
+knows much about him. You meet him everywhere, yet nobody can tell
+you how he gets there. His acquaintance is astonishing, ranging from
+dustmen to dukes, as it were; he cuts nobody, though he is intimate
+with nobody; he is familiar with his world and all that it expects of
+him; and he plays the game skilfully, correctly, and as a gentleman
+should. There are droves of him in London; probably no other city in
+the world could, with comfort, accommodate so many of him. He lives
+in the sun; he is the joy and pride of the restaurateurs' and the
+café-keepers' hearts; no billiard-room is complete without him; he
+shines at bars of onyx; music-halls and theatres could not get on
+without him; and, on the whole, it is his useful and pleasing function
+to keep the West End of London and its offshoots going. What the West
+End of London means to the man-about-town is a large question. It means
+clubs in the morning, with a tailor, a hatter, a bookmaker or two,
+thrown in; it means expensive lunches, lazy, somnolent afternoons, big
+dinners, hard drinking, cards, night clubs, and a day that ends at
+three o'clock in the morning. Nobody but an Englishman could stand the
+racket; nobody but an Englishman could find satisfaction in so doing.
+
+The man-about-town is the last expression of an unhealthy plutocracy;
+he is the child of means, the son of his father, the pampered darling
+of his mother; and he has never understood that life was anything more
+than a frivolous holiday. Whether he has money or happens to have spent
+it all, he sets the standard of expenditure for everybody who would be
+considered in the movement. He also sets the fashion in hats, coats,
+trousers, fancy waistcoats, shoes, walking-sticks, and scarf-pins for
+Englishmen at large. It never occurs to him that he does this, but he
+does it. He it is, too, who is the prime supporter and patron of the
+manly English sports, horse-racing, glove-fighting, coaching, moting,
+polo, shooting, fishing, yachting, and so forth. In these exercises he
+finds great delight. When he is not busy dining and wining and painting
+the town red, sport is the mainstay of his existence.
+
+He is usually young till he reaches the age of thirty, when he begins
+to decline rapidly. But the older he gets the younger he gets. Although
+he may lose his hair, and be compelled to have resort to false teeth
+and elastic stockings, his spirits are invariably of the cheerfullest,
+his laugh is boisterous, his interest in life acute, and he continues
+to be passionately fond of food and drink. It is not till his locks
+become hoar, his purse well-nigh empty, and the number of his years
+well over threescore-and-ten that he begins to droop. Englishmen will
+point him out to you in cafés, and say with hushed voices, "You see
+that man,--the one with the frowsy beard and his hat atilt--well, he
+spent a hundred and fifty thousand twice! A hundred and fifty thousand,
+my boy! What did he do with it? Oh, well, what do people do with money?
+There's a man, sir, that's seen life: used to have a house in Berkeley
+Square; has owned three Derby winners; built the Thingamybob Theatre
+for Miss Jumpabouty; knows everybody; has hobnobbed with the King when
+he was Prince of Wales; used to be hand-in-glove with the Duke of ----
+and that crowd; and now, damme! he hasn't a pennypiece."
+
+All this with the air of a person who is showing you something worth
+seeing. It is the English fatuity, first of all, to admire the man who
+is possessed of wealth; secondly, to admire a man who is throwing his
+money away; and, thirdly, to look with respectful awe upon the man who
+has thrown it away. It warms the English heart and fires the English
+imagination to see the son of a recently deceased provision-dealer
+playing the prince at the best hotels, plunging at Ascot and Monte
+Carlo, buying up the stalls at the Frivolity at the behest of Lottie
+Flutterfast, and generally flinging to the winds the hard-earned and,
+to a great extent, ill-gotten estate of his late lamented parent.
+By all the best people--by all the best English people, that is to
+say--such a youth is received and made welcome, if not exactly taken to
+the bosom. Englishmen ask him to dinner simply because he has money.
+They are aware that his courses will not bear examination, that his
+tastes are gross, that his intellect is none of the brightest. He has
+nothing to say for himself; he is neither entertaining, nor amusing,
+nor instructive. The Englishman has no ulterior designs upon him; he
+does not hope to get him into this or that financial swim, neither does
+he desire to marry his daughter to him; he simply feels that it is well
+to be friendly with money and the man-about-town.
+
+Even a bankrupt or "broke" man-about-town is better to the Englishman
+than none at all. With such a person he will foregather and be pleasant
+in the sight of all men. "Old So-and-so," he says, "is a dear old
+sort. He is broke, of course, and sometimes he rather worries one
+for sovereigns. But I have never deserted a pal in adversity in my
+life, and I am not going to begin with Old So-and-so." Thus your good
+snob Englishman would lead you to believe that he was on terms of
+intimacy and affection with Old So-and-so in Old So-and-so's palmy
+money-squandering days. Whereas, in point of fact, he never clapped
+eyes on the man till he had spent his last farthing.
+
+It is all very English, and to a mere Scot a trifle astonishing. The
+Scot, if I know him at all, takes no joys of spendthrifts, however
+prettily dressed, and, least of all, can he be brought to court the
+society of a man who has reduced himself to beggary by extravagance and
+riot. The bare gift of prodigality and the bare reputation of having
+been wealthy are nothing to the Scot. If he wants men to admire, he
+can find men of solider quality. The Englishman, on the other hand,
+has no great love for either solidity or worth; the first makes him
+envious; the second bores him. Though he may himself be a person of
+judgment and sober life, he likes to have about him men who are going
+or who have gone the whole hog, and who pursue their pleasures without
+restraint, remorse, or fear. Hence the man-about-town will always
+figure interestingly in English society. There is romance about him. He
+has been foolish, and perhaps even wicked; but he belongs to the select
+coterie of people who, when all is said, make the gay world go round.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+DRINK
+
+
+Mr. Crosland has very kindly suggested that "under the inspiring
+tutelage of the national bard Scotland has become one of the drunkenest
+nations in the world." I shall not retaliate as one might do, but shall
+content myself by referring the reader to the easily accessible tables
+of statistics, which render it quite plain that Scotland's drunkenness
+is very considerably exceeded by the drunkenness of England.
+
+In London, at any rate, strong drink flows like a river. There are 5300
+licensed houses in the metropolitan area alone. In Kilburn, a suburb
+of more or less irreproachable respectability, there are twenty-five
+churches and chapels and thirty-five public-houses. During late
+years public-house property has begun to be looked upon in the light
+of a gilt-edged investment. Turn where one will, one finds the older
+inns are being swept away, while on their sites are erected flaring
+gin-palaces, with plate-glass fronts, elaborate mahogany fitments,
+gorgeous saloon and private bars, painted ceilings, inlaid floors, and
+electric light throughout. Behind the bar, instead of mine host of a
+former day and his wife and daughter, there are half a dozen perked-up
+barmaids with rouged cheeks and Rossetti hair, and a person called
+the manager, who for £2 a week runs the place for its proprietors--a
+Limited Company, which owns, perhaps, twenty or thirty other houses.
+In the conduct of these mammoth drinking-places three great points are
+kept in view: namely, that a quick-drinking, stand-up trade pays better
+than any amount of slow regular custom; that the English drinker of
+the lower class cannot tell the difference between good drink and bad,
+often preferring, indeed, the bad to the good; and that, as bad liquor
+is cheaper than good, the sound commercial thing to do is to supply bad
+liquor.
