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The End of a Chapter 
 
The End of a Chapter 
 
 By 
 
 Shane Leslie 
 
 M. A. Cambridge 
 
 New York 
 
 Charles Scribner's Sons 
 
 1916 
 
. L 
 
 Copyright, 1916, by 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Published April, 1916 
 
 APR 13 
 
 CI.A427662 
 
Preface 
 
 It was while invalided in hospital during the Great 
 War that I began to record notes and souvenirs of the 
 times and institutions under which I had lived, realis- 
 ing that I had witnessed the suicide of the civilisation 
 called Christian and the travail of a new era to which 
 no gods have been as yet rash enough to give their 
 name, and remembering that, with my friends and con- 
 temporaries, I shared the fortunes and misfortunes of 
 being born at the end of a chapter in history. 
 
 To the memory of those of them who have died be- 
 fore the next chapter has begun I dedicate this book, 
 and especially to that of my brother, Captain Norman 
 Leslie, whom I buried at Annentieres in France, between 
 the guns of two armies. 
 
Contents 
 
 Links with the Past . 
 
 
 
 3 
 
 Eton College . 
 
 
 
 26 
 
 The Dynasty of Hanover 
 
 
 
 47 
 
 Cambridge University . 
 
 
 
 67 
 
 The Religion of England 
 
 
 
 92 
 
 The Politicians 
 
 
 
 110 
 
 Ireland and the Irish 
 
 
 
 , 133 
 
 An Empire of Sport and Freedom . 
 
 
 
 , 151 
 
 Society in Decay . 
 
 
 
 , 171 
 
 PoST-VlCTORIANISM 
 
 
 
 187 
 
 Epilogue , 
 
 
 
 , 203 
 
The End of a Chapter 
 
LINKS WITH THE PAST 
 
 People who are old enough to write memoirs 
 have usually lost their memory. Fresh mem- 
 ories have few memoirs. I have had to fall 
 back upon the unpublished memoirs of others, 
 having been born only half-way through the 
 eighties. I was brought up at Glaslough, in 
 the county of Monaghan, in Ireland, on the 
 townland of Castle Lesly — such space upon 
 God's earth as previous Leslies had been able 
 to hold by purchase, forfeiture, or force of 
 arms against "The MacKenna of Truagh." 
 The Irish branch of the Leslies was founded 
 by Bishop John Leslie, who kept his diocese 
 of the Isles creditably clear of Cromwellians 
 during the Civil War. In Ireland, as Bishop 
 of Raphoe, he built a fort instead of a palace, 
 and was known as "The Fighting Bishop." 
 Before battle he used to invoke divine neu- 
 trality on the plea that "though we are sin- 
 ners, the enemy are not saints." He lived 
 to be a centenarian, and at the Restoration 
 rode from Chester to London a distance of one 
 hundred and eighty miles to welcome the King. 
 
4 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 He was then in his ninetieth year. From this 
 grim stuff sprang a race of theologian squires 
 with an addiction to lost causes. They sup- 
 ported the Stuarts and voted against the Union. 
 One fled into exile rather than acknowledge 
 William of Orange, and another refused a bribe 
 rather than betray the Irish Parliament. It 
 was a Leslie who took out a patent for the lost 
 island of Atlantis or Brazil, which was last seen 
 floating down Galway Bay. The family were 
 perhaps lucky to have so much real land to 
 restore to the original owners under the Land 
 Purchase Acts. 
 
 A great-grandson of "The Fighting Bishop" 
 was Charles. He and the Duke of Welling- 
 ton's father married sisters. Charles's grand- 
 son is my grandfather, Sir John Leslie, who 
 could claim last year, in the centenary of 
 Waterloo, to be a surviving cousin of the vic- 
 tor. To make the link with the past I asked 
 him to sign my application to go to the Great 
 War. 
 
 Before I went, I spent some hours delving 
 in his memory, which is very accurate con- 
 cerning events before the Crimean War. Born 
 in 1822, he has seen the whole Victorian era 
 from its prelude to its aftermath. He has 
 outlived almost all his contemporaries, and 
 
LINKS WITH THE PAST 5 
 
 even seen their children die of old age. A 
 third and a fourth generation he has seen go 
 out to perish in the War of wars. 
 
 The only thing he could remember of the 
 old duke was being taken to see him as a 
 schoolboy and getting no tip! Scores re- 
 member the duke's funeral, but my grand- 
 father is probably the only living person who 
 has seen Talleyrand and heard the voice of 
 Sir Walter Scott. 
 
 He can remember five reigns. George IV 
 he once saw looking through a window in his 
 last days, and he heard the London newsboys 
 cry his death. He was born while Pius VII 
 (Napoleon's pope) was still alive and Monroe 
 was President of the States. His father, born 
 in 1769, was not able to distinguish between 
 American citizens and Yankee rebels ! 
 
 My grandfather saw Talleyrand on the 
 steps of Hertford House when ambassador of 
 France to St. James. Talleyrand had been 
 a French bishop before the Revolution and 
 subdeacon at the coronation of Louis XVI ! 
 My grandfather was chiefly interested in the 
 white-capped cooks whom that astute diplomat 
 had introduced into London. Little did he 
 dream that a granddaughter of his would one 
 day marry the great-grandson of the Comte 
 
6 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 de Flahaut, Talleyrand's illegitimate son — 
 (according to the Encyclopedia Britannica). 
 
 As a boy travelling in a Scotland undefiled 
 by railways he once listened to a kind old 
 gentleman, who entered the coach at Edin- 
 burgh and explained the antiquities as they 
 passed. It was Sir Walter Scott in his anec- 
 dotage. Sir Walter died in 1834, the year my 
 grandfather went to Harrow School. It was 
 in the stern old days of William IV, and he 
 remembers vividly the week's journey from 
 Glaslough to Harrow on the top of a coach 
 without an overcoat! In October, 1834, he 
 saw the old House of Parliament burning from 
 the top of Harrow Hill. His house, Dr. Long- 
 ley's, also suffered a fire, and he saw the future 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, in a fit of economic 
 panic, throw the contents of the boys' bed- 
 rooms on the heads of those who were putting 
 out the fire from below! He was taught to 
 write Latin verses by "Harry" Drury, who 
 had instilled a first notion of the poetic art into 
 Byron forty years before. Dr. George Butler 
 was then headmaster, whose son, the present 
 Master of Trinity told me that Drury and 
 Byron sat up one whole night discussing the 
 immortality of the soul. With morning they 
 parted — Drury to school and Byron to bathe. 
 
LINKS WITH THE PAST 7 
 
 While a Harrow boy he subscribed to the 
 first shilling parts of Pickwick Papers, by an 
 unknown author. Unfortunately he threw 
 them away when read. One day an old boy 
 came down to the school dressed in a sporting 
 check, the boys clustering round to hear his 
 yarns. It was the future Cardinal Manning, 
 whom my grandfather describes as the neatest 
 rider in Rotten Row. Another day the poet 
 Wordsworth came down to the school. 
 
 At Oxford he went to Christ Church under 
 Dean Gaisford who unkindly rusticated him 
 for high spirits. He remembered the youth- 
 ful Ruskin then at Christ Church being ragged 
 by hearty Britons. Ruskin caused great 
 amusement by bringing a portentous old 
 mother with him to college, whom the young 
 bloods considered "a holy horror." 
 
 After playing cricket for Oxford against 
 Cambridge in 1843, he went on the grand tour, 
 riding through Spain with Mr. Hardinge, fa- 
 ther of the Indian viceroy. Later he drove to 
 Rome, through Italy, meeting Rossini and Mrs. 
 Browning, and saw George Sand smoke — the 
 first lady in Europe to do so. These were the 
 picturesque days when the Pope still walked 
 the streets, and the monsignori presided over 
 the police and sewers. When he returned to 
 
8 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 Rome forty years later both Pope and Tiber 
 had been enclosed within stone walls to the 
 great artistic loss of the city. 
 
 He knew London in the forties, and heard 
 men who are now legendary like Macaulay, 
 Brougham, and Peel speak in Parliament. 
 His Oxford tutor warned him not to attend 
 Newman's Anglican sermons, and he recalls 
 the timid little, ethereal, Jew-like doctor, 
 whose secession later shook the church, 
 moving through the lanes of Oxford. 
 
 In those days Tom Moore and O'Connell 
 played the parts of Yeats and Redmond in 
 London to-day. Moore had hung up his rebel 
 harp in the Whig salons of London when my 
 grandfather met him, while O'Connell used 
 to strut the streets modulating his small talk 
 with the gestures of oratory. He could re- 
 member Louis Philippe in Hyde Park, and 
 Napoleon III he knew as a foreign adventurer 
 prowling St. James Street for country-house 
 invitations. The future Emperor was not 
 considered a sportsman, and when he proposed 
 to my grandmother's sister (Lady Fortescue) 
 he was refused by Colonel Darner as a penniless 
 Frenchman ! Darner had been on Cathcart's 
 staff at Waterloo, and had a poor opinion of the 
 Bonapartes ! My grandmother remembers the 
 
LINKS WITH THE PAST 9 
 
 future Emperor staying at their home at Came 
 in Dorset, and winning her over with half- 
 crowns and barley-sugar, which he used to 
 buy for her in Dorchester. Everybody thought 
 Napoleon dull and fled him. When found 
 wandering alone the dreamer remarked to one 
 of the family: "II par ait que j'ennuie ces 
 jeunes gens." He used to tell old Darner: 
 " Vous me verrez un jour aux Tuileries." Darner 
 doubtless shook his head, for like all soldiers 
 of that time he had spent his life getting the 
 uncle out of the Tuileries. As attache in Rus- 
 sia he had witnessed the retreat from Moscow. 
 So terrible were the scenes, when not only 
 "General Fevrier" but the wolves fought for 
 the Czar, that he would never mention them. 
 When his daughter married Lord Fortescue, 
 Napoleon III sent her a beautiful fan from 
 the Tuileries which had belonged to his mother 
 the Queen Hortense. 
 
 A quaint memory of my grandfather was 
 D'Orsay the last of the Dandies, whom he 
 affected with the young bloods of the time. 
 By his account D'Orsay was only an early 
 Victorian Oscar Wilde living on his clothes 
 and his notoriety. When D'Orsay died, he 
 left him his most precious possession — his 
 valet, whose wages he had omitted to pay 
 
10 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 for some years. The " gorgeous " Lady Bless- 
 ington he recalled supported by two footmen, 
 no less gorgeous, for crutches. 
 
 In the world of sport he has seen wonderful 
 changes. He was the last to use a muzzle- 
 loader to shoot pheasants, and he often killed 
 them at distances which modern guns did not 
 reach. He has seen the rise and decline and 
 final disappearance of modern first-class cricket. 
 He is the doyen of the Marylebone Cricket 
 Club, the hallowed ark of all English cricket. 
 His membership dates from 1841. As a Har- 
 row boy he saw his first Derby in Blooms- 
 bury 's year, 1839 — the horse that " won the 
 Derby and a lawsuit and broiled the Lords and 
 the Commons"; and as a young officer he won 
 the Grand Military Steeplechase on his own 
 horse. The late Lord Harlech recorded how 
 he appeared unattended and won as an out- 
 sider by beautiful riding. 
 
 In his youth prize-fighting was the na- 
 tional sport, and "the champion of England" 
 was, after the Archbishop of Canterbury, un- 
 officially the second person in the realm. He 
 watched the famous fight between Sayers and 
 Heenan, which roused more real feeling be- 
 tween England and America than the Ala- 
 bama. To a degenerate generation he used 
 
LINKS WITH THE PAST 11 
 
 to describe how Sayers faced his rival like a 
 polo-pony against a dray-horse, and though his 
 right arm was soon put out of action fought 
 thirty rounds with his left until Heenan's 
 face was a red mask. Unfortunately, Sayers's 
 backers broke the ring rather than lose their 
 money, and the fight was declared drawn. It 
 was the climax and end of the old English 
 boxing without gloves. Never again did dep- 
 utations from both Houses attend a prize- 
 fight. 
 
 My grandfather had retired from the army 
 before the outbreak of the Crimean War in 
 order to devote himself to art. If he is not 
 the oldest cavalry officer in England,* he is the 
 last of the pre-Raphaelites. Holman Hunt, 
 and Millais, whose profile resembled his, be- 
 came his close friends. Landseer came to him 
 for comfort as one of the few artists who ap- 
 proved his lions in Trafalgar Square. It was 
 to my grandmother that Watts wrote a deli- 
 cate letter explaining that he married Ellen 
 Terry — to save her from the dangers of the 
 stage ! She was one of those present at that 
 
 * Until the recent Zeppelin raids he was the only surviving soldier 
 to have seen service in the streets of London. He rode out with 
 the First Life Guards during the Chartist riots of 1848. Between 
 the writing and printing of this chapter he has died. Requiescat in 
 pace. (January 23, 1916.) 
 
12 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 dreamlike union between Art and Beauty — 
 which was only to break like an iridescent 
 bubble. When Watts died, a beautiful pic- 
 ture of my grandmother in her youth was un- 
 rolled from the lumber of his studio. 
 
 The pre-Raphaelites formed a circle with 
 Ruskin for their criticising genius. Unfor- 
 tunately, Millais carried away Ruskin's wife 
 after painting her picture. Mr. and Mrs. 
 Millais afterward met Ruskin before they 
 could turn and run. "Hold up your head 
 high, Effie," said Millais, and poor Ruskin 
 shuffled off the pavement. At times the best 
 course is to simulate the attitude of the in- 
 jured party. 
 
 My grandfather went to Dusseldorf, and 
 painted his first picture in the Black Forest — 
 a study of children being shown a crucifix. 
 As he was quite unknown it was a pleasant 
 surprise to be placed on the line at the Royal 
 Academy and to receive a flattering letter 
 from the prince consort, to whom Germany 
 and Christianity were the same. It was as 
 sudden and unique a brilliance as winning the 
 Grand Military without a backer. 
 
 He succeeded his brother Charles to his 
 Irish estates in 1871, and celebrated the event 
 by defeating Isaac Butt, Parnell's predecessor 
 
LINKS WITH THE PAST 13 
 
 in Irish leadership, at the Monaghan polls. 
 A few years later he was himself defeated by 
 Tim Healy, Parnell's secretary. It was the 
 last stand the old gentry and grand juries made 
 against the Nationalists. When I stood as a 
 Nationalist nearly thirty years later I was ac- 
 cused of giving my hand to a family foe. On 
 the contrary, I found the Nationalist party 
 then fighting Tim far more bitterly than we 
 ever did. Tim is the greatest orator in the 
 Empire according to Balfour, and he has all 
 the Celtic gift and attraction for enmities. 
 It is difficult not to think of him as an imp 
 who has fallen into the holy water by mistake. 
 It was lucky for the Church he was baptised 
 a Catholic, for his tongue can say terrible 
 things. When a minister was enumerating 
 the power at the disposal of the crown against 
 the Boers to the tune of "We've got the ships 
 and the money, and we've got the men," he 
 paused and asked what the Boers had — 
 "God!" came a hiss — it is believed from Tim 
 Healy. At any rate, the effect was electric. 
 
 My grandfather witnessed an effective piece 
 of play in the House during a duel between 
 Disraeli and Gladstone. During a heated flight 
 of oratory Gladstone upset some pens on the 
 table between them. Disraeli rose and, after 
 
14 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 calling attention to the fact, slowly replaced 
 them one by one. The effect of Gladstone's 
 speech was lost by the time Disraeli finished. 
 
 He had two brothers, Charles and Tom. 
 Charles was a generous landlord, and once 
 paid the election expenses of a ruined op- 
 ponent. A monument was erected to him by 
 "a grateful tenantry," but with some Irish 
 humour the bill was sent in to the brother of 
 the statuee to pay! Our relations with our 
 tenantry have been so good that I may give 
 a story of how we got even with them in re- 
 cent years. We were exhibiting turnips at the 
 Monaghan show, but of inferior growth, so 
 our steward, to save the honour of the family, 
 stole out at dead of night and removed the 
 best turnips from an old tenant's farm ! With 
 these we won handsomely, but — the truth 
 being told — were disqualified. 
 
 I should add that when the rents were re- 
 duced by the Land Commission, a number of 
 tenants refused to go into court out of re- 
 spect for my grandfather. Only in Ireland 
 could such loyalty exist. 
 
 Charles Leslie accompanied Lord Hartington, 
 afterward Duke of Devonshire, on a trip to the 
 American Civil War. They passed through 
 the lines of both armies, visiting Richmond 
 
LINKS WITH THE PAST 15 
 
 and the White House. Unfortunately, Hart- 
 ington appeared at a New York ball with a 
 Southern favour given him by the mother of 
 a future English duchess. They were lucky to 
 return alive. 
 
 Charles Leslie was interested to find that 
 Archbishop Hughes of New York had been 
 born on his estate — amid the snipe bogs of 
 Annaloghlan. Hughes was perhaps the great- 
 est Irishman of his century, with all the talents 
 and none of the defects of his race. If he suf- 
 fered, like Lincoln, from "education defective, " 
 he was as great in argument or administration. 
 At Lincoln's request he went and persuaded 
 Napoleon III not to recognise the South dur- 
 ing the Civil War. He was a Moses to the 
 Irish race, for he established Catholic citizen- 
 ship in a Promised Land. The body of this 
 great and simple man lies under the Gothic 
 Cathedral he planted on Fifth Avenue. 
 
 My grandfather's other brother, Tom Leslie, 
 was wounded in the Crimea by a Russian 
 bullet, which the commander-in-chief sent 
 home to his mother. He was on Lord Rag- 
 lan's staff, and it was to him the order re- 
 sulting in the Charge of Balaclava was first 
 given. He told me nearly fifty years later 
 that he was about to take the order which 
 ran — "Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to 
 
16 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 advance rapidly to the front, and try to pre- 
 vent the enemy carrying away the guns." 
 
 But a popular young officer, Captain Nolan, 
 asked for the honour and galloped off with 
 the message to Lord Lucan, leaving Tom to 
 curse what is known in the family as "Leslie 
 Luck." 
 
 Raglan wished some Turkish guns taken 
 by the Russians to be saved, but Lucan could 
 not see them and questioned Nolan, who, 
 being a hot Celt, pointed toward the Rus- 
 sian guns at the end of the valley and asked 
 if he were afraid. Lucan repeated the blunder 
 to Lord Cardigan, a duelling rake, who in- 
 stantly led the famous charge. As they swept 
 toward the jaws of death, a headless horse- 
 man crossed their track and fell. It was 
 Nolan, who had probably ridden back to cor- 
 rect his mistake but was the first to be killed 
 by the fatal guns. "Some one had blundered." 
 At any rate, it was not a Leslie. 
 
 In 1856 my grandfather married Constance, 
 daughter of "Minny" Seymour, the adopted 
 daughter of Mrs. Fitzherbert, the wife of 
 George IV. With the permission of Edward 
 VII, and some aid from my grandmother, 
 Mr. Wilkins has written two volumes on that 
 royal romance. 
 
LINKS WITH THE PAST 17 
 
 George IV actually married Mrs. Fitzher- 
 bert in the presence of her brother and uncle 
 when Prince of Wales. It was of her some 
 poet wrote when she lived at Richmond: 
 
 "I would crowns resign to call her mine, 
 Sweet lass of Richmond Hill." 
 
 The trouble was that Mrs. Fitzherbert was 
 a devout Catholic, and insisted on a legal 
 wedding, which was afterward denied by 
 Fox in the House. Mrs. Fitzherbert never 
 used her position for personal ends. What- 
 ever influence in the prince's life was good 
 came from her. Whatever unhappiness en- 
 tered hers came from him. Even after he 
 slighted her and married an official queen, 
 she was willing to return to him with the per- 
 mission of the Pope, in whose eyes her mar- 
 riage remained legal and binding. Her gentle 
 piety and dauntless wifehood endeared her to 
 the whole royal family, and William IV gave 
 her leave to wear widow's weeds for George 
 IV, who was buried with her miniature round 
 his neck. She refused the title of duchess as 
 savouring of the rank of a royal courtesan, 
 but her servants wore the royal livery. 
 
 After the King's death the Duke of Wel- 
 lington induced her to burn all the papers in 
 
18 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 her possession except the certificate of the 
 marriage, a letter, and the will of the King, a 
 letter by the officiating minister, and a note 
 written by Mrs. Fitzherbert attached to it, 
 which were placed in Coutt's Bank. King 
 Edward VII gave permission to Wilkins to 
 publish what was needed to prove the mar- 
 riage when the box was opened, more than 
 seventy years later. The papers were then 
 removed to the Windsor Archives. They 
 were not published in full or perhaps the 
 mystery of Mrs. Fitzherbert's children might 
 have been cleared. 
 
 It is said that she bore the prince children, 
 but as they were born sacramentally her own 
 family had naught to conceal. The unproven 
 tradition among her Catholic relatives was 
 that she had children, and that one of them 
 was at one time designed to marry the re- 
 stored Bourbon King of France. The follow- 
 ing exists in Mrs. Fitzherbert's handwriting: 
 
 I, Mary Fitzherbert desire my executors to employ the will 
 signed by George P of W's in support of my character with 
 Posterity, but I do not ask to found upon it, any pecuniary 
 claims on the personalty of His late Majesty, George the 
 4th so witness my hand. 
 
 this day of 1836. 
 
 I, Mary Fitzherbert, moreover testify that my union with 
 George P. of Wales was without issue. 
 Witness 
 
LINKS WITH THE PAST 19 
 
 This is obviously a rough copy and, being 
 unsigned, leaves the mystery a mystery. 
 
 Though there have been American pre- 
 tenders to be descended from George IV and 
 Mrs. Fitzherbert, she left her personalty to 
 her adopted daughter "Minny" Seymour and 
 her favourite niece Marianne Smythe. It has 
 been supposed they were her children. 
 "Minny" (Mary Georgiana) Seymour was 
 my great-grandmother, daughter of Lord 
 Hugh and Lady Horatia Seymour. If she 
 had been Mrs. Fitzherbert's daughter, Mrs. 
 Fitzherbert would never have promised to 
 bring her up Protestant. Marianne Smythe, 
 however, married into the Catholic Jerning- 
 hams. Difficulties pursued Mrs. Fitzherbert. 
 Lord Hugh Seymour died, mentioning all his 
 children except "Minny" (Mary) Seymour. 
 The Seymours wished to remove the child 
 from Mrs. Fitzherbert. The "Seymour Case" 
 followed, in which the Prince of Wales sup- 
 ported Mrs. Fitzherbert's claim to the child 
 and even canvassed the peers on her behalf. 
 In the end Lord Hertford, the head of the 
 Seymours, committed her to Mrs. Fitzherbert's 
 care. The prince made a great pet of her, and 
 her letters to him (addressed to "dear Prinny ") 
 are extant in the Windsor Archives. During 
 
20 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 the "Seymour Case" the prince said in his 
 affidavit that he was under a dying request 
 from Lady Horatia Seymour — "to be the 
 father and protector through life of this dear 
 child." 
 
 The prince certainly kept his promise. When 
 the girl was pressed by her family to marry 
 Lord Francis Egerton, at a time that her heart 
 was set on Colonel Darner, she appealed to 
 "Prinny" who had become George IV. In 
 her letter she begged the protection of one 
 "toward whom from my peculiar position I 
 am more bound than any other human being." 
 And she continued: "Your Majesty's great 
 goodness and parental conduct which com- 
 menced with my earliest years, and has been 
 graciously extended to me to this present 
 moment, only increases the pain and embar- 
 rassment I feel, etc." (July 13, 1825.) 
 
 In the end she was allowed to marry Colonel 
 Darner. Though the King treated her with a 
 parent's love it seems impossible for her to 
 have been Mrs. Fitzherbert's child. Whether 
 Mrs. Fitzherbert had children or not must 
 remain undecided until two pages which have 
 been cut from the Catholic baptismal at 
 Brighton are restored. The pages under 1800 
 and 1803 have been removed. After 1803 Mrs. 
 
LINKS WITH THE PAST 21 
 
 Fitzherbert left the prince. The mystery, if 
 there is one, is undoubtedly contained in the 
 Windsor Archives, for General Kelly-Kenny, a 
 close friend of Edward VII, told me that Lord 
 Knollys removed papers to Windsor which 
 Wilkins was not allowed to use when the 
 famous box was opened at Coutt's. 
 
