The Cruise of the Nona (continued 6)

Now this process was everywhere accompanied by, and tested by, prophecy. The seeker after some new ‘law’ (as a sequence of physical phenomena is rather oddly called) would experiment until sequence was discovered, and, when it was discovered, he could confidently presume upon its completion; as, for instance, in the series of atomic weights. He could say, ‘You will find that this series will follow upon such and such a course,’ and when he was proved right he had achieved his end. The whole method of the progress was of this nature. It was like a man plotting down points upon a curve until he had aligned a sufficient number to give him the general formula, after which he could confidently say, ‘You will find, when the curve is fully described, such and such other points to lie along it.’ Or it was like a man reëstablishing a Roman road. He says: ‘I find a section of it here pointing right to a neighbouring port, and a little way on another section still pointing the same, and I am confident that I shall find some place-name or parish boundary or other relic confirming that Roman road throughout.’ He is pretty certain to be right.

On the parallel of physical science, this habit of prophecy as the confirmation of judgment spread to things, in which, by their nature, mechanical judgment is impossible.

Another negative source was ignorance, and especially ignorance of the past. Our moderns have more and more lost the knowledge of the past. They have been taught to despise it; they think of it first as of something foreign and odd; later, if they study, as of something very different from what it was. They, therefore, miss the lessons of the past, and especially the chief lesson, which is that the developments of society follow no mechanical process; that their way is not the way of an arrow, but of a serpent. Ignorant of this, men fall into the simple error of taking the tangent to the curve, of prolonging the actions of causes immediately before their eyes, and of conceiving the future in terms of the present, as children do. Hence these confident assertions that in so many years such and such a country will have grown to such and such a population: that such and such a language will have become dominant—and so forth.

But it is to be noted that this process is not often applied to evils, for men do not like to face an evil future.

I notice in this political or social prophecy one very strange omission: they never by any chance allow for that cause which is the major cause of change in human affairs: I mean religion.

Thirteen hundred years ago, the great fact before all men’s eyes was the Roman Empire of the East. The commander of the armies, a half-divine being seated in Constantinople, was the centre of the world and the acknowledged head of all that counted, from the Atlantic to the Persian borders, and from the Northern barbarism to the desert. Pressure menaced from the Persian hills and from the Tigris, and there was pressure from savage hordes in the mountains, and in the plains beyond to the north. Had men then been in the habit of prophesying after our foolish modern fashion, they would have told you this or that, but all in terms of the Empire, or the German and Slav barbarians, or the Persians; and while they so thought in terms of the only things they knew, there had already arisen, in a place remote and utterly insignificant, among tribes of a few hundreds without power, culture, or tradition, under conditions utterly negligible, the flaming spirit of Islam.

To our own modern world there must come either some vast religious reaction, or some vast religious novelty, or both. It is inevitable; for men live by religion. Yet no one speaking of the future takes it for one moment into account. I know of but one book, a book of singular genius, in which the thing appears, though tentatively; and that is in Jefferies’ fine vision called ‘After London.’ But even Jefferies did not make of it the main source of change. In his day men had already begun to lose the significance of religion in human affairs.

The great light of the Forelands on the weather side, the Goodwin Lights on the lee, stood like the lamps of a street in the fall of that darkness as, with the tide beneath us, we ran up for London River. But, the wind coming from more northerly, we had to choose between beating up and standing out.

We did the last, though the wind was falling, because that lane of water is full of the world’s shipping, and it was plainer to keep a course. By midnight the breeze had died down to a light air, and, somewhat later, the sky now very clear, we bore up on the other tack, the starboard tack, and went round till we had the dying air right abeam, and so came under brilliant stars within the point of Thanet land and dropped anchor and slept.

But early the next morning we woke to see the sun rising up undimmed over the wide North Sea, cut sharply by the calm horizon. It promised a warm and kindly day....

I could wish that this book, already so long as to have become intolerable to the reader, the writer, the printer, and all others concerned in its production, already so heavy as to have become a business to the publisher, the carman, and the railway people (if, indeed, they transport it, but I have known of books transported in bulk on shipboard, and sinking to the glory of God, before they reached their destination, and that to the great advantage of our miserable world, which is abominably overcrowded with books)—I could wish that this book, already so prolix, so otiose, so weary of its way that no poor gabbler in an inn ever more offended his audience than I will mine; I could wish that this book, which may be called The Great Sea Serpent of books, or again, The Cromwell Road of Books, or once again, The Pambiblicon, or endless Compendium, or again, The Long Arctic Night—what you will—I could wish that this book were longer still, I say, in order that I might drag you to perdition with the tedium of a million memories north of the Forelands, north of the Goodwins, north of Long Nose: memories of the Muddy Rivers of the Trinobantes, whose descendants inhabit rather than cultivate the Essex clay: memories of sandbanks rising out of the misty seas like whales, and of the platters of Harwich, and of the King’s ship called The Serpent, and of Orford River, and of the Onion, and of Lowestoft, Yarmouth, and the exceedingly difficult labyrinth of the Wash, and of the awful great tide at King’s Lynn.

But I renounce—not so much for your sakes as for my own, nor do I even speak of that Thames River which sailors called London River, and of the getting across it slantwise in spite of the great ships and the way in which time has silted up that harbour.

There are many curious things to be noted about the opening of London River. There is the double tide, so that a man making Long Nose from the Channel finds a new tide taking him up towards London. There is the way in which the best of all the channels into the river is the one least used, because it would make ships go out of their way. Ships come into the Thames either from the north or from the south, so they save time, which is money, by skirting either coast, but the main mid channel only the Dutchmen use when they have occasion to come up London River; I approve them. Then there is the way in which undoubtedly all this has silted up and risen since the time of the ancients. It is not only the stuff brought down by the river which has piled up these banks; there is also, I am sure, a lifting of the land. Nothing else could account for Thanet ceasing to be an island, or for Richborough standing now high and dry. The surface of the earth moves slowly up and down over centuries, and no one shall persuade me that Pevensey has run dry, Rye has been drained, Lympne has run far inland, Dover inlet has been closed, and the Wensum turned from a great sea passage to a ditch by any action other than the lifting of the land. The last thing to be said about Thamesmouth is this, that it was never shut for traffic since the beginning of recorded time ... until.... Men always traded up and down it with a swarm of shipping since men first left memorial of their doings, until the fourth of August, 1914.

It is not the least arresting of those many portents accompanying the Great War that in its first week, for the first time in human history, the port of London was paralysed.

And so back to the Forelands, and the run between the Kentish corner and the Goodwin Sands, with a few kind words to Saint Augustine, and Julius Cæsar, and the men that murdered Saint Thomas, and so grew tails, and such others as have landed at this turn of the coast; but none for Hengist and Horsa, who never lived at all, and yet have done all manner of harm. So through the Downs into the Channel again and back on my way to the sea of Sussex, and to the shores which may be drowned and swamped for a while by alien townsmen, but will keep their own counsel and in due time will rise again.

We brought up as night fell under the shelter of Folkestone Breakwater. It had fallen almost calm as we slid into the oily place under the darkness, and there was a long exasperating swell, not regular, but coming in stupidly from the southeast, whence no wind blew, and washing back from the stones of the pier. A drizzling rain also was falling and, in general, my companion and I paid for the splendour of those last days round the corner of Kent and across the Thames. It was too early to sleep and, as I had had the helm the night before, I had slept also during the day. I sat looking at my main chart, though I knew every inch (oh! come! say rather millimetres) of the coast I was to follow; and I pondered upon that shore-line of Kent and Sussex, and upon places which I had passed far off on my way eastward, and which I would now see from closer by as I stood down-Channel on my westward journey home.

How well (too well?... No) does a man get to know a bit of coast like this between Selsea and the Downs after half a life of lazy passages along it, and (to be just) sometimes of wicked winds! It becomes as familiar as a street; not only the aspect of the shore—changeable as that is—not only lights and buoys, and the hours for the turn of tides and all the rest of it, but the very sea itself in spite of its innumerable diversity.

But one effect of this familiarity is odd and unexpected,—I know not whether others have felt it; I have felt it profoundly (especially in the last few years),—and that is, the way in which the sameness of the sea, the reiteration at sea of similar emotions, of similar heights and bearing-marks of the coast, the unity of scene, of time, of action, the eternity of the sea, throw into relief the catastrophic change, the cataract of change, inland: the revolution which has transformed modern England; so that, of all the states I know, none has become so intimately different from its own immediate past, within the memory of men elderly, but not yet old, as England: yes, even South England: the refuge.