+
+With these admirable axioms continually before it, the English trade
+has prospered amazingly. More drink and worse drink is sold in England
+to-day than has ever been sold in England before. Through legislation
+intended to ensure sound liquor and the proper conduct of licensed
+houses the proprietors have consistently made a point of driving the
+usual brewer's dray. "In order to meet the Food and Drugs Adulteration
+Act, all spirits sold at this establishment, while of the same
+excellent quality as heretofore, are diluted according to strength."
+"The same excellent quality as heretofore" is choice, and so is
+"diluted according to strength." As for the beer, we dilute also the
+beer according to strength. When we are caught at it, it is a mistake
+on the part of the cellarman, who has been discharged; and the fine is
+so small in proportion to the profit on selling water, that we smile at
+the back of our necks and keep on diluting according to strength. Our
+whole system, in fact, is designed to make people drink, and to make
+them drink the worst that we dare put before them.
+
+Now, the Scot, drunkard or no drunkard, does have something of a taste
+in liquor. The best clarets have gone to Scotland (in spite of Mr.
+Crosland) since claret became a dinner wine. You cannot put off a Scot
+with either bad whisky or bad beer. He knows what whisky should be and
+what beer should be, and in Scotland, at any rate, he never has any
+difficulty in getting them. But the English, taking them in the mass,
+are quite the other way. Any sort of wine, provided it be properly
+fortified and sophisticated, passes with them for the real thing.
+Their Scotch whisky is about the most wholesome thing they drink; but
+large quantities of this are bought by English merchants in a crude
+state, and rammed down the public throat without a thought to maturing,
+blending, and otherwise rendering the spirit potable. English beer, we
+have been told in song and story, is the finest beer in the world. Yet
+nobody can visit an English brewery without discovering that English
+beer is not English beer at all. Glucose in the place of malt, quassia
+and gentian in the place of hops, finings in the place of storage, are
+the universal order; and so depraved and perverted has the fine old
+English taste in beer become that brewers who have set up to provide an
+honest article and sent it out to their customers have had it returned
+with the curt comment that "nobody would drink such hog-wash, and what
+the customers wanted was beer, and not brewer's apron." Every now and
+again scares crop up in consequence of the use of improper ingredients;
+there is an inquiry, a Royal Commission, and the Englishman still
+goes on stolidly drinking. Arsenic will not drive him away from his
+favourite tipple, neither will _cocculus indicus_ or any of the round
+dozen abominations upon which the brewer's chemist takes his stand.
+
+If there is one thing more than another that is considered the chief
+necessity of life in the English household of the poorer class, it is
+beer, and its sister beverage, porter. From morning till night the
+can is continually going between the house of the artisan and the
+neighbouring "public." The first thing in the morning the artisan
+himself must have a couple of goes of rum and milk; by eleven o'clock
+he is ready for a pint of four-half; at noon, when he knocks off for
+dinner, he will imbibe a quart or more of the same beverage; and at
+night, after work, he sits in the taproom till closing-time, and drinks
+as much as ever he can pay for or chalk up. Meanwhile, his wife must
+have her drop of porter in the morning, her drop of bitter to dinner,
+and her drop of something hot before going to bed. Also on Saturday
+afternoons, when the twain go marketing together, they must have a few
+drinks, just to show there is no ill-feeling; while on Saturday night
+the artisan not infrequently improves the shining hours by "getting
+blind," to use his own elegant phrase. Thus it quite commonly happens
+that a third and even a half of the total income of a household of the
+artisan class is spent in alcohol. Thrift, provision for a rainy day
+and for old age, become an impossibility. Underfeeding usually walks
+hand in hand with overdrinking; the man loses his nerve, the woman her
+comeliness and her capacity; and the end is pauperism and a pauper's
+grave, if nothing worse.
+
+Among the English middle and upper classes there is distinctly a
+greater tendency to moderation than among the lower classes. For all
+that, the middle classes especially can point to a great many brilliant
+examples of the fine art of soaking. Publicans, betting-men, commercial
+travellers, proprietors of businesses, solicitors' clerks, journalists,
+and the like get through an amount of drinking in the course of a day
+which would probably appal even themselves if they kept an account
+of it. "Let's 'ave a drink," is invariably one of the first phrases
+dropped when two Englishmen meet. "We'll 'ave another" is sure to
+follow; and so is, "'Ang it, man! we _must_ have a final." Among the
+middle classes, too, as also among the upper classes, there is a very
+great deal of secret drinking, particularly among women and persons
+whose professional or official positions necessitate the maintenance
+of an appearance of extreme respectability. The grocer's license and
+his fine stock of carefully selected wines and spirits offer a ready
+means of supply to the female dipsomaniac, who would not be seen in
+a public-house for worlds; besides, gin can be charged as tea in a
+grocery account, and many a bottle of brandy has figured in such
+accounts under the innocent pseudonym of "rolled ox-tongue."
+
+Though the English upper classes, as I have said, drink with a certain
+moderation, their moderation really embraces a quantity of liquor which
+would send the artisan quite off his head. Whiskies-and-sodas at noon,
+Burgundy at lunch, with cognac to one's coffee, three kinds of wine at
+dinner, followed by liqueurs and whisky, make no appreciable mark on a
+man who is living at his ease and can sleep as long as he likes; but
+the sum total of alcohol is quite considerable, and probably greater
+than that consumed by the "drunken sot" for whom my lord has such
+contempt.
+
+Of English drinking, generally, one may remark that it is done in a
+very deliberate and unsociable way. The English cannot be said to drink
+for company's sake. They do not foregather and carry on their drinking
+merrily. In their cups they are neither witty nor happy, but just dull
+and dour and inclined to be quarrelsome. They drink for drinking's
+sake,--for the sake of intoxication, and to drown trouble. I wish them
+good luck and less of their vile concoctions!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+FOOD
+
+
+The subject of diet--he prefers to call it diet--is apparently one of
+unlimited interest to the Englishman. Meet him where you will, he is
+ever ready to discuss, first, the weather, and then the things--that
+is to say, the kinds of food--that agree with him. Indeed, you could
+almost stake your life on extracting from any strange Englishman you
+happen to come across some such statement as, "I can't abide eggs,"
+or, "Veal always makes me bilious," within ten minutes of opening
+up a conversation with him. The Englishman's house, we are told, is
+his castle; and the Englishman's hobby, surely, is his digestion. In
+point of fact, ninety-nine per cent. of adolescent and adult English
+people suffer from chronic indigestion in a more or less severe form.
+Flatulence, heartburn, colic, and "liver" are the Englishman's mortal
+heritage. He is invariably troubled with some of them, and quite
+commonly with all. If you relieved him of them he would scarcely thank
+you, because he has nursed them from his youth up, and what he really
+wants is amelioration, and not cure. Probably this is the reason why in
+the midst of his wails and his unholy talk about diet he continues to
+feed in precisely the grossest, greasiest, and least rational manner
+that generations of bad feeders have been able to develop.
+
+Of mornings, if you sojourn with an English family, you will be invited
+to breakfast at half-past eight. Promptly at that hour they serve a
+sort of sickly oatmeal soup, compounded apparently of milk and sugar,
+which they call porridge. Then follow thick and piping-hot coffee with
+'am and eggs, fish, or a chop, and bread and butter and marmalade as
+a sort of wind-up. The man who tackles this menu goes to business
+belching like a torn balloon. By eleven o'clock, however, he is ready
+for a little snack--oysters and chablis, prawns on toast, a mouthful
+of bread and cheese and a bottle of Bass, or something of that kind.