 Mrs. Fitzherbert left her pearls to Marianne 
 Smythe, and her other relics to "Minny" 
 Darner, who divided them among her daughters 
 — the portrait by Romney and the King's 
 miniature to Lady Fortescue, the locket with 
 the King's hair and the bracelet to Lady Con- 
 stance Leslie, her pictures and Mrs. Fitz- 
 herbert's rosary to Lady Blanche Heygarth. 
 
 The latter has described to me being taken 
 to Mrs. Fitzherbert's dying chamber in Tilney 
 Street. She recognised the litanies which 
 were chanted on that occasion on reading 
 Newman's Dream of Gerontius afterward. 
 Together with my grandmother she erected 
 the monument to Mrs. Fitzherbert in the 
 Catholic church at Brighton. On her hand 
 were chiselled the wedding-rings of her two 
 Catholic husbands, and finally the fatal circlet 
 which united her to "the First Gentleman" 
 and the uttermost cad in Europe. 
 
 By accidental irony, on the wall above her 
 
22 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 tomb is the stray lettering— Sancte Georgi, 
 or a pro nobis (St. George, pray for us). It 
 were more fitting that an Ave Maria were in- 
 scribed on the coffin of a King, whose sole 
 claim to grace is that he was the husband of 
 Maria Fitzherbert! 
 
 My grandmother remembers Colonel Darner 
 taking her to Brussels after the coup d'etat 
 of 1851, and hearing Thiers abuse "le coquin" 
 as he called Napoleon. She has many memories 
 of the Vanity Fair of Thackeray's time. Cu- 
 riously enough, it was her relative, Lord Hert- 
 ford, whom he pilloried as the wicked Marquis 
 of Steyne in Vanity Fair, and even sketched 
 from life in the suppressed plate of the first 
 edition. Thackeray was due to dine at her 
 house the night before he died, and his last 
 letter was written to refuse. In the exquisite 
 minuscules with which he wrote to friends he 
 sent word: 
 
 Saturday 
 Dear Mrs. Leslie: 
 
 Since I wrote and said yes, I have been in bed 2 days and 
 fate and the Doctor say No. Indeed I am unfit to come (I 
 have only this minute crawled down to my sofa) and no- 
 body can be more sorry than 
 
 Yours very faithfully, 
 
 W. M. Thackeray. 
 
LINKS WITH THE PAST 23 
 
 This was written on December 22, 1863, 
 and the writer died two days later. Years 
 afterward his daughter saw the letter and 
 said it must have been the last time he ever 
 wrote.* 
 
 Thackeray and Dickens used to be on bad 
 terms. My grandmother recalls the ludicrous 
 incident which brought them together. As 
 they both left the Athenaeum, unknown to 
 each other, they seized the same hat. The 
 effect was ludicrous enough to appeal even to 
 professional humourists and they shook hands. 
 
 Her strangest lint with the past was being 
 taken to see Miss Berry then ninety years of 
 age, to whom Horace Walpole had proposed 
 marriage. Miss Berry was the anonymous 
 figurehead of Thackeray's Four Georges when 
 he wrote: 
 
 m 
 
 A very few years since I knew familiarly a lady who had 
 been asked in marriage by Horace Walpole, who had been 
 patted on the head by George I. This lady had knocked at 
 Doctor Johnson's door; had been intimate with Fox. I often 
 thought as I took my kind old friend's hand, how with it I 
 held on to the old Society of wits and men of the world. 
 
 Perhaps my grandmother is now the only 
 living person to have touched a hand that 
 
 * She wrote in 1901 : " I could have cried over the letter of my 
 father. It was quite strongly and well written. Who could have 
 thought that dear pen was to be laid aside for ever ? " 
 
24 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 knocked on Johnson's door. She has seen 
 the evolution of society from the crinoline to 
 the tango, from the time when it was a close 
 club to the latter days when it resembled a 
 mob. Joachim and Rubinstein had played 
 in her house in early days. In the fifties she 
 heard Mrs. Kemble sing one of his poems to 
 Tennyson, with Rossetti, Burne- Jones, and 
 Doyle for audience. Landseer used to mimic 
 "The Dook," as Wellington was called, in her 
 salon. In those days gold was pronounced 
 "gould" and china "cheney." She noted 1860 
 as about the year that Christmas cards super- 
 seded valentines. She attended the last ball 
 given by Palmerston,* and saw him weeping 
 for the Prince Consort — the only time tears 
 were recorded of "Pam." Though innocent of 
 any sporting proclivity, she was loyal enough 
 to dream that Edward VII's Persimmon would 
 win the Derby, and on the strength of her 
 dream wagered five pounds successfully in the 
 cause of charity. 
 
 When Lady Cardigan's grim memoirs of the 
 English aristocracy were published, she bought 
 up and burned the remainder of the first edition. 
 
 *I may add a last memory from her note-book: "Countess Cas- 
 tiglione's appearance at Lady Palmerston's 28 June, 1862, gloriously 
 beautiful — quite mobbed — and all the English beauties paled before 
 her." Ou sont les neiges d'antan ? 
 
LINKS WITH THE PAST 25 
 
 It was her auto-da-fe in defence of many friends 
 who could no longer defend themselves — an 
 act which befitted her as one of the surviving 
 links with a time and a regime which is now 
 engulfed for ever. 
 
ETON COLLEGE 
 
 The English public school and the national 
 character lie at each other's roots. The Eng- 
 lish school has played as great a part as the 
 German schoolmaster within the Empire that 
 it has helped to build. Sedan was the victory 
 of the latter, in the way that Wellington said 
 Waterloo was won in the playing-fields of 
 Eton. 
 
 In America and England the public school 
 is different. The American institution im- 
 poses a free education on the children of 
 citizens. In England only the parents of a 
 certain caste or fortune can afford to send 
 their boys to a public school. The school of 
 the poor is "the board-school," but its pupils 
 may not call themselves public-school men 
 in after life. That is the proud distinction 
 of those who have been to Eton, Harrow, 
 Winchester, Westminster, and Rugby — the 
 planets of the system — or to one of the fifty 
 subsidiary schools that follow in their wake. 
 The public-school system is traditional and 
 
 26 
 
ETON COLLEGE 27 
 
 caste-making. The men from the public 
 schools form the distinctive class between the 
 hereditary gentry and the mob. They are 
 the bulwark of the professions and of the 
 services. In peace time they maintain the 
 customs and practice of sport. But the Great 
 War has put their system on trial. The new 
 armies are largely officered by public-school 
 men. 
 
 My school experience was the same as that 
 of a generation born in the eighties and nine- 
 ties, who were therefore of cannonable age 
 at the outbreak of the war. Even if my con- 
 temporaries had not been for the most part 
 cut down in their flower, we should have all 
 agreed that school-time was the best phase of 
 life. In memory of man English schools, 
 private or public, were hotbeds of cruelty. 
 Dickens helped to abolish Dotheboys Hall 
 with a pen more stinging than the cane of 
 Squeers, whose model in life was actually 
 commemorated by a church window. At Har- 
 row in the thirties my grandfather was bullied 
 and even roasted at a fire by his fagmaster. 
 At Eton and Rugby the customs were just 
 as brutal. Mere children were tossed in 
 blankets or thrashed by other boys for ig- 
 norance of the school slang. 
 
28 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 In later Victorian days schools became as 
 pleasant to the boys as expensive to the 
 parents. Luxury and sport were developed. 
 Bullying declined to favouritism. Boys came 
 to love their schools with a religious passion. 
 
 I went to Ludgrove, one of a score of private 
 schools preparing for Eton. It was under 
 Arthur Dunn, captain of the English Eleven. 
 He was assisted by a staff of gentlemen ath- 
 letes, who posed for the illustrations in the 
 Badmington Booh of Football. There was no 
 suspicion of pedagogue among them, and they 
 became the objects of our sincere hero-worship. 
 They included "Joe" Smith, another of Eng- 
 land's captains, who saved Oxford from de- 
 feat in the most famous of cricket encounters 
 with Cambridge. Another was H. P. Hansell, 
 whose courtly mien and polished French have 
 been since devoted to tutoring England's 
 next King. He was a connoisseur in China 
 and a man of delicate taste, liable to be dis- 
 turbed with sad wrath when a boy wrote God 
 without a capital G. He has become a well- 
 known character in the public eye accompany- 
 ing the Prince of Wales on all occasions, even 
 to Paris, where the irrepressible Parisians re- 
 marked that there was "more Hansel than 
 Gretel" permitted in the prince's company. 
 
ETON COLLEGE 29 
 
 Arthur Dunn taught us to play football as 
 honourably as the game of life, to recite the 
 Kings of Judah and Israel, to love God and 
 to hate Harrow. He died in his prime as the 
 result of football strain — a bright and lovable 
 memory, touching "muscular Christianity" at 
 its highest. Yet most of his boys were doomed 
 to die younger than he. To have been a school- 
 boy in the nineties was to become fodder for 
 the war flames of the next century. 
 
 On Ascension Day, 1898, the school flag was 
 solemnly lowered. Mr. Gladstone was dead, 
 and a solemn hush overspread the school, 
 though some of us, scions of the landed class, 
 felt that the devil had taken his due. It 
 marked as well as any date the end of the 
 Victorian era of which jubilees were the climax. 
 Henceforth the Empire, glutted with a seventh 
 of the globe, was to experience difficulty and 
 even the symptoms of disaster. The follow- 
 ing year brought the Boer War, in which loss 
 of fame was ill concealed in farce. By the 
 time the tears, recriminations, and laughter 
 aroused by the war were finished, Queen Vic- 
 toria and the century associated with her 
 name had passed to the historians. 
 
 Meanwhile, with the aid of a little Latin 
 and less Greek, I was making my way through 
 
30 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 Eton, greatest if no longer the most select 
 of the public schools. Eton is a traditional 
 republic of a thousand boys divided into 
 fifteen houses, each enjoying separate govern- 
 ment but federated for purposes of sport and 
 study not unlike the United States of Amer- 
 ica. The school is ruled by a society of ath- 
 letes drawn from all the houses, who stand in 
 relation to the Headmaster as the Senate of 
 the United States stands to the President. 
 The Head is chosen not by the votes of the 
 school, but by a governing body. However, 
 as an inclination to democracy he cannot use 
 the birch until it is presented to him formally 
 by the boys themselves. 
 
 In the matter of education, Eton does not 
 educate so much as initiate. She takes no 
 pride in conferring a sound commercial train- 
 ing. Only one of my contemporaries has since 
 "made his fortune," which he did while still 
 in his teens by making an early corner in pic- 
 ture post-cards to the mild amazement of his 
 instructors. Eton invests boys with a social 
 stamp entitling them to enter the freemasonry 
 of English gentlemen. Of this much-envied 
 and much-decried society there are roughly 
 three ascending degrees recognised unofficially 
 throughout the Empire. . 
 
ETON COLLEGE 31 
 
 1. "Sportsmen." 
 
 2. Sportsmen who have been at Oxford and 
 Cambridge. 
 
 3. Old Etonians. 
 
 I fear that old Etonians have tended to 
 seclude themselves in a caste by themselves. 
 It is the defect of a social quality. It is Eton's 
 pride that she produces men and not "mugs," 
 guiding statesmen and not pushful politicians, 
 viceroys and not commercial nabobs, and on 
 a lower scale after-dinner speakers rather than 
 orators, hunting parsons rather than mystic 
 theologians. Nevertheless, she reared Pusey, 
 the chief theologian of the age, and Labou- 
 chere, a pure wire-puller. Her training be- 
 fits a future chancellor better than the bank 
 clerk in posse. The Etonian prefers graceful 
 dignity to intellectual study. It was typical 
 for a most brilliant son, Randolph Churchill, 
 to refer to decimal points, when Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer, as "those damned dots!" 
 Not unlike Castlereagh, who is said to have 
 given up Java because he could not find it 
 on the map. The exact sciences have never 
 appealed to English gentlemen. They have 
 left clerkship and surveying, like sanitation, 
 to the middle classes. It is a pity that the 
 public schools do not produce the scientific 
 
32 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 or efficient spirit. It accounts for German suc- 
 cesses in commerce and in war. 
 
 There is no modern side at Eton. Modern 
 languages are a side-show. Science, irreverently 
 called "stinks," is taught rather like the ac- 
 complishment of drawing-room conjuring. The 
 main studies are Latin and Greek, which 
 have lost their public value since the classics 
 are no longer quoted in Parliament. Boys 
 are served with daily rations of Latin and 
 Greek that are seldom absorbed with pleasure 
 or profit. Every week claims a copy of Latin 
 verses, which to the ordinary boy is a mad- 
 dening exercise in Chinese puzzledom. Only 
 a few reach the standard which would enable 
 them to write Latin epitaphs for Westminster 
 Abbey without disturbing Poets' Corner with 
 a false quantity. 
 
 The only English poetry we learned was in 
 the guise of Latin exercises. My acquaintance 
 with the Celtic School dates from a feverish 
 night turning Yeats into Latin elegiacs. To 
 clothe lines like — 
 
 '* My brother is priest in Kilvarnet, 
 My cousin in Maharabuie " 
 
 with Ovidian measure is like Dr. Haig Brown's 
 tour de force in putting Euclid (Prop. I) into 
 Latin verse! 
 
ETON COLLEGE 33 
 
 The classical curriculum produced the re- 
 fined scholarship and literary taste which 
 were so much acclaimed in the eighteenth 
 century. The art of apt quotation had a 
 public value, and Etonians led the way in 
 applying Horace and Virgil to modern contin- 
 gencies. Ever memorable at Eton was the 
 reply of a master who had been skating on a 
 flooded field (we called Philippi) in the words 
 of Horace, "Philippis versa acies retro," which 
 can be exactly rendered: "Turning the out- 
 side edge at Philippi" ! As brilliant was the 
 flash in which some one discovered the Greek 
 for "muscular Christianity" in Thucydides — 
 Philosophoumen aneu malahias (We are lovers 
 of wisdom without softness). 
 
 Apt turns to Scripture were equally ap- 
 plauded. When a boy accused a master of 
 needing a crib himself, another quoted from 
 Proverbs: "The ass knoweth his master's crib." 
 It was a tradition that "Judy" Durnford, 
 when Lower Master, found a button in the 
 chapel collection, which he read out in terms 
 of pounds, shillings, and pence, "and one 
 trouser-button ! " proceeding immediately with 
 the words of the service — "Rend your hearts 
 and not your garments !" 
 
 It is bad taste at Eton to assume aught but 
 
34 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 a bored indifference to school work. Enthu- 
 siasm is reserved for games. To be too clever 
 or intellectual is resented as un-English. The 
 quality which is most encouraged and re- 
 warded in Germany is repressed in English 
 schools by unwritten laws among the boys 
 themselves. About one boy in ten works his 
 hardest, and he is nicknamed "a sap," since 
 it is folly to be wise. Unless he is also athletic 
 he tends to become a social outcast. In my 
 father's generation at Eton it was said that 
 only two boys other than the annuity-receiving 
 scholars worked hard. They were George 
 Curzon and St. John Brodrick, who as Indian 
 Viceroy and Minister of War have well il- 
 lustrated the types of Eton genius and Eton 
 plodder in their respective careers. Their 
 quarrel over Indian administration is historic. 
 Both were "saps," but Curzon had some of 
 the "heaven-sent" and "all-highest" quality 
 which distinguishes the Kaiser. 
 
 No English school can teach French as well 
 as Latin. It is doubtful which teaches less, 
 the French teacher who mispronounces Eng- 
 lish or the Englishman who talks bad French. 
 All Frenchmen are "ragged" on a national 
 principle at English schools. At Eton any 
 new master is liable to traps. In my time one, 
 
ETON COLLEGE 35 
 
 a non-Etonian, was informed by his class that 
 by old custom popular masters were hoisted 
 round their classrooms. On hearing that the 
 vote of popularity had fallen on him, he suf- 
 fered himself to be carried about by the boys 
 in triumph during school hours. Unfortunately, 
 he mentioned his success to an older colleague 
 and his career was closed. Boys are cruel. 
 
 I was present on a famous 5th of November 
 when a gentle teacher of Mathematics was 
 "ragged" by the class, who appeared in masks 
 and played football. Suddenly the door opened 
 and Dr. Warre, the majestic Headmaster, en- 
 tered. Without a word he proceeded to ex- 
 amine our books, where the diagrams illus- 
 trated Natural History oftener than Geometry. 
 A ludicrous incident occurred. One of the 
 boys was quite unable to remove the mask 
 from his face. With restrained anger Dr. 
 Warre inquired his name. It was world- 
 famous! The Head drew himself up in his 
 robes, and sadly said in tones as of a Pope 
 excommunicating one of his own family: 
 
 " A great old Eton name." 
 Then he left the room, but the effect was 
 annihilating. Edmond Warre was one of the 
 greatest of Eton Headmasters — a Grecian and 
 an oarsman, he epitomised English culture. 
 
36 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 His brow was Olympian, and he carried the 
 shoulders of a prize-fighter. Out of his mouth 
 proceeded praises and punishments with a 
 sound of innocuous thunder. In class he 
 often uttered platitudes as impressively as 
 though they came from a judge of the living 
 and the dead. 
 
 Every morning as he passed into chapel be- 
 hind the solemn file of his sixth form per- 
 forming their traditional goose-step to the 
 notes of the organ, the school rose to salute 
 him. The light from the east window threw 
 a sightless expression upon his spectacles, 
 always reminding me of GEdipus stepping 
 onto the Greek stage behind the rhythmic 
 marching chorus. He was a grand old man, 
 and worthy to flog the future bishops and 
 statesmen of England. I do not know how 
 many hundreds of Eton boys slain in the 
 battles of the Empire will not rise to do him 
 reverence among the dead. The Headmaster 
 of Eton has more to do with the soul of Eng- 
 land than the Primate of Canterbury. The 
 feeling of Etonians to Eton is more akin to 
 religion than most sentiments in the English 
 breast. The cry of Floreat Etona I is the Ave 
 Maria of the devotion of all who have been 
 there. 
 
ETON COLLEGE 37 
 
 In his old age Warre attempted reform. 
 He tried to improve our handwriting, which 
 was crabbed by the system of writing lines 
 for punishment, and he issued edicts on be- 
 half of French. Classical Masters were bid- 
 den to teach it for an hour weekly (but as 
 a dead language, like Latin). There was an 
 underground conflict among the Masters be- 
 tween the modern men and the traditionalists 
 at this time, in which the latter saved the old 
 curriculum as piously as iEneas saved the 
 Palladium from Troy. While the boys slept 
 the conflict raged. Some of the older men 
 were as quaint as characters in Dickens. The 
 nicknames and legends attached to them have 
 been carried to the farthest outposts of Em- 
 pire. One of these on his retirement was 
 presented by his boys with a grand piano in 
 testimony of being "the slackest Master in 
 the school." "M' Tutor" is as great an in- 
 stitution as "M' Dame" at Eton. A boy's 
 tutor performed a consul's role in helping and 
 protecting his pupils when in trouble in other 
 classrooms. The Eton Dame is now extinct. 
 She was a relic of matriarchy, and equally 
 sacred and primitive. These gifted old ladies 
 who kept the Eton houses fostered half the 
 heroes and adventurers of Empire. Sargent's 
 
38 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 brush has luckily preserved the features of the 
 last of them — old Jane Evans, who lived to 
 see one of her charges Headmaster. For sixty 
 years she had been at Eton, and her boys had 
 filled her dining-hall with trophies from all 
 lands. She told me she had once carried up- 
 stairs a boy of five who was sent to the Eton 
 world in petticoats ! She remembered great 
 men only as boys in Eton jackets. Her keen, 
 humorous eyes had taken in generations of 
 them, and in old age they carried in con- 
 sequence a look of eternal youth. To Eto- 
 nians she was the second lady in the land. 
 
 Eton taught little Theology, moral or dog- 
 matic. Decency and reverence were instilled 
 instead. Boys brought their home creed with 
 them and, perhaps, returned with its frag- 
 ments. In morals, Etonians have the English- 
 man's right to take their own line, provided 
 they do not become prigs on the one hand or 
 beasts on the other. Athletics purify their 
 life. 
 
 Religious services were choral — a daily 
 draught of song and chant which Etonians 
 take as a memory into life's dryer places. 
 The Sunday sermon was a mild appeal to take 
 holy orders or grow up like Lord Roberts. 
 Preachers were advised not to refer to the 
 
ETON COLLEGE 39 
 
 seventh commandment or to Wellington's his- 
 toric remark about Waterloo and the playing- 
 fields. In the latter case he was liable to raise 
 Homeric applause. On Sunday boys were 
 made to write answers to scriptural questions, 
 a hateful tribute to the Sabaoth God which 
 made Sunday the chosen day for smoking or 
 catapulting the royal rabbits in Windsor. 
 True worship was given to athletic prowess 
 and physical beauty. But immorality was 
 rare. If twice in a generation a house had 
 been cleaned out, the inmates were rowdies 
 more than decadents. In one case the boys 
 solemnly hoisted a black flag as each of their 
 number departed. Love of athletics made boys 
 more Greek than Christian in their ideals. 
 Only the Jesuits have ever been able to impose 
 the supernatural on English boys. Their ideal 
 is St. Aloysius, a delicate youth with a lily. 
 The popular Etonian inclines to a tomboy 
 with a cricket-bat. Aloysius would have been 
 better for games and Etonians for the sac- 
 ramental view of life. The ideal would be a 
 combination of the two. The Reformation, 
 while it made, also limited, English institu- 
 tions. 
 
 The captain of Beaumont "the Jesuit Eton" 
 was said to have sent a football challenge to 
 
40 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 Eton. Eton contemns other schools just as 
 England despises the rest of the world, and 
 the Eton captain answered: "What is Beau- 
 mont?" The reply was superb: "Beaumont 
 is what Eton was — a school for Catholic 
 gentlemen!" 
 
 The Eton school chorus expresses the senti- 
 ment felt toward others. 
 
 "Harrow may be more clever, 
 Rugby may make more row, 
 But nothing in life shall sever 
 The bond that is round us now." 
 
 The feud between Eton and Harrow is im- 
 placable and inexplicable. My grandfather 
 was cut by all his Harrow friends for sending 
 his boy to Eton. Riots used to follow the 
 cricket contest. I believe it represents the 
 last trace of the war between Roundhead and 
 Cavalier. On June 4 of 1915, Eton officers 
 in the trenches telegraphed "Gott strafe Har- 
 row!" 
 
 To substitute Germany for Harrow and the 
 United States for Rugby would give a fair 
 idea of the adult Etonian's outlook. Etonians 
 imbibe a certain sense of the effortless supe- 
 riority which haunts every imperial race. To be 
 an Etonian seems better than to become great 
 
ETON COLLEGE 41 
 
 or successful. Boys are lulled into a sense of 
 unassailable primacy which they extend later 
 to the Empire. We tasted a divine but care- 
 less flower, as though the lilies on the Eton 
 shield were a kind of lotus. No Eton captain 
 can ever be so great again as he was at school. 
 Miss Evans used to say that Etonians tended to 
 become great men or black sheep. Arthur Ben- 
 son found the Eton boy an insoluble mixture 
 — "Now an angel, now a demon." When Ben- 
 son was an Eton Master I spent two halves in 
 his class. He seemed to be equally puzzled 
 and saddened by the boisterous boy life about 
 him. He feebly despised their games as they 
 not unfeebly despised his poetry ! Though an 
 English poet, the system compelled him to 
 teach us to write verses in dead languages. 
 He used to sit above us like some literary 
 Prometheus with his big, bushy head bowed 
 to his desk by the system which prevented 
 him communicating to us his gift of divine 
 fire. He left Eton to edit Queen Victoria's 
 letters. I have wondered whether he found 
 the Queen's English or our schoolboy Latin 
 the more tedious. 
 
 It was hoped he would succeed Warre as 
 Head, but the traditionalists opposed him, 
 and a compromise was found in Edward 
 
42 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 Lyttelton, who as a cricketer and a vegetarian 
 was expected to satisfy the conservative as 
 well as the advanced men. 
 
 Eton punishments were as prehistoric as the 
 pillory. Youths of an age that would be 
 salaried and married in America were liable 
 to be solemnly held down on a wooden block 
 by two assistants and minutely perforated 
 with a birch rod, which figured for seven and 
 sixpence in the bill. Mr. Leigh, the Lower 
 Master, was humorously called "The Flea," 
 because he generally drew blood on these 
 occasions. Only the blood royal was exempt, 
 but Leigh used to make the Duke of Albany 
 sit on the block instead. The greatest achieve- 
 ment of the Beresfords was stealing the Eton 
 block, which for years was kept at their seat 
 at Curraghmore. 
 