To many I know this is a cause of rejoicing. Worse things have given way to better in their eyes. To others it is a despair; they are of that temperament which can only repose in fixed sanctities. For my part, it is to me a regret. Because the change is unhappy, and happiness is the end of man.

The older England I knew (the spirit of which has almost disappeared) was a happier place; happier not only in the immediate elements of personal happiness, but in the more distant elements of corporate happiness, such as national pride and security. Yet some find the change to be good: so they do.

At any rate, in this mixture of good and evil, the thing that we should note—the thing the historian will note with amazement—is the profundity and the rapidity of the change.

There stand the same marks, the same headlands, which I knew as a boy; the sight to landward is very little changed. There are the same three forts of Spithead, through which I used to set out from the sheltered water. There is the same odd entry, somewhat shoal and difficult, to the branches of Chichester Harbour and Bosham, that famous hamlet in the story of England. There is the low shelf of Selsea Bill, and the mark on the Mixen, and the two buoys of the Looe Stream, and the Owers Light winking outside—as I remember it winking when I watched it, a little boy, from the height of the Downs. The entry to Littlehampton is the same, and to Shoreham. The breakwater at Newhaven, though it still seems new to me, is already old. Beachy Head Light, which used to be on the summit of the cliff, has been shifted to the beach below. The breakwater at Hastings has failed, but Fairlight gives you the same marks; and the entry to Rye is what it always was, a caution to camels who have passed with honours through the eyes of needles. Dungeness slowly crawling out to sea still seems the same. The only material change in all that passage is the dangerous failure called Dover Harbour, against which the rushing tide of the Straits tumbles angrily, finding interference after so many æons of freedom: so that just outside Dover in almost any weather you are tossed by a confused and irritated sea. But all the rest, the Forelands Light and the Goodwins, are what I have always known. Up and down that stretch of water there is somewhat more building on the land, slightly changing the aspect of the distant shore. There is the curious long group of huts on Shoreham beach, Seaford sending up red brick on to the green of the heights above it, and Bexhill to-day where once was loneliness. But take it all in all, it is the same scene, after nearly forty years of sailing on that sea and watching that land with Highdown still for the best sea-mark, and with the clump of Chanctonbury—yes, even the stump of Halnacker Mill, though it is now all ruins. The marks are the same. I might turn boy again and set sailing and not find the sea-things other than I had known them.

But on land—in the heart of man—what a transformation! There went into it the England of the seventies—an England aristocratic, free, with ease of movement within and acting externally, at will, upon all nations. An England with a sense of increasing wealth and of increasing knowledge, and an England English. Of all the men and women you met, most had been born in the villages, or little market towns, which are the roots of England. It was one society: that of to-day is another, almost foreign to the first.

Of all this revolutionary change, covering the short space of half a lifetime, two effects are most prominent: the fall of Parliament from great honour to contempt, and the change in the press. Of these the change in the press is the most obvious, and perhaps the most remarkable.

The press of England has passed, as a whole, in that space of time from one social condition to another totally new. There are still dignified exceptions, but they are survivals and abnormal. The general spirit of the press has utterly changed. It is as great a change as a man might experience who, having been brought up, let us say, as an English public school boy and university man, should so sink as to pass his middle age up-country in a strange colony far overseas, as a labourer among labourers.

At the beginning of the period, England had a press—daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly—especially designed for, and consonant to, an aristocracy: not designed for, and consonant to, lords and ladies; but designed for, and consonant to, a highly cultivated governing class whose power was unquestioned, and which then directed the whole community. The intellectual life of the nation was concentrated in that class: it included men of all births, but having in common the same cultivation of spirit, the same manner of talking, the same sufficient knowledge of the European past, the same less, but still sufficient knowledge, of contemporary Europe: and, what was most important, the same philosophy and social outlook.

This class (the gentry, or whatever you like to call it), had its own press, the great daily papers, the weekly reviews, the serious monthly and quarterly reviews. Side by side with that press there was a frankly popular press, which had no sort of power, and which was intended to amuse the non-political mass below. It was represented in two or three very vulgar Sunday newspapers full of police court cases, and murders, and the rest; and weekly papers with tittle-tattle about the superiors of the class which read them; but it was the press of the educated class which represented, mirrored, and to some extent influenced the general action of England.

In that press you had, for its daily papers, information more rapidly acquired, better balanced, more detailed, and more extensive by far than was to be found in the press of any other country. Everything of importance was known to the governing class of England through that press, and was known at once; and, on the whole, was known in something like the right proportion. The weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies were powerful organs of intellectual expression, and set also a literary standard. You saw in them the names of Tennyson or Browning, of Huxley and the Duke of Argyll, of Lord Salisbury, of Arnold. There was about the whole atmosphere of this press something of that tone of equality, ease, and sure touch which is the mark of a governing class in any aristocratic state.

To-day, you have a press in which the less vital of these characteristics remain; the essential have wholly disappeared. Information is still rapidly acquired (though the English press here has no longer any advantage over the Continental, such as it used to have a generation ago), but the type of information is wholly different; and as for that quality vital to truth, the sense of proportion, it has vanished. The knowledge of Europe has fallen to a level negligible or contemptible. All the most weighty things are either hidden for private purposes, or (this is much the most common fault) unappreciated. While the Italian, French, and German papers are giving with full detail and with right balance the aspects of our contemporary civilisation; while men like Ferrero or Maurras are perpetually before the eyes of the Continent, we have here men who are no more than the servants of wealthy, half-educated, or uneducated millionaires, their owners: men who write to order any nonsense about Europe which those owners desire to publish. Therefore the great movements abroad, reacting upon the national life of this country, are misunderstood and invariably take opinion by surprise. I will give two examples which will be fresh in the memory of all.

No newspaper here either foresaw or, when it arrived, made comprehensible the Italian movement which led to the resurrection of the country by Mussolini. Compare such astonishing ignorance with the state of affairs in England a lifetime ago, when Italy was first rising to her modern position. Then the English papers closely followed all the ferment in Italy. It was to their columns that foreign statesmen turned for the facts and news on the progress of Savoy. To-day no Continental statesman looks at our press, save now and then to protest against some childish blunder. Again, even as I write, there is taking place in London a highly important conference between the bankers and politicians, the object of which, on the one side, is to diminish French power and, on the other, to maintain it. I turn to the ‘Temps,’ or to the ‘Corriere,’ and I find in the first paper very full and detailed accounts of the debates of the committees with an adequate educated judgment upon the results attained. In the second paper, I find a good, balanced judgment upon the situation with a leaning towards the English interest regarded as nearly identical with the Italian. But I defy any one to make out from ‘The Times’ what is really going on at that conference! You will read plenty of abuse of the French; plenty of self-praise and acres of generalities. But you will not find yourself informed—although the great business is going on here in London right under our eyes.

I thought it the part of a contemporary to follow the affair as closely as I could. I soon found it necessary to give up looking at the English papers, and to buy the papers of the Continent in order to instruct myself. The method had the disadvantage of delay, but had the advantage of giving me real information. The few papers which still keep up the façade of culture in their form, though certainly not in their contents, are, again, of less importance than the new popular press which makes no pretence to culture in any form, which is owned by impossible adventurers, such as no one a generation ago would have had in his house, even had they then existed;and it is this popular press now which is the main instrument in the moulding of opinion.

The revolution is complete. It is as complete as though the education of the country were to pass from the hands of the classicists and the mathematicians to those of Big Business, and boys were to be taught advertisement and salesmanship instead of the humanities. And this our passing from one mode of public expression, and control by suggestion, to another utterly different and far baser system, has come silently and has worked its effect unnoticed. It is only by contrasting then with now that we notice it.

We are arrived in England to-day at a condition in which the popular newspaper gives its owner a power in the State comparable only to the power of finance and far superior to the nominal power of those poor play-actors, embarrassed, furtive, who still bear titles of authority: Secretaries of State for this or that. And yet, by the very nature of the organism, this new instrument of power, the mob press, must be ill-informed, unreal, and—what is not without its importance—morally vile.

Less obvious than the complete change in the press, in its functions and character, perhaps less pronounced and less advanced, yet certainly of great moment, is the fall of the House of Commons and of Parliament in general from authority and dignity to well-deserved contempt.