+Then at half-past one there is lunch, practically a dinner of several
+courses, or a cut from the joint, accompanied by what the English
+euphoniously term "two veg." At tea-time your Englishman must needs
+lave himself in a dish of Orange-Pekoe or Bohea, to the accompaniment
+of lumps of cake. And at long and last comes dinner, the crowning
+guzzle of the Englishman's day, and a function usually spread over a
+couple of hours. It will be perceived that this gustatory programme or
+routine has been copied from the French. The French put away two good
+meals per diem, one at noon and the other in the evening, and there
+is no reason why the English should not do the same. When you come to
+think of it, dinner in the middle of the day is a low, under-bred,
+undistinguished arrangement; also not to dine at night is to run the
+risk of not losing one's figure, and of having the neighbours say that
+one cannot afford it.
+
+The French programme would be all very well if it were carried out
+on French lines all through. But it is not. When you say "soup" in a
+French restaurant, it means that you will be served with half a dozen
+table-spoonfuls of _consommé_, or _petite marmite_, or _bisque_, as the
+case may be. When the Englishman says "soup," he means enough thick
+stock to wash a bus down. What is more, he gets it and swallows it. And
+it is so all down the menu--too much of everything, and don't you think
+you can put me off with your blooming homoeopathic portions. A liberal
+table, no stint, good food, and plenty of it, is one of the bulwarks of
+English respectability. That bad digestion and talks about diet follow
+is nobody's fault.
+
+This profusion--this overfood, as it were--has been brought to its
+noblest expression by the English aristocracy, whose tables literally
+groan with costly viands, whose spits are always turning, and whose
+scullions and kitchen wenches are as an army. It is related that when
+a certain duke found it necessary to retrench, and was advised by his
+family solicitor to get rid of his fifth, sixth, and seventh cooks,
+his grace remarked, "But ----, So-and-so, a man must have a biscuit!"
+And the English middle class of course faithfully imitates to the best
+of its powers the English upper class, and so on through the grades.
+Among all classes there is a rooted prejudice against food that happens
+to be cheap. To this day people who eat escallops are rather looked
+down upon, for no other reason than that oysters run you into half a
+crown a dozen, while you can get excellent escallops at ninepence. So
+the herring, the whiting, and other kinds of cheap fish are considered
+little better than offal by persons who can afford to pay for sole
+and salmon. Turtle soup is infinitely to be preferred to any other
+soup in the world because it is dearer, and champagne is drunk, not
+because people like it, but because it looks swagger and testifies to
+the possession of means. These gustatory idiosyncrasies are purely
+English, and obviously they are the offspring of the English love of
+display and superfluity.
+
+Among the lower classes the general feeding, though cheaper, is just
+as wasteful and just as gross. Excluding bread, it consists chiefly
+of inferior cuts of butcher's meat with _charcuterie_ and dried fish
+thrown in. It has been complained against the Scot that he is none
+too clean a feeder, delighting hugely in inferior meats. Haggis is
+held forth as a great exemplar in point. But it cannot be denied that
+throughout England the one kind of emporium for the sale of comestibles
+which flourishes and is unfailingly popular is the pork or ham-and-beef
+shop. And here what do you obtain? Why, exactly the meats which
+gentlemen of the type of Mr. Henley describe as offal. They include, in
+addition to pork in and out of season, pig's feet, pig's heads, pig's
+liver and kidneys, pig's blood sausages, the "savoury duck" or mess of
+seasoned remnants, tripe boiled and raw, and chitterlings. So that
+the haggis of Scotland is fairly well balanced. I am not suggesting
+for a moment that the English display other than a proper judgment in
+devouring these dainties. But if they will favour the pork shop and its
+contents, they can scarcely expect to be set down for an angel-bread
+and manna-eating people.
+
+Perhaps the chief scandal about English feeding lies in the condition
+of the English hotels. On the Continent an hotel is an establishment
+for the accommodation of travellers requiring food and rest. In England
+an hotel is an establishment for the accommodation of landlords and
+waiters. "High class cuisine," says the tariff card, also "wines and
+spirits of the best selected quality." Yet one's experience tells one
+that, though the bill will be heavy, neither the cuisine nor the wines
+will be more than passable, much less high class. A menu which is the
+same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, bad cooking, careless service,
+and a general lack of finish, are the things one may expect at an
+English hotel with the tolerable certainty of not being disappointed.
+To complain is to draw forth the ill-disguised contempt of bibulous
+head-waiters and the stiff apologies of haughty proprietors. But
+beyond that mortal man will never get, because the English hotel is an
+immemorial and conservative institution, and as wise in its own conceit
+as the ancient sphinx. Of late and in London attempts have been made to
+organise hotels adapted to the best kind of requirement. So far as I am
+aware, only two of them have really succeeded, and the charges at both
+places are quite prohibitive.
+
+Closely identified, one might almost say affiliated, to the English
+hotel is the English railway-buffet, of which so much has been said
+in song and story. The sheer horribleness of the "refreshments" here
+provided has passed into a proverb. The English themselves admit that
+if you wish to know the worst about refreshments, you should drink
+the railway-buffet tea and partake of the railway-buffet sandwich.
+They also admit that for abominations in the way of aërated waters,
+milk, beer, and whisky, pastry, cakes, hard-boiled eggs, cold meats,
+boiled chicken and ham, and chops and steaks from the grill, the
+railway-buffet takes the palm; and they admit further that the Hebes
+who dispense these comestibles to the hungry and howling mob have the
+manners of duchesses. Yet the English without their railway-buffets
+would be an utterly woebegone and miserable people. Put an Englishman
+down at a strange railway-station with a half-hour wait before him.
+He has but one resort: he inquires right off for the buffet, and
+there he gorges and swizzles till the warning bell advises him of the
+departure of his train. If there is no buffet, he becomes a dejected,
+pallid man, and threatens to write to the newspapers. So long as the
+railway-buffets continue to exist, the English digestion can never
+aspire to perfection, even though English feeding and cooking outside
+railway-stations became ideal; for a single "meal" of railway-buffet
+viands would permanently disorganise the digestive capabilities of the
+most ostrichy ostrich that ever walked on two legs.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+LAW AND ORDER
+
+
+The English love to be ruled, just as eels are said to take delight
+in being skinned. They hold that a nation which is properly ruled
+cannot fail of happiness. Their notion of rule may be summed up in the
+phrase, "Law and order." The Englishman believes that law and order are
+heaven-sent blessings especially invented for his behoof. "Where else
+in the world," he will ask you grandiloquently, "do you get such law
+and such order as you get in England--the land of the free?" If anybody
+picks his pocket, or encroaches upon his land, or infringes his patent
+rights, or diverts his water-courses, the Englishman knows exactly
+what to do. There is the law. They keep it on tap in great buildings
+called courts, and persons in wigs serve out to you precisely what you
+may deserve with great gusto and solemnity. The man picked your pocket,
+did he? Three months' imprisonment for the man. Somebody is making
+colourable imitations of your patent dolls' eyes. Well, you can apply
+for an injunction. And so on.