 The captains used canes at their own plea- 
 sure. I remember peers' sons being caned in a 
 way that would have entailed lawsuits in a 
 board-school. Only the convict and the chil- 
 dren of the rich have the privilege of being 
 flogged in England. The small boys are liable 
 to menial service. Queen Victoria gave orders 
 for her grandsons to be "fagged" according to 
 custom. In my time the fags included an 
 Astor and a Drexel, for family names do not 
 
ETON COLLEGE 43 
 
 impress Eton. Eton might have inquired as 
 innocently as King Edward of a shocked Phil- 
 adelphian: "What is a Biddle?" 
 
 One young nobleman's son introduced him- 
 self as Lord C , son of Earl C . The 
 
 whole house promptly kicked him twice, once 
 
 for Lord C and once for Earl C . This 
 
 story is capped from Harrow, where a for- 
 eign prince at the school was once mentioned 
 as a candidate for the Spanish throne. The 
 poor boy had to be removed, as half the school 
 took the necessary steps to be able to boast 
 afterward that they had kicked a King of 
 Spain ! 
 
 The athlete was the only king in the public- 
 school democracy. The prizes of youth went 
 to the strong. Woe to the weak and the lag- 
 gard ! Power and popularity greeted the 
 rower, the runner, and the cricketer. Curiously 
 enough, military proficiency was rated low. A 
 boy who shot for the school at Bisley was an 
 inferior being to one who rowed at Henley or 
 batted at Lord's. The school volunteers were 
 called "bug-shooters" in facetious allusion to 
 their manoeuvres in country lanes. This pref- 
 erence is responsible for the preponderance 
 of bravery over strategy in Eton soldiers. 
 Courage to die is still admired more than the 
 
44 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 cunning which entraps a foe. But the end of 
 all Samurai is extinction. 
 
 It was noteworthy that a Japanese visitor 
 asked only how "the spirit of Eton" was 
 taught. It was the spirit not letters we learned. 
 
 The Etonian enters the world with a work- 
 ing code of honour and a knowledge of gentle- 
 manly conduct in the rough and tumble of life. 
 What he desires of art or music or literature 
 he must glean surreptitiously for himself. It 
 is sad to think of Shelley at Eton flying from 
 his pursuers like a baby owl mobbed by star- 
 lings in daylight. 
 
 Eton is a great Aryan as well as English 
 institution. Reform would only complete the 
 decay which has been caused by the admission 
 of the sons of Orientals, financial magnates, 
 snobs, and swindlers. The sturdy squirarchy 
 who compose the bulk of the Eton families 
 have been swamped. One house has been 
 recently known as "the Synagogue." Win- 
 chester, the sister school, has taken the pre- 
 caution of excluding non-Christians. Eton, 
 in a generous effort to keep pace with the Em- 
 pire, has become as cosmopolitan as English 
 society. 
 
 Eton has enjoyed almost a monopoly, how- 
 ever, in men of state and imperial distinction— 
 
ETON COLLEGE 45 
 
 apart from men of genius, which is ambulator/ 
 like the Spirit, and not necessarily aristocratic. 
 
 The Etonian is the most marked among the 
 types that spring out of the public school. 
 His is the caste composed of ruling and ad- 
 venturous, half -educated but honourable men. 
 All professions accept his leadership except 
 journalism and stock- jobbing, which as sub- 
 sidiary to literature and commerce are largely 
 left to Celts and Jews. In other professions 
 he makes a brilliant mark, even in art and 
 politics, the two professions giving the out- 
 sider a chance to reach the topmost level of 
 society. Men who are not public-school men 
 can succeed by making themselves idols in 
 politics or smashing idols in art — a Disraeli 
 or a Bernard Shaw. 
 
 Eton has naturally produced more poets 
 than painters, more diplomatists than dem- 
 agogues — but there are few Tory cabinets out 
 of which she cannot man a rowing eight ! 
 
 The war has tested Eton to the core, and 
 proven that "Etonesse oblige." In an aristo- 
 cratic war like the Boer War 129 Etonians 
 were killed out of the 1,400 who fought. In 
 the first year of Europe's war 368 fell out of 
 2,558. One of two prints hangs in every Eto- 
 nian's room, the "Sir Galahad," which Watts 
 
46 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 limned for the school chapel, or Lady Butler's 
 picture of an Eton officer charging deathward 
 to the cry of "Floreat Etona!" They signify 
 one the spiritual and the other the carnal war- 
 fare, though perhaps a strife has come in which 
 they seem synonymous. 
 
THE DYNASTY OF HANOVER 
 
 To the English their dynasty is an institution 
 on a par with the Church or the Bank of Eng- 
 land — consecrated by the one, paid for through 
 the other. But to Eton, the owner of Windsor 
 Castle is a neighbour. Eton herself is royal 
 and her chapel, like the amphibious Berwick- 
 on-Tweed (which is neither English nor Scotch), 
 needs special mention in the state prayer-book. 
 Harrow was founded by a yeoman, Winchester 
 by a bishop, but Eton by King Henry VI. 
 Eton's feast is the 4th of June — the birthday 
 of the simple-souled George III, who had an 
 affection for Eton. To this day every Eton 
 boy, even of American blood, wears a mourn- 
 ing-band round his hat in his honour, just as 
 bluejackets still wear black scarfs for Nelson. 
 The dynasty of Hanover was German, and 
 the Teutonic guttural never left the throats of 
 their descendants. For constitutional or im- 
 perial purposes the dynasty proved admirable. 
 Yet, both George I and George II were aliens, 
 who had achieved nothing besides making 
 Hanover "a coarse Versailles." Summoned to 
 
 47 
 
48 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 England, they initiated with some reluctance 
 that long epoch of comfort, not without glory, 
 from which the Empire really dates. If their 
 House seemed a stupid parody of the An- 
 tonines, their Empire exceeded the bounds 
 and prosperity of the Roman. The Georges 
 changed climate but not manners. They con- 
 sented good-naturedly to wallow in the golden 
 trough provided by their English destiny. 
 Thackeray could not be received at court for 
 describing the nature of their wallowing. 
 Nevertheless, their mediocrity satisfied Eng- 
 land. George I was only a stop-gap — a peri- 
 wigged scare-pope. George II had some dapper 
 bravery, though his horse bolted with him on 
 the field of battle. George IH watched with 
 dull piety his kingdom swell into Empire of 
 the world. Yet "Farmer" George saw her 
 through her death-struggle with Napoleon be- 
 fore he died of imbecility and old age. George 
 IV was a pure scamp, and William IV a noodle. 
 After these came the Victorian era. 
 
 Victoria touched constitutional excellence, 
 and even her "bad" Prince of Wales hatched 
 into the best of imperial presidents. Under 
 Edward VII the sovereign became almost too 
 popular, for it is an unwritten law that he 
 should not absorb the sentiment due to his 
 
THE DYNASTY OF HANOVER 49 
 
 ministers, who cannot run the King's business 
 otherwise. It was a relief to some when his 
 dictatorship of tact was succeeded by George 
 V. England's ideal is to hail her own common 
 multiple of qualities on the throne. 
 
 Of Victoria who shall speak? Already she 
 is a myth and a legend, like Queen Elizabeth 
 and Florence Nightingale. Diva Victoria. 
 
 She was unspoiled and unimaginative, with 
 a genuine gentleness, which in the eyes of the 
 people assumed the aspect of a halo, and with 
 touches of prejudice and severity, which sim- 
 ilarly passed for wisdom. Her etiquette was 
 pedantic. She kept her mother standing in 
 her presence, and dismissed a venerable lord- 
 in-waiting for slumbering on duty. When an 
 unhappy officer of the Guard once risked a 
 slightly improper story at her table she in- 
 sisted on its repetition and remarked in the 
 icy silence which followed: "We are not 
 amused!" Her era was moral. Her own 
 family were awestruck of her, but she showed 
 herself big-hearted to fallen sovereigns and 
 worthless old servants. She repaired the tomb 
 of the last Stuart King in France and welcomed 
 the last Napoleon to England. To a Scotch 
 gilly, John Brown, she extended real favour, 
 and even consulted him on public affairs. He 
 
50 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 was a rough-grained fellow, complaisant when 
 sober and rude to the Queen when drunk. He 
 became the aversion of the royal family and 
 ministers of state. It was a good day for 
 them when they could all join in singing 
 "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the 
 grave" — though the Queen mourned. 
 
 However, she wrote an epitaph for his 
 memory surpassing what she had written for 
 Disraeli. Disraeli, according to the royal pen, 
 was "a dear and honoured memory," but 
 John Brown was "God's own gift." 
 
 The reign of Victoria was an era in itself. 
 She was lifted, before she died, to the summit 
 of a wave in world history, which she had 
 mounted as a graceful girl. She became Eng- 
 land's fairy godmother. She waved her sceptre 
 in odd corners of the earth like a wand and 
 they became hers. Under the shadow of her 
 throne rose the Victorians — two generations 
 of statesmen, soldiers, poets, and divines. 
 Individually they were not as brilliant as the 
 Elizabethans, but they were more continuously 
 remarkable. It was something that early Vic- 
 torians could hail a day when they saw "a 
 Newman mould the church and Gladstone 
 stamp the state." Prosperous times had set 
 in at home tempered only by thrills of minor 
 
THE DYNASTY OF HANOVER 51 
 
 disaster on the far-away frontiers abroad. The 
 conditions produced a supply of great men. 
 After Victoria the mould broke. The great 
 Victorians died off in the nineties. Only the 
 charlatan-prophets Ruskin and Chamberlain 
 survived painfully into the new century to see 
 the failure of their missions. Ruskin could not 
 make the English see artistically, and Cham- 
 berlain could not make them think imperially. 
 The middle class out of which they sprang re- 
 jected them both. 
 
 Privately and publicly Victoria rejoiced 
 her people. She was high-minded and stopped 
 her ministers — even the Duke of Wellington — 
 from swearing. Presentation at her court be- 
 came a certificate in domestic morals. The 
 light of her countenance was withdrawn from 
 sinners who married their deceased wives' 
 sisters. She drove Valentine Baker, her best 
 cavalry officer, out of the army for moral mis- 
 conduct. He continued his career — where 
 men's motives are better consulted — as a 
 Turkish pasha ! She pressed the political 
 ostracism of Dilke after his divorce trial, and 
 marked his prosecutor Lord Llandaff for pro- 
 motion. 
 
 She married Albert "the Good," an 
 Evangelical German who introduced the 
 
5% THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 Christmas trees into England, whereby toy- 
 makers in the Fatherland have since grown 
 rich. He was pure, dreamy, and peace-loving. 
 He invented Exhibitions and with difficulty 
 persuaded the English to accept the success 
 of 1851. The English disliked him because 
 he was no sportsman, though the Queen to 
 his great distress made him wear a kilt in the 
 Highlands. He convinced the Queen that 
 England must never go to war with Germany. 
 The slightest anti-German policy he considered 
 "wickedness." She came to regard the sup- 
 port of Prussia as a " holy duty." He must 
 share the credit with Mr. Adams of once 
 averting war with America. In private life he 
 gave the example of the large family just as 
 it was being discarded by the upper classes. 
 When he stood for the Cambridge chancel- 
 lorship, mocking placards were issued: "Vote 
 for Albert — five children!" The English 
 laughed at him until his tragic death, when 
 widow and nation combined to erect a memo- 
 rial in consummate Gotho-Germanic vulgarity. 
 The Albert Memorial with its clumsy statuary 
 surmounted by an image of brass topped by 
 cross and canopy was not the souvenir of an 
 unassuming prince, but the symbol of a com- 
 mercial age. At Windsor his room was pre- 
 
THE DYNASTY OF HANOVER 53 
 
 served as he left it — the hat and stick, and 
 other possessions in grim and dusty repose. 
 Victoria and Albert were always spoken of 
 privately by their ministers as "Eliza" and 
 "Joseph." Lord Halifax told me "Eliza" was 
 coined by Dean Wellesley in order to be able 
 to refer to the Queen in her presence. But 
 Albert was her only love, and there is a pa- 
 thetic tale of "the Widow of Windsor" travel- 
 ling abroad and halting her journey to kiss 
 the keys of an organ which he had once played 
 as a young man. 
 
 To have seen the old Queen is becoming a 
 memory. She often drove through Eton, and 
 when she died, the school was given the honour 
 of lining the last lap within the castle gates 
 at her final home-coming. For days we were 
 marshalled in the playing-fields. The school 
 Volunteers formed a thin grey line on either 
 side of the road backed by the rest of the 
 school, while a derelict cab passed solemnly 
 up and down in guise of a hearse — not without 
 some groaning laughter. Death is only less 
 ridiculous than old age to Youth. The great 
 day brought the usual mishaps inherent to 
 British organisation. The royal horses shied 
 at the station, and the new King called on a 
 squad of bluejackets to draw the gun-car- 
 
54 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 riage through Windsor. It was a solemn 
 moment when we caught sight of the sailors 
 bending on their improvised ropes — the tiny 
 coffin — and the galaxy of Kings. 
 
 In the excitement some of our Volunteers 
 forgot to reverse their arms. Generals on 
 either side of the coffin whispered hoarsely: 
 "Reverse!" — which the delinquents obeyed 
 too late and in windmill fashion, almost 
 striking heads in the procession. A few sec- 
 onds later King and Kaiser were passing. I 
 do not know if the eyes of the German war- 
 lord caught our fiasco. He was walking with 
 our schoolmate Albany, who had become his 
 subject as Duke of Gotha. 
 
 Albany had been as much chaffed in the 
 school for becoming a German duke as Ar- 
 thur of Connaught had been praised for his 
 refusal. That Prince Arthur refused 40,000 
 pounds a year and preferred to remain an Eng- 
 lish officer on a pittance strengthened the dy- 
 nasty. When Albany became Gotha his Eton 
 friends performed a mock goose-step in his 
 honour, reducing him to tears. The next year 
 he returned for the Queen's funeral. As he 
 passed, he pointed out the Eton boys to the 
 Kaiser. For a moment that keen, restless eye 
 shot down our unmilitary ranks, as his un- 
 
THE DYNASTY OF HANOVER 55 
 
 withered arm covered us with a jerk. Few of 
 the boys standing there that day in Eton suits 
 have not since met his legions in battle. 
 
 The Kaiser must be included in the dynasty, 
 for, as an Irish genealogist has pointed out, if 
 his mother had been a boy, he would be King 
 of England ! The cross between Anglo-Han- 
 overian imperialism and Prussian religio- 
 militarism has proved pregnant. Genius it 
 has produced in the Kaiser, not without a 
 Neronian touch, as shown in his hatred for 
 his mother and the false pride that plays be- 
 fore a burning world. He was always an 
 enfant terrible. The Duke of Connaught tells 
 how the future Kaiser was intrusted to him 
 at Edward VIFs wedding in the sixties. The 
 duke wore a kilt over his bare knee. Half- 
 way through the service he found his amiable 
 young nephew had crawled low and bitten 
 him on the bare ! 
 
 The Kaiser grew to be a neurotic dreamer, 
 ill content with a safe throne, nervously con- 
 scious of the conquests and destinies that 
 only awaited his invocation. Hence, the 
 alarms and excursions with which he troubled 
 his English relatives. While Victoria lived 
 he only dared manifest himself by telegram. 
 Between him and Edward, however, there 
 
56 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 grew a cordial hatred. Yet it must be admitted 
 that he staved off the evil day as often as it 
 was conjured up in his name by the Junkers. 
 One true story may be given. 
 
 A few years back an English ironclad 
 bearing English royalty unwittingly passed 
 through the Kaiser's regatta at Kiel. To the 
 amazement of the imperial staff the stranger 
 passed without proferring a salute. The Eng- 
 lish had not suspected the Kaiser's presence, 
 and were more than astonished to be followed 
 and boarded by the indignant Kaiser in per- 
 son. What astonished them more was that 
 he wore yachting shoes under his naval uni- 
 form. It was not explained till afterward 
 that rather than receive an accidental insult 
 before his captains, the Kaiser had scrambled 
 into uniform and gone out of his way to ex- 
 tract sufficient courtesy from his relative to 
 save appearances. In his hurry he had for- 
 gotten to change his shoes! 
 
 Another age must judge the Kaiser. His- 
 tory alone can tell what his share has been. 
 It is at least a little grotesque to call him 
 "Antichrist." Surely it were an anticlimax 
 for Queen Victoria to have been grandmother 
 to Antichrist ! 
 
 By the time Edward succeeded Victoria 
 
THE DYNASTY OF HANOVER 57 
 
 there seemed not much left to be done. He 
 had always been kept out of politics by his 
 mother, who showed a curious jealousy in not 
 allowing him to succeed to any of his father's 
 orders or positions. England's greatness at 
 home could not be repeated, so Edward turned 
 his mind to diplomacy abroad. Under his 
 auspices as peacemaker, Europe was brought 
 into that state of tranquil balance which al- 
 ways precedes a war. It is while alliances are 
 uncertain and the dispositions of nations un- 
 pledged that peace is kept. The gamble of 
 war remains too incalculable. 
 
 Strong dispositions breed calculations and 
 calculations turn into challenges. Strong rul- 
 ers control national dispositions and weak 
 ones cannot control challenges. Edward was 
 neither, but he tried nobly to corner the ris- 
 ing maelstrom. But who can square the circle 
 of Fate? 
 
 It fell to Edward to choose a good under- 
 standing with Germany or France. He pre- 
 ferred the latter. Trivial but world-changing 
 influences affected his decision. By a strange 
 irony Prince Albert's Teutonic discipline had 
 driven him as a young man for consolation 
 to the Parisians. There was the unforgiveness 
 of his Danish Queen toward Prussia. There 
 
58 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 was the fate which embittered his sister, the 
 Kaiser's mother. There was the Kaiser's dis- 
 courteous request not to bring "his grocer 
 friend" in his suite. Above all, there was the 
 growing distrust for Germany, which he was 
 quick to scent among the upper classes, to 
 buoy him in proffering his historic embraces 
 to France. 
 
 I was in France during the Boer War and 
 during Edward's visit to Paris. During 1901 
 even appeals to "Fontenoy" did not prevent 
 an Irishman being stoned for English. In 
 those days "Chamberlain Assassin! 9 was the 
 chant of the boulevards, and the suicide of 
 Kitchener the perennial topic of the cafes. 
 Two years later I found myself with a crowd 
 of students from the Latin Quarter watching 
 Edward and Pere Loubet whirling to the 
 Theatre Frangais in a brougham fenced by a 
 regiment of horse-tail-helmeted cuirassiers. It 
 seemed a pretty pageant to us — the entente 
 going to the play! None of us realised at the 
 time that it was the car of Destiny we had 
 watched encircled by long-haired furies, un- 
 der whose wheels the generation to which we 
 belonged was doomed to perish. None are 
 blinder than those who live in the white light 
 of history before it has been caught and dis- 
 
THE DYNASTY OF HANOVER 59 
 
 sected on the spectroscope of the historian. A 
 similar fate awaited Paris students and Eton 
 boys: 1914 found them both of cannonable 
 age! 
 
 The reign of Victoria was an epoch, but 
 Edward's was epoch-breaking. Yet he only 
 set out to be a citizen-King, until everybody 
 came to regard him as a personal friend — 
 "Europe's Uncle" the French called him. 
 He recognised Labour members at Windsor, 
 and he issued a proclamation in green to the 
 Irish. He was anxious to sign a Home Rule 
 Bill. He received "General" Booth, which 
 was as startling on the part of the Faith's 
 Defender to the High Church Tories as in 
 another way Roosevelt's reception of Booker 
 Washington in the White House. He tried 
 to omit the anti-Catholic oath at his corona- 
 tion. He made a success of racing, and he 
 advanced the German Ghetto to court. 
 
 In the end he came to be considered a 
 sportsman among sportsmen, a Catholic sym- 
 pathiser by Catholics, "saved" by Salvation- 
 ists, and a democrat by the Labourites. Among 
 the Irish, whom he had offended on his visit 
 as Prince of Wales by wearing Masonic regalia, 
 there was a distinct movement "to capture 
 the King," before he captured them ! Loyal 
 
60 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 Orangemen signalised his visit by chalking 
 "Popish Ned" on the walls of Deny. The 
 Jews found themselves in clover. Sir Ernest 
 Cassel, who shared the King's mentality to a 
 curious degree, entered the Privy Council, and 
 was generally honoured for his discretion. 
 The society dancer who demanded his head 
 on a charger after giving an exhibition before 
 the King represented no popular feeling. 
 
 It was by his friendship with Sir Thomas 
 Lipton that Edward made the mistake of 
 trying to force an election on the Royal Yacht 
 Squadron. There are only two spots left in 
 England where entry cannot be bought — 
 Westminster Abbey and the Yacht Squadron. 
 Lord Ormonde and his fellow yachtsmen black- 
 balled Lipton with every available black- 
 ball. Royalty had suffered few such repulses 
 since Magna Charta. Yet wags inquired what 
 right had the King's hereditary Butler (Or- 
 monde) to take airs over the King's grocer! 
 
 But Edward's popularity never waned. 
 Even the Nonconformists who had scourged 
 his princely vices were reconciled by his 
 kingly furtherance of peace. To a nation of 
 shopkeepers Edward "the peacemaker" seemed 
 a national insurance. And all this success 
 was due to the tact which allowed him to be- 
 come all things to all men without endangering 
 
THE DYNASTY OF HANOVER 61 
 
 his own dignity. Tact is the gift of doing the 
 right thing in place of the obvious. When 
 an Eastern prince, whom he was entertain- 
 ing, threw a sucked gooseberry skin over his 
 shoulder, Edward promptly rilled an awkward 
 pause by doing likewise. When the French 
 aldermen visited Windsor, he had the name of 
 the Waterloo Gallery changed for the day. 
 Edward appreciated tact in others. When he 
 visited the Catholic seminary at Maynooth, 
 he understood that Union Jacks would be a 
 forced offering from Irish Nationalists, and 
 was delighted to find his attiring-room deco- 
 rated instead with pictures of his own race- 
 horses — a sincere tribute from a horse-loving 
 race! 
 
 A good instance of tact may be mentioned 
 in connection with Maynooth. The martyred 
 Empress of Austria when hunting in Ireland 
 once found herself within the seminary grounds. 
 The president, Archbishop Walsh, welcomed 
 her, and, noticing that she seemed a little em- 
 barrassed at moving booted and spurred among 
 doctors of divinity, chivalrously offered a loan 
 of his gown, clad in which she continued her 
 visit. Her return offering was not so tactful, 
 for she presented the Hibernian College with 
 a silver St. George ! 
 
 Edward was a go-between rather than a 
 
62 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 statesman, a conversationalist rather than a 
 man of letters. But he was the only diplo- 
 matist in the public service. His reading was 
 limited. Lady Sarah Spencer told me that she 
 used to read to Gladstone in his old age. One 
 day while reading Southey, the Prince of 
 Wales called and insisted on Gladstone read- 
 ing a book which he rated very high. It was 
 Marie Corelli's BarabbasU They decided to 
 give the royal choice a trial. After an hour's 
 reading, Gladstone uttered one word by way 
 of comment: "Southey!" 
 
 Edward had keener perception for men 
 than books. It is history how he tacitly 
 dropped the absurd "divine right of Kings" 
 with all its sentimental superstition and prac- 
 tical limitations. He preferred to wear the 
 unassailable mantle of a modern president. 
 He was certainly a better Republican than 
 many of the Americans who thronged his 
 court. He lived like an epicurean and died 
 like a stoic. Neither devil nor doctor could 
 affright him much. His sudden death left a 
 pang of remorse such as no world ruler had 
 left since the Emperor Titus. 
 
 The parallel between the two has not been 
 noticed. Each succeeded to a so-called Au- 
 gustan age, and ruled over an Empire which 
 
THE DYNASTY OF HANOVER 63 
 
 was settling into comfortable stagnation. Each 
 was accused of indulging in revelry before suc- 
 ceeding to the throne, and each seemed to 
 die untimely for the happiness of the world. 
 There went out a feeling among Edward's 
 subjects akin to the sentiment which used to 
 prompt the deification of the Roman rulers. 
 