But for this evil there is more hope of remedy than there is for the evil of the press. When any organ of government reaches a certain degree of decay, some other automatically takes its place, and if the substitution is made promptly enough, the state may bridge over the passage without disaster.

Such substitution lies ready to our hand. We have only to increase the power of the Crown, and that would indeed give truth to the boast too often repeated that the continuity of names is valuable to society. The monarchy is still there in name, and the giving of true power to it is therefore still possible.

The decline of Parliamentary authority and dignity has been wholly a rot from within. The people of England did not desire it; they desired nothing better than to continue their old respect for that aristocratic institution at Westminster round which every activity of the nation had centred. The damage was done by permitting personal corruption to go unpunished. When once the habit arose of condoning the use of public position for private enrichment—and that secret—it was impossible for the strength of the institution to survive. The temptation of the politician to enrich himself at the expense of the public good (to take bribes, to sell monopolies and contracts and policies) is so very strong that, unless it is met by as strong a check of discipline, it is bound to run riot, and it has done so. It has come on in a flood, especially during the last twenty years, taking every conceivable form, but all those forms proceeding from the immunity of the evil-doers. Men possessed of political power create public monopolies which they handle for their own enrichment: they take bribes, they give out contracts as against payment. They will assign a valuable state right to some company and then, resigning office, take up a highly salaried post in that company. The traffic in honours for the private advantage of those who bestow them is the least of these cancers which are eating away the body of Parliament. The habitual practice of blackmail in the course of personal intrigue for power (it is mutual between the politicians and the newspaper-owners) is the worst. But all are excessive in degree, and between them they have done their work. It is now impossible to restore to politics, which are now professional politics, the old prestige. It is gone.

In the presence of these experiences, the commonplaces of Parliamentary life with which all Parliamentarians are thoroughly familiar, and which at last the public are learning, the attitude of the politicians themselves is one of tolerance: the attitude of the public is a weary and disdainful indifference.

This attitude of tolerance on the part of the politicians, this policy they have chosen of excusing and pardoning corruption, seems to me more worthy of discussion than anything else in public life to-day; it is the centre of the whole affair.

Corruption in some degree you must have under any form of government. Half the art of government is the devising of methods for the repression, rather than the destruction, of corruption. So long as men love notoriety and wealth, so long as notoriety and wealth can be conferred by the possession of political power, and so long as political power dominates the courts of justice—that is, for ever—so long you will have corruption present among those who govern, except under a strong king. It stands to reason that the appetite for wealth or notoriety or both will incite men in political power to obtain them, and as that power gives them in a large measure control of the courts of justice and full control of the police and of prosecution, they can be rendered in the main immune from the consequences of their actions. I should not think it remarkable to learn that in any country, at any time, there was very great corruption among the public men. What I should think remarkable, what I should think a phenomenon worthy of special study (because it would be exceptional and would necessarily produce exceptional results), would be to hear that the corruption was not punished, and that those who were caught and exposed in flagrant acts of corruption were actually promoted. That is what we have here to-day in England.

It is with the toleration of parliamentary corruption as it is with disease in the human body. Hardly anybody goes through life without some bad illness. Most people have some one or other specific weakness which develops into a long illness ending in death, and all human beings whatsoever are liable to disease, even those few who do not for the moment suffer from it. But everywhere you see the human race fighting disease, and trying to avoid its consequences. Now if you found a man who took his disease as a habit, and tended rather to accentuate it and foster it, you would think his action abnormal. You would say, ‘Certain strange consequences will follow upon this.’ And you would be right.

I have found the modern toleration of bribery and blackmail in politics to be defended with very different arguments, but I fancy that the underlying motive of the defence, the real basis of it in a Parliamentarian’s world, is patriotism combined with a certain new scale of moral values which has come in with the century. I fancy all those who have in my hearing defended this later-day toleration of corruption, really had at the back of their heads a conviction that such degradation of public life did the country no great harm, being no more than a sort of permanent necessary evil. They think that the lessening of the security of the state which would come from exposing and punishing the culprits a much greater evil than letting them go their way. It is something of the attitude which most people take towards a family scandal. They say: ‘These things will happen anyhow; and we shall lower the family by any public discussion of them.’ So say the more reputable at Westminster.

There are then, as I see it, two elements in the now admitted and universal toleration of bribery and blackmail among politicians. The first element is the noble element of patriotism which judges that of two evils you must choose the least, and that the evil of a certain minimum necessary amount of political vice is far less than the evil of shaking authority and order in society and at the same time weakening the country in the face of its rivals. The second element is the judgment that the levying of and submitting to blackmail, and the offering and taking of bribes among Parliamentarians is only one out of hundreds of moral evils in the state, and is one of the least.

If these be the real foundations of the tolerance of these evils, the artificial arguments advanced are many and varied. I remember one political dinner table in Surrey where we thrashed out the whole business at some length. Everybody present was connected with public life directly or indirectly, and no one, so far as I know, was himself or herself guilty. Yet, out of twenty, only three of us, of whom I was one, maintained the necessity of checking the evil. All the others, the remaining men and, of course, all the women, relied upon this argument: that what you wanted in the conduct of the state was ability, sound judgment of the elements in any problem to be dealt with, and a good forecast of the immediate future. If you had these, they said, the country prospered; lacking these, any disaster might come. If you got these qualities in those who governed, it did not matter whether they were also given to peculation, or to odd tricks of spying and threatening, or to selling policies and monopolies, or to taking bribes.

I think that answer would have been sound if you could have proved that there was some necessary connection between good judgment, resolute will, patriotism, and all the rest of it, and the particular vices in question. For instance, a man defending the luxury and worldliness of a religious hierarchy might very well say: ‘These are moral evils, no doubt; but you will hardly get men able to conduct a great organisation who shall at the same time be indifferent to pomp and pleasure.’ But I would contend that in the case of Parliamentary life the connection does not apply. The kind of man who advances by taking or giving bribes, especially the man who advances by taking bribes, the kind of man who spends his energy in ferreting out the secret actions of rivals and then threatening them with exposure if they continue to compete with him, is not the kind of man who will normally have good judgment. Such men are, as a rule, of a very base sort intellectually, and the vices from which they suffer are the vices of small, uncertain, and despicable minds. If I wanted a man to manage a great business with foresight, strong will, and a good understanding of the elements of the problems before him, I might choose him in spite of a record for cruelty or pride—two very detestable vices. But I should be unwise to choose him if he had a record for petty peculation and perpetual intrigue among his fellows. Men suffering from these vices do very well in the lower ranks of the secret police, but they are unfitted for high position. Indeed, we have had experience in the last few years, and very rude experience, of what happens when you give such men even a small part of the governing power in the state. It was such men who judged, for instance, that the Jewish Communist revolution in Hungary would succeed. It was such men who supported the Greek adventure against Turkey, and it was such men who capitulated to Ireland.

Another argument I have heard advanced is this: that corruption on a far larger scale was vigorous during all the lifetime in which England was rising to its modern position of a Great Power.

From Walpole to the younger Pitt, from the South Sea Bubble to the Act of Union, public life was conducted universally upon a system of bribes. No one can deny that these were the years during which the modern greatness of England was founded; therefore (it is advanced) there is something quite out of proportion in fussing about a modern Chancellor of the Exchequer taking a few thousand shares across the breakfast-table, or a modern Postmaster-General signing a contract in favour of some private company and then taking a highly paid post with that company as his reward; for, if a very much more extended system of bribery did the country no harm in its formative period, we have nothing to fear from little individual peccadilloes in the way of taking a few thousands here and there, as is the habit of our public men to-day.

I fully agree that if the bribery were of the same quality in both cases, this argument would be sound. But the whole point of the affair is that the bribery is of a different kind.

The corruption of the eighteenth century was the purchase by those who controlled honours (and in a large measure the public purse) of votes in support of their policy; at the same time it was the open grasping of lucrative sinecures and large salaries by those in power.

An eighteenth-century aristocrat would give his dependent a lucrative sinecure, or a position in which he was free to accumulate great sums; he and his would vote themselves an exaggerated salary; he would vote out of the taxes great sums to his colleagues, and he would take many private opportunities for enriching himself, as the natural action of a man possessed of the power to do so through a public post.