+
+This is law. All Englishmen believe in it, particularly those who have
+never had any. When it comes to the worst, and the Englishman finds
+that he really must take on a little of his own beautiful specific, he
+usually begins by falling into something of a flutter. Those bewigged
+and sedate persons seated in great chairs, with bouquets in front of
+them and policemen to bawl "Silence!" for them, begin to have a new
+meaning for the Englishman. Hitherto he has regarded them complacently
+as the bodily representatives of the law in a free country. He has
+smacked his lips over them, rejoiced in their learning, wit, and
+acumen, warmed at the notion of their dignity, and thanked God that
+he belonged to a free people--free England. Now, when it comes to
+a trifling personal encounter before this mountain of dignity--this
+mountain of dignity perched on a mountain of precedent, as it were--the
+Englishman shivers and looks pale. But his solicitor and his counsel
+and his counsel's clerk--particularly his counsel's clerk--soon put him
+at his ease, and instead of withdrawing at the feel of the bath, he is
+fain to plump right in. Whether he comes out on top or gets beaten is
+another matter; in any case, the trouble about the thing is that, win
+or lose, it is infinitely and appallingly costly. Law, the Englishman's
+birthright, is not to be given away. If you want any, you must pay for
+it, and pay for it handsomely, too. Otherwise you can go without. The
+English adage to the effect that there is one law for the rich and
+another for the poor is one of those adages which are very subtly true.
+There is a law for the rich, certainly. There is also a law for the
+poor--namely, no law at all. On the whole the Englishman who has not
+had his pristine dream of English law shattered by contact with the
+realities is to envied. All other Englishmen, whether their experience
+has lain in County Courts, High Courts, or Courts of Appeal, talk
+lovingly of English law with their tongues in their cheeks.
+
+With respect to order, the much bepraised handmaiden of law, I do not
+think that the English get half so much of her as they think they
+do. She costs them a pretty penny. The up-keep of her police and
+magistrates and general myrmidons runs the Englishman into some noble
+taxation; yet where shall you find an English community that is orderly
+if even an infinitesimal section of it has made up its mind to be
+otherwise? In London at the present moment there are whole districts
+which it is not safe for a decently dressed person to traverse
+even in broad daylight; and these districts are not by any means
+slum districts, but parts of the metropolis in which lie important
+arteries of traffic. There is not a square mile of the metropolitan
+area which does not boast its organised gang of daylight robbers,
+purse-snatchers, watch-snatchers, and bullies who would beat a man
+insensible for fourpence, and whose great weapon is the belt.
+
+For convenience' sake these people have been grouped together under
+the term "Hooligan." The police--the far-famed London police--can
+do nothing with them. They admit that they are ineradicable and
+irrepressible. The magistrates and the newspapers keep on asseverating
+that "something must be done." That something apparently consists
+in the capture of a stray specimen of the tribe, who is forthwith
+given three months, with perhaps a little whipping thrown in. But
+hooliganism is a business that continues to flourish like the green
+bay-tree, and London is no safer to-day than it was in the time of
+the garotters. As the belt is the weapon of the London robber, and as
+Hooligan is his name, so we find in all the larger provincial towns
+gangs of scoundrels with special instruments and slang names of their
+own. In Lancashire and the Black Country kicking appears to be the
+favourite method of dealing with the order-loving citizen. In some of
+the northern towns the knuckle-duster, the sand-bag, and the loaded
+stick are requisitioned; and in all cases we are told the police are
+powerless. The fact is, that, on the whole, England cannot be reckoned
+an orderly country. The "hooligans" and their provincial imitators are
+just straws that show the way of the wind. When these persons say: "We
+will do such and such things in contravention of the law," there is
+practically nothing to stop them. In the same way, when a community
+determines to run amuck on an occasion of "national rejoicing" (such
+as the late Mafeking night), or because a strike is in progress, or a
+charity dinner has been badly served, or the vaccination laws are being
+enforced, it does so at its own sweet will, and order can be hanged.
+Once a week, too,--namely, on Saturday nights,--English order, like
+the free list at the theatres, is entirely suspended. Saturday night
+is the recognised and inviolable hour of the mob. Throughout the
+country your flaring English gin-palaces are at their flaringest; the
+beer-pumps sing together with a myriad voices, and the clink of glasses
+takes the evening air with beauty. Until, perhaps, eight o'clock all
+goes well; then the quarrelsomeness which the English masses extract
+from their cups begins to assert itself, and the chuckers-out (in what
+other country in the world are there chuckers-out?) and the police
+begin to be busy. Till long after midnight their hands are full, and
+it is not until the Sabbath is a couple of hours old that the English
+masses seek their rest. In the meantime what squalid indiscretions,
+what sins against humanity, what outrages, have not been committed? The
+bare consumption of drink alone has been appalling; the bickerings,
+angry shoutings, indulgences in pugilism and hair-pulling, have been
+infinite; and on Monday morning the police-courts will have their usual
+plethora of drunks and disorderlies, wife-beatings and assaults on the
+police, with, perhaps, a case or two of manslaughter and a murder to
+put the crown on things.
+
+In the main, therefore, law and order may be counted among John Bull's
+many illusions. They are, as one might say, sweet to meditate upon;
+they look all right on paper, and they sound all right in the mouths
+of orators. For the rest the Englishman who is wise smiles and keeps a
+folded tale. One may note, before leaving this entertaining subject,
+that in England lawyers and laymen alike take a special pride in
+admitting a certain ignorance. At the bare mention of Scots law they
+lift up pious hands and impious eyes and say, "Thank Heaven, we know
+nothing about it!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+EDUCATION
+
+
+Lord Rosebery, whom the worthy Mr. Crosland dislikes on purely racial
+grounds, is usually credited as the originator of what has latterly
+become the Englishman's watchword, "Educate, educate, educate!"
+Whether it was the Scotch half of Lord Rosebery or the English half
+that prompted him to this simple human cry, I shall not pretend to
+say. On the other hand, it is certain that when his Lordship offered
+the English such a profound piece of advice, he gave them exactly
+the counsel that they most needed; for, though the English boast of
+their knowledge, though they are the arrogant possessors of seats of
+learning out of which can come nothing but perfection, though they
+possess ancient universities and ancient public schools, though they
+have a school-board system and free education, and though their country
+is overrun with middle-sized men who play billiards and drink bitter
+beer and call themselves schoolmasters, they are indubitably and
+unmistakably an uneducated people.
+
+Until the passing of the Elementary Education Act of 1870, learning
+in England amounted practically to a luxury. Only the rich might be
+permitted to know things. It was a case of schools, colleges, and
+universities for the sons of noblemen and gentlemen. The rascally lower
+classes might look after themselves. It is open to question whether the
+rascally lower classes were not, on the whole, educationally better
+off in that day than they are at present. That, however, is by the
+way. But in the later sixties the reformer got his eagle eye on the
+rascally lower classes. He perceived that the rascally lower classes
+were in bad case. They got drunk, they used foul language, they smoked
+short pipes, and, Heaven help them! they could not read. Anticipating
+the English or Scotch half of Lord Rosebery, as the case may be, the
+reformer said, "Educate, educate, educate!" And it was so. The English
+have been educating ever since. They educated to such purpose that
+thirty years later Lord Rosebery felt it incumbent upon himself to bid
+them educate, educate, educate! In those thirty years the rascally
+lower classes learned somewhat. They were supposed to discover, _inter
+alia_, that knowledge was power. They were told that a hodman who could
+write his name was a better hodman than the hodman whose sign-manual
+was a cross. They were led shrewdly to infer that their pastors and
+masters and general betters owed their supremacy to knowledge; and
+that if they, the rascally lower classes, would only instruct their
+children, these same children might wax great in the land and carry
+burdens no more. The rascally lower classes sent their children to
+school, some of them cheerfully, some of them with groans; and the
+stars began to shine over England's darkness.
+
+What has come to pass all men know. Every Englishman gets the
+smatterings of a literary education, and believes in his heart that
+he was cut out by the Almighty to be a clerk. The honest trades and
+handicrafts are no longer desirable in the minds of English youth. To
+take one's coat off with a view to livelihood is a business for dolts
+and fools. Advertise in England for an office-boy and you shall receive
+five hundred applications; advertise for a boy to learn plumbing, and
+you will be offered, perhaps, two daft-looking lads, who after much
+thrashing have managed to attain the age of fourteen years.