 Among Catholics a myth arose that so good 
 a King could only have died in the communion 
 of the Church. It was rumoured that he had 
 returned in his last illness not from Biarritz 
 but from Lourdes hard by. A nun in the 
 Midlands was reported to have seen his soul 
 in the purgatory of the just ! Certain it is that 
 good Protestants watched Father Vaughan 
 a little anxiously during those last days ! 
 When the Tablet published a photograph of 
 King Edward with Father Vaughan there 
 was a slight emeute in Buckingham Palace. 
 
 George V caused no anxiety to Protestants. 
 Blameless and unimaginative, he filled the 
 requisition form of an English sovereign. He 
 proved a sedative in feverish times. He had 
 none of his father's ambition to rearrange Eu- 
 rope. He collected postage-stamps in pref- 
 erence to racing-cups, and drew a keener eye 
 on pheasants than on women. The middle 
 classes welcomed him, and the lower ones had 
 
64 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 no apprehensions. The upper class, who were 
 beginning to play at decadence, smiled at 
 his domestic virtues. A moral king is always 
 a subject of ridicule. A king who tries to do 
 his duty never raises that sentiment which ac- 
 crues to selfish brilliance and even gallantry. 
 Henry VIII remains the most popular of Eng- 
 lish monarchs. Fate has not been kind to 
 George V. For the sake of the dynasty he en- 
 deavoured to win the Derby, but "all the 
 King's horses" were unavailing. He went to 
 the army and navy boxing instead of the first 
 production of "Parsival," when it was ru- 
 moured shocking to the Nonconformists. He 
 tried to be a constitutional monarch, but only 
 produced an outburst in the House. A well- 
 intentioned effort to settle the Irish question 
 led to a deadlock. Civil war threatened, and 
 was only prevented by universal war. The 
 conflict of Armageddon eddied around his 
 throne, and he uttered well-chosen words and 
 performed appropriate actions, though he saw 
 the Guards off to annihilation in France wear- 
 ing a frock coat and top-hat. He became a 
 teetotaller, but his subjects left him stranded 
 "dry." Throughout his reign he has showed 
 himself the type intended by the settlement — 
 a patriot King under Whig domination. 
 
THE DYNASTY OF HANOVER 65 
 
 Yet it is unfair to judge him as critically 
 and harshly as some subjects have taken upon 
 themselves to do. Alone of his statesmen and 
 generals he has made no blunders. He stands 
 an unchanging and homely figure in the strife. 
 His throne remains the safest if not, in view 
 of Belgium, the most glorious in Europe. In 
 contrast to the Kaiser's feverish omnipresence, 
 his calm passivity is a steady guidance if not 
 a wild inspiration to the Empire. 
 
 Before the war Englishmen believed in four 
 things: a powerless throne, a powerful navy, 
 the diplomacy of Sir Edward Grey, and their 
 form of democracy. The scene of Grey's tri- 
 umphs has become the scene of British disas- 
 ters. The fruits of democracy have proved 
 unappetising in war time. The navy and the 
 throne remain as sheet-anchors to public hope. 
 George V has, by his unchanging calm and 
 refusal to bow before fear or imagination, 
 proved the fibre which resists the strain in 
 the public mind. It is possible that he has 
 those needful qualities, which could not be 
 expected from a more brilliant sovereign — 
 the qualities of stolid patience and imperturb- 
 able phlegm. The elements of royal greatness 
 are not all glittering nor necessarily such as 
 chroniclers prefer to chronicle. It is something 
 
66 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 that a most English type of Englishman sits 
 upon the throne in unstable days. 
 
 George III amused his subjects by his in- 
 ability to discover how the apple entered the 
 dumpling, but he saw Napoleon dumped on 
 St. Helena. George V may rouse his subjects' 
 mirth, but he is their best figurehead sailing 
 through the waters of Armageddon. 
 
 A curious passage in Carlyle's Frederick 
 the Great recalls as an obstacle to Prussian 
 plans — " Britannic George." " Suppose your 
 Britannic Majesty," quoth Frederick, "would 
 make with me an express neutrality conven- 
 tion ? " But he wouldn't. History often re- 
 peats. 
 
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 
 
 The atmosphere of the University in England 
 is indefinable. Oxford and Cambridge are 
 microcosms of national history. Tradition 
 and freedom mingle through their precincts. 
 To the powers "that are" they are obsequious 
 only in the choice of their Chancellors, who are 
 dukes at least. When Wellington was made 
 Cambridge Chancellor, Archbishop Whately 
 had the spirit to apply for the command of 
 the Horse Guards. The Universities may ap- 
 preciate royal favour like the sunshine, but 
 there is no sun-worship. An English University 
 is its own universe. 
 
 The University is the only time and place 
 in the lives of Englishmen when they show 
 their emotions. Faith and scepticism, enthu- 
 siasm and cynicism bear sway among the 
 young men. The undergraduate has a license 
 to practise his real self. As a rule, he regrets 
 the experiment and slips into one of the con- 
 ventional grooves prepared for him. Only 
 the idealist continues to be an undergradu- 
 ate through life. The English environment is 
 
 67 
 
68 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 one which brings rockets to dark earth. The 
 torches of English civilisation are safety-lamps 
 which warm without consuming their carriers. 
 They are passed on by one generation of 
 common-sensed officials all over the Empire to 
 another. They are cherished at home by a 
 semi-athletic caste of clergy and half-humor- 
 ous types of lawyer and legislator — in other 
 words the University class. By such the Em- 
 pire is managed if not uplifted — as a depart- 
 ment store rather than as a spiritual force. 
 The cream of University men includes the 
 educated part of the upper and the upper part 
 of the educated class. These men reach suc- 
 cess and honour. Everybody who is not in 
 the University class had better be a duke or a 
 salesman, who can both afford to be without 
 a degree. 
 
 The colleges at Oxford and Cambridge 
 form a mosaic of English history. If they are 
 winged by modern science they are also 
 weighted with tradition. They are demo- 
 cratic unto themselves, but their tendency is 
 to make a caste. The experiment of bringing 
 Rhodes scholars from all over the world to 
 Oxford or Indian babus to Cambridge is doubt- 
 ful. The colonials are better for their own 
 colleges instead of learning to imitate English 
 
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 69 
 
 sportsmen. The Indians are the worse for 
 being educated as an equal race in England by 
 way of prelude to being ruled as an inferior 
 one in India. I recall an Indian at Cam- 
 bridge saying: 
 
 "In India I was taught that white men and women were 
 sacred. But for three years here I have been cadged by Eng- 
 lish porters and prostitutes for the price of beer." 
 
 A few more sentimental mistakes, and 
 Oxford and Cambridge will pass like old Eng- 
 lish boxing and London society itself into the 
 shadowy vale of cosmopolitanism. 
 
 The education at the University is more in- 
 telligent than scientific. The individual is al- 
 lowed to develop by himself even at the hazard 
 of indolence. Facilities are afforded, but no 
 system is imposed. A man may accept the 
 facilities and make the best of them, or he 
 may start a new school. There are no official 
 schools of thought. Anybody is only too wel- 
 come who will think at all. I have known no 
 Cambridge teacher not to confess that the Ger- 
 man training was more up-to-date and or- 
 ganised. Provincial Universities like Leeds 
 and Liverpool are more practical. London 
 University is far more thorough. The German 
 University is a grinding-mill compared to the 
 
70 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 loose-flowing moulds at Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge. 
 
 Oxford and Cambridge ! Quis separabit ? 
 They are the sacred twins suckled by one 
 alma mater. They have set the tone of Eng- 
 lish life, and embalmed every phase and period 
 of her history. It is difficult to state the real 
 difference between the rivals. It is a divine 
 truth that Cambridge men are Aristotelians 
 and Oxford men Platonists. Cambridge is 
 scientific where Oxford is mediaeval. If Ox- 
 ford is called "the home of lost causes," the 
 Cambridge of Newton, Harvey, and Darwin 
 has some claim to be the home of discovered 
 ones. Yet, curiously enough, the whole stock 
 of English poetry flows from Cambridge — 
 Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, Gray, Wordsworth, 
 Byron, Tennyson ! Oxford can only point to 
 a solitary Shelley, whom she was careful to 
 expel for atheism ! 
 
 But Oxford's bead-roll is in religion. Cam- 
 bridge cannot match Grossetete, Wolsey, Wes- 
 ley, Keble, Manning, and Newman. Alone 
 among northern Universities Oxford begat a 
 Pope — the Cretan Alexander V, whom envious 
 Cambridge men insist to have been the Sixth 
 of that name. 
 
 The Universities keep the old tradition. 
 
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 71 
 
 With responsive spirits they leave a perennial 
 influence, which without being philosophical 
 or sentimental has proved the seed-ground of 
 all that is most generous in English life. 
 Against backgrounds that are material and 
 uninspired the University for ever points to 
 higher and nobler ideals. Every Varsity man 
 carries away in some measure amongst the 
 husks of knowledge the certainty that there 
 are less things saleable in heaven and earth 
 than the advocates of sound commercial edu- 
 cation would suppose. 
 
 Oxford is only a street that is not straight, 
 winding under a canopy of towers and bells, 
 but saint and cavalier, scholar and adven- 
 turer have trodden and loved it above the 
 broadways of all the world. Cambridge is 
 only an ecclesiastical hamlet planted on a 
 fenland brook, but all the poets of England 
 have watched their youth slip by with its 
 muddy stream. From Cambridge, too, came 
 the poet of the Great War. 
 
 I was at King's College, Cambridge (1904- 
 8). King's was considered by affectionate 
 King's men as "The Cambridge Balliol." 
 Candid friends considered it "Balliol without 
 Balliol men." There was some truth in the 
 saying, which confirmed another to the effect 
 
72 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 that modern Cambridge has been "the grave 
 of genius." 
 
 The men of Balliol have obtained an un- 
 canny share of success even among Oxford 
 men. Jowett, their great Master, seemed to 
 be able to stamp his pupils with intellectual 
 efficiency in class followed by an effortless 
 superiority when they entered the world. 
 His pupils included Milner, Curzon, Lans- 
 downe, Grey, Asquith. The Balliol type suc- 
 ceeded because it did not pitch its ideal too 
 high. Self-sufficient and self-supporting, their 
 combined advance in church and state cul- 
 minated in the hour that Premier Asquith 
 gave Cosmo Lang the Archbishopric of York. 
 The age which reverenced the Balliol ideal ap- 
 proved the transaction. A day was to come 
 testing that ideal by trial, not as before by 
 success. Balliol stands or falls by Asquith's 
 premiership. 
 
 King's was very different. We were as in- 
 tellectual and our Greek scholarship was better 
 — but we had not produced a great man since 
 Sir Robert Walpole — excepting, perhaps, Strat- 
 ford de Redcliffe, "the great Eltchi," and the 
 disastrous pride which led to the Crimea and 
 a pro-Turkish policy. King's men were less 
 practical and more abstract than Balliol men. 
 
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 73 
 
 The type has been sketched by one of their 
 number, Mr. Wingfield Stratford: 
 
 He has studied Socialism with Plato and heresy with the 
 Fathers; he has found the higher thought in the valleys of the 
 Yang-tse, and evolution on the shores of the iEgean. Though 
 a fighter and an idealist, the catchwords of clique and party 
 leave him cold . . . too responsive to genius to miss any spark 
 of it in a contemporary or an opponent, he is at once the fair- 
 est and most redoubtable of controversialists. 
 
 This well expresses the secret and the cause 
 of Cambridge thinking. Cambridge men can- 
 not or will not join or form parties. Oxford 
 men, however, have incarnated their genius 
 in religious movements, such as Wesley's or 
 Newman's, or in influences upon the civil 
 body like Matthew Arnold's or Jowett's. 
 The Cambridge genius always tended to a 
 higher abstract thought, that slipped beyond 
 theology and above patriotism. These were 
 left to Oxford. Oxford stood loyally by the 
 Stuarts and she professes religious orthodoxy 
 to-day. Perhaps one terrible sentence will 
 discriminate historically between the twain. 
 Cambridge produced the Reformers and Ox- 
 ford burned them. 
 
 Life at King's was an inspiring but dis- 
 arming experience. As a result of high think- 
 ing, the finished King's man acquired the 
 
74 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 seeds of dilettantism. He entered the world a 
 little sceptical, a little doubtful how far the 
 battle of life was worth fighting. He was un- 
 fitted by the previous and supreme struggle 
 for knowledge for knowledge's sake. Never- 
 theless, there were many King's men who 
 tried to practise a definite idealism in life. 
 
 The society at King's consisted of thirty 
 Fellows or Dons and a hundred and fifty un- 
 dergraduates. The teaching staff was good 
 but eccentric. The best of them taught by 
 inspired intercourse rather than by formal lec- 
 tures. For instance, Walter Headlam, who 
 did more than all Tubingen and Gottingen 
 to restore the Greek text of iEschylus, could 
 only instruct select groups of explorers to his 
 rooms. On a late afternoon they might dis- 
 cover him dressing, for the day and the night 
 were alike to him; and, like Mrs. Cannam 
 in Dickens, he could not distinguish between 
 winter and summer. He ate when he happened 
 to be hungry and lectured, like an Athenian 
 sophist, when confronted by the seeking ig- 
 norant. Set utterances and horal meals he 
 scorned as impediments from which his clear 
 spirit had been emancipated. The floor of 
 his room was knee-deep in books, folios, and 
 papers. Unopened correspondence lay strati- 
 
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 75 
 
 fied between one week's book reading and the 
 next. A youth was once simple enough to 
 show up a copy of Greek verses overnight. 
 In the morning Headlam only remarked: 
 "I am afraid it is lost for ever !" 
 
 Headlam used to sit in the midst of the 
 strata balancing an ink-pot on one knee and 
 scribbling words into Greek texts missing 
 since the Renaissance on the other. His 
 famous emendations in exquisite script were 
 allowed to float about the room until gathered 
 for the Classical Review. A year later they 
 became the prey of German editors. Head- 
 lam was of those who knew too much to be 
 able to finish a book conscientiously. If a 
 commentary was pushed into his hand he 
 would discourse divinely on two or three lines 
 of poetry — but woe to the commentator! It 
 was exciting to pupils to learn that text-books 
 which lecturers were solemnly commending 
 elsewhere were riddled with idiotic pedantry. 
 Headlam's assaults on Verrall were famous 
 in the annals of literary duelling. He possessed 
 that rare brilliance typical of English scholar- 
 ship, which is content to leave theoretic spade- 
 work to the Germans, while mercilessly crit- 
 icising their practice. To him the German 
 editors were only guessing what iEschylus 
 
76 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 ought to have written, but did not. Head- 
 lam's work recalled Cornewall Lewis's deft 
 attacks on Niebuhr's Roman History and Por- 
 son's amused contempt of a German rival: 
 
 "The Germans in Greek 
 Are sadly to seek, 
 Save only Hermann 
 And Hermann's a German !'* 
 
 Even Liddell and Scott's Lexicon — the lan- 
 tern which guides the Anglo-Saxon race in 
 its study of Greek — fell under Headlam's 
 lash. At the time of its revision he made a 
 celebrated offer to the Oxford Press to point 
 out a distinct blunder on every page! He 
 gave his pupils that information which is not 
 in books. He could discuss the Eleusinian 
 mysteries with illustrations from the Bible, 
 or point out the Wagnerian motifs underlying 
 the Greek Choruses — things hidden from gram- 
 marians and the blind race who set examina- 
 tion papers for the blind. I can hear him 
 explaining the witchcraft in the Persce as 
 though he believed in sorcery, or trying to 
 strum the lost music of the Agamemnon on 
 a hired piano. 
 
 In his fragrant enthusiasm and his exquisite 
 sense for the lost voices of Hellas he was akin 
 
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 77 
 
 to Shelley — save that he preferred to write 
 his poetry in Greek, which he considered an 
 easier language than English! A real parallel 
 lies between Headlam and Porson — England's 
 finest Grecians. Each waged controversies of 
 scorn, and, by brilliant emendations, each won 
 the clever perversion of "splendid emendax" 
 for Horace's splendide mendax. Exactly one 
 hundred years after Porson, Headlam died, 
 leaving the iEschylus unfinished which he had 
 dedicated to Swinburne eight years before. 
 He was very fond of Swinburne's letter of 
 reply, that he regarded the Orestean Trilogy 
 "as probably on the whole the greatest spir- 
 itual work of man." He used to point out 
 to us how Swinburne was often impeded in 
 his English verse by thinking in Greek — a 
 trick he had learned from Landor. With him 
 perished something very old, and yet very 
 young. 
 
 Another King's Don upon whose lips men 
 hung wonderingly was Lowes Dickinson, one of 
 Chesterton's Heretics, who was understood to 
 be able to inculcate a prose style under guise 
 of a teacher of history. He wrote the "Letters 
 of a Chinese Official," which drew a pompous 
 reply from Mr. Bryan, under the impression 
 he was pulling some Mandarin's pigtail. The 
 
78 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 irony of time has brought the comment that 
 Bryan's policy is Chinification ! He was a 
 good metaphysician, but the effect on his hear- 
 ers was agnosticism, and on his imitators con- 
 ceit. He slowly drowned the Christianity of 
 the college in intellectual cream. But he 
 stood out for fair play. He sounded the first 
 note in the Independent Review calling for a 
 reconsideration of the treatment meted to 
 Oscar Wilde. The publication of De Prqfun- 
 dis in 1905 came to many like the cry of a 
 literary Dreyfus. The Wilde culte dates from 
 Dickinson's famous complaint that the Eng- 
 lish could make nothing of him or Blake or 
 Shelley — "but martyrs." No recorder of the 
 time can but consecrate or desecrate a page to 
 that Byron de nos jours, who shocked and fas- 
 cinated the young more after death than 
 during life. His vogue represented less a 
 literary phase than a kink in the Teutonic 
 temperament. Within a few years ten biog- 
 raphies of him appeared in English while 
 German "sociologists" reduced his sins to 
 scientific pamphlets. Perhaps he was more 
 guilty in word than in deed, but the national 
 hypocrisy which trampled upon him also 
 raised him to the dignity of a scapegoat. Be- 
 tween the Diocesan school at Portora on the 
 
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 79 
 
 shores of Lough Erne and the cemetery of 
 Pere Lachaise lay the history of the whole 
 aesthetic movement. 
 
 One of his sons joined Cambridge under a 
 false name. Men used to criticise his father 
 loudly in his presence to show that they did 
 not suspect his identity. It is memorable that 
 a son of Wilde has since fallen in France under 
 another name than that which he redeemed. 
 
 Discussion at King's was very catholic. 
 Fabianism, Rowing, Medievalism, Darwin, 
 Ghostly Research, and our own Dons were 
 perennial topics. Our Dons included Professor 
 Bury and Sir Robert Ball — who were the 
 skimmed cream of Dublin for English con- 
 sumption. Bury succeeded Lord Acton in 
 the chair of History, and was understood to 
 have become a total recluse in the attempt to 
 read Acton's library. Sir Robert Ball, known 
 as "Zerubbabel," was chief jester in a very 
 humourless circle. His best story pertained 
 to a popular lecture on "The Mountains of 
 the Moon," which he once expected to deliver 
 in a provincial town. As he was driven to 
 the town hall he was faced by placards ad- 
 vertising him on the subject of "Earthquakes." 
 How he gratified an English mob desirous of 
 knowledge of the earth's crust by deft manip- 
 
80 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 ulation of photographic slides of the moon 
 is a tale still told in colleges. 
 
 One charming old man of antediluvian 
 standing dwelt among us, whom only Lamb or 
 Dickens could have described. He was the 
 subject of as many legends as Jowett at Ox- 
 ford. Outside Latin Poesy, Madrigals, and 
 Whist he was a child. He had made a railway 
 map of excursion and cheap trains all over 
 England in the hope of visiting his scattered 
 friends at one swoop, but one link was always 
 missing ! It was said that when intrusted with 
 the College Chapel he filled his pockets with 
 nuts and pennies to facilitate counting the 
 men. The confusion which ensued in the 
 Porch of men groping for dropped pennies and 
 nuts was so great that, mistaking it for a riot, 
 he hastily announced: "No chapel for the day." 
 
 The only Don outside English traditions was 
 Sir Charles Waldstein. As Lowes Dickinson 
 was a Cambridge version of Pater, so Wald- 
 stein was an Americanised Ruskin. It was a 
 bold step to bring a professor from the States 
 to teach fine art to Cambridge, but he made 
 a most suggestive teacher. He used to ask 
 audiences of brute-male Britons how many had 
 ever noticed the colour of their mothers' eyes. 
 
 In my time he was planning a cosmo- 
 
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 81 
 
 politan dream for excavating Herculaneum. 
 His lectures were frequently broken by ap- 
 plause as he read telegrams from the last 
 sovereign to approve the scheme. The only 
 other Don of American training in Cambridge 
 was Mr. Lapsley from Harvard, who put on 
 the mantle of an English Don with the au- 
 tochthonous grace and ability of Americans 
 placed in old English institutions. He was a 
 fair return from America for the original gift 
 of John Harvard, who was bred at Emmanuel, 
 Cambridge. I do not think I have met a sin- 
 cerer Englishman except Henry James. I 
 sometimes suspect that New England is the 
 only bit of "Old England" left. 
 
 The two great and venerable figures at 
 King's were the Provost, "Monty" James, 
 and Oscar Browning, "The O. B." Dr. James 
 was at the head of all mediaeval palaeography, 
 and used to distract our evenings by his ghastly 
 "Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary," which since 
 gathered in book form have thrilled Mr. 
 Roosevelt. 
 
 Oscar Browning had known everybody and 
 done everything for a generation. In his 
 History lectures he could refer familiarly to 
 viceroys and statesmen by their Christian 
 names. The legends told of him would fill 
 
82 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 a volume. One day as Tennyson entered the 
 great court of King's a bulky professor is 
 said to have run to him, explaining: "I am 
 Browning!'' 
 
 "No, you are not," replied Tennyson, and 
 walked away. 
 
 Another legend recounted that 0. B. had 
 assisted, owing to his learning and in spite of 
 his heresy, at the Vatican Council. He stood 
 for Parliament and was defeated by his own 
 pupil Austen Chamberlain, whose supporters 
 followed the sage with derisive cries of "poet !" 
 
 O. B. was the perennial butt for University 
 jokes. In my time he retired, having out- 
 lived his glory. On Sunday evenings a rabble 
 of the curious gathered in the rooms through 
 which the best of the Cambridge world had 
 passed, and listened to O. B.'s swan-song, 
 which was a gabble of royal anecdotes accom- 
 panied on an instrument irreverently called 
 the O. B.-ophone ! Nevertheless, Quixote was 
 not a greater Don in his time. Both at Eton 
 and Cambridge he had fought for reform and 
 met a reformer's fate. Of his courage I only 
 remember that in old age he acted Pickwick 
 in Esperanto. 
 
 It was curious how Cambridge lived on the 
 myths of her own men. There was the great 
 
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 83 
 
 Dr. Munro, professor of Latin, who was pas- 
 sionately fond of figs. One year the Trinity 
 fig-tree produced amid much leafen travail, 
 but one enormous fruit, which Munro tended 
 until the eve before eating, when he affixed his 
 card with "Dr. Munro's fig" written upon it. 
 The next morning the fig was gone, but on 
 the card was added: "A fig for Dr. Munro !" 
 Who, too, can forget the memory of J. K. 
 Stephen, the flower of King's, who once read 
 a learned paper to a learned society from a 
 few blank sheets of paper ! He died young 
 and mad, leaving behind him two memorable 
 lines desirous of a better country: 
 
 "When the Rudyards cease from Kipling 
 And the Haggards ride no more !" 
 
 which reminds me that the lyrics of "The 
 Merry Widow" and "The Quaker Girl" were 
 written by a King's Don (Mr. Roper). 
 
 Among the younger men was a brilliant in- 
 consequential being, Wingfield Stratford, who 
 wrote a remarkable History of English Patriot- 
 ism. It amounted to a Rise and Decline of the 
 British Empire (haunted by fear of the de- 
 cline), and written in the torrential and per- 
 sonal style of late Victorian. 
 