But your eighteenth-century aristocrats who gave the tone to all that system, the big squires of the time, and the great merchants whom they digested into their body, were neither influenced in policy nor lowered in dignity by what they did. They did not profess to be acting otherwise, they did not put themselves into an absurd position, nor live in panic of exposure. A man would take money or honours as the wages of voting for the Government, but members of the Government themselves would not habitually take money in order to advantage company promoters who desired to fleece the public. There were occasional examples of this sort of thing, but it was not normal. You cannot imagine Walpole, for instance, or the younger Pitt, at either end of the period, taking money from a chance financial adventurer who should have come to him to get a new duty put on, or an old duty taken off, or a new kind of monopoly invented, whereby to fill his pockets.

I cannot imagine a man going to the younger Pitt, and saying: ‘My brother who is your colleague in the Government and I have a project for fitting sailing-ships with such-and-such a device. If you will help us to make it a law that all British ships shall carry this device and purchase it from us, we will give you a share in the proceeds.’ Our modern politicians act in this fashion; and, what is perhaps worse for the authority of Government, they do so in a fashion which makes them ridiculous: they loudly protest their innocence on the eve of exposure, and live always in some trepidation, and in a sort of incessant wrestling match with those who could make their lives intolerable by public insistence on their little habits.

Here is, I think, the core of the whole matter. Those patriots who rightly think they serve the country by strengthening the authority of even nominal governors, but who are persuaded that the toleration of political vice strengthens such authority, make in this second postulate of theirs a very obvious error. It is an error which they would not make, I think, if they lived the life of their fellow citizens and knew the average Englishmen better than they do.

All politicians live a life apart from the general mass of the less wealthy, less privileged classes, though they themselves are so largely drawn from these strata. It is astonishing when one hears them talking among themselves to discover how remote they are from the general interests of the public, and how seriously they take their own sham divisions and sham battles, and with what strange simplicity they believe that these sham battles are of vast moment to the electorate. The public as a whole is now fully acquainted with the nastiness and degradation of public life. It certainly does not appreciate the ultimate consequences of these, but at any rate it is no longer under any illusions. Indeed, my experience is that the ordinary member of the public, the average man in the liberal professions and in commerce, rather exaggerates the evil than otherwise, although he does not recognise its danger. He is ready to believe that pretty well any politician may be found taking money, and he does not distinguish as he should between the two sharply different types of Parliamentarians: those with a dirty record of their own, and those with a clean record who permit and support the dirt in the midst of which they live. For it must be admitted that public life is full of men who would never dream of themselves doing such actions as have come to mark their profession as a whole; but these men do not on that account stand excused. They support the nastiness in the midst of which they live; they refuse to correct it; they even, as a rule, join those who would prevent its exposure. They are accessories to all those acts which they not only personally despise and are disgusted with, but which in private they denounce. For they could put an end to the system if they preferred justice to their own little careers and the general good of England to their personal ease or notoriety.

Sometimes they try to salve their consciences by substituting a general for a particular condemnation—the oldest device known to governing man for shirking the duties of government.

I remember an excellent comedy of this sort in which I myself took part. The Admiralty had given an order for the making of an important part of a man-of-war to a small company (what is called a ‘one-man’ company) run for the profit of a friend of the Prime Minister of the day.

There was nothing excessive about that bit of favouritism. It was natural that a politician should help a friend: some one must have the order, and there was no great harm done to the State. But the next step was of real importance.

It turned out that the part supplied was defective. Those who supplied it might plead that they did not know the defect to exist, nor indeed would it be to their advantage to have allowed such a defect. It was probably an accident, though it did point to the work having been given to people inadequate to its gravity. The part was sent back to be put right. Instead of being put right, as it should have been, an operation was performed with the effect of concealing the defect, instead of remedying it. The part was sent back in such a condition that, had the flaw not been discovered, the great man-of-war itself and its crew might have perished. This was obviously a very serious matter indeed. If there is one thing the politicians must not be allowed to play tricks with, it is the Navy.

Now, the Parliamentarians appointed to look into public accounts issued a fine bombastic denunciation of the awful business, and used such words as would have satisfied Jeremiah. But they were very careful not to mention a single name.

That seemed to me something of a defect. I was in Parliament at the time, and I set out to find out who were the actual human beings responsible for this crime. Unless one got on to them and punished them, one might as well have done nothing in the matter. If things of this sort can be done with impunity, they will certainly be done again.

I found the greatest difficulty in getting any single one of those six hundred-odd men in the Commons to act with me in the matter. I did not, of course, approach more than a few, because there were not more than a few who would even consider the public good; but by one of those few I was told that it was not usual to act in this fashion; that such action was regarded as ‘personal’; that the thing was now some months concluded and ought to be buried; that it was difficult to arrive at the ultimate responsibility in these affairs—and so on. They all applied to a principal unit of the British Navy, to an English man-of-war and a thousand English lives, the principle that the politician was more important than ship or crew, and that their own Parliamentary skins were more important than the country.

The individual private member of Parliament has no power of action in Parliament except the chance of the ballot or the putting-down of a question. I put down my question. It was answered in the most pathetic manner by the politician directly responsible, who called Heaven to witness that I had traduced by my question an old and valued friend of his own whom he loved as a brother. That the fault was that of ‘a subordinate.’ The House murmured its sympathy. I pointed out that I had traduced no one, that I had only asked for the names of the responsible people and for their prosecution. Whereupon, as another journalistic phrase goes, ‘the matter was allowed to drop.’ But I need hardly add that the person nominally responsible was promoted to a public honour, and that no ‘subordinate’ appeared.

It was only a small episode, though it would not have seemed small to the officers or crew if their ship had struck in the middle of the night owing to a defect in the steering gear—still, honestly, it was a small matter as politics go. There are hosts of much graver instances, but it was a characteristic one.

The argument that this now universal taint covering public life is tolerable because the same thing goes on in every country where there is a Parliament, and therefore does not weaken us in the face of our rivals, has two bad flaws in it.

The first is a neglect of the fact that the cancer called Parliament is no longer universal. Some of our rivals are already rid of it: all are disgusted with it; most will probably have cut it out within a generation.

The second is that nowhere is Parliament bound up with the Nation as it is in England.

The French parliamentary system is at least as corrupt as the English: from the little I know of it, I should say it was worse. The American, I understand, is not so bad; but it is still sufficiently corrupt to excite the perpetual vigilance of the American electorate and press, which are as ruthless in exposing such evils as we are resolute in concealing them. Of the Polish and German systems, which have just come into existence, I know nothing. The Italian was contemptible, and the Spanish a joke. They have both been happily kicked into the street, and I trust we shall hear of them no more.

But the parliamentary corruption of other countries is attached to an institution which in those countries is subsidiary to the national life. No one in France, for instance, regards the Parliament as a necessary, or even a properly working, part of the national existence; it is a modern experiment, very unpopular, and standing in some dread of far more permanent and deep-rooted institutions, such as the University, the Army, the Church, and the landed system, with which it has to work as best it may. The politicians in Paris can and do work great harm in all departments, but they do not form the traditional organ of government, rooted in the country, as the Commons do here. They live under perpetual protest.

In the United States, as everybody knows, the central representative assembly is altogether subordinate. The Senate is far more powerful, and far more respected. The President is high above both. He has monarchic powers superior to anything of the kind in Europe—superior by far to those exercised by the King of Prussia in the days when that individual was also military head of the Reich.

But in England Parliament is the great national institution. It is bound up with the whole life of the country. A disease attacking it is a national disease. The lawyers’ guild, which is in England far, far more powerful than in any other country, is inextricably bound up with Parliament. There can in England never be any question of the armed forces acting apart from Parliament; nor can there be apparently (and unfortunately) as yet a kingly power, like that of the President of the United States. A King of England would to-day find ample popular support against Parliament; but how is he to move?