+
+The fact is, that the English do not know what education means. At
+the public schools, and at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge,
+education has become, to a great extent, a social matter. You go to
+these places to learn, certainly; but you also go with a view to the
+formation of a desirable and influential acquaintance, and to get
+upon your forehead the mark which is supposed to make glorious the
+public-school and university-bred Englishman. As a general rule, that
+mark is altogether imperceptible to the eyes of the unelect, who, if
+the truth must be told, discover the university man not so much by
+his manners or conversation as by his ineptitudes. When one comes to
+consider the principles upon which the public-school and university
+system are worked, one is quite prepared to admit that, were it not for
+the element of snobbery patent in the system, English public schools
+and universities alike would in the long run have to be disestablished.
+As it is, they are the conventional resort of aristocratic adolescence,
+and permitted to exist only on condition that, if a low middle-class
+person can find the money and keep up the style, he, too, may join the
+angelic host. To the man of temperament, to the scholar, to the man
+who loves learning for learning's sake, the English universities have
+precious little to offer.
+
+After Oxford and Cambridge, one turns to London and the non-resident
+foundations, all of them, I believe, modern. Here, as it seems to
+me, the English err again. Broadly speaking, these institutions,
+wittingly or unwittingly, devote their energies to the preparation of
+young men for the Civil Service. If you are an English board-school
+teacher at £80 a year and you discover that a second-class clerk in
+the Circumlocution Department commences at £300 a year, and that,
+roughly, the examination to be passed is the same as for matriculation
+at London, you naturally go in bald-headed for matriculation at
+London. For the learning you get by these efforts you have not the
+smallest respect. If, on presenting yourself for examination by the
+Civil Service Commissioners, you come out sufficiently high on the
+list to secure an appointment, well and good. If not, your labour
+has been wasted. It is this spirit which is at the bottom of the
+English ignorance. With them, learning, education, is a means to an
+end, and not in the least its own exceeding great reward. Hence a
+properly educated Englishman is almost as rare as a blue rose. For the
+masses--the rascally lower orders, that is to say--there are the board
+schools. Here for thirty years past has been enacted about the sweetest
+travesty of education that the mind of man could conceive. For the
+teaching of the children of the rascally lower orders, the wise English
+Government, with the assistance of the wise English school boards, has
+invented what is to all intents and purposes a new type of man. And
+his name shall be called Schoolmaster. He began Heaven knows how. But
+if you inquire into him, you will find that he has spent three years
+at a Government training college, and that prior to this experience
+he was for some years a pupil teacher; also that he is a son of the
+people, and that his father drove an engine or kept a shop. In these
+latter circumstances he was, perhaps, fortunate. The marvellous fact
+about him is that, in spite of his years of pupil-teachership and of
+his three years at a Government training college, he is not a man of
+either learning or culture. I am told that an English pupil teacher is
+not expected to fash himself by the study of either Latin or Greek. Two
+books of Euclid will see him through the stiffest of his examinations.
+He does not need to have even a nodding acquaintance with modern
+languages; and as for science, if he really wants some, he must pick it
+up at evening classes. Even when he passes into the Government training
+college,--where, by the way, he is instructed and boarded and lodged
+gratis,--his studies do not become in any way profound. The history of
+England, the geography of the world, arithmetic according to Barnard
+Smith, algebra according to Dr. Todhunter, Latin and Greek according
+to Dr. William Smith (Part I.), with a little French,--a very little
+French,--bring him to the end of his tether.
+
+Really, the whole business is childish. Any youth of average capacity
+should get through the entire three years' course in six weeks. Of
+course, there is the so-called technical training to reckon with;
+that is to say, a man at one of these colleges is supposed to spend
+a great deal of his time, and no doubt does, in perfecting himself
+as a teacher; but one would have thought that actual practice in an
+ordinary school would be the best instructor in this respect. In
+any case, nobody can consider closely the English schoolmaster as
+manufactured at Government training colleges without perceiving that
+the Government turns out a very remarkable article indeed. I have no
+desire to belittle a hard-worked, and probably underpaid, body of
+public servants. Their profession is a thankless one. I do not think
+for a moment a single man of them went into it with his eyes open,
+and I know for a certainty that the school boards and the Government
+between them have so hedged it round with petty annoyances that a
+man possessed of feeling must loathe it. It is probably this feeling
+of loathing of his work that keeps the English schoolmaster down. He
+knows that it is vain for him to go a hair's-breadth out of the beaten
+tracks. The school boards must have grants; the Government inspectors
+must be satisfied. There is only one method of ensuring these desirable
+consummations: that one way amounts to sheer mechanism and slog. The
+English schoolmaster must have no temperament. If he possess such a
+thing, he is bound to come to great grief. Hence the whole weight of
+the English system is, from first to last, employed in the work of
+knocking temperament out of him and keeping it out. His three years'
+free training particularly tend to make a slack, unthinking sap-head
+of him. He gets a parchment which entitles him to call himself a
+certificated teacher, and he is taught to imagine that for downright
+learning there is nothing like himself under the sun. In this latter
+surmise he is quite right. The schoolmaster in England, though he will
+probably be another quarter of a century waking up to the fact, counts
+for next to nothing. Men of parts avoid him; men of no parts laugh at
+him. For himself, I imagine, he will long continue to believe in his
+heart that he is a great man, a little lower, perhaps, than a parson,
+but certainly a little higher than a policeman.
+
+The real value of English education, like the real value of most other
+things, becomes apparent when it is put to the test of practical
+affairs. Any employer of labour will tell you that, whether an English
+boy come to him from a board school or a school of a higher grade,
+whether he be the son of a ploughman or of what the English call a
+professional man, he is always and inevitably a good deal of a fool.
+You have to teach him how to lick stamps. You have to teach him that,
+excepting in so far as he can write and read, what he has learned at
+school is not wanted; you have to teach him how many beans make five;
+you have to teach him that punctuality and accuracy are worth more in
+business than all the botany he ever learned; and all the time you
+have to watch him like a cat watching a mouse. "Fire out the fools!"
+once exclaimed Dr. Robertson Nicoll. I do not think it is too much to
+say that, if the average English employer took the hint, he would have
+nobody left to do his business for him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+RECREATION
+
+
+To amuse oneself is the great art of life. From the English
+point of view, the finest kind of amusement is to be obtained by
+killing something. Fox-hunting, deer-stalking, grouse-shooting,
+pheasant-shooting, pigeon-shooting, and even rabbit-shooting still
+stand for a great deal among the best class of Englishmen. Of old, the
+masses had their bull-baitings, dog-fights, and cock-fights. These,
+however, are no longer regarded as legitimate forms of amusement,
+and the masses, being for various reasons unable to hunt foxes and
+shoot pheasants, have to fall back on recreations in which killing
+takes place only by accident. There is the race-course and the
+football-field. The masses are expected to consider themselves happy.
+Outside racing and football, however, the come-day, go-day Englishman
+has a good many facilities for recreation. Although in most communities
+the grandfatherly authorities have abolished the old feasts and fairs,
+which provided periodic saturnalia of merry-go-rounds and wild-beast
+shows, it is a poor townlet which cannot nowadays boast its permanent
+settlement of cocoanut-shies and shooting-galleries, where on Saturday
+evenings the true-born Englishman may find substantial joys. Then, for
+the Londoner, in addition to this kind of thing, there are from time to
+time provided vast orgies at Hampstead Heath, the Welsh Harp, Barnet
+Fair, and other choice resorts. Here, again, it is a case of cocoanuts,
+shooting-galleries, swing-boats, steam-roundabouts, and aërial flights,
+backed up with donkey-rides, a free use of the tickler and the ladies'
+teaser, unlimited confetti throwing, and unlimited beer. These
+amusements, of course, are on the face of them quite innocent, and
+equally English and unintellectual.