 King's perhaps attained a zenith when 
 
84 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 Wingfield Stratford was correcting his last 
 pages in the same building in which Rupert 
 Brooke was touching his early sonnets. Neither 
 was then known outside the college gates. 
 Brooke has since been saluted as a poet in two 
 hemispheres. Yet it will be rather as a dawn 
 star than as a harvest-moon that his light will 
 shine. He was cut down on life's threshold, 
 like a knight errant beating on the door that 
 others will open. To King's men his death came 
 with the pathos of the death of a relative or 
 a child. We felt the same sickness at heart 
 on reading Brooke's name in a casualty list 
 that we would feel on seeing a lark shot to 
 earth as it rose in song. We could have spared 
 half our "distinguished men of letters" for 
 him. 
 
 Well I remember the first day I saw him at 
 King's — on the football field. Suddenly a 
 freshman with long and not unhyacinthine 
 locks was seen to tear through the muddy 
 scrum. It was Rupert Brooke, and we paused 
 in our game to observe this semblance of a 
 Greek god in a football shirt. "And did you 
 once see Shelley plain?" another age will ask. 
 
 Brooke's first public appearance was as the 
 messenger in the Eumenides, which was played 
 in the original Greek in the Michaelmas term 
 
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 85 
 
 of 1906. With his clarion, buskins, and classical 
 dress he looked like a youthful Gabriel "wind- 
 ing God's lonely horn." He was one of those 
 people who could not help looking picturesque. 
 
 It was a glory for King's that Rupert Brooke 
 and Edward Busk should have been contem- 
 poraries in her gates. When Brooke was send- 
 ing his first sonnets to the Westminster Gazette, 
 Busk was amusing us with "the new sport of 
 motor-bicycle making," as we called it. He 
 was the most promising engineer of his year, 
 and solved the problem of aeroplane stability 
 under a high wind in a manner that gave the 
 English command of the air. Both met early 
 and tragic ends. Brooke was buried in an 
 olive grove in the Greek seas. Busk was in- 
 cinerated in his blazing car hundreds of feet 
 above the ground. Busk was perhaps the 
 greatest individual loss during the war. It 
 was only fitting for the King to write a letter 
 to mark his worth. He had applied genius to 
 mechanics. I remember him as a boy of in- 
 domitable energy and resource. The only 
 meal to which he ever asked me took place at 
 midnight down the river, in a distant garden 
 to which the guests swam, propelling the means 
 of entertainment in a bathtub. 
 
 Besides real genius, which necessarily attains 
 
86 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 fame, there was a band of enthusiasts with 
 us, who won such honour as comes from the 
 breach of conventional methods — men who 
 were revolted by the sterile agnosticism or 
 careless national sense in our midst. Youthful 
 charlatanism took curious forms. In my time 
 two champions of Christendom flung them- 
 selves at the prevailing infidelity, and after- 
 ward became insane. One sacrificed his 
 career to found a sect, and another attempted 
 to disprove materialism by rather gruesome 
 experiments in psychical research. In the 
 name and cause of the disparaged Deity he 
 ventured to raise the most famous of college 
 ghosts, which had long and quietly inhabited 
 rooms at Corpus. 
 
 Religion we used to debate furiously. The 
 strangest wager I ever heard of arose from such 
 a debate. An agnostic and a Christian, after 
 an evening of vain controversy, dared each 
 other to persuade a woman to leave the streets 
 on the ethical or the Christian plea. It was 
 the agnostic who won. 
 
 The undergraduate tendency led men to 
 extremes before they subsided into ordinary 
 life. Enthusiasts who persisted in their en- 
 thusiasms were liable to be discarded. If 
 they were prepared to go into the wilderness 
 
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 87 
 
 they might go alone. Men like Father Hugh 
 Benson, Leo Maxse, Eustace Miles, and Er- 
 nest Edghill had recently gone from Cambridge 
 against a mocking world. All except Benson 
 were King's men. Miles gave London a Pro- 
 teid Restaurant. Benson threw his vivid per- 
 sonality into the Catholic cause. Edghill, the 
 finest theologian of his day, who was said to 
 have composed his Hulsean lectures in the 
 train overnight, wore away his short days 
 wrestling with the social danger in the slums. 
 Leo Maxse scented and denounced the Ger- 
 man peril for ten years before the war. As 
 editor of the National Review he endured all 
 the pangs and triumphs of Cassandra. The 
 more hysterically he told sooth the more bit- 
 terly he was repelled by those who preferred 
 smooth-lipped prophets. The National Re- 
 view played a historic part in those days, not 
 unlike that of the Anti-Jacobin, under Can- 
 ning's editorship, in stimulating feeling against 
 Napoleon and the French. Maxse lived to be 
 justified, but Benson and Edghill died like 
 candles in a high wind by the wayside. 
 Edghill was the protagonist in a fierce fight 
 whether the King's College Mission should 
 be Christian or ethical in character. As the 
 Christians drew into rival sects, the agnostic 
 
88 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 element triumphed. Rome naturally offered 
 a Gordian solution to many, of whom Benson 
 certainly proved a flower among controversial 
 thorns. 
 
 It seemed strange for the son of an Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury to become a Catholic 
 priest. Yet never was chrysalis hatched with 
 such jubilant celerity as when the Benjamin 
 of Lambeth Palace became a free-lance in the 
 service of the Vatican. As a curate in Cam- 
 bridge he uttered an ascetic note in the home 
 of "muscular Christianity." Charles Kingsley 
 was responsible for muscular Christianity. As 
 a typical Cambridge man he provoked the Ox- 
 ford Cardinal's Apologia. The Cambridge ideal 
 associated Health and Holiness. The extreme 
 opposite was St. Hildegarde's saying that God 
 cannot dwell in a healthy body. The old 
 Puritans would have said the same of a happy 
 body. But all happiness is haunted, and Ben- 
 son exactly appreciated the mixture of fear 
 and fun which goes to the making of true re- 
 ligion. With fecundive fervour he poured 
 forth a series of novels, which may be described 
 as the Epistles of Hugh the Preacher to the 
 Anglicans — to the Conventionalists — to the 
 Sensualists, etc. 
 
 I can see him sitting in the firelight of my 
 
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 89 
 
 room at King's, unravelling a weird story 
 about demoniacal substitution, his eyeballs 
 staring into the flame, and his nervous fingers 
 twitching to baptise the next undergraduate 
 he could thrill or mystify into the fold of 
 Rome. 
 
 His career was that of an ecclesiastical 
 Winston Churchill, with whom he offered a 
 parallel even to the stutter in his speech. 
 Yet both could command the irritated at- 
 tention of the elder men they addressed. In 
 each case a father's son made a famous father 
 memorable for his son. It was Archbishop 
 Benson who gave Anglicans their watchword 
 in resisting "The Italian Mission," and Ran- 
 dolph Churchill who taught the Tories to 
 chime: "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be 
 right." It was a curious denouement to hear 
 the sons of both reversing the wisdom of their 
 fathers. Winston preached Home Rule in Bel- 
 fast, and Hugh Benson upheld the Pope in 
 Cambridge — instances both of the old Greek 
 word peripateia, which may be translated, 
 "the somersault divine" ! 
 
 The King's man was perhaps a type, but the 
 Cambridge man ran out of a more general 
 mould. It may be queried what he had to 
 show at the end and how he has proved in 
 
90 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 the day of national trial. The ordinary de- 
 gree man leaves Cambridge with a certificate 
 enabling him to step into the clerical, legal, or 
 teaching professions, but each individual must 
 find himself out as well as his profession, and 
 then how to profess it. He is better equipped 
 physically than scientifically. Sixty per cent 
 have passed through the training necessary to 
 athletics. Athletics do count first in University 
 life and the authorities submit. Perhaps, they 
 prefer to turn out normal, clean-limbed men to 
 a horde of pedants and professors. To win a 
 dark or light Blue at athletics gives men an 
 unassailable distinction through life. The 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer McKenna learned 
 to count as bow of the Cambridge boat. Picked 
 parishes and legal partnerships drop into the 
 lap of athletic heroes, which is logical in a land 
 where Boat-race day is a national event, and 
 Empire day a recent creation of faddists. The 
 Oxford or Cambridge rowing Blue touched the 
 high-water mark of the system. The row- 
 ing coaches were subsidiary gods. The whole 
 University could be divided on a matter of 
 oarsmanship. To the nation it was more im- 
 portant that Cambridge should defeat the 
 Harvard eight which appeared on the Thames 
 in 1906 than that the House of Lords on its 
 
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 91 
 
 banks should be saved. And there is sanity 
 in the choice. A seat may be purchased in 
 the Lords but not in the Varsity Crew. 
 
 Ideals hold sway at Cambridge, but the 
 strenuous life is not abhorred. In my time 
 the most famous exponent of Rooseveltism 
 offered two wagers to the effeminate. To 
 row against anybody the seventeen miles to 
 Ely, and then run the full distance back, or 
 to walk a greater number of miles in the day 
 than any one could eat eggs! 
 
 The Great War has not found University 
 men lacking. No genius or strategist has 
 arisen from the academic ranks, but by scores 
 and hundreds Varsity men have left their 
 office stools and taken command of companies 
 in the field as readily as though they were 
 football-teams. They have shown themselves 
 efficient, chivalrous, and fearless. The losses 
 which have befallen them are greater propor- 
 tionately than in any other class. University 
 traditions may perish, as they perished in 
 America during her Civil War; the old-fash- 
 ioned culture and the time-honoured jokes 
 may become extinct — the science of English 
 rowing even may be lost in foreign graves 
 —but the great Universities will not have 
 worked or played in vain ! 
 
THE RELIGION OF ENGLAND 
 
 "Christian England" is a cant term much 
 employed by the critics and the upholders of 
 orthodoxy alike. What it means is a dis- 
 puted proposition. As a Catholic nation Eng- 
 land partook nobly of the Crusades, and 
 built the finest set of national cathedrals ex- 
 tant in Europe — thanks, indeed, to loans from 
 the Jews, whom she treated with intermittent 
 tolerance. The Crusaders, the Lollards, the 
 Elizabethan High-Churchmen, the Caroline 
 divines, the Puritans, and eighteenth-century 
 bishops, who signed the articles of faith "with 
 a smile or a sigh," have all left their mark on 
 the national religion. A general result makes 
 English Christianity sentimental rather than 
 theological. It tends to save appearances 
 rather than souls. 
 
 In public life religion makes little difference. 
 The devotee and the anticlerical is equally 
 rare. The state bishops are objects of envy 
 rather than of reverence. The depths of 
 religious awe between a foreign Catholic and 
 an Anglican appear in the story of the honest 
 
 92 
 
THE RELIGION OF ENGLAND 93 
 
 Briton arguing with a Frenchman and end- 
 ing: "To H— 11 with the Pope !" With a pal- 
 lor befitting the terrible words of his reply, the 
 Frenchman drew himself up and uttered: "To 
 H — 11 with the Archbishop of Canterbury!" 
 Whereat the Briton dissolved in laughter. 
 'To H — 11 with the gold stick in waiting" 
 would have sounded as comical. The English 
 Primate is a court official, and it is the Chan- 
 cellor who keeps the King's conscience. Arch- 
 bishop Laud was the only occupant of the 
 see since the Reformation to press divine 
 rather than official honours on himself, and 
 the only one to suffer execution on the scaf- 
 fold in consequence. 
 
 Reverence and common sense go to the 
 making of English religion. "Preach the 
 Gospel and put down enthusiasm," was a 
 Victorian Bishop's watchword. The religion 
 taught at the great schools amounts prac- 
 tically to a light coat of moral disinfectant 
 with a sentimental affection for the school 
 chapel thrown in. A sixth-form boy can bet- 
 ter criticise New Testament Greek, compared, 
 say, with Thucydides, than expound its doc- 
 trines. 
 
 It is only at the University that such as 
 are religious tend to shuffle into shades and 
 
94 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 sects. Organised efforts to draw men into 
 different doxies fail. The ordinary English- 
 man has not been troubled by religion for two 
 hundred years. At Cambridge missioners from 
 America were received with polite amuse- 
 ment. Everything American — Mrs. Eddy's 
 Theology, Mr. Bryan's Bimetallism, Mr. Car- 
 negie's Libraries, or even Gildersleeve's Pindar 
 were regarded as nostrums. The University 
 training secures a constant stream of recruits 
 for the Church, for it often unfits them for 
 any other profession. To the gentleman of 
 culture or country pursuits, the Church of 
 England rectory affords a temptation that 
 the vulgar Dissenting manse or the disciplined 
 Catholic presbytery cannot offer. The ideal 
 of the English Church has been to provide 
 a resident gentleman for every parish in the 
 kingdom, and there have been worse ideals. 
 In the good old days the parson read Horace 
 and rode to hounds. Since agricultural de- 
 pression has set in, the curate reads Kipling 
 and plays football. The old-fashioned Angli- 
 canism and Dissent of England are practically 
 dead, and parasites devour their remains. Rit- 
 ualism has eaten into the core of the Estab- 
 lishment, while sects and political societies 
 have dismembered Puritanism. The Catholic 
 
THE RELIGION OF ENGLAND 95 
 
 Church has made conquests in the upper 
 classes, but she has leaked from the lower 
 story. 
 
 Anglicanism is less a creed than a condi- 
 tion of mind peculiar to the English. An- 
 glicanism spells an ideal of temporal followed 
 by eternal comfort. It is the historical at- 
 tempt to combine the advantages of the Catho- 
 lic and the Reformed faith. It implies tradition 
 without mystery, bishops without authority, an 
 open Bible and a closed Hell. The Articles of 
 the English Church were originally articles of 
 peace devised to enable the rival supporters 
 of church and sovereign to live under one 
 roof. Real Protestantism came with the Pu- 
 ritans, and Cromwell was the first Noncon- 
 formist. Anglican doctrine changes with dynas- 
 ties and fashions of thought. The ritual varies 
 with each parish. But the Church has its 
 place as an old-established institution dis- 
 seminating traditions of decency and honour. 
 Even Catholics would deprecate its disestab- 
 lishment as a social disaster second only to 
 the overthrow of the House of Lords. 
 
 The two religious movements of the nine- 
 teenth century, the Evangelical and the Cath- 
 olic revivals, loosened the stakes of Angli- 
 canism as a mere church-and-state preserve. 
 
96 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 The medievalist with a taste for liturgy, the 
 Hot Gospeller, and the critic of the Pentateuch 
 all entered within its portals. The virtue of 
 toleration even for opposing beliefs has been 
 deduced by apologists from necessity. There 
 is a delightful tale of a Bishop of Gloucester 
 who ruled over High and Low Church with 
 an equal mind until the former presented him 
 with a popish mitre, which he promised to 
 wear. On the expected day the Low Church 
 gathered to protest against a Bishop wearing 
 a hat in church, but the wise Bishop satisfied 
 both by carrying the dangerous emblem under 
 his arm ! 
 
 There is a wonderful comprehensiveness in 
 the Church of England. At Gibraltar or in 
 Ulster Anglicanism may be a different church. 
 The Bishop of Gibraltar used to dress as a 
 Catholic prelate, whose see was Southern Eu- 
 rope. "I believe I am in your Lordship's 
 diocese," was the Pope's humorous comment 
 to him. It was the same pontiff who answered 
 an Anglican Bishop's request by giving him 
 the formal blessing reserved to incense before 
 burning. The contretemps caused by High 
 Church bishops travelling abroad are beyond 
 count. The greatest sensation was caused by 
 a Scottish prelate who went to France in the 
 
THE RELIGION OF ENGLAND 97 
 
 purple cassock of a continental bishop. As 
 he brought his wife with him, the pious inn- 
 keeper refused to allow her in. 
 
 "Mais je suis en vacances" explained the 
 paragon of diocesan respectability. 
 
 "II ny a pas de doute que monseigneur est 
 en vacances" replied the poor innkeeper to 
 whom the situation was with difficulty ex- 
 plained by the chaplain. 
 
 The most curious compromise in England 
 is that the wives of spiritual peers have no 
 official position. This dates from Queen Eliza- 
 beth's cheery remark when the first married 
 Archbishop brought his lady to court: "Mis- 
 tress I would not, wife I cannot call you." 
 
 In Ireland the Anglican bishops amounted 
 to Cromwellians in lawn sleeves. To-day they 
 are the leaders of a stranded crusade and the 
 trustees of a disestablished church. For three 
 hundred years they preached that St. Patrick 
 was an Anglican, until Gladstone bade them 
 throw up the missionary sponge. Though the 
 native cathedrals and old revenues had been 
 made theirs, the duel had proven unequal. 
 The Catholic Church thrived on poverty and 
 persecution, and became more than ever the 
 church of the people. In contrast to elsewhere, 
 the Catholic Church in Ireland became so 
 
98 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 identified with popular rights and opposed to 
 feudalism that I remember an old Catholic 
 peer exclaiming: "We have held the faith in 
 spite of the priests ! " 
 
 Anglicanism failed in Ireland because of the 
 poor quality of bishops. Swift said they were 
 highwaymen who stole the papers of the true 
 bishops on their way over. At the end of the 
 eighteenth century Primate Stuart wrote to 
 Lord Hardwicke: 
 
 Fix Mr. Beresford at Kilmore, and we shall then have 
 three very inactive bishops, and, what I trust the world has 
 not yet seen, three bishops in one district reported to be the 
 most profligate men in Europe. 
 
 As late as 1822, Bishop Jocelyn of Clogher 
 was removed from his see for scandalous 
 crime. There were always exceptions. There 
 was a Berkeley at Cloyne and an Alexander 
 at Armagh, the latter of whom survived into 
 the twentieth century as the last of the state- 
 appointed bishops in Ireland. When a child 
 I recited "There is a green hill far away" 
 to his wife, the authoress. I was asked at the 
 close which verse I liked best. I answered: 
 "The last." "And why ?" "Because it is the 
 last," I replied frankly. 
 
 When Archbishop Alexander was old and 
 
THE RELIGION OF ENGLAND 99 
 
 I was young we became close friends. I was 
 sometimes left in charge of him at his palace, 
 for he grew very feeble. We used to drive 
 together round the patrimony of Patrick (the 
 demesne that disestablishment had left him) 
 and over the crest of Armagh, where Brian 
 Boru lies buried and the flags taken from the 
 French at Ballinamuck hang in the old cathe- 
 dral. After a peep to see how his rival, Car- 
 dinal Logue, was progressing with his brand- 
 new structure, we used to return to discuss 
 Greek plays and Latin Fathers under the pic- 
 tures of all the courtiers, scoundrels, and good 
 men who had ever ruled Armagh for England. 
 The greatest in the miscellany was Usher, 
 that truly Irish divine, who first proved that 
 Christ was born in the year 4 B. C. 
 
 Archbishop Alexander could recall New- 
 man's preaching at Oxford. "He was an 
 apostle!" he used to say, and to hear him 
 preach in St. Mary's he often went without 
 the supper which his college had made a 
 movable feast to coincide with the hour of 
 Newman's preaching. Dr. Alexander was a 
 High-Churchman, and when he maintained the 
 symbolism of the Cross an Orange mob stoned 
 his carriage in Dublin! Plunged all his life 
 in the Irish maelstrom, he always held out for 
 
100 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 peace with principle. Old age found him un- 
 daunted and unsoured, nor had humour de- 
 parted from him or his neighbour, Cardinal 
 Logue. I wish I could sketch that quaint and 
 venerable pair as I remember them. 
 
 Archbishop Alexander, with his round, be- 
 nignant face and bulky frame, needed only a 
 peruke to resemble an angelified Dr. Johnson, 
 as he laid down the laws of poetry and the 
 Church to us over his teacups. Here is a 
 page I once scribbled like a third-rate Boswell: 
 
 " Pope Leo XIII has written some Latin 
 verses, my Lord." 
 
 " Yes, but he is not infallible in metre. I 
 have found one false quantity. Dr. Butler, of 
 Trinity, is the greatest wielder of classic verse 
 in the world. He threw Tennyson's ' Crossing 
 the Bar' into six different Greek and Latin 
 measures." 
 
 Who is your favourite playwright? ' 
 iEschylus. He wrote the finest line in poe- 
 try, when he played on Helen's name, call- 
 ing her Helenas, helandros, heleptolis — bane of 
 ship, bane of man, and bane of city! ' 
 
 Is there any Greek irony in the Gospel? ' 
 Yes, the verse ' And I, if I be lifted up, 
 will draw all men unto me ' is irony, dramatic 
 and divine." 
 
 
 (6 
 
THE RELIGION OF ENGLAND 101 
 
 Cardinal Logue looked and thought the very 
 opposite. Like the Apostles, he came of fisher- 
 folk, and his gaunt, bony face with bushy 
 brows planted over his sad yet shrewd Celtic 
 eyes made him like Granuaile or some such 
 weather-battered personification of Ireland in 
 a cassock. He too had passed outside politics 
 and beyond controversy. He was a link with 
 Ireland's penal past. He had outlived his 
 generation and filled the sees of Ireland twice 
 and three times over with his own hands. He 
 told me he had sat on the bishops' bench 
 with John MacHale of Tuam, who had been 
 a Bishop before Catholic emancipation (1829). 
 MacHale died in 1881 and Logue was conse- 
 crated in the seventies. 
 
 The interchange of humour and respect 
 kept Logue and Alexander friends. When 
 Cardinal Vannutelli came to consecrate the 
 new cathedral at Armagh, Alexander left a 
 card with the Pope's legate. The two cardinals 
 paid the Protestant primate a visit. As the 
 three old men were gossiping in Latin under 
 the roof most sacred to Protestant ascendancy, 
 a tumult was heard in the streets, and great 
 was their amusement on learning afterward 
 that rival religious mobs had begun to break 
 windows in their honour. 
 
102 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 Cardinal Logue used to describe the con- 
 clave which elected Pius X with some humour 
 (now cardinals are forbidden to mention de- 
 tails); how he and two others came together 
 socially and were mistaken for plotters, which 
 they were not at all, at all! And how, had he 
 been made Pope, he would have certainly 
 jumped out of the window! 
 
 Alexander was the high-water mark of all 
 that was best in Anglicanism. He was tolerant 
 without being unorthodox. I remember the 
 wrath which mantled upon his gentle old face 
 after reading a sermon by Dean Hensley Hen- 
 son. "He has blasphemed the Mother of 
 God!" They were brave words for an Irish 
 Primate to utter. 
 
 Alexander was the last of the great pulpit 
 orators, comprising the Liddons and the Ma- 
 gees, in whose wake came only the sky-squib- 
 bers and slang preachers. The slump which 
 has been visible in the state has visited the 
 Church. The Great War found no single great 
 man on the bishops' bench except Gore, of 
 Oxford, who, owing to his liberal views, was 
 barely on speaking terms with his diocese. 
 The archbishoprics were filled by courtiers, 
 fashionable in doctrine as in politics. 
 
 When I became a Catholic, Archbishop 
 
THE RELIGION OF ENGLAND 103 
 
 Alexander sent for me and, after a good-hu- 
 moured scolding, added: "I nearly did it myself 
 when I was your age !" He told me that al- 
 most all his Oxford friends had become Catholic 
 priests, but what he mourned was that they 
 disappeared. He seemed to think they drifted 
 away like wrecks. It is certainly true that 
 the Catholic Church made wonderful converts 
 in those days. The pick of Oxford followed 
 Newman, and what, indeed, happened to them 
 all? Save for a Manning or a Ward, they 
 were not much heard of again. 
 
 The leading Anglicans are generally laymen. 
 Gladstone was a church reader, and tried to 
 use his position of premier to make theological 
 interruptions during the Vatican council. Only 
 the adroitness of his diplomats saved him from 
 a foolish position. Lord Ampthill, who pre- 
 vented Disraeli from making a speech in bad 
 French at the Berlin Congress, saved Glad- 
 stone from worse theology in 1870. However, 
 Gladstone apologetically sent a British ship- 
 of-war to secure the safety of the Pope during 
 the fall of the Temporal Power. Lord Hali- 
 fax has been described as the lay pope of the 
 Church of England. He sacrificed a great 
 career to lead the High Church and further 
 reunion with the Mother Church of Rome, 
 
104 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 whom the High Church nicknamed "Aunty," 
 and the Low Church "The Scarlet Woman." 
 I once heard the present Archbishop of York 
 humorously describe her in conversation as 
 his Pink Aunt ! 
 
 If Lord Halifax had been in holy orders 
 he would have been put into prison or tried 
 like the saintly Bishop King for ritualism. 
 He has described to me the most thrilling mo- 
 ment of his life when he almost induced Leo 
 XIII to recognize Anglican Orders. Far more 
 ascetic and theological than the bishops he 
 vainly endeavours to persuade to live up to 
 their Catholic title, he hovers like an ignis 
 fatuus between two Churches. He was the 
 good influence among Edward VII's fast 
 friends in youth. It was Halifax who procured 
 the prayers and telegram of Pius IX when the 
 prince's life was despaired of. 
 