Therein lies the gravity of the situation. Parliament will not reform itself, and yet there is no power external to Parliament capable of reforming it. Though the nation were in the last extremity of peril, we have not at hand some force external to Parliament capable of pushing aside its maleficent impotence and taking over the reins. Indeed, when certain politicians were secretly trying to make peace behind the back of the Allies during the crisis of the Great War, no one moved—except a few humble seamen, who stopped one important voyage of their own accord. Should we live to see an invasion of this country, or a shameful capitulation, I fear that the disaster and the shame would still be presided over by the politician. During the Great War we owed half a dozen insanities to the fact that with us a politican can order the movements of armies, in spite of the soldiers, and affect—though he can hardly direct—the foreign policy of the country, in spite of its competent permanent officials. It is true that the millionaire newspaper-owner, especially if he be devoid of instruction, and therefore of all responsibility, has more to do with the framing of a policy than has the politician, and it is true that the great and weighty financial interests are much more powerful. But Parliament is the door through which everything must pass—or, to change the metaphor, it is the instrument which alone can be used for direct effect; and its decline is on that account of very grave moment to the future of the country. It is therefore a despairing thing to say that the decline cannot be checked, that the disease must run its course; yet I fear there is nothing else to say. It is manifestly too late to set things right. There came one moment after another in which a remedy could have been applied; but each opportunity was refused, and I do not see how any sufficient one can arise in the future.

To have checked the rot at the very beginning, as, for instance, during the telephone scandal, would have been easy enough (already, a few years before, Mundella had been thrown out of public life for what was then thought a monstrous lapse, but what would now be thought hardly an irregularity). It was even possible to turn the current as late as the Marconi scandal. One virile decision in that crisis might still have saved Parliament. But I do not see, nor do I think any one else can tell me, how it can be saved now.

The test is very simple. On the day when a Cabinet Minister is heavily fined or imprisoned for irregular action in connection with money the tide will have turned. Does any one believe that such a day will come? I for my part certainly do not. Therefore the decay will continue. The system, already deep-rooted and established, will become a matter of course, and there will happen in the long run to the House of Commons what has happened to every institution which gets past praying for; but, meanwhile, what of us who have no other instrument? What of the nation?

One point of view was presented to me by a wise old gentleman who had spent about thirty years (doing nothing) in the House of Commons and then wangled a peerage (for nothing) out of his colleagues; for he desired to live on under the same roof and to spend the last of his days amusing himself—remaining an indulgent spectator of what was still, to him, a slightly interesting affair.

It was on the evening of a day when I had been trying hard to dig one of the more noisome of the politicians out of the earth in which he had taken refuge after a particularly unpleasant affair. The old fellow had watched the process with an active amusement, and I think he was grateful to me for having provided him with an entertaining day. He had been watching from the gallery, but that evening, as I dined with him, he warned me against wasting too much energy in such a pastime.

I assured him that it was no pastime—that I took it very seriously indeed.

‘I know you do,’ he answered, ‘and that is just what I am warning you against. The country is carried on not by these fellows,’ jerking his thumb towards the door, ‘but by the general activity of its people: that people is sound and will come well out of any ordeal.’

The war proved him right.

‘What the mass of the people do not do for themselves,’ he said, ‘is done by a rather too large but very conscientious body of permanent officials, underpaid, industrious, and exceedingly competent. The politicians are only the scum on the top; they have very little to do with the happiness or the unhappiness of the nation, and not much to do with its strength. Even the points of policy are, as a rule, decided outside their circle in the weightier financial world. It is a waste of energy to draw that covert too long.’

There is a great deal to be said for the old boy’s attitude. But I could not help asking him what Mr. Gladstone would have done if he had been faced with a Chancellor of the Exchequer taking shares over the breakfast-table; for he remembered Mr. Gladstone well, and had for him that odd half-worship which so many men who knew that powerful, short, oratorical genius of a better past were smitten with. I said, ‘In Mr. Gladstone’s time the Secretaries of State had more privacy than our modern politicians, and their actions interfered less with the general life of England than they do to-day: with the permanent officials far less; yet you know as well as I do what Mr. Gladstone would have done if he had found a member of his Government taking shares from a company promoter over the breakfast-table.’

The old man answered to this that the standard was altogether higher in his own youth than it was now, and that though he could not deny that Cabinet Ministers’ present habit of taking money was a weakness to the country, yet he thought it a small weakness. He added a thing which I have since discovered to be profoundly true, ‘At any rate, it cannot be remedied, and so you are wasting your time.’

In all the discussions—far too many!—in which I have engaged upon this subject I found only one really enthusiastic defender of the system, and that was a wealthy young Anglo-American who either just had taken up, or was just about to take up, a place in public life. To him our present way of going on had a sort of special excellence peculiar to this country and worthy of Bacchic praise. He spoke like a man who has come into a promised land, and he was moved to indignation by my criticisms against certain recent events. He applauded a Cabinet Minister who had just given a valuable monopoly to a company promoter and then resigned, and accepted a permanent highly salaried post in that company: for he repudiated any connection between the selling of the monopoly and the immediate subsequent acceptation of the salary. He was indignant that such a connection should be dreamt of. They were separate acts.

First the politician, in his capacity of public servant, honestly weighing all the pros and cons, decides that a company promoter is the right man to have a great public monopoly—worth millions. He gives him that monopoly. There the matter ends.

Then begins quite another set of actions. The politician as a private individual accepts a highly salaried post in the pay of the said company promoter and lives on the profits of the monopoly.

Only insane suspicion could connect the two acts.

It was a startling theory to hear: it was also completely new to me. But it had this advantage: it made him a contented supporter of that which others either laughed at cynically or held their tongues about.

I shall be interested to see, as I grow older, whether this type of defence develops, and whether we shall find the taking of bribes and the levying of blackmail a matter, not for commonplace acceptance, but for indignant praise. I do not think that we shall have much of that argument. It is exotic. No man of our blood is really comfortable in the presence of financial corruption. He may tolerate it: he may practise it; but it does not fit in with his conscience, still less excite his enthusiasm.

However, one never knows. There are very vile commercial transactions which certainly excite admiration to-day as surely as they would have excited in our fathers the determination to hang the culprit. Laxity in the relations between men and women which our fathers would at least have condemned is to-day not so much condoned as defended and made into a sort of religion. Direct treason in time of war merits a few months in the second division. So it is on the cards that I shall live to hear men say in awestruck tones, ‘What a fellow Binks is! The Prime Minister’s agent offered him ten thousand pounds to clear out, but he got one hundred thousand pounds in solid cash before he had done with him. He frightened the old fool to death by showing he knew all about Chapel Street.’

After all, I have heard much the same tone of religious veneration in those describing some stock-exchange swindle of our day, and a fortune made in a few weeks by the deception of the multitude and the ruin of a thousand families.

So there is still hope.

The authority and prestige of Parliament have sunk like water in a river lock, sogging away rapidly before our eyes.

The process should normally have been more rapid, and the ultimate crisis to which it should surely lead was due to come long before this.

It would have been much better for the country if it had so come. The Marconi scandal was an excellent opportunity for an explosion and a thorough clearing of the air. The far worse Dope scandal, taking place when the nation was fighting for its life, was perhaps the last chance offered. If half a dozen of the politicians and company promoters compromised in the Dope scandal had been openly tried and sent to penal servitude during the war, we should have been the better for it to-day. Instead of that the whole thing was hushed up, and the loot remained in the hands of the looters: an example followed by I know not how many others in the short seven years which have elapsed since that worst of abominations was condoned.

Perhaps the strongest brake that was put upon the pace downhill, the strongest force restraining a final collapse, and thereby condemning the country to the gradual and certain extinction of Parliamentary authority, lay in the momentum of the old Parliamentary prestige.

To an older generation, of whom some few survive, the idea of a seat in Parliament was connected with honour and a social position worthy of ambition. That generation carried on an admixture of the old tradition which only slowly died, and while it lasted supported the collapsing fabric with which it was intertwined.

Such men, before the present nastiness began, had already acquired a habit of the House of Commons, they lived in the thoughts and customs of an older and much better time, and lent to the diseased institution of their age the memories of its health during their own early youth and manhood.

Some very few still survive to lend the corruption of professional politicians a remnant of moral support. When they are gone we shall have the problem to face in full as we have not yet had to face it.

Of those men who had thus obtained a habit of the House of Commons, as it were, and who for long lent it a fictitious value which it had long ceased to possess, I would particularly recall—for I followed his public action closely and often discussed it with him—Sir Charles Dilke.

