Front matter (continued 3)

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 10s. 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.