 At the other pole to Lord Halifax was Lord 
 Radstock, who, like the famous Lord Dart- 
 mouth, "wears a coronet and prays"! Rad- 
 stock was a drawing-room preacher, who 
 claimed to have converted the old Emperor 
 William. He once went to preach to the god- 
 less French, and was heard to entreat them 
 publicly: "Buvez de Veau de vie, buvez de Veau 
 de vie, mes peresl" He meant the water of 
 
THE RELIGION OF ENGLAND 105 
 
 life, but the witty French inquired if brandy 
 was the English sacrament. 
 
 Religious life in England is at its best in 
 dealing with the fcetid slums, which en- 
 cumber the great cities of the land. The 
 High Church sent out men devoted and true, 
 of whom Father Dolling was reckoned an 
 Anglican Vincent de Paul. Though disliking 
 ritualism, Archbishop Alexander told me he 
 once went to confirm some of Dolling's dis- 
 ciples in a back slum, who rose up singing 
 and pronounced "We are marching to the 
 goal" as though it were gaol. "Only too true, 
 poor fellows," whispered Dolling, who was an 
 Irishman, across the chancel to the Arch- 
 bishop. 
 
 England's greatest social and religious dan- 
 ger lay in those slums. They remain hotbeds of 
 disease and unrest, which are not allayed by 
 the efforts of temperance workers on the one 
 hand or by bouts of drunken pleasure on the 
 other. Born in original gin may be said of 
 most slum babies, one-half of whose survivors 
 to manhood are found unfit for military service. 
 Drops of oil are dropped on the howling ocean 
 of greater London. Oxford and Cambridge 
 have founded settlements of well-meaning 
 students, but critics have reported them as 
 
106 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 only an expensive way of showing the poor 
 how the rich live. Nevertheless, the inculca- 
 tion of muscular Christianity by a band of 
 stalwarts is not valueless, even if young bur- 
 glars are sometimes given the benefit of a gym- 
 nastic training ! 
 
 The present Bishop of London sprang to 
 fame from Oxford House. Perhaps he is the 
 typical modern bishop. For ever photographed 
 and paraded in the papers, he can be suave 
 and cheery to everybody. He preaches a 
 "jolly" theology. He is fonder of making a 
 good phrase than points in controversy. He 
 could not help describing the Great War as 
 "The Nailed Hand versus the Mailed Fist." 
 He has no pretensions except what the High 
 Church insists on giving him. He slaps his 
 curates on the back and calls the working 
 man "Mate." He can crack a harmless joke 
 about church to show he is a layman, after all, 
 and explain to a Londoner that Christ was 
 really more of a sportsman than a Sunday- 
 school teacher. 
 
 The most successful of his clergy, Preben- 
 dary Carlile, once startled us at Cambridge 
 by referring to the Good Shepherd from the 
 university pulpit as "the Divine Fox-hunter!" 
 His Church Army is the one success of modern 
 
THE RELIGION OF ENGLAND 107 
 
 Anglicanism. When so much gush is spoken 
 of Divine love, he showed that its practice 
 meant loving the unlovable. To love the 
 lovely is easy to gods or men. 
 
 On the whole, England has but a loose hold 
 on Christianity, which is left to the individual. 
 The Salvation Army men have swept up the 
 refuse of her pinchbeck Babylons, but they 
 have won their real success as an imperial 
 sociological bureau. The High Churches with 
 their free gifts and lighted candles dot the 
 slums like Christmas trees planted artificially 
 in a dreary jungle. It is the system of bribing 
 souls which has lost England to the churches. 
 Snobbery has driven away the poor. The 
 fashionable churches count their coronets, 
 and the middle-class chapels advertise their 
 carpet-knights. 
 
 The Church of England reigns chiefly as a so- 
 cial club, with which are deposited the moral 
 standards of society. There are more people in 
 London society to-day who believe in their fam- 
 ily ghosts than in the resurrection of Christ. 
 Superstition has thrived oddly in London, as 
 it throve in the later Roman Empire, to the 
 disregard of the old-fashioned deities. I have 
 known an outgoing governor consult a clair- 
 voyant, and ladies who prefer palmists to 
 
108 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 confessors. And I once attended a seance in 
 Grosvenor Square, where the recently deceased 
 wife of an Irish viceroy sent messages to her 
 friends in society. High personages frequent 
 the boudoir of Endor. I suppose there are 
 few who have not consulted "Mrs. Robinson," 
 the principal witch to London society. The 
 most curious superstition prevalent is the use 
 Protestant ladies make of St. Anthony of 
 Padua to find lost jewels or to help them win 
 at bridge. I have even known a relic of that 
 much-tried saint used to help a race-horse in 
 the Derby. 
 
 The only genuine native expression of reli- 
 gion is the much-derided Nonconformist Con- 
 science, which is entirely occupied with the 
 public care of two commandments. There is 
 no reason to consider English public men more 
 moral than the French, except that they must 
 be careful not to be found out. In France a 
 politician's private life is never scanned un- 
 less a woman figures in his death, as in the 
 sinister cases of Gambetta, Boulanger, and 
 President Faure. But in England, public 
 men who are caught out in their lifetime 
 are hounded to political or actual death. On 
 the day of judgment the middle classes of 
 England will point very triumphantly to the 
 
THE RELIGION OF ENGLAND 109 
 
 most prominent scapegoats they succeeded in 
 nailing to God's barn door, of whom the no- 
 blest and hardest treated was Parnell. 
 
 The English people will always shrink from 
 blasphemy and try to keep respectable, but 
 it cannot be said that there is a Christian 
 England in the sense that there is a Christian 
 Russia, or a Christian Ireland. The deep 
 religious sense which underlay "Merrie Eng- 
 land" seems only likely to return under the 
 stress of deep national humiliation and sor- 
 row. What, indeed, was asked by the Divine 
 Prophet, to whom the Church of England is 
 officially dedicated, if ye gain the whole world, 
 and lose your own soul ? 
 
THE POLITICIANS 
 
 The history of modern England is the history 
 of English politics. No growth could be more 
 native than the legislation of compromise 
 through compromise. Though the House of 
 Commons has seen a gentlemanly game become 
 a class gamble, the system remains a regulated 
 contest between those who are in and those 
 who are out of power. The object of each is 
 to supplant the other with a more popular 
 edition of each other's schemes. Once in a 
 generation there is a struggle for principles. 
 Over the Reform Bill, Home Rule, and the 
 House of Lords, men were ready to sacrifice 
 their political lives. 
 
 Ever since the Tories were unwise enough 
 to support the Stuarts, the great Whig families 
 have ruled England. After the Reform Bill 
 of 1832, the Whigs took the middle classes 
 under their tutelage. After that of 1867, 
 Whigs and Tories divided the working men. 
 The advent of Irish and Labour parties spoiled 
 
 the game. The old Whigs were a race of 
 
 no 
 
THE POLITICIANS 111 
 
 material-minded optimists, who had made 
 their idea of liberty a tyrannous fetich. The 
 Tories remained a secluded class, whose 
 haughty pessimism was only relieved by oc- 
 casional and adventurous bids for power. 
 The modern Liberal is a humanised and vul- 
 garised Whig. He has continued a domestic 
 sentiment for aboriginal races and the foreign 
 policy, which enabled England to lord Europe 
 without having to pay or fight for the privilege. 
 They are the class whom Napoleon gibed for 
 shopkeepers, and shop they have kept ever 
 since under divine and sometimes royal pat- 
 ronage. But the Liberals were no hypocrites 
 in going to war for Belgium. " Suffer the lit- 
 tle nations " was a Gladstonian text, though 
 Parnell complained that Ireland was forgotten. 
 I heard a leading statesman whisper that the 
 German invasion of Belgium inclined him to 
 believe in the Divine government of the 
 universe. Nothing less could have brought 
 in John Bull. 
 
 The Conservative party is built upon an 
 outvoted squirarchy and a state Church which 
 is in a minority in the state. As a political 
 force they have held terms of power, thanks 
 to wars and war scares. They have placed 
 their trust in brilliant adventures ever since 
 
112 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 Jacobite days, and they have maintained the 
 pomp and prestige of Empire. 
 
 Out of the brilliant "Young England" 
 episode they drew Disraeli. They suffered 
 his leadership as the price of political victory, 
 as later they underwent complete collapse for 
 the sake of another novus homo, Chamberlain. 
 Disraeli's career was a romance such as no 
 Eastern vizier or Western plutocrat could tell. 
 He began as a pioneer in dress and an sesthete 
 of words. It was Disraeli, and not Oscar Wilde, 
 who wrote: "I like a sailor's life much, though 
 it spoils the toilette!" Wilde wrote his life 
 into plays, but Disraeli was his own actor. 
 Wilde accused nature of copying literature, 
 but Disraeli actually made his novels come 
 true. In Tancred, written in the thirties, he 
 described the military occupation of Cyprus 
 which he carried out as a prime minister 
 forty years later. As a Jew he had no com- 
 punction in threatening white Russia with 
 black Indians on behalf of an Asiatic power 
 like Turkey. It was a striking but accursed 
 policy to bring Indian troops to Europe. Un- 
 fortunately, it took root, and we have heard 
 a Minister threaten "Gurkhas to Potsdam." 
 That a Christian Kaiser has enlisted Islam 
 against fellow Christians cannot excuse a 
 
THE POLITICIANS 113 
 
 breach of this — the true Aryan heresy. Who- 
 soever pits black against white — should be 
 anathema! There is one Aryan race and 
 Christ is its prophet! 
 
 Disraeli alternately flattered and fascinated 
 England. He began his career by writing a 
 revolutionary epic in the plains of Troy, and 
 he ended by capping the solemn British Con- 
 stitution with an Oriental tiara. The day of 
 his death was added as "Primrose Day" to 
 the national calendar, while Gladstone's was 
 forgotten though it coincided with Ascension 
 Day. Disraeli's mantle was divided between 
 Salisbury and Randolph Churchill. The for- 
 mer continued his foreign policy, while ad- 
 mitting that Disraeli had "backed the wrong 
 horse" in supporting Turkey. Randolph 
 Churchill inherited and perfected the ideal of 
 Tory democracy. He made himself "Young 
 England" rampant, and he troubled the right- 
 eous Gladstone sore. 
 
 Of Randolph Churchill I have a slight 
 memory. He was my uncle by marriage, and 
 I was his first godson. He had married an 
 American in days when such an alliance was 
 considered as experimental as mating with 
 Martians. There was a conservative suspi- 
 cion against American wives, but Randolph be- 
 
114 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 longed to the noble army of Progressives. His 
 career was too brilliant to be lasting. I only 
 remember him as the fallen ex-Chancellor given 
 over to haunting regrets and unattainable de- 
 sires. He scarcely noticed the presence of 
 children in the house. 
 
 In those days Winston was a fearless sandy- 
 haired youth occupied with the custody of a 
 moated stronghold called "the den" and the 
 drilling of a dozen nervous boys. For Winston 
 his father always used the dimissory mood. 
 Yet few sons have done more for their fathers. 
 But Randolph was not responsible for his 
 inability to appreciate Winston's budding 
 genius. He was suffering an agonising decline 
 from the political world in which he once had 
 his whole being. The story has been told 
 with dispassionate pathos in Winston's Life 
 of his father — perhaps the greatest filial trib- 
 ute in the English language. No antagonist 
 could have passed Randolph's steel but his 
 own reckless blade. Like a political Saul, he 
 fell finally upon his own weapon. Vain trips 
 were made to Africa, Asia, and America, but 
 health and balance were denied to a brain 
 still winged with genius and weighted with 
 its ambitions. The collapse of an aeroplane 
 in mid-air is always more terrible than the 
 
THE POLITICIANS 115 
 
 overturning of a hackney-cab in the street. 
 Randolph fell from meteoric heights, and 
 men wondered as much as they pitied. 
 
 In the schoolroom at home we tasted 
 strange fruits, like the fruits of the Bible, 
 which he brought back from his travels, and 
 the youngest of us played with Oriental dolls he 
 remembered to buy for us. During his dying 
 dash through Japan he purchased whole em- 
 poriums with the magnificence of the reputed 
 milord. Eccentric though he became, it is 
 said that the Orientals did not find him madder 
 than other Englishmen ! I do not know any- 
 thing nobler than his wife's devotion during 
 his agony. Together with a doctor she ac- 
 companied him on that nightmare trip round 
 the world, exposed to the lynx eyes of the 
 press and the subtler advances of disease. 
 She attended him to dinners, where he was 
 liable to substitute well-known truths for 
 conventional courtesies in his speech, and she 
 cheerfully crossed the tropical seas, when it 
 was necessary to include a leaden casket 
 among their baggage. I cannot withhold 
 this tribute to my aunt, though she has since 
 achieved more mundane fame as the editor 
 of the first Magazine de luxe, as a playwright, 
 and the captain of a hospital ship. 
 
116 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 Early in 1895 Randolph returned, and died 
 amid a burst of sympathy such as was ac- 
 corded to Byron, whose genius he resembled 
 in some ways. Endowed with brilliances of 
 verse and speechcraft respectively, they were 
 the spendthrifts of their own minds. In- 
 tractable to would-be superiors, contemptuous 
 of native stupidity, and careless of conventions, 
 they amazed a bourgeois England. Rejected 
 at home, they were hailed as dazzling types of 
 their race abroad. Keenly alive to adventure, 
 they trailed the bleeding pageant of their 
 lives overseas. Finally, they wore themselves 
 out in impossible causes — Byron in the at- 
 tempt to achieve freedom for a worthless 
 Greece, and Randolph in the yet forlorner 
 hope of associating genius with the policy of 
 the Tory party. 
 
 The people loved Randolph because he was 
 domineering, utterly fearless, and a little un- 
 scrupulous. As a schoolboy he had shown 
 the same traits. At Eton he had three fags 
 whom he used to summon by a system of 
 knocks on the floor — one for Trower, two for 
 Freer (my informant), and three for Beres- 
 ford-Pierce. He ordered Freer once to write 
 out some lines he had incurred as a punish- 
 ment. As a result, Freer could not do his own 
 
THE POLITICIANS 117 
 
 work and appealed to his fagmaster. Ran- 
 dolph sent for all available Greek and Latin 
 lexicons, and, secreting Freer at the bottom 
 of the stairs, hurled himself down with the 
 lexicons and disappeared. Result — the Dame 
 ran out and found Freer suffering from an 
 apparent accident which incapacitated him 
 from going into school, but not from writing 
 out Randolph's lines. 
 
 In many senses Randolph was not a Vic- 
 torian statesman, but he knew how to em- 
 ploy a tart and careless truth of speech, which 
 often made Gladstone's involved wisdom ap- 
 pear more involved and less wise. In France 
 he could have played the part of a Boulanger, 
 and in America, perhaps that of a Roosevelt, 
 who has certainly tried to make his party as 
 Progressive as Randolph wished to make his. 
 Similarly, both found refreshment in African 
 hunting trips, which each described by letter 
 to a wondering world. Though he mocked all 
 that was dear to bourgeoisie, he came nearer 
 than any of his generation to the "Merrie 
 England," which, deep under Puritanism and 
 the Nonconformist Conscience, still underlies 
 English character. He was not abashed to 
 call his fellow Ministers, W. H. Smith and 
 Lord Cross, "Marshall and Snelgrove," or to 
 
118 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 brand Gladstone as "the Moloch of Midlo- 
 thian." His dream was for the old-fashioned 
 Tory party to be sustained by the votes of the 
 crowds who vibrated to his voice. But from 
 Tory democracy both his party and himself 
 came to be disillusioned, and when he slipped 
 his own legions trod him underfoot. With cyn- 
 ical candour Salisbury accepted his resignation, 
 because, as he said, he had always thought 
 him mad. 
 
 I can remember Salisbury at the memorial 
 service for Randolph in Westminster. He 
 seemed only to need a white ruff and a velvet 
 doublet to become one of those Elizabethan 
 statesmen who knew so well when to wait 
 and when to act, when to bite and when to 
 swallow — whose speech sounded most generous 
 when it was most ironic. An Abbey requiem 
 is the most impressive rite left to England. 
 The organ tones seem to touch the statues of 
 the mighty dead to attention, and for a mo- 
 ment the dull glow of tapers casts a flicker 
 upon their viewless eyes — as yet another mem- 
 ory is added to their oblivion. 
 
 Randolph had foreseen some such scene in 
 a cynical mood, and had even prophesied 
 what a charming letter Gladstone would write 
 to his widow proposing burial in the Abbey. 
 He was happier buried near Blenheim. 
 
THE POLITICIANS 119 
 
 And here it may be noted as a characteristic 
 of dying chivalry in English politics that no 
 one paid more deference or attention to Ran- 
 dolph's last broken speeches than his old rival, 
 Gladstone. It may be recalled that when 
 Lord Tweedmouth suffered mental breakdown 
 while speaking in the Lords on Campbell- 
 Bannerman's death no one in politics or the 
 press took the slightest advantage. 
 
 The Tory party could raise no new star 
 after Randolph until they adopted Chamber- 
 lain, an ex-Republican, who had shocked their 
 fathers even more than Disraeli had amused 
 their grandfathers. His advent followed a cu- 
 rious sequence. When Dilke and Chamber- 
 lain together formed Gladstone's radical wing, 
 they could pull the old man unto restiveness. 
 A fateful divorce case dislodged Dilke from 
 public life, and Chamberlain found himself less 
 powerful alone. He was glad of the Home- 
 Rule issue to change parties, but his subse- 
 quent policy of tariff reform ruined both him- 
 self and his new party. It was not tariff 
 reform so much as imperial unity which sprang 
 from the Boer War. Chamberlain, who be- 
 gan as a Unitarian Sunday-school teacher, 
 brought down the pillars of the House of Lords 
 in his fall. Tragic ends befell the last of the 
 Victorian statesmen — Churchill, Parnell, Dilke, 
 
120 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 and Chamberlain. Failure grim and even 
 ghastly clouded their last phases. Chamber- 
 lain, the last of them, died melodramatically a 
 few weeks before the Great War was to test 
 the Empire he had dreamed to make an Em- 
 pire. 
 
 Churchill and Chamberlain bequeathed their 
 sons to the Tory party. It would be difficult 
 to say which created the greatest difficulty 
 to that party — Winston Churchill by leaving 
 or Austen Chamberlain by remaining. Win- 
 ston I knew ever since he was the enfant terrible 
 of a home circle. As a boy he was untidy, un- 
 manageable, and quick of speech. When he 
 returned from Harrow with a torn jacket he 
 replied to all remonstrance: "How should I 
 not be out of elbows, when my father is out 
 of office?" His adventurous spirit fastened 
 on King Solomon's Mines as his favourite 
 reading. He read it twelve times, and once 
 drove its author haggard in the course of a 
 cross-examination. "What did you mean?" 
 he insisted on one disputed point, and the 
 author confessed he did not know himself. 
 Once Winston was taken to the Tower of 
 London, but declined both train or bus as too 
 prosaic means of conveyance. Finally he sent 
 cheerful word home that he had started "with 
 
THE POLITICIANS 121 
 
 a drunken cabman and a frisky horse !" The 
 secret of his soul is adventure. 
 
 Though his Harrow Master, Bishop Weldon, 
 prophesied his future success just as Bishop 
 Sam Wilberforce had prophesied it of Ran- 
 dolph, Winston learned as little at Harrow as 
 his father at Eton. He showed his typical 
 courage there by embracing his old nurse 
 amid the mockery of the school. Under his 
 fighting mask he has always carried a generous 
 heart. I think he was the only Minister of 
 the Crown who wept in the House at the dec- 
 laration of war. 
 
 He was self-educated, for he was never sent 
 to a University. He went into the army, and 
 taught himself literature and history in his 
 tent at night during his campaigns — of which 
 he rapidly saw four on three continents. 
 During the Boer War he came down to Eton 
 and gave me the best advice I have ever heard 
 on education: "Do not turn your mind into 
 a damned ammunition wagon, but into a 
 rifle to fire off other people's ammunition." 
 When he entered politics, journalism lost a 
 vivid pen. The combination of American and 
 Marlborough blood across the ages produced 
 what might have been a super war corre- 
 spondent. No individual in the cabinet knew 
 
122 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 the smack and taste of war as Winston, who 
 was one of the few Englishmen who could 
 appreciate Mary Johnston's wonderful im- 
 pressionist novel of the American Civil War — 
 Cease Firing. He found it so true to war's de- 
 tails that he could not understand how a 
 woman could have written it. 
 
 His career is the most brilliant in recent 
 politics. The best English politicians are 
 necessarily adventurers. They can only enter 
 the lists after single duel with the largest 
 antagonist in sight. Disraeli sought out Peel, 
 Randolph Churchill challenged Gladstone, 
 Lloyd George won fame by bearding Cham- 
 berlain in his den, and Winston fastened 
 mercilessly on Balfour. He mocked him out 
 of office perhaps a little bitterly, remembering 
 his father's desertion. His father called Glad- 
 stone "an old man in a hurry" in the same 
 mood that Winston compared Balfour in polit- 
 ical rout to Charley's Aunt — "still running." 
 
 Winston passed from Colonial to Home Of- 
 fice, and from Home Office to Admiralty. He 
 joined the Admiralty a "little navyite," but 
 he immediately adopted serious views on sea 
 power. He devoted himself to testing sub- 
 marines rather than "teasing goldfish," as 
 he called his attacks on plutocracy. Intimate 
 
THE POLITICIANS 123 
 
 friends noticed a change in his character. 
 Thought succeeded ebullition, and he was 
 the first of the cabinet to read the writing on 
 the wall of the world. Three years before the 
 war he confessed his fears in private. I re- 
 member once at lunch comparing the Persian 
 menace in Greek history to the German 
 scare. Instantly his face hardened. 
 
 He returned from the German manoeuvres, 
 which he witnessed as the Kaiser's guest, with 
 one grim comment on his lips: "I can only 
 thank God there is a sea between England 
 and that army!" Some have since seen 
 reason to give thanks that he had the super- 
 vision of that sea. 
 
 There were public prophets like Roberts 
 and Beresford, who shouted their alarms from 
 the housetops, but the public treated their 
 speech as it always does the speech of Irishmen. 
 Only in time of war are the Irish of serious 
 account. Beresford's epigram — "battleships 
 are cheaper than battles" — was surely worth 
 considering. The German war scare, dating 
 from 1900, fell flat in England because people 
 remembered a similar French scare as well as 
 the cry of "Bear" which had been raised once 
 too often in the seventies against Russia. 
 
 At the Admiralty Winston found there were 
 
124 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 closer watchers and more interested critics 
 scrutinising him than any at home. Not for 
 nothing were codes stolen and ships dogged 
 by spies from sea to sea. He realised what 
 was coming, and he had just the time, though 
 not all the support, necessary to put the grand 
 fleet in order for the day. 
 
 His contribution to the national defence 
 was the only part which on trial proved pre- 
 pared. I remember passing through the Ad- 
 miralty and the War Office consecutively in 
 August, 1914. The latter seemed in a state of 
 chaotic confusion, the passages choked with 
 supernumerary clerks writing and feeding be- 
 hind screens. The Admiralty was like a silent 
 morgue. Only an occasional messenger passed 
 down the corridors. In the midst sat the 
 Lords of Admiralty before a board with the 
 positions of the ships marked in miniature 
 upon the seven seas beneath the gigantic 
 wireless that communicated with them in 
 as many minutes. 
 
 If Winston had died on the day the fleet 
 was mobilised, he would have fulfilled his 
 ambition, which had been to enjoy a decade 
 of power and achievement. He used to say 
 sadly of the spiritual side of life for which he 
 had so little time: "One world is enough at 
 
THE POLITICIANS 125 
 
 a time." Though no devotee, he was reverent 
 because he had imagination. After his escape 
 from prison in Pretoria he confessed: "There 
 is a God that looks after Winston." Religious 
 intolerance was as distasteful to him as of- 
 ficial stupidity, and he found enough of both 
 in each of his parties. 
 
 In the day of achievement he was replaced 
 for unknown reasons, possibly not unassociated 
 with public clamour. There was something 
 very generous in the welcome he gave to Bal- 
 four, his father's old supplanter and twenty- 
 five years later his. Randoph Churchill had 
 once written from political exile: "So Arthur 
 Balfour is really leader and Tory democracy is 
 at an end." Winston could have noted in his 
 father's words: "After all, A. B. cannot beat 
 my record." 
 