He belonged, of course, to an older time, when politics were still respectable and even dignified, and, having begun to take root in them much earlier in life, he felt acutely the wastage of his powers—for he could never have office. But he was treated by the Chair as a sort of Elder Statesman, and I shall always remember the solidity and detail of his experience in foreign affairs. He was one of the very few men of my time (overlapping from an older time) who knew what he was talking about when he discussed the Continent, and who followed the change which was taking place over all Western Europe; and he could value the degree and the quality of it in each country, or at least in the Germanies, in France, in Italy, and in Belgium. Spain he discussed less, and I do not know what his measure of acquaintance was with Spanish affairs. I always count his evidence as valuable in the interesting discussion upon the origin of Gambetta. He knew Gambetta well, and did not despise him. He said that he was a Jew, and that, therefore, he was quite alien to the French temper. That, of course, was also the thesis of many of Gambetta’s enemies (for Liberals always seem to think that they are saying something unpleasant about a man when they say that he is of Jewish race), but it was not the testimony of most of his friends. Two of Gambetta’s friends I knew well enough: one was a relative of mine, the other was that very great man, Déroulède. I do not think Déroulède was a very accurate observer, but at any rate he testified to the intensely national quality of Gambetta, and swore that there was nothing Oriental about him at all. My own relative, who was of a more cynical temper, said that he was certain of the same thing from careful observation. Gambetta seems to have been a man who commanded real and profound affection, but his legend will be distorted, for it is one of the curses of the modern political chaos that those who by accident or by their desire enter its whirlpool of personal competition and consequent advertisement must inevitably be betrayed by fate. Not one of them can appear as he is, and not one of them will ever be taken by posterity to have anything of greatness about him, however great he may be, unless he can exercise some talent outside the wretched parliamentary business into which he has been caught up.

There is in that life such an admixture of violence, cunning, and bombast, quite apart from the money taint, that a man’s name becomes a mere label for hatred and ridicule in places where the struggle is taken seriously, as it is in France or in Ireland. It becomes a mere label for play-acting and make-believe in a country such as ours, where politics are not taken seriously.

No English Parliamentarian could suffer the legacy of hatred, virulent contempt, and documented, detailed, evidenced accusation which will prevent the name of Gambetta from taking an honourable place in history. But, on the other hand, no English politician, since the nineties, will cut any figure for posterity unless he can do something outside his profession. There is nothing to prevent the Postmaster-General, or the Leader of the Opposition, or any other of the circus, from writing a good poem, or painting a good picture; but, unless he does something of the sort, his name will only be one of a hundred names, half comic and all wearisome. For the trade has lost its dignity. It is found out.

I have delayed on this subject too long. It is public property, and filth at that, and people are tired of it, for in their heart of hearts they know that nothing more can be done, that public life in its Parliamentary form is past saving.

It is possible that I exaggerate the effect of the evil; it is possible that some novel remedy besides the obvious one of increasing the power of the Crown may set things right. It has certainly done so in the past; the break-up of one institution apparently necessary to society has discovered the importance of other forces which have saved society by bringing up new forces unsuspected. It is possible. Perhaps it is probable. It is to be hoped. And that is all one can say.

Such thoughts are suitable for a drizzling calm, and for wet canvas hanging useless and dead in a hopeless dawn upon a sea without life. But with the coming of a little wind, a little northeasterly wind in the growing light; with its blowing away of the misty rain, and its bringing a heartening into the morning, I prefer to turn to better things, to the realities: to the English water and to the English land.

The mist scudded off from the Folkestone waters, the light not only brightened, but grew coloured, until at last there was a fine, flaming dawn over the Kentish chalk and the Bastion cliffs of the Kentish salient, and very soon she was running to it prettily, her wet canvas holding the wind well, and, if anything, pressing her a little too hard. My companion came on deck with the morning, woken by the new life in the hull, and by the run of the sea along the sides. As yet the water was smooth, for the wind was a trifle off shore, and would so remain until we had come into the hollow bend of the flat coast, the last of which runs almost due south, and which ends in the shingle of Dungeness. Also we were still on the ebb and the wind followed the stream.

After the sun had risen the breeze grew stronger, and even violent; but as I greatly desired to round the Ness before the tide should catch me and raise a sea, I would not take in a reef. So I held on, though with the more southerly course we were setting, and with the wind still rising, it was not over safe; for that wind was now coming almost due aft, her boom was right out, and I feared a gybe. To take every advantage of any slight northing of the wind that might come, I ran closer into the coast at a still greater risk of gybe, of course, if the wind should hold where it did when we came to the sharp turn of the Ness. We were now running for it very hard indeed, and the Nona, splendidly as she lifts when properly trimmed, was burying a little owing to too great press of mainsail, and with head sails doing no work to support her bows. A slight sea had risen, although the tide was still with us and with the wind, and once or twice she took it green as she plunged forward.

Then it was, as I held the Nona with difficulty thus, right in front of a wind that was now much too strong for her canvas, that I understood what had long puzzled me, and that is, why the ancients, down to the end of the Dark Ages in the Mediterranean, and to, perhaps, the fourteenth century in the North, continued to step the masts of their square rig so far aft. It was to prevent burying; to give the bow its chance of lifting to the sea. For this rig sailed at its best with the wind aft, and when their boats were running so with the great square sail driving them into the seas, had their mast been stepped forward, they would have buried dangerously.

And why do you think men were so long in adapting the fore-and-aft to larger boats?

But I cannot delay to consider such things of the past, for I am at the edge of Dungeness, and with my heart in my mouth lest at any moment she should gybe over.

I handed the helm to my companion, who had a better eye than I had, and a firmer hold, and he, with great skill, did just save the gybe. We had not the luck to hold the tide; we caught the turn of it and the early flood nearly two miles from Dungeness Point, and, as you may imagine, it raised a short and buffeting sea, which made our task the more perilous. My companion handled her beautifully, until I told him he could go as near as he liked to the end of the Ness, because the land shelves down here so steeply as to give one deep water right up against the shore. We were, perhaps, five minutes in the worst of the ordeal just opposite the lighthouse before we could put the helm a trifle over and get the wind fairly on our quarter and breathe again. It seemed about half an hour, for the strength of the tide, even against that wind, made us forge very slowly past the land, and it was astonishing to see the white foam racing by while the shingle, a stone’s throw away, barely crept past us; but save the gybe he did, as I said, and there came that placid moment when she would take a turn a little west of south, and then fairly west of south, and the roar of the wind was at her quarter and I had no excuse for an excessive nervousness. But she was pressing too hard altogether, so now we threw her round (as I ought to have done long before), took in two reefs, and then were able to set an easy and comfortable line for the doubtful harbour of Rye, which neither of us had yet made. We feared we might touch at the entry, but we had at least the comfort of a wind off the land, yet far round enough to take us in without beating, and we were on a rising tide.

I have often thought that a boat running snug and properly reefed to suit the wind is a model of the virtue which the theologians called temperance, and which has nothing to do with the historical dread of wine bred in those who have themselves suffered from, or have seen in their families, the disease called dipsomania. For temperance does not mean doing things half-heartedly, still less does it mean doing or not doing things extremely. It means suiting your implements to your motive power, and not carrying on at a risk. It is not unconnected with dignity, and there is something profound about it; I will call it the contralto among the virtues, and leave it at that.

We sped on (the stream against us, very slight now that we were inside the Ness); we saw before us the broomstick, or whatever you like to call it, which marks (or does not mark) the entry into Rye Haven, and the last bare remnant of what was once the crowded fairway, a market for the nations—the harbour of Rye.

The little town stood up inland, neat and beautiful, red and grey, a pyramid thrown up towards its squat steeple; for under that keen northeasterly air all was clear and well cut. The pilot book gave us no comfort; it only told us that the deep changes with every gale, and, as for the lead, there was no use for it, the shore would come too steep; what we had to do was to look out for the outer buoy, and round it, hoping that as we turned we should neither touch nor get into irons, but still have the wind easterly enough to round to take us in.

On the plan I had by me the fairway was marked dangerously near the point from which the wind was coming, but I trusted to luck, and still kept her to her course.

Any man making Rye Haven must first resign himself to the will of God, and consider, especially if the boat is running and a little over-canvassed, that death is but a mighty transition; that it is all sand hereabouts, with no cruel rocks to tear the tender body with their horrid fangs; that nothing is worth calculating in life, because things happen by fate anyhow, or by chance, but certainly not by our direction; and that if, or when, she strikes, it will not be his fault. There is no man living that can ever tell you the deep into Rye Harbour, for it shifts with every wind, and at the best it is of the narrowest. As for me, I have made it four times in my life, each time I have touched and never have I struck, and how the thing was done no one knows. Nevertheless, they still build ships in Rye, and the tradition of the sea is all about it, though what used to be the old haven is now a field.