+
+Failing merry-go-rounds and cocoanut-shies, the delights of which are
+apt to pall, the English masses have still left to them their main
+redoubt of rational enjoyment, which, for reasons no man may skill,
+is called the music-hall. The English music-hall is practically an
+expansion or efflorescence of the old-fashioned "sing-song." Sixty
+years ago the man who went out to take a stoup of ale at his inn was
+accustomed to be regaled with a little music free of charge. Mine
+host had possessed himself of a second-hand piano, and secured the
+services of some broken-down musician to play it for him. There was
+a great singing of old songs, and the time sped merrily, as it did
+in the golden age. These feasts of harmony brought custom, and in
+course of time the evening "sing-songs" at certain hostelries became
+organised institutions and were run on lines of great enterprise, the
+piano being supplemented by an orchestra, and the pianist by a number
+of professional singers and entertainers. Within the last fifty years
+the "sing-song" has been separated from its parent the alehouse, and
+has developed into the music-hall. To-day the English music-halls
+are almost as thick on the ground as churches and chapels. In the
+metropolis you would have a difficulty to count them. In the provinces
+every town of size supports two or three halls, and insists on London
+talent and London style. The class of entertainment provided may be
+costly and amusing, but it is certainly not edifying. The performers
+almost to a man, and one might say to a woman, are persons who can be
+considered "artists" only in the broadest sense, and whose ignorance
+and vulgarity are as colossal as their salaries.
+
+Roughly, the entertainment may be divided into two sections, the one
+concerned with feats of strength, juggling, and the like, and the
+other with laughter-making and vocalism. As regards the first of these
+sections, a man who can balance a horse and trap on the end of his
+chin appears to give great satisfaction to an English audience. Why
+this should be so, nobody knows. The good purpose that may be served
+by balancing a horse and trap on the end of one's chin is not obvious;
+but the English masses are ravished by the spectacle. They also have
+a great fondness for the stout lady who catches cannon-balls on the
+back of her neck, for the other stout lady who risks her life nightly
+on the flying trapeze, for the gentleman who walks about the stage
+with a piano under one arm and a live mule under the other, and for
+the gentleman who rides the bicycle standing on his head. To the mind
+of the English masses these are marvels and well worth the money. They
+give a zest to life, they provide material for conversation, and their
+attraction seems perennial.
+
+The great stand-by of the halls, however, is the laughter-making and
+vocal department. Here shine the great stars whose names are familiar
+on English lips as household words. Here is purveyed the culture, the
+song, and the humour of the English masses. It is from the music-hall
+stage that the vast majority of Englishmen take their tone and their
+sentiment. That renowned comedian, Fred Fetchem, strolls on to the
+boards of the Frivolity some night, and, assuming a fiendish grin,
+exclaims idiotically; "There's 'air!" Next morning and for many weeks
+thereafter all England says; "There's 'air!" on any and every occasion.
+"What ho she bumps!" "Now, we sha'n't be long," "Not half," "Did he?"
+and similar catchwords, all popular and all meaningless, capture the
+English imagination in their turn, and for a season, at any rate,
+Englishmen can say nothing else. It is the same with the music-hall
+song. Always there are current in England three or four "songs of the
+hour," which every Englishman worth the name sings, whistles, or hums;
+and always these songs, from whatever point of view regarded, are of
+the most blithering and bathotic nature. At the present moment the
+prime and universal favourite is that pathetic ditty, _Everybody's
+Loved by Some One_. For the benefit of the English, I quote the first
+stanza and the chorus of this work:
+
+  A lady stood within a busy city,
+  Her darling little daughter by her side;
+  She'd stopped to buy a bunch of pretty violets
+  From a ragged little orphan she espied.
+  The words she spoke were kinder than the boy had heard for years;
+  And in reply to what she asked, he murmur'd through his tears,
+
+  Everybody's loved by some one, everybody knows that's true,
+  Some have father and mother dear; sister and brother, too.
+  All the time that I remember, since I was a mite so small,
+  I seem to be the only one that nobody loves at all.
+
+With this enchanting song the English welkin resounds by day and night.
+The great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman, full of four-ale and
+bad whisky, howls it in chorus at his favourite "public," work-girls
+sing it in factories, mothers rock their children to sleep with it, and
+every English urchin whistles or shouts it at you with unflagging zest.
+Of course, there are others; for example, there is _I'm a P'liceman_,
+which goes like this:
+
+  In the inky hour of midnight, when the clock is striking three,
+  As I stroll along my beet-root, many curious things I see:
+  Ragged urchins stagger past me to their mansions in the west;
+  Millionaires, through cold and hunger, on our doorsteps sink to rest;
+  Dirty dustmen in their broughams, off to supper at the "Cri.";
+  Then "Bill Sykes," the burglar, passes, with an eye-glass in his eye.
+
+  Such are the sights I witness when I am on my beat,
+  Filling my heart with sawdust, filling my boots with feet;
+  Covering half the pavement up with my "plates of meat,"
+  Though mother sent to say that I'm a p'liceman--
+
+which--need one remark?--is intended for what the Scots are supposed to
+call "wut." Also, there is _He Stopped_:
+
+    Pendlebury Plum had a wart on his gum,
+      And he rubbed it with sand-paper hard;
+    The wart on his gum made Plum fairly hum,
+      When it stuck out about half a yard.
+    The wart grew so quick, when he rubbed it with a brick,
+      Till it looked like a short billiard-cue;
+    Said Plum to himself, "I shall die on the shelf,
+      For I'm darned if I know what to do."
+
+    So he went and got a pick-axe and shov'd it underneath,
+    Then he lifted up his jaw, and he swallowed all his teeth;
+    Then he stopped!
+
+The verses I have quoted are a good, true, and fair sample of the kind
+of thing that finds favour among the English masses. I do not think
+that anything better is being proffered, and it is pretty certain that
+anything less inane would be doomed to failure. The fact is that the
+English mind in the lump is flat, coarse, and maggoty, and the English
+understanding is as the understanding of a feeble and ill-bred child.
+A couple of generations ago the songs popular among Englishmen had
+some claim to coherence, decency, and common sense; nowadays, however,
+the Englishman admits that "he cannot sing the old songs." He has gone
+farther and fared worse, and among the many symptoms of his decadence,
+none is more pronounced than his easy toleration of the balderdash that
+is being served up to him by the "'alls."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+STOCK EXCHANGE
+
+
+There is nothing in England more astounding or more tigerish than
+the city man. Englishmen have a fixed idea that they are the soul of
+generosity, indifferent to money, and not in the least sordid. When
+they are put to it for a type of sheer greediness it pleases them to
+point a finger at the Scot. Yet there can be no doubt that of late
+years the desire for riches has become the absorbing English passion.
+The ostentation and vulgar displays of the aristocracy and the newly
+rich have stirred the middle-class English heart to envy. How comes
+it that such and such a man sleeps on lilies and eats roses? He has
+"means," my friend. And what are "means"? Just money. If you are going
+to be happy in this life, if you insist upon a full paunch of the
+choicest--upon the ease and softness which are so grateful to decadent
+persons, if you would be in a position to possess all that the soul
+of the decadent person covets, you really must have money. And as you
+are a middle class Englishman whose people have omitted to leave you a
+million or so, it is very awkward for you. Life is short; the cup goes
+round but once.