 Only dire extremity induced the Liberals 
 to call Lord Lansdowne and Balfour out of 
 retirement — a historic pair. If Lord Lans- 
 downe was really the last of the Whigs, there 
 were reasons for regarding Balfour as the last 
 of the Tories. The Tory leader, Bonar Law, 
 was a colonial, and real Tories are born not 
 imported. Lansdowne found himself excusing 
 the official nightmare as the South African 
 disasters fifteen years before. In 1900 Arnold 
 
126 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 White wrote in Efficiency and Empire of a 
 supposed European war: 
 
 Our institutions would have been found wanting. We 
 should have listened to Lord Lansdowne . . . revealing the 
 fact of his being "struck'' with our deficiencies. In that case 
 we should have had our Colenso, our Stormberg, and Magers- 
 fontein on a larger scale. 
 
 Fifteen years have brought them on a colos- 
 sal scale. Few things have been more pathetic 
 than Balfour and Lansdowne recalled from 
 grass to drag the clumsy plough of coalition. 
 
 English history is an automatic repeater. 
 The same character under similar circum- 
 stances produces the same results. Mr. Wing- 
 field Stratford, the most patriotic of historians, 
 compared the England of the Crimean War 
 with that of the eighteenth-century wars with 
 Spain and found "the same swaggering con- 
 fidence, the same choice of a safe enemy . . . 
 a reluctant chief Minister, the same criminal 
 unreadiness for war." It was to be the same 
 before 1914. Asquith was as reluctant to go 
 to war with Germany as his prototype Aber- 
 deen had been to attack Russia. It was Win- 
 ston Churchill and Haldane who convinced 
 the cabinet of the necessity of war in 1914. 
 But the old tradition to be unprepared and 
 to neglect warning had remained. From the 
 
THE POLITICIANS 127 
 
 Hundred Years' War to Waterloo all Eng- 
 land's wars had pivoted on the Low Coun- 
 tries, yet at her height of world supremacy she 
 was unable to save Belgium at her gates. 
 Antwerp from being a bolt in the blue should 
 have exercised her strategy ever since Glad- 
 stone wrote to his War Minister in 1870: "What 
 I should like is to study the means of sending 
 twenty thousand men to Antwerp with as 
 much promptitude as at the Trent affair we 
 sent ten thousand men to Canada." 
 
 But England has preferred to send be- 
 lated expeditions to meet disasters elsewhere. 
 Neither the old-fashioned Whigs nor Tories 
 were responsible for the government which 
 faced the war. It was a middle-class collec- 
 tion with some help from Jews and Celts. 
 A bourgeoisie is only effective under piping 
 conditions of peace, but war requires a mili- 
 tary aristocracy. It is not wise to abolish 
 feudalism from civilisation, while leaving its 
 close relative, war, on the horizon. 
 
 The English political system has attracted 
 lawyers rather than business men. The glib 
 tongue is even more successful than the ready 
 purse. Part of the political game is to be able 
 to prove that whitewashed blackness is nearer 
 white than black. Transferred to a scene 
 
128 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 where traditions and business sense can be 
 discounted, great lawyers quickly become great 
 politicians. The turning-point in English his- 
 tory found an English, a Welsh, a Scotch, and a 
 Jewish lawyer taking turns at the wheel — As- 
 quith, Lloyd George, Haldane, and Isaacs. 
 
 Since the opening of the century, the Em- 
 pire had prayed for a great man, and though 
 Lloyd George gave the sound and Grey af- 
 fected the silence of one — the Empire still 
 prays. Lloyd George, like O'Connell before 
 him, was the Celt harrowing Saxon institu- 
 tions. Grey was the trump-card and the 
 mystery man of the cabinet. The peace of 
 Europe seemed involved in his discretion. 
 "Straightforwardness" was always put for- 
 ward, and deservedly, as his virtue. But a 
 time has come when people have begun to ask 
 if straightforwardness is all they required of 
 their diplomatists or sheer courage the only 
 needful of the soldier. There was an old 
 teacher of Mathematics at Cambridge who 
 used to counsel "a little low cunning" in 
 meeting problems. Had Grey really the abil- 
 ity to foresee and the patriotism to realise that 
 England would never have a better chance 
 to' defeat Germany ? Or was he only a diplo- 
 matic angler adrift, casting a feverish but 
 
THE POLITICIANS 129 
 
 lucky fly over the Balkan eddy? A time has 
 since come when his position in the Balkans 
 has been compared to "Parsival at a poker 
 party." Whether he foresaw events or not, he 
 suffered them to do the work. He has the 
 credit for having licked the entente into shape 
 after it had been swaddled by Edward VII. 
 Between them they prepared, though they did 
 not plot, side-currents leading to the Great 
 War. History will decide which, or whether 
 either, can claim to be called " Edward the 
 Peacemaker." But Grey's fellow countrymen 
 will forgive him, for lying is not a national tal- 
 ent, and they have since taken to heart the 
 most succinct sentence in Carlyle — "Diplo- 
 macy is clouds: beating of your enemies is 
 land and sea." 
 
 In default of the heaven-sent, Herbert As- 
 quith led. Brilliantly read, practical, and 
 legally argumentative, he was the exemplar 
 of Jowett of Balliol. He harnessed the Non- 
 conformist Conscience and Free Trade to a 
 rumbling old doctrinaire coach, if not to a 
 fiery chariot — and in it he drove through the 
 Lords and over the Union. A plain, blunt 
 man fit to rule, but not particularly inspired to 
 save an Empire — without much enthusiasm or 
 humour to spare. Very symbolic is the story 
 
130 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 told of him at an entertainment of French 
 delegates. Asquith wore the uniform of an 
 elder brother of Trinity House, which drew a 
 query from a visitor. The incarnation of Eng- 
 lish Dissent explained: " Je suis le frere aine 
 de la Trinite!" The Frenchman bowed po- 
 litely and said: "Ah — nous n'avons jpas ga 
 en France !" 
 
 Asquith may be judicially stupid, but he is 
 never unreasonably foolish. He refuses to be 
 unbalanced, for he keeps his footing to his 
 own subjects. He is suspicious of dreamers, 
 especially of the fervid company of "cranks 
 and Christs." He only respects what he can 
 understand. Everything else appears to him 
 like so much froth on the changeful tide of 
 the world. He could not appreciate Ulster's 
 ideal, or the imperial dream of the Jingo, or 
 the sentiment of the Catholic. He offended 
 them all mortally. He would not allow the 
 latter the simple satisfaction of carrying the 
 Host through the London streets, and he 
 underestimated the soul of the Ulster Prot- 
 estants. I remember his cynical remark on 
 hearing of Archbishop Alexander's dream of 
 reunion with Rome: "He must be in his 
 dotage." His branch of oratory has been de- 
 scribed as "a plain tale without any mis- 
 
THE POLITICIANS 131 
 
 sionary fervour," which could apply equally 
 to his life. He has the English prejudice 
 against missionaries, whether of creeds or tar- 
 iffs. Decency without humbug is his motto. 
 His choice of Bridges for Laureate was as 
 typical as his selection of Lang for Archbishop. 
 In each case he chose culture without mysti- 
 cism. 
 
 Yet his lack of imagination proved a strength 
 more than a weakness. He was not aghast 
 or appalled at Armageddon occurring during 
 his administration. He measured events and 
 men from the law courts, and the unveiling of 
 history was to him like a political panorama. 
 Common sense and practical wisdom upheld 
 a man to whom the splendour of failure, the 
 idealism of the fanatic, and death for a dream 
 meant little. It was not in his blood or in 
 his upbringing. His college teacher, Jowett, 
 had mocked Newman, and his political leader, 
 Gladstone, betrayed Gordon. Yet these two, 
 Gordon and Newman, were the sweetest Eng- 
 lish gentlemen that ever trod the earth, for 
 whose sake many have tried to love a some- 
 what unlovable race. 
 
 Life brought Asquith great successes without 
 sharp trials. His son repeated his success at 
 Oxford. A most brilliant hostess became his 
 
132 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 wife. Ireland, Wales, and Jewry bent their 
 necks to uphold his administration. In vain 
 Socialist, Suffragette, and Carsonite raged 
 about his feet. Asquith's easy-chair seemed 
 to roll above the water-floods. 
 
 With perfect equanimity he faced the World 
 War. When the hearts of others were failing 
 them for wrath or fear, he took his glass of 
 wine and played his rubber of bridge after the 
 day's work. He had the common sense to 
 know that teetotalism will not vanquish the 
 Hun. He retained mental elasticity and per- 
 formed his allotted business as usual. He knew 
 perfectly well that he was for the time irre- 
 placeable. There are two public men whom 
 the Great War cannot change much, and who 
 were perhaps born to see England through her 
 trouble — the lineal descendant of "Farmer 
 George" and the favourite disciple of Ben- 
 jamin Jowett. 
 
IRELAND AND THE IRISH 
 
 To write of Ireland among English institu- 
 tions seems a bull or as the Greeks called it, an 
 oxymoron (sharp folly). Nevertheless, Eng- 
 land would not be what she is without Ireland. 
 For good or for bad, for sunshine or for rain 
 (chiefly the latter), England and Ireland seem 
 doomed to cross-entanglement, with their pres- 
 ent continually marred in the future by each 
 other's past. 
 
 Whatever political trouble the Irish cause 
 and however many prizes of church or state 
 are taken by the Scotch, the English owe 
 much to the Celtic fringe. Celtic influences 
 have purged the Anglo-Saxon of much original 
 Teutonism. Religion, and later the sporting 
 spirit, passed from the Celt into England. As 
 horse-racing came from Ireland, so golf, the 
 grandmother of cricket, came from Scotland. 
 It is symbolic of Irish influences that at one 
 time the names of the leading jockeys and 
 Jesuits in England were drawn from the same 
 clans — Rickaby and Maher. 
 
 Ireland is a paradox. The sages say there 
 
 133 
 
134 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 are three paradoxes which shall never be un- 
 derstood — the Trinity, Woman, and Ireland, 
 but the greatest paradox is Ireland. She is 
 the exception to all rules. She is the most 
 distressful and yet the most easily contented 
 country. She is the most Catholic in creed, 
 and in her folk-lore the most pagan country 
 in Europe. Her people are the most feudal, 
 and yet they produced O'Connell the creator 
 of all modern democracy. They are accused 
 of failing economically under both free trade 
 and protection. They are accused of building 
 too many Catholic cathedrals, but in Dublin 
 they have been indicted for not building one 
 — (as though they intended to take back 
 the Protestant erection). In sum, witnesses 
 against them disagree, for Ireland remains the 
 home of the unexpected. It is only during a 
 strike that Irish streets present any signs of 
 activity. She was the only country to in- 
 crease her population as the result of being a 
 belligerent in a European war. When gloom 
 obscured the world, Ireland became "the one 
 bright spot." Nevertheless, it took a war of 
 nations to bring Irish factions out of that at- 
 mosphere of suspicion and rancour in which 
 Irish life is lived. Professor Jackson of Cam- 
 bridge, after serving on the Irish University 
 
IRELAND AND THE IRISH 135 
 
 question, told us he had made four discoveries 
 in Ireland: 
 
 1. That everything is a secret. 
 
 2. That Englishmen are honest fools. 
 
 3. That everybody is suspect. 
 
 4. That the best whisky is kept in Ireland. 
 
 Behind the factions and the politics of Ire- 
 land live a remnant of those who still speak 
 the Irish tongue. On the Kerry borders, the 
 Connemara bogs, and the Donegal Highlands 
 lingers the oldest vernacular speech in Europe. 
 Gaelic was spoken when Caesar landed in Brit- 
 ain. Compared to Gaelic, English is a mongrel 
 without a syntax. An Irish scholar laughs at 
 the inflection of English verbs much as the 
 English make fun of a Chinaman's pidgin- 
 English. 
 
 The Irish speakers may be illiterate, but 
 their wisdom is older than printing. Theirs 
 is a week which dedicates no day to Thor. 
 They know the stars by unclassical names. 
 Even the Pole-star (of the Northmen sailors) 
 is "the Star of Knowledge" (of the Celtic 
 Druids) to them. Orion's Belt in Irish Ireland 
 is "the King's Wand." I once collected names 
 by which the stars were known in Ireland be- 
 fore the Norman invasion from an old woman 
 living between Muckish and Errigal moun- 
 
136 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 tains. She was afterward in trouble for selling 
 illicit liquor, but she had the "old knowledge" 
 as it is called. In that part of Ireland the folk 
 live in an atmosphere of fairy. Their affec- 
 tions are barely earthly, for they leave mar- 
 riages to be fixed by the priest. The passion- 
 ate go to America or take to drink, for their 
 women have beauty and not fire. The Ave 
 Maria has frozen their lips. But the folk have 
 humour and bitterness and religious ecstasies 
 and fierce sports to fill the emotional cup 
 which other peoples sacrifice at one fell swoop 
 to lust. Because lust was not good enough, 
 the Celt invented romance. The Church, like 
 a wise old mother, has not interfered much 
 with their custom and legend. In Gaeldom 
 superstition is lost in imagination, and there 
 is sometimes slight difference between charm 
 and prayer, except that charms are always for 
 temporal needs. In an Irish household there 
 is a hereditary prayer for milking the kine, 
 another for raking the ashes over the hearth 
 fire, which is never allowed to go out. There 
 are prayers at bed-making or at catching sight 
 of the sun. There are formal benedictions for 
 taking snuff or for picking herbs. Until the 
 day of the dispensary doctor the Irish had a 
 fairy pharmacopoeia. If they did use fox oil 
 
IRELAND AND THE IRISH 137 
 
 or a burnt swallow, the cures were not less 
 numerous than under modern conditions. In 
 the dark corners of cabins, in deserted lanes, 
 and by Druid wells the old ranns can still be 
 heard. It is only the old people who were 
 born before the great famine swept Ireland to 
 the bone, who have the "old knowledge.' ' An 
 old man, the last story-teller of his townland, 
 once showed me the blood charm, warning me 
 never to put it to paper. He could stop a 
 horse from bleeding as easy as he could blow 
 the froth from it. I knew an eldest son of an 
 eldest son, who was visited by people from 
 Belfast to be charmed of their warts, and an 
 old shepherd, nearly a hundred years old, who 
 rubbed men and sheep for "the rose" (ery- 
 sipelas) . 
 
 In the Gaelic tradition every flower and beast 
 was remembered for the part it played in the 
 Passion. Peasants still spare the beetle that 
 put the soldiers off the Lord's track, and re- 
 mark that the midges bite sharp since they 
 ate Judas ! Still they shudder at the curlew — 
 the Juif errant of the moors — that once mocked 
 Calvary. If the curlew's cry is that of a lost 
 soul, the cheery chanticleer, who proclaims 
 some such inanity as "cock-a-doodle-doo" to 
 the Saxon world, calls with every dawn to the 
 
138 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 reverent Gael: "Mac an oiyer slaun!" (the 
 Son of the Virgin is safe). 
 
 Love of animals in Ireland is not confined 
 to the horse. The Irish saints admitted fox 
 and badger as monks into their communities. 
 There were two modern bishops who took 
 their reverent dogs into their cathedrals, of 
 whom one was Archbishop Croke, the dread 
 of English statesmen. When he lay dying dur- 
 ing Holy Week of 1902, his pet dog entered 
 and sat solemnly on his empty throne between 
 the vested canons during the service of Tene- 
 brse. To those present it seemed a solemn 
 sign of death. A thousand years previously 
 St. Columba's death was foretold by his old 
 white horse. Philosophies change, but things 
 that are stranger than philosophies do not. 
 
 Very curious customs surround the dead in 
 Ireland of which "the wake" and "the keen" 
 have been plagiarised and debased by writers. 
 They all spring from the Celtic belief (older 
 than St. Patrick) that the dead do not die. 
 Tobacco-pipes are often left on graves in- 
 stead of wreaths, and at old-fashioned wakes 
 offerings of snuff are piled on the body of the 
 corpse, from which each friend takes a pinch. 
 Hence the familiar greeting of old folk ex- 
 changing snuff: "I never took a better pinch 
 
IRELAND AND THE IRISH 139 
 
 off the navel" — followed by the time-honoured 
 response: "May the souls of all yours rest in 
 peace by the grace of God." 
 
 There are a number of funeral games re- 
 served for wake nights such as "Boxing the 
 Connaughtman" and "the Sitting Brogue." 
 As the hours of night pass, the living forget 
 the dead and dance, for to the Celts life and 
 death are as one. A priest told me once of 
 an old beggar woman who died in a ditch in 
 his parish. Of their charity the neighbours 
 waked her for three merry nights — till the 
 next townland felt lonesome, and begged the 
 loan of the body for a dance themselves. It 
 was high time before the priest had her buried. 
 This spirit has reached the upper classes, for 
 on a famous occasion an Irish peer celebrated 
 the opening of a family vault by a county 
 ball ! The priests have suppressed wakes and 
 keening lately. I heard a pathetic story of a 
 priest who officially forbade the keen. Then 
 his brother was drowned and "he let the piti- 
 fulest, beautifulest keen ever heard in the 
 parish." The people have the quaint and 
 weird colouring in them that is too often 
 bleached by civilisation. The invisible seems 
 the more likely to their untutored minds, and 
 the temporal not to be depended upon. All 
 
140 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 current Irish philosophy is summed in the 
 saying, "It will all be the same in a hundred 
 years" — which in its most important aspect 
 is true. The universal answer to "What is the 
 time?" is "Time enough." Only a people 
 who have banked in eternity can afford to 
 waste their time. 
 
 Mystery and beauty still stalk the land. 
 I knew a woman whose child was drowned in 
 a well, and the child used to pull her skirt 
 every time she went to draw water. She used 
 to touch barrenness with a twig of enchanted 
 blackthorn. She had other children who be- 
 came prosperous in New York. Only two 
 generations separate the cultured Irish-Amer- 
 ican millionaire from the poor but God-loved 
 race who habited Ireland "from the Flood to 
 the Famine." 
 
 As the old Irish tongue died out, there arose 
 a literary compassion in England which took 
 the form of a Celtic movement. A school of 
 writers arose who made literary capital by 
 belauding or belittling, libelling or labelling 
 the Irish. Thanks to an audience of the 
 middle class fleeing from English Teutonism 
 and Philistinism, these writers won a cockney 
 fame. Only Yeats deserved laurelled rank, 
 though he was not an Irish poet at all, so 
 
IRELAND AND THE IRISH 141 
 
 much as a Rossetti lost in what old writers 
 called "a Druidical mist." The only other 
 figure in the movement was Synge, who, in 
 his masterpiece, grafted a glorified dialect of 
 Anglo-Irish to an absurd plot. His "Playboy" 
 infuriated native audiences who had expected 
 an Irish D'Artagnan or Quixote from him at 
 least. The Playboy only tried "to kill his 
 dad with a loy," but parricides are unknown 
 in Ireland, though I remember one unfortunate 
 enough to shoot his father accidentally. He 
 was always called "Bagdad," with that Irish 
 felicity for nicknames which called an agent, 
 who was being perpetually missed, "Wood- 
 cock!" 
 
 There are fine phrases in Synge. Who can 
 forget — "a young gaffer would capsize the 
 stars," or "coaching through Limbo!" But 
 they were not Anglo-Irish, so much as pseudo- 
 Shakespearian. George Russell (A. E.) is the 
 real Irish poet. Oddly enough the last of the 
 Bards is also the first Irish Communist. 
 
 Ireland is a land where a few leading men 
 in politics or literature are ever playing to 
 the gallery of the gods. The people them- 
 selves seem only happy when Heaven and 
 earth are listening to their dissensions. There 
 are fixed sides on political, religious, and 
 
142 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 literary questions between which there is no 
 place for canvass or conversion. Celtic gram- 
 mar can be as fierce a question as Home Rule. 
 Ireland is a house divided against itself. If 
 one side of the house went under, the other 
 side would have lost its sounding-board. 
 
 I shall never forget or regret contesting 
 Derry City as a Nationalist in 1910. Mr. 
 Redmond launched me with a classical speech 
 upon the maelstrom. Nobody cared a straw 
 for free trade or taxes, for home or foreign 
 policy. I lost a stand-up religious faction 
 fight by small majorities. The halt, the dying, 
 and the dead came to the poll. One voter died 
 trying to vote for me and a funeral-wreath fig- 
 ured in my election expenses. I retired later 
 in favour of my chief Protestant supporter, 
 David Hogg, and the seat was won for Home 
 Rule. Hogg was perhaps the last of the ex- 
 tinct race of Radical Ulstermen who stood the 
 siege of Derry and won the battle of Bunker 
 Hill — in each case against an English king. 
 
 But so fierce was the feeling evolved by the 
 Carson campaign that Protestants would not 
 receive the sacrament where Home Rulers of- 
 ficiated. It is difficult for any one who has not 
 been behind the scenes of an Ulster election 
 to realise the Mohammedan hatred of the 
 
IRELAND AND THE IRISH 143 
 
 Cross among Orangemen, or the holy horror 
 among Catholics for a "black Protestant." 
 An Irishman's vote is decided at baptism and 
 remains so until death polls all "beneath the 
 Green." I believe my rival was brought to 
 canvass the vote of the local "holy man." 
 Somebody inquired the nature of his holiness. 
 "Well, he just sits there all day and curses the 
 Pope!" 
 
 No power less than German bayonets could 
 bring these stubborn peoples together. 
 
 The division in Ireland is religious and 
 not racial. There are as many Celts in the 
 Orange ranks as there are of old Norman and 
 Cromwellian blood among the Catholic Na- 
 tionalists. An O'Kane used to lead the Orange- 
 men, and it was an O'Flanagan who urged the 
 Protestants "to kick the Queen's Crown into 
 the Boyne" rather than be disestablished. 
 
 The secret of English misrule is that only 
 Irishmen can understand the Irish. George 
 Wyndham was the only fit ruler England ever 
 sent to Ireland. Descended from the mar- 
 tyred Lord Edward Fitzgerald, catholic- 
 minded, a soldier, and an editor of poetry, he 
 seemed one born to solve the Irish question. 
 He was the first Irish Secretary to visit a Na- 
 tionalist member in his home. Unfortunately, 
 
144 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 for his generous and sanguine nature he was 
 assailed by the lower clamour of his own party 
 and, when in difficulties, politely abandoned 
 by Balfour. I met him on his civilising tour 
 amongst Ulster landlords. I can recall the 
 tones of dreamy persuasiveness with which he 
 urged his scheme of Devolution or disguised 
 Home Rule to them, and they wondering to 
 what devilment he was up. His grief, when 
 betrayed by men who thought indeed he was 
 betraying them, was terrible. His tears were 
 not those of a baffled politician, but of a de- 
 feated idealist. When he fell from office he 
 wrote a beautiful letter, unprinted as yet, in 
 which he recognised that Ireland's Messiahs 
 must be stoned like those of any other country. 
 His was not the first nor will it be the last 
 heart to be broken for love of Ireland. 
 
 In Ireland as in chemistry the most in- 
 nocuous subjects are liable to become ex- 
 plosives when mixed. Religion and politics 
 form unfortunately the commonest example of 
 such combinations. Sir Horace Plunkett re- 
 pelled the Danish invader from the butter 
 market, but unfortunately mixed bad theol- 
 ogy with good economics in his famous book. 
 There was a clerical explosion. Believing in 
 conciliation amongst Irishmen, I once brought 
 
IRELAND AND THE IRISH 145 
 
 Sir Horace to the only spot he had never trod 
 in Ireland — the Seminary of Maynooth. Dr. 
 Hogan, his severest critic, ran out to welcome 
 him, and the entente was established, which 
 springs up between all Irishmen of good-will. 
 Another time I brought Provost Mahaffy of 
 Trinity to see Cardinal Logue. I believe that 
 if he had not had to catch a train, they would 
 have solved the Irish problem between them! 
 The trouble in Ireland is that people are afraid 
 of meeting for fear of becoming friends. Dr. 
 Mahaffy was the omniscient friend of my 
 youth. Though he could teach History, Greek, 
 German, and Music at will, I knew him best 
 as a snipe-shooter. With his old-fashioned 
 gun and soft clerical hat and gaiters he used 
 to face the Monaghan bogs — looking not un- 
 like Mr. Pickwick in his attire, but a Winkle 
 I should add in sporting assiduity. The snipe 
 with its long bill is the sacred bird of Irish 
 sport — the ibis of the bogs. There are different 
 theories as to its shooting as of its cooking. 
 Mahaffy held you should fire whenever you 
 sighted the white glint of its breast. I once 
 saw him kill a snipe between eighty and 
 ninety yards away — the most beautiful shot 
 I ever saw fired. He was over threescore at 
 the time himself. He was wonderful com- 
 
146 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 pany bog-trotting. He used to launch theories 
 on all subjects. He started the idea that is 
 now generally held by Irish anglers, that 
 coarse fish like the pike came into Ireland 
 with the Saxons (whom it resembles for slug- 
 gish gluttony) and are still slowly dispos- 
 sessing the lively brown trout who is a native 
 Irishman of the lakes. Certainly there is no 
 old Gaelic word for pike as there is for trout 
 and salmon. 
 