I remember sitting up to a very late and clear sunset of a Whit-Monday, gazing, under the sharp northeast breeze (the Nona moored at last to the wooden quay), at the pyramid of red roofs, and the highly successful walls and battlements of Rye, and considering within my mind many things.

First I considered within my own dear mind how marvellously this place had been preserved, seeing what modern England is, and what modern travel is. It is, of course, a stage-scenery town, such as I have heard that Rothenburg is in Germany, and, therefore, there is an interest in preserving it; but I never heard that any such pains were taken to prevent its destruction by increase or rebuilding, or by any of those courses which bring death to beauty, such as a good train service, clubs, large and torturing hotels. Rye manages to live on. I suppose there is a spell. At any moment it may be broken, and the flood will pour in.

Being what it is, you cannot begin thinking about Rye without finding yourself dragged on to consider preciosity, and from that to the business of letters is but half a step.

Here at Rye did I meet and speak with Henry James, who was in the very heart of letters. Here also did I meet his brother, William James, whose business in life it was to write about philosophy, but whose conversation when I met him turned principally upon the subtle diplomatic genius of the King of England then reigning; upon the stability of English institutions; the excellence of the English police, and the singular faculty shown by our institutions of permitting differences without conflict. Also the piercing wit of the paper ‘Punch,’ and the profound wisdom of ‘The Times.’ I had just come back with a companion from foreign parts; I had been sleeping rough, and I was in no condition to take part in polite conversation, so I did all the listening, and, as I listened, I still considered how literary was Rye. And so now, years after, looking at Rye from my boat, was I led on to consider the trade or business of letters.

When a writing man approaches that subject, he feels—at least I feel—like a man before a jumbled heap of material of all kinds—one of those refuse-heaps in which you may pick up stray bits of machinery, or salve a little fuel, or find what you will. Or again, it is like being in one of those shops—there are few of them left, alas!—where an old half-wit has collected all manner of things, so that one knows not whether to begin by the furniture, or the glass, or the pictures, or the second-hand telescopes, or the books. For there is an indefinite number of ways of considering letters.

To those who have had to pursue letters as a trade (and to this I have been condemned all my life since my twenty-fifth year) it certainly is the hardest and the most capricious, and, indeed, the most abominable of trades, for the simple reason that it was never meant to be a trade.

A man is no more meant to live by writing than he is meant to live by conversation, or by dressing, or by walking about and seeing the world. For there is no relation between the function of letters and the economic effect of letters; there is no relation between the goodness and the badness of the work, or the usefulness of the work, or the magnitude of the work, and the sums paid for the work. It would not be natural that there should be such a relation, and, in fact, there is none.

This truth is missed by people who say that good writing has no market. That is not the point. Good writing sometimes has a market, and very bad writing sometimes has a market. Useful writing sometimes has a market, and writing of no use whatsoever, even as recreation, sometimes has a market. Writing important truths sometimes has a market. Writing the most ridiculous errors and false judgments sometimes has a market. The point is that the market has nothing to do with the qualities attached to writing. It never had and it never will. There is no injustice about it, any more than there is an injustice in the survival of beauty or ugliness in human beings, or the early death of the beautiful or the ugly. There is no more injustice about it than there is in a dry year hurting a root crop, and a wet harvest hurting a corn crop. The relationship between the excellence or the usefulness of a piece of literature, and the number of those who will buy it in a particular form, is not a causal relationship, it is a purely capricious one; and I, for my part, have never complained of the absence of a market, nor flattered myself upon the presence of one when a market turned up, though I have certainly been astonished at the way the market would behave.

For some few months thousands upon thousands—at one moment sixty thousand a week—of the articles I wrote upon the war were demanded by the public. Some months later the same articles, of the same value, or lack of value, were no longer demanded. There was no particular reason, the articles were clear, and based upon such insufficient knowledge as I shared with all my fellow citizens. I had no private information save upon the point of numbers, and that was the very point upon which the public grew most easily fatigued, and were at last most sceptical.

Mr. Hutchinson, for whose work I personally have (though I am afraid my judgment is not worth much in these things) a great liking, wrote among other books a book called ‘Once Aboard the Lugger.’ It was exceedingly amusing, fresh, and, as I should have said, well worth anybody’s buying. I do not know how many copies he sold of it, but I should imagine nothing very astonishing. A little while after he wrote a book called ‘If Winter Comes,’ and it sold by the stack, and by the ton. One could see it piled up man-high upon the counters of shops in America, and it sold, and it sold, and it sold.

Mr. Wells wrote a book which is most remarkable, and will probably make a mark in English literature. It was called ‘The Time Machine.’ When Henley (I think it was) was bringing it out by instalments, the appearance of each was, for me at least, and for very many others, the chief event of the month. I do not know how many copies he sold, but there again I will swear nothing comparable to the numbers he has sold of later books which certainly will not stand out in English literature. That one which I hear has sold most largely has always seemed to me to be a mere repetition of what his audience already thought they knew, and of a philosophy which they already held: I mean his ‘Outline of History.’ It was mainly a repetition of the popular mythology of to-day, of antiquated scientific jargon, full of the popular errors, but it was clear, well-proportioned and vivacious, showing a rare economy in the use and placing of words. It was also (and that is high minor praise for any book purporting to deal with history) astonishingly accurate in details. The names were properly spelt; south was never written for north, nor east for west; the dates were all right. Any one who has attempted the writing of history will not belittle such a feat: I, least of all, because I am constitutionally inaccurate in such things, and I will write left for right and north for south as a matter of course, and the word ‘Tyre’ for the word ‘Acre,’ and so on. At any rate, the book, with all its good and bad qualities, is obviously not of the first class, and equally obviously is not destined to endure, while ‘The Time Machine’ is quite certainly of the first class, and is quite likely to endure. But I believe that the huge ephemeral demand for the ‘Outline of History’ created no special, certainly no very great, demand for the more permanent ‘The Time Machine.’ In general, I am assured by publishers, that when there is a sudden boom in a writer’s work, they hardly ever manage to float on that boom a resale of earlier works; while if these earlier works are unknown, it is almost impossible to give them a popular fame on the strength of the later works. Witness the late Mr. Hudson’s ‘Crystal Age.’ I came across it as a young man in a bookshop in the Euston Road on a winter evening. I took it up and began reading it, and I read it so long that the bookseller told me I must buy it, which I did. Now, towards the end of Mr. Hudson’s life, he became deservedly famous as a writer upon the things of the natural world, and especially upon animals. But what made him famous was not his subject, though he was both accurate and learned; it was his manner of writing. One would have expected, therefore, that the ‘Crystal Age’ would, upon his fame tardily arising, have a quiet and equal fame. It did not. I say that there are no laws governing these movements. They are capricious and incalculable.

Sometimes one hears that a great demand for a book, or for a set of newspaper articles, is due to something touching a common feeling in a particular fashion, something which great bodies of men necessarily feel together. There is a sense, of course, in which that is a mere truism, for it is clear that obscure stuff, or stuff dealing with matters that could not interest great numbers, will never sell. Why should it? But if the statement is intended to mean (as it usually is) that whatever sells in great numbers does so through this quality of a common appeal, that anything having this quality will always sell in great numbers, and that this quality is in some way a rare thing discoverable only in ‘best-sellers,’ then the statement is manifestly false. A great deal of matter which possesses this appeal—enormously the greater part of such matter—remains unknown, and that which is best known is often rather weak in such an appeal. There are a great many factors entering into the result of a great popular demand which people forget because they are irrational: fashion is one, routine is another, inertia is a third. I know one man whose name, for the honour I bear it (he is now dead), I would not publish, since what I am about to say of his work is not flattering. He wrote a great number of stories, all of them with exactly the same plot and exactly the same characters. There was a beautiful chocolate-box girl, there was a villain, there was a hero who became rich after being poor, there were parents who objected to the match, and there was a racehorse. Had he departed from the formula, he would not have sold. As it was, he sold by the million. He was not only as modest a man as you could find, but exceedingly generous. He put on no airs; he made no error as to the nature of his success; he is already forgotten. Nothing shall persuade me that any one of many thousand men could not have written exactly the same; but a certain vast public got used to that particular insipid food, and wanted it unchanged, just as you and I get used to a particular kind of breakfast, and eat it every day of our lives.