+
+You have £500. How is it to be made into £50,000, and that while the
+flush of youth still incarnadines your ambitious cheek? There is only
+one way: you must speculate--judiciously, if you can; but you must
+speculate. You are an Englishman and a sportsman, and sometimes you get
+your £50,000. Then all the world marvels and would fain do likewise, so
+that the ball is kept rolling. It is a ball full of money, and it rolls
+cityward. The generous, open-handed Englishmen who are the City take as
+much as they want and toss you the balance. The game is as fashionable
+as ping-pong: everybody plays it, and, win or lose, everybody calls
+it the Stock Exchange. I am told that the Stock Exchange proper is a
+reputable institution and essential to the well-being of the country.
+I do not doubt this for a moment; but round it there has grown up a
+specious and parasitical finance which is rapidly transforming the
+English into a nation of punters. "Fortunes made while you wait," is
+the lure to which the latter-day Englishman has been found infallibly
+to respond. The remnant of the common sense possessed by his excellent
+grandparents arouses in him a sneaking suspicion that the golden
+promises of the outside broker and the bucket-shop keeper are not to be
+depended upon. Yet he reads in his morning paper that no end of stocks
+and shares have risen a point or dropped a point, as the case may be,
+and he knows that if he had been in on the right side he would have
+made more money in a few hours than his excellent grandparents could
+have made in the course of a whole grubby lifetime. Hence, sooner or
+later, his patrimony, or few hundred of surplus capital, is planked
+into the ball that rolls citywards, on the off-chance that it may come
+back arm in arm, as it were, with thousands.
+
+Even the more cautious sort of Englishman, who looks upon speculation
+with a deprecating eye and pins his faith on legitimate investment,
+is rapidly descending into the gambling habit. Schemes which promise
+fat dividends inflame his imagination and drag him out of the even
+tenor of his way. He is perfectly well aware that fifteen, twenty,
+and twenty-five per cent. in return for one's money is quite wrong
+somehow. But, on the other hand, the prospect ravishes, and there are
+concerns in the world which pay such dividends year by year without
+turning a hair. Only sometimes there is a colossal smash, and half the
+shopkeepers of England put on sackcloth and ashes and get up funds for
+one another's relief. To the looker-on the whole system is highly
+diverting; to the players in the game the fun will never be obvious.
+
+The real truth about the matter is simply this--the standard of living
+in England is an inflated and artificial standard. Practically every
+Englishman lives, or longs to live, beyond his means. The workman
+and the workman's wife must put on the style of the foreman and the
+foreman's wife, and the foreman and the foreman's wife must appear
+to be nearly as comfortably off as the manager, the manager as his
+employer, all employers, shopkeepers, factory owners, iron-masters,
+engineers, printers, and even publishers as prosperous as each other,
+and so on till you come to dukes, than whom, of course, nobody can be
+more prosperous. It would be possible to bring together six Englishmen
+whose incomes ranged from £1 10_s._ a week to £50,000 a year, and
+whose dress and tastes would be pretty well identical. Fifty years ago
+the sons of the middle classes had really no inclination toward the
+superfluities. The dandy was rather laughed at among them, the gourmet
+was a monster they never by any chance encountered, and the libertine
+was a sad warning and a person to be eschewed. Nowadays it is all the
+other way: the gilt and tinsel and glamour and rapidity of the gay
+world have captured the English understanding and brought it exceeding
+low. There is little moral backbone left in the country. Money, money,
+money, to be ill gotten and ill spent, is the English ideal. The man
+who can go without is considered a crank or a fool or worse, or he is
+set down for an indolent fellow who should be given a month or two on
+the treadmill for luck. The whole duty of man--of Englishmen, that is
+to say--is to have money in ponderable quantities; the man without it
+is of no account at all. Nobody believes in him, nobody wants him,
+nobody tolerates him. He may be wise and witty and chaste and blessed
+with all the virtues, and still be received with great coldness by bank
+managers; and it is well known that the attitude of a bank manager
+towards a man is the attitude of society at large. If the bank manager
+beams and rubs his hands, "God's in His heaven: all's right with the
+world." If the bank manager frowns and sends you impertinent letters,
+you may last a week or a fortnight or a few months, but you are on thin
+ice, and you must please take care not to forget it. I should not be
+at all surprised if the omnipotent official whose business it is to
+discover what persons are or are not qualified to approach our British
+fountain of honour were one day found to be a bank manager in disguise.
+
+So that, on the whole, the Englishman has every inducement to get
+rich and to be very quick about it. His dealings with the "Stock
+Exchange"--that is to say, with the City--are but the natural
+expression of his anxiety to oblige all parties concerned. It is a pity
+that getting and spending should become the main concerns of his life;
+but, as he pathetically puts it, "One must do as Rome does, and some
+women are never content." The Stock Exchange is the only way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE BELOVED
+
+
+What is more beautiful or meet to be taken to the bosom than the
+Englishman? Everybody loves him; his goings to and fro upon the earth
+are as the progresses of one who has done all men good. He drops
+fatness and blessings as he walks. He smiles benignity and graciousness
+and "I-am-glad-to-see-you-all-looking-so-well." And before him runs one
+in plush, crying, "Who is the most popular man of this footstool?" And
+all the people shall rejoice and say, "The Englishman--God bless him!"
+
+Hence it comes to pass that in whatever part of the world the
+Englishman may find himself, he has a feeling that he is thoroughly
+at home. "I am as welcome as flowers in May," he says. "These pore
+foreigners, these pore 'eathen are glad to see me. They never have
+any money, pore devils! and were it not for our whirring spindles at
+home, I verily believe they would have nothing to wear." In brief, the
+Englishman abroad is always in a sort of Father Christmassey, Santa
+Claus frame of mind. He eats well, he drinks well, and he sleeps well.
+He calls for the best, and he PAYS for it. It is a wonderful
+thing to do, and it goes straight to the hearts of the "pore foreigner"
+and the "pore 'eathen." This, at any rate, is the Englishman's own
+view. It is a pleasing, consoling, and stimulating view, and it would
+ill become an unregenerate outsider rudely to disturb it. Indeed, I
+question whether the Englishman in his blindness and adipose conceit
+would allow you to disturb it.
+
+When persons in France say, "_À bas l'Anglais_," your fat Englishman
+smiles, and says, "Little boys!" When people put rude pictures of
+him on German postcards, he smiles again, and says that the flowing
+tide of public opinion in Germany is entirely with him. When Dutch
+farmers propose to throw him into the sea, he becomes very red in the
+neck, splutters somewhat, and says, "I'm sure they will make excellent
+subjects in time." And when the savage Americans desire to chaw him up
+and swallow him, he says, "You astonish me. I have always been under
+the impression that blood was thicker than water." His desire is to
+live at peace with all men; but his notion of peace is to have his
+hand in both your pockets and no questions asked. He owns two-thirds
+of the habitable globe (_vide_ the geography books), and every pint of
+sea is his (_pace_ the popular song); he owns also everything that is
+worth owning. He is the Pierpont Morgan of the universe. Who could help
+loving him?
+
+On the other hand, the excellent J.B. has not escaped calumny. If I
+were disposed to reproduce some of the slanders upon him, it goes
+without saying that they would make a rather large chapter. All manner
+of foreign writers have time and time again had a fling at the
+Englishman. They love him, but their love is not blind. They perceive
+that he has faults of a grievous nature, and they write accordingly.