 Another theory he broached upon the bogs 
 was that the local McKennas, like most glens- 
 men and "mountainy" men in Ireland, were 
 a remnant of the Firbolgs or original neo- 
 lithic race of Ireland, who had been driven by 
 the conquering Gaels into the mountain dis- 
 tricts. A rounder type of skull and dark hair 
 mark the elder race, which is sometimes de- 
 scribed as Spanish. It was wrongly said that 
 when Oscar Wilde wished to become a Catho- 
 lic in his youth at Trinity, Mahaffy advised 
 him to become a good pagan instead. Ma- 
 haffy 's advice really was: "My dear X3scar, 
 you are not quite clever enough to be one of 
 us at Trinity, but they will be glad enough to 
 have you at Oxford." So Wilde became a Fel- 
 low of Magdalen ! Mahaffy has made many 
 famous replies, which may one day be chron- 
 
IRELAND AND THE IRISH 147 
 
 icled. When a fanatic inquired if "he were 
 saved," the Doctor of Divinity gravely an- 
 swered, yes. "Why do you not proclaim it 
 on the housetops ? " went on the other. "Well, 
 it was such a narrow squeak, I like to say 
 nothing about it!" was the witty answer. 
 
 The last chapter of Irish history has been 
 strange. I watched it from many sides. A 
 Nationalist candidate myself, two of my re- 
 lations were returned as Unionists, a cousin 
 entered the Home-Rule cabinet, and an uncle 
 became an O'Brienite, or Independent mem- 
 ber in Cork, whose beautiful niece as a 
 climax married the Ulster leader — Carson him- 
 self! 
 
 It always struck me that the Puck who put 
 the "Ire" in Ireland must have ranged Red- 
 mond and Carson on wrong sides. Redmond 
 struck me as a conservative country squire, 
 fonder of pressing the trigger of his shooting 
 gun than of thumping tubs. A politician who 
 has never taken a bribe, forgiving to his polit- 
 ical enemies, a tolerant Catholic, and a mild 
 rebel, he would have made a better member 
 of Grattan's Parliament than a modern leader 
 in perilous times. 
 
 Carson was a real boss. He concentrated 
 his followers and exuded his own movement. 
 
148 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 His profession was the law, but his vocation 
 was its defiance. He was probably the last 
 of the Irish demagogues born to trouble Eng- 
 lish politics to frenzy. Only Redmond's in- 
 fluence with the cabinet kept him out of jail, 
 whither slow-witted Saxons were anxious to 
 send him. His cries will linger on the breeze 
 of history as long as historians suspect his 
 unconscious part in firing the Great War. 
 
 Ireland has always been a stormy petrel. 
 Her ancient name was Inisfail — the Island of 
 Destiny. Her rebellions have twice preluded 
 the fall of English sovereigns. O'Connell's 
 agitation gave a lead to the revolutions of 1848 
 over Europe. For three years before the Great 
 War, Ireland threatened civil convulsion. She 
 is the Banshee of the world, and her crying 
 aloud betokeneth death ! 
 
 Curiously enough, the wife of an English 
 admiral told me that while the English fleet 
 were visiting Kiel before the outbreak of war 
 she wagered Tirpitz a sovereign that there 
 would be civil war that year in Ireland — and 
 Tirpitz only smiled! German agents were 
 thick in Ireland that year. They made a ter- 
 rible mistake of judgment. Even their Eng- 
 lish cousins cannot understand Ireland. Irish 
 regiments went to the Transvaal cheering 
 
IRELAND AND THE IRISH 149 
 
 Kruger. They licked the Boers and returned 
 cheering — Kruger ! 
 
 Carson's men were in grimmer earnest than 
 Redmond's, who could -see humour, which 
 was unfortunately closed to the former during 
 those fateful months. As a rule in Ireland they 
 say everybody can see a joke except the po- 
 lice, the Saxon, and the dead. Ulster men are 
 a hard-working, hard-saving race, preferring 
 to indulge in prejudices rather than pleasures, 
 superstitious even in their dread of supersti- 
 tion, but peaceable rather than military. A 
 feeling of surprised dismay swept over them 
 when the War proved to be not their war at 
 all, and Ireland was proclaimed in spite of 
 their gun-running to be "the one bright spot 
 of Empire." Slowly and sadly they performed 
 a full turn toward the sea and faced a new 
 enemy under their imperturbable leader. Only 
 a few were unwilling to think of so good a Prot- 
 estant as the Kaiser as an enemy, but the 
 most of them remembered too late the for- 
 gotten text that they who take the sword 
 shall perish by the same. 
 
 We had long known for certain that there 
 would be no United Ireland without blood- 
 shed. No one expected that it would be 
 brought about shoulder to shoulder in another 
 
150 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 land. Volunteers, Catholic and Protestant, lie 
 in French graves. They were apart in their 
 lives but in death they are not divided. To 
 Ireland herself the Kaiser brought not a sword 
 but peace. 
 
AN EMPIRE OF SPORT AND FREEDOM 
 
 "What should they know of England who only 
 England know?" is a phrase of Kipling which 
 would have puzzled all Victorian premiers 
 except Disraeli. To Disraeli England and the 
 East were equally congenial, and he eventually 
 merged the English with the Indian crown. 
 Kipling's burst to fame came with the rough 
 times of the Boer War when prophets were 
 needed to say smooth things. In 1888 a friend 
 of mine forwarded some of Kipling's work to 
 England and received word that it was "not 
 up to the standard of the Daily Telegraph!" 
 
 Whoever knows England knows the Em- 
 pire. Officially it is not an accretion but an 
 extension. English types and codes, English 
 sports and chaplains have been reduplicated 
 in block, wherever official tape has reddened 
 the map. 
 
 The principles of English Whig society 
 were no abstract beliefs in fraternity, liberty, 
 and equality. That the eldest brother should 
 inherit is the English view of fraternity. 
 That an Englishman's house is his castle 
 
 151 
 
152 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 represents his ideal of liberty, and that all 
 sportsmen are equal is his nearest approach 
 toward equality. Imperialists, on the one 
 hand, cannot forgive Ministers who will not 
 govern imperially, and "Little Englanders," 
 on the other, excuse the Empire in that it is 
 not imperial. Nationalism flourishes rather 
 than the reverse in British dominions. And 
 most religions except that of the state are suc- 
 cessful. A spirit of tolerance inclines officials 
 to snub the official creed. It is the first Em- 
 pire to practise religious tolerance — even unto 
 apathy, as earnest believers have reason to 
 deplore. Belgium used to send out more 
 missionaries annually than England. On the 
 Mediterranean English soldiers salute the 
 Catholic Host at Malta, and the Holy Carpet 
 in Egypt. The Koran is taught in the college 
 commemorating Gordon — the principal Chris- 
 tian martyr of England. 
 
 Faith and morals of the East have been 
 severely left alone since the Indian mutiny. 
 Even the horrors of Chinese life in the Trans- 
 vaal mines were glossed by Archbishop David- 
 son as "a regrettable necessity." Thomas a 
 Becket's brimstone is no longer stocked at 
 Canterbury. The English official is the worst 
 missionary possible. He believes his religious 
 
SPORT AND FREEDOM 153 
 
 and social customs are the best, but he is in- 
 different whether inferior races envy or imi- 
 tate. His offer to India is: "We will manage 
 your government and finance without bribery 
 or injustice. We will spear your pigs and 
 shoot your tigers for reward. Worship your 
 own gods, and we will sell you their images by 
 the gross. If our bishops bore you, they bore 
 us much more. If you really wish to be Chris- 
 tians, select your own brand." 
 
 The English realise that it is a vain dream 
 for those who believe in "original sin" to try 
 to convert races who repeat from childhood 
 the words: "Man is originally good." I 
 once asked a Brahmin how English clergy 
 affected him. He answered: "The Bishop 
 of Madras used to have a wife, who ruled 
 him and his chaplains. We laughed when he 
 said he would show us the way to heaven. 
 We do not think women can show the way 
 to heaven." 
 
 The Indian Empire began with a dividend- 
 bearing company and ended in the famous 
 phrase, "The white man's burden," which 
 represents a hazy notion of an Aryan mission 
 to the East. The English have not under- 
 stood Indian thought or mysticism. Even 
 Sir Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia was a 
 
154 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 parody of Buddha. Kipling etched Indian 
 philosophy in Kim, and Laurence Hope ech- 
 oed their passion in The Garden of Karma. 
 Incidentally Laurence Hope was the only white 
 woman to commit suttee on her husband's 
 grave. 
 
 India's real contribution to English life is 
 polo, which has since proved a true tie be- 
 tween the sea-divided Saxons. It is curious 
 that East and West can only meet in games 
 — in Persian chess or Indian polo. Sport is 
 the key to English rule and character. Fair 
 play is the pith and fibre of the Empire. It is 
 sport which makes the English generally prefer 
 referees to codes, adventure to efficiency, and 
 the honour of contest to the lust for reward. 
 English justice gives a sporting chance to 
 every native in India. The 9th Lancers were 
 degraded by Curzon, to his great credit, for 
 not confessing the murder of a black cook. 
 Uhlans under such circumstance might have 
 been promoted. 
 
 The government is not directly responsible 
 for famines. For disaffection it is. Govern- 
 ment stupidity sends Indians to English uni- 
 versities to forget their inferiority at the price 
 of that in which they are superior. The symp- 
 toms of discontent are sometimes inscrutable. 
 
SPORT AND FREEDOM 155 
 
 Critics, for instance, point out that statues of 
 Queen Victoria in India have to be guarded 
 by sentries day and night, like those of Cath- 
 erine the Great in Poland. Yet different 
 reasons underlie the necessity. Catherine's 
 policy of conquest was hateful to Poles. It 
 is the public statue of the womanly form that 
 shocks Orientals. The presence of Queen 
 Mary stripped King George's durbar of the 
 reverence, though not of the loyalty, that 
 should hedge one who occupies the throne 
 of the great Mogul. 
 
 Under English rule no Indian has suffered 
 for his religion. The mutiny was due to pig's 
 fat on cartridges and pig-headedness in high 
 places. It was suppressed by a Viceroy who 
 was dubbed "Clemency" for his pains or 
 rather for the lack of pains he inflicted on the 
 natives. In John Nicholson the mutiny pro- 
 duced the only European to receive religious 
 worship in the East since Vasco da Gama and 
 St. Francis Xavier. 
 
 A traveller was once surprised to see a Judge, 
 a Counsel for the Defense, and the Clerk of 
 the Court arrive in a distant part of India to 
 try a Pariah for his life ! In the same spirit 
 the English sent a special train during the 
 Boer War to bring a dying Irish private the 
 
156 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 Last Sacraments. Whosoever aspires to the 
 next world-empery should make memento of 
 such. 
 
 Indians may enter the Council of State 
 but not the Bombay Yacht Club. English 
 clubs and the Memorial to the Cawnpore 
 Massacre are forbidden ground. European 
 minorities in the East can afford to grant 
 liberty but not equality. Kings can only 
 rule where "they can do no wrong," and whites 
 must employ similar illusions in guiding the 
 black. Modern unrest in India dates from the 
 proposal of the Catholic Viceroy Ripon, him- 
 self the member of a recently penalised sect, 
 to subject white offenders to black magis- 
 trates. A typical compromise was made which 
 insisted on an Englishman's right to a "pie- 
 bald jury" half composed of whites. Under 
 Curzon the unrest developed into a kind of 
 babu-anarchism. Curzon represented Balliol 
 on the throne, the philosopher-king who re- 
 formed India, until its calm was broken by 
 bombs — a cold, scintillating ruler not un- 
 worthy to succeed Warren Hastings, on whose 
 virtue or iniquity historians cannot agree. 
 He explained the use of commas to his officials 
 and introduced the Dalai-Lama to armed 
 civilisation. It was no anomaly on his part 
 
SPORT AND FREEDOM 157 
 
 to give a gorgeous durbar in time of famine. 
 Roman Emperors sated the crowds with 
 "games and bread," partem et cirsenses. If 
 bread was lacking in India, Curzon at least 
 provided a circus. 
 
 English and Indian remain inscrutable to 
 each other, especially the English. He has 
 never wearied inveighing against native caste 
 — yet at Curzon's durbar Indian rajahs were 
 much entertained by the refusal of visiting 
 English duchesses to courtsey to the beau- 
 tiful American vice-reine. Pierre Loti wrote a 
 poetical book in favour of an India without 
 the English, as one might praise a mediaeval 
 palace without its modern conveniences. This 
 sensible Indians realise; only idealists pro- 
 test. 
 
 An appreciation of sportsmanship is the 
 test for autonomy through the Empire. Aus- 
 tralia had to defeat England at cricket before 
 she was given a commonwealth. The entente 
 with France was immensely helped in pop- 
 ular estimation by France's football victory 
 over Scotland. Australia's success caused a 
 sentimental mourning for "the Ashes of Eng- 
 lish Cricket," and a form of crusade was des- 
 patched to bring them back from the antip- 
 odes. Losing the Yacht Cup to America was 
 
158 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 felt almost as much as the original loss of the 
 colonies. 
 
 Sport remains the great unofficial depart- 
 ment which permeates the Empire and costs 
 the nation half as much again as the navy. 
 Whoever can define "sport" can define the 
 English. Sport is a practice originating prob- 
 ably in the ceaseless war Anglo-Saxons had 
 to wage against forest animals. The north- 
 erners had to be mighty hunters to live. The 
 English branch of the Teutonic family carried 
 the sea-faring and animal-slaying propensi- 
 ties of the race to their highest pitch. Modern 
 sport, thanks to a Celtic blend, keeps the 
 mean between the torture of animals and 
 humanitarianism. Dick Martin, of Gal way, 
 established animal protection by law. The 
 unwritten law of sport was gradually estab- 
 lished that the pursued must be allowed a 
 chance to escape. That big game have to be 
 killed in the swamp instead of the arena still 
 differentiates the northern from the Latin idea 
 of sport. The true sportsman prefers to miss 
 a difficult quarry rather than to slay an easy 
 one. This is a sentiment unknown to the 
 Latin and mysterious to the Oriental. A 
 Jewish squire was sadly perplexed when his 
 guests put down their guns rather than fire 
 
SPORT AND FREEDOM 159 
 
 among birds that flew too tamely. A sports- 
 man is one who takes his chance when he 
 ought and not when he can. He shall not aim 
 at the sitting bird nor strike the fallen boxer 
 nor "quench the smoking flax." True sports- 
 manship sweetens the competition of life, is 
 long-suffering in action, and is not puffed up 
 in reminiscence. 
 
 Yet sport until Victorian days could be 
 cruel for cruelty's sake. English bull-fighting, 
 in which the animal's horns were sawn, his 
 tail and ears cropped, and his nostrils plugged 
 with pepper was far more cruel than the 
 Spanish ceremony. Bull-baiting was abolished 
 in 1835 only. As late as the forties my grand- 
 father saw a badger drawn from a tub by a 
 woman with her bare shoulders ! 
 
 Sport has gradually attained its refinements 
 and position in the Anglo-Saxon world. A 
 man without the sporting sense is as much 
 out of place as an American without mone- 
 tary instincts or a Latin without gallantry. 
 "These people must be lunatics or devils," 
 observed the Thibetans when the first English 
 expedition broke into a gymkhana. Even 
 Belgian gendarmes gasped on seeing foot- 
 balls bob behind the trenches in Flanders. 
 Wellington took foxhounds to the Peninsular 
 
160 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 War. It is curious how the English mind re- 
 duces even militarism to terms of sport. In 
 the Boer War ambulance wagons came to be 
 called "game-carts." Replacing a general 
 was "changing the bowling." Firing on the 
 Red Cross was contemptuously summed up 
 as "not playing cricket." Sport lends a greater 
 prestige to men than politics. In winning the 
 Derby during his premiership Lord Rosebery 
 experienced a moral grandeur that prevented 
 him taking a serious part in politics again. 
 
 The sporting sense lies at the root of the 
 national love of compromise. It has pro- 
 duced a class of referees. Even the Speaker 
 of the House is a glorified umpire who inter- 
 prets the rules of parliamentary fair play. It 
 is this sense more than language which divides 
 German and English. German thoroughness 
 can but detest compromises which arise from 
 the spirit of freedom and fair play. Germany 
 progresses by hard-and-fixed rules — but Eng- 
 land by exceptions to rules. German children 
 commit suicide to avoid examinations which 
 in England are a national joke. The German 
 working man is forced to live comfortably. 
 In England he is free to be miserable. 
 
 Fair play introduced into war is a stumbling- 
 block to German militarists just as cheering 
 
SPORT AND FREEDOM 161 
 
 an adversary is considered a confession of 
 weakness. Yet Botha was cheered at Ed- 
 ward's coronation as Marshal Soult was at 
 Victoria's. The English went out to war with 
 Germany with a genuine wish to see fair play. 
 It was a spirit which endured while the Em- 
 den was afloat, but sank irretrievably with 
 the Lusitania. 
 
 The result of national characteristics has 
 given England a sporting rather than a mili- 
 tarist caste. In Germany, an officer's uniform 
 is his fortune. In England it required a small 
 fortune, before the war, to wear one. Only in 
 India or Egypt is there a tendency to militar- 
 ism. Imperialism, which is the base of all mili- 
 tarism, past or present, is of a recent growth 
 in England. Its rise may be popularly traced 
 in those "deathless" ditties which affect men's 
 minds more than laws. From anti-Russian 
 days the English crowd hummed: 
 
 "We don't want to fight, 
 But by Jingo, if we do !" 
 
 The rank and file of imperialism took their 
 name from the verse. The Jubilee period pro- 
 duced an infectious chorus not unlike a hys- 
 terical peacock's Te Deum, "Tarara-boom- 
 de-ay !" 
 
162 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 The dubious days of the Boer War in which 
 the Empire struck bottom temporarily led to 
 the haunting refrain: "What ho, she bumps!" 
 It was a pity when the day of battle came that 
 the music-hall should have taken the place of 
 a national Tyrtseus. Perhaps nothing could 
 better show the careless phlegm of the Eng- 
 lish soldier than the laughing snatches and 
 phrases with which he charges. When the 
 French chant their Marseillaise, Mr. Atkins 
 has been heard to observe as he goes into ac- 
 tion for all eternity perhaps: "Front seats 
 sixpence ! " 
 
 As long as Gladstone obsessed public life 
 by his personality, imperialism was not en- 
 couraged as a creed. Chamberlain was the 
 first to conceive the notion of putting the Em- 
 pire into a fiscal strait-waistcoat. He marked 
 the advent of the business man into politics. 
 He did not hesitate to conquer the Boers with 
 shells made in Germany and cavalry from 
 the antipodes. The Boer War should have 
 acted as a signal and a warning. General 
 after general buried his reputation behind 
 the kopjes. Buller was disgraced, Methuen 
 captured, and Kitchener reprimanded. The 
 despatches made woful reading. Roberts once 
 reported that all would have been well 
 
SPORT AND FREEDOM 163 
 
 with one regiment if there had been no panic ! 
 And Buller confided that he had made the 
 enemy respect his rear ! It was no consolation 
 to hear that the Boer numbers had been killed 
 several times over. The public craving for 
 comfort centred on Baden-Powell's defence 
 of Mafeking. It was afterward confessed that 
 the defender had exhibited "unconventional 
 gaiety" more than any military quality, and 
 even committed lese-majesty by issuing his 
 own head on postage-stamps. In the modern 
 sense there was not a siege at all. Neverthe- 
 less, Mafeking was the high-water mark of 
 imperialism. Its relief threw London into 
 hysteria and added "maffick" to the Standard 
 Dictionary. At Eton I remember a vivid in- 
 cident typical of that microcosm of Empire. 
 Among the decorations of bunting a Boer 
 flag was hung from the window of a boy sus- 
 pected of being a pro-Boer. The boys gath- 
 ered and stormed the house, the inhabitants of 
 which showered their books and stores into 
 the street. The air was rent with groceries 
 and bathtubs. It was a mad half-hour, and 
 the house was more damaged than most of 
 the buildings in Mafeking. In the evening the 
 whole school marched up to Windsor with 
 torches to serenade the old Queen. Leaving 
 
164 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 the Windsor mob to bellow outside the gates, 
 we entered and sang under the royal windows. 
 The curtains were drawn aside by the Hindu 
 attendants, and we beheld the Queen with 
 the cadaverous Bishop of London (Creighton) 
 standing in the background. The hand of 
 death was over both of them, and, indeed, 
 they died within a few days of each other in 
 the following January. For a few moments 
 the sad, stolid face of Victoria looked out 
 upon the children and the grandchildren of the 
 Victorians. It was pathetic that she for whom 
 Gordon had died and the Light Brigade 
 charged should make her farewell bow to us 
 from the box on an evening of opera bouffe ! 
 
 The Boer War outlasted Queen Victoria, 
 with its endless failures and delays. Warning, 
 unfortunately, it did not bring. It even gen- 
 erated a fatal idea among Englishmen. It is 
 said that the devil, failing to tempt the Irish 
 to believe there was no Heaven or Hell, whis- 
 pered to them, "There is no hurry" — and they 
 believed him. Some genius for evil persuaded 
 the English that they could always "muddle 
 through." The result was that all ideas of 
 efficiency and preparedness resulting from the 
 South African travail were still-born. Dis- 
 asters were forgotten not digested. The of- 
 
SPORT AND FREEDOM 165 
 
 ficial history of the Boer War, completed by 
 Colonel Robertson, I believe on his death- 
 bed, has never been published by the War 
 Office. It is a document essential to the his- 
 tory of the Empire, but to this day the English 
 public are in ignorance. 
 
 The Boer War itself was forgotten in the 
 elections of 1906. The Liberals returned to 
 power on the tide of reaction, bringing with 
 them all the half-hatched feuds and schemes 
 which made the country a political cockpit 
 until the outbreak of the Great War eight 
 years later. 
 
 The English were more encouraged than 
 dismayed by their adventures on that con- 
 tinent, which had swallowed empires and 
 churches. The travels of Livingstone, his dis- 
 covery by Stanley with the immortal "Dr. Liv- 
 ingstone, I presume," uttered at their meet- 
 ing, the finding of Victoria Nyanza, Rhodesia, 
 the Cape to Cairo Railway, the purchase of 
 the Suez Canal, and the damming of the Nile 
 led the English to believe in their vocation 
 as a charmed if not a chosen people in Africa. 
 They absorbed the Boers, they shooed the 
 French from Fashoda, and they blocked the 
 Germans in Morocco. 
 
 The Egyptian chapter was amazing. The 
 
166 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 early Victorians used to be interested in the 
 Sphinx because of its resemblance to Tom 
 Cribb's countenance after a prize-fight. The 
 next generation conceived a mission to the 
 Egyptians. They entered into a dual control 
 with the French to rule that part of the Sul- 
 tan's dominions for the good of its inhabi- 
 tants. The bombarding of Alexandria and 
 single control followed. The patriot Arabi 
 was defeated, and only escaped death owing to 
 four thousand pounds' worth of legal assistance 
 from Wilfred Blunt. Arabi was spared, but 
 Gordon was sacrificed. Whether Gladstone's 
 soul must sit and twitter for ever on the tele- 
 graph-wires to Khartoum or not, Gordon's 
 soul marches in the great army of idealists, 
 whom the world has not known how to use. 
 Only England could have given Egypt a Gor- 
 don and a Cromer. Since Joseph, no for- 
 eigner has done more for Egypt materially 
 than Cromer. As an instance of the eternal 