Of course, there is a different set of factors operating in different phases of society. The popular best-seller of to-day depends upon the existence of our great towns with their machine-made citizens, all working blindly in little grooves, lacking any common direction—a dust of individuals. He depends also on that new-fangled, mechanical, and, let us hope, ephemeral, institution called ‘popular education.’ If you tell millions of boys and girls (nearly all the citizens of the state), at the age when they receive unquestioning any dogmatic teaching, that their ancestors were repulsive savages, first actually bestial, later exceedingly vile, and that these ancestors passed through certain stages, and were ‘Cavemen,’ and men of the ‘Stone Age,’ and of the ‘Bronze Age,’ and so forth; then, obviously, writers using such terms, and taking for granted such a mythology, will fit in with the popular market. The demand for books, or for writing in any form, is created by minds already moulded, and any kind of writing which tends to break the mould is resented and left on one side. In older phases of society, judgment upon writing was passed by a few well-trained and leisured people, who handed down their judgments to a larger class, but still a small class compared with the whole state; and it is clear that in such a condition of society—which was that of England from the last third of the eighteenth century to the last third of the nineteenth—there would be no best-sellers in our modern sense, and that there would be a nearer approach between the demand for a book and its excellence. But there also the mould had to be considered. Macaulay’s false rhetoric sold well, because it agreed with the religion of his day. No historical work telling the truth about James II would have sold in his day, nor for that matter would any such matter sell in ours.

For religion is here, as elsewhere, at the root of effect. Robert Louis Stevenson was an excellent writer, but his popularity reposed not upon his excellence alone, but also upon the consonance of his religion with that of his readers. A man who was perpetually telling you that it was your duty to be cheerful, that you must take pleasure in God’s creation, that you had a ‘task of happiness’ would cut no ice with the Irish, or with the Italians, or, in general, with the Catholic culture of Europe, but he rings true in the ears of the Protestant culture. Conversely, what the French powerfully call the ‘bitter taste of reality’ has very little chance with the crowd of the North. It is a spur and a relish to the crowd of the South. You could not sell Barrie in Arles nor Baudelaire in Pudsey.

The truth remains that the relation, or the lack of relation, between the economic result of a literary effort and its success as a piece of craft is of very much less importance than the consideration of the canon, the attempt to achieve a standard. To get a canon is the first requirement of letters. For though it is said that time will test literature for us in any case, this is not universally true; and, even in so far as it is true, it is better to have the good things to our hand than to wait for time to establish them. Such a canon requires not only intelligent analysis, but a common philosophy into which our rules must fit. It is, therefore, with great difficulty arrived at, or perhaps not to be arrived at at all, in a period of confusion like ours. But the attempt to arrive at it never loses interest—no, not even to-day.

One of the things which always seem to me best worth saying in connection with letters is that prose should be distinguished, not only from verse, but also from rhetoric; and that prose in itself, mere lucid, economic, unornamented prose, is the foundation of good letters.

If the national prose is sound, the rest of national expression will come of itself. But this matter of prose has to-day been nearly forgotten. For most of us perhaps the phrase ‘good prose,’ or ‘fine prose,’ really means rhetoric. It means a passage in which the soul is stirred by a choice of rhythm and sound, and a mystical connotation of words in some passage not definitely reduced to versification. Thus, all the great passages from the Jacobean translation of the Hebrew Scriptures which are familiar as examples to our generation are essentially rhetoric; so are the excerpts quoted from Bunyan, such as the fine closing passage of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’; so is every single passage quoted from Carlyle; so are even those quoted from Newman and (I am sorry to say) those quoted from the greatest of our modern prose writers, Huxley.

But prose is rightly to be distinguished from anything of that kind. The excellence of prose lies in its adaptation to the function of intelligent expression or of narration. It is a statement; the end of it is not the exciting of emotion but the clear presentation, whether of a record (in fiction or fact) or of an idea, which the writer desires to communicate to his fellows.

He that succeeds in presenting the idea lucidly, so that no modification or subsidiary idea confuses the process; he that succeeds in presenting vividly to the reader an image of particular fact, or of imagined fiction, vividly arisen in his own mind, is a writer of good prose; and the better he succeeds in this faculty of mere exposition, the more he excels in the supreme character of lucidity, the better his prose. Prose which is redundant is worse than prose which is economic in the use of words, simply because economic prose is the better statement. Exactitude of word and idea makes better prose than the use of many synonyms and of vague terms, simply because it ministers to lucidity. A mass of adjectives or adverbs is usually (not always) ill in prose, because usually (not always) the idea which the writer has to express does not involve all these modifications; they only slip from his pen through laziness or through his having heard them before. It is obviously better prose to say, ‘I was tired out,’ than to say, ‘I was wholly tired out,’ unless for any particular reason you wish to express complete exhaustion. It is obviously better prose to say ‘the sky’ than ‘the blue sky,’ unless for any particular reason you are concerned in your description with the colour of the sky.

But the worst enemy of prose to-day is the snobbishness of rules and forms, the Mumbo-Jumbo of hieratic prescription. The influence of these is a very good example of that excellent rule laid down by Saint Thomas Aquinas that all evil exists in mistaking, or misusing, the means for the end. This plague of pedantry does not rage quite as severely as it did when I was young, but it is still pretty severe. You are told that it is good prose, for instance, to have as few adjectives as possible. That is nonsense. It is good prose to have as many adjectives as you need, and no more. You are told, as a sort of eleventh commandment, never to split an infinitive; the rule is that of an excellent master of English, the late Professor Ker, who adds, ‘except when euphony demands it.’ I would go further; I would say that when the spoken language has arrived, as ours has to-day, at the universal use of the split infinitive, the written language may follow at some little distance behind. We are told that prose must never be emphatic, or excited, or this, or that, or the other. All that is nonsense. Prose must be emphatic when special emphasis is to be expressed, excited when excitement is to be expressed, and so forth. But certainly the character of good prose is the subordination of everything in it to the end, which is expression of what you have to say; and that is the distinction between good prose and rhetoric and verse. For in rhetoric and in verse the end is the emotion you desire, non-rationally, to excite; but in prose the end is rational presentation, narration, or statement of thesis: nothing more.

Judged by such standards, the two best prose writers in English are, I think, Dean Inge and Mr. Gosse; for they, each of them, write on subjects where they have much to say, with the use of no words other than those needed for such expression, and they put those words invariably in the right order. Cecil Chesterton is dead.

I had almost written that there is no such thing as ‘great’ prose, in the sense in which there is ‘great’ rhetoric or ‘great’ verse. The very best prose may be dull if the subject expressed is dull to the reader. You will get no better prose, for instance, than Newman’s ‘Arians of the Fourth Century.’ It is not dull to me, because I happen to be interested in that bit of history, but it would be fiercely dull to any reader who was not. Nevertheless it is first-rate prose. Newman, having to write about a particular thing upon which he had made himself immensely learned, having to tell a certain number of facts, and to express a certain number of ideas, does so with the best choice of words in the best order—and that is prose.

The very fact that any sound definition of prose involves many negative and only one positive (to wit, the positive need for lucid expression) makes it true that good prose is a common art. Excellence in prose is not common to all: far from it; but the faculties whereby excellence is reached are common to all. A man who is a first-rate walker, who carries his body with an exact poise, who can walk far without fatigue, and at a good pace, is a rare man; but we can all walk, and we all approach in various degrees the standard that man has reached. So it is with prose. Those who think that good prose must have something odd about it—a few archaic words, little eighteenth-century tricks here and there, subjunctives popped in, like currants into a cake—these resemble men who in walking every now and then in high spirits do a little dance for fun. They are free to do so; we are not displeased. We cannot help noticing them (which is, perhaps, their object), and no one is the worse for the gambado. But in so far as they indulge in the fantasy, they are not walking; and if they do it the least bit too much, they are playing the fool. A wise man said to me once, ‘Don’t go and get your words from the artist colourman’s.’ Would that I had remembered his words in youth as I now humbly acknowledge them in age.

But the rhetorician wisely indulges in extravagance, and as for the poet, he may use what words he likes, and go to any extreme, or to any excess, so long only as he hits the mark. For it is with poetry as with love and with singing in tune. It is with poetry as with the sense of reality. It is with poetry as with the toothache. Either you have it, or you have it not.