+Curiously enough, too, quite severe criticisms of John Bull have been
+written in his own household. Mr. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, for example,
+who is an Englishman, and apparently innocent of Celtic taint, actually
+goes so far as to call the Englishman an Anglo-Norman dog:
+
+  Down to the latest born, the hungriest of the pack,
+  The master-wolf of all men, called the Sassenach,
+  The Anglo-Norman dog, who goeth by land and sea,
+  As his forefathers went in chartered piracy,
+  Death, fire in his right hand.
+
+And the English poet goes on to elaborate his indictment against the
+Englishman, thus:
+
+                        He hath outlived the day
+  Of the old single graspings, where each went his way
+  Alone to plunder all. He hath learned to curb his lusts
+  Somewhat, to smooth his brawls, to guide his passionate gusts,
+  His cry of "Mine, mine, mine!" in inarticulate wrath.
+  He dareth not make raid on goods his next friend hath
+  With open violence, nor loose his hand to steal,
+  Save in community and for the common weal
+
+  'Twixt Saxon man and man. He is more congruous grown;
+  Holding a subtler plan to make the world his own
+  By organized self-seeking in the paths of power
+  He is new-drilled to wait. He knoweth his appointed hour
+  And his appointed prey. Of all he maketh tool,
+  Even of his own sad virtues, to cajole and rule.
+
+We are told, further, that the Beloved has tarred Time's features,
+pock-marked Nature's face, and "brought all to the same jakes,"
+whatever that may mean. Also:
+
+              There is no sentient thing
+  Polluteth and defileth as this Saxon king,
+  This intellectual lord and sage of the new quest.
+  The only wanton he that fouleth his own nest,
+  And still his boast goeth forth.
+
+This is an English opinion, and, consequently, worth the money. Mr.
+Blunt assures us that in putting it forth he has the approval of no
+less a philosopher than Mr. Herbert Spencer, and no less an idealist
+than Mr. George Frederick Watts. "I have not," says Mr. Blunt, "shrunk
+from insisting on the truth that the hypocrisy and all-acquiring greed
+of modern England is an atrocious spectacle--one which, if there be
+any justice in Heaven, must bring a curse from God, as it has surely
+already made the angels weep. The destruction of beauty in the name
+of science, the destruction of happiness in the name of progress,
+the destruction of reverence in the name of religion, these are the
+Pharisaic crimes of all the white races; but there is something in the
+Anglo-Saxon impiety crueller still: that it also destroys, as no other
+race does, for its mere vainglorious pleasure. The Anglo-Saxon alone
+has in our day exterminated, root and branch, whole tribes of mankind.
+He alone has depopulated continents, species after species, of their
+wonderful animal life, and is still yearly destroying; and this not
+merely to occupy the land, for it lies in large part empty, but for his
+insatiable lust of violent adventure, to make record bags and kill."
+
+When the Beloved comes across reading of this sort he no doubt sheds
+bitter tears, and remembers how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to
+have a thankless child. And he goes on his way rejoicing, unimpressed
+and unreformed.
+
+The fact of the matter is, that from the beginning, John Bull, though
+possessed of a great reputation for honesty and munificence, has never
+really been any better than he should be. When he interfered between
+tyrant and slave, when he went forth to conquer savage persons and to
+annex savage lands which somehow invariably flowed with milk and honey,
+he made a point of doing it with the air of a philanthropist, and for
+centuries the world took him at his own estimate. Even in the late
+war the great cry was that he did not want gold-mines. As a general
+rule he never wants anything; but he always gets it. It is only of
+late that the world has begun to find him out and that he himself has
+begun to have qualms. He feels in his bones that something has gone
+wrong with him. It may be a slight matter and not beyond repair, but
+there it is. He cannot put his hand on his heart and say; "I am the
+fine, substantial, sturdy, truth-speaking, incorruptible, magnanimous,
+genial Englishman of half a century ago!" The fly has crept into the
+ointment of his virtue, and the fragrance of it no longer remains. His
+attitude at the present moment is the attitude of the anxious man who
+perceives that life is a little too much for him, and keeps on saying,
+"We shall have to buck up!"
+
+He is in two minds about most things over which he was once cock-sure.
+He could not quite tell you, for example, whether he continues to stand
+at the head of the world's commerce or not. Once there was no doubt
+about it; now--well, it is a question of statistics, and you can prove
+anything by statistics. Out of America men have come to buy English
+things which were deemed unpurchasable. The American has come and seen
+and purchased and done it quite quickly. The Englishman is a little
+puzzled; his slow wits cannot altogether grasp the situation. "We must
+buck up!" he says, "and take measures while there is yet time." He
+does not see that the newer order is upon him, and that inevitably and
+for his good he must be considerably shaken up. His own day has been
+a lengthy, a roseful, and a gaudy one; it has been a day of ease and
+triumph and comfortable going, and the Beloved has become very wealthy
+and a trifle stout in consequence. Whether to-morrow is going to be
+his day, too, and whether it is going to be one of those nice loafing,
+sunshiny kind of days that the Beloved likes, are open questions. It
+is to be hoped devoutly that fate will be kind to him: he needs the
+sympathy of all who are about him; he wants encouragement and support
+and a restful time.
+
+It is said that his Majesty of Portugal, who has just left these
+shores, on being asked what had impressed him most during his
+visit, replied, "The roast beef." "Nothing else, sir?" inquired his
+interlocutor. "Yes," said the monarch; "the boiled beef." And there
+is a great deal in it. Through much devouring of beef the English
+have undoubtedly waxed a trifle beefy. It is their beefiness and
+suetiness--that fatty degeneration, in fact--which impress you.
+
+Recognising his need of props and stays and abdominal belts, as it
+were, the Beloved has latterly taken to remembering the Colonies. He
+is now of opinion that he and his sturdy children over-seas should be
+"knit together in bonds of closer unity," "to present an unbroken front
+to the world," "should share the burdens and glories of Empire," and so
+on and so forth. The Colonies--good bodies!--saw it all at once. They
+had been accustomed to be snubbed and neglected and left out of count,
+and they had forgotten to whom they belonged. In his hour of need the
+Beloved cried, "'Elp! I said I didn't want you, but I do--I do!" and
+the Colonies sent to his aid, at a dollar a day per head, the prettiest
+lot of freebooters and undesirable characters they found themselves
+able to muster. Later, they sent several landau loads of premiers and
+politicians, who were fed and flattered to their hearts' content,
+and went home, no doubt, greatly impressed with the English roast and
+boiled beef. These gentlemen made speeches in return for their dinners;
+they were allowed to visit the Colonial Office and kiss the hand of Mr.
+Chamberlain; they saw Peter Robinson's and the tuppenny tube: and the
+bonds of Empire have been knit closer ever since.
+
+Not to put too fine a point upon it, the Englishman's attempt to
+buttress himself up out of the Colonies has proved a ghastly failure.
+The scheme fell flat. The English may want the Colonies, but the
+Colonies do not want the English--at any rate, on bonds of unity lines.
+The banner of Imperialism which has waved so gloriously during the
+past lustrum will have to be furled and put away. The great Imperial
+idea declines to work; it has been brought on the political stage half
+a century too late. At best it was a fetch, and it has failed. The
+All-Beloved will have to find some other way out. Whether he is quite
+equal to the task may be reckoned another question. One supposes
+that he will try; for there is life in the old dog yet, at any rate,
+according to the old dog.
+
+
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+Original spelling has been retained.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 56453 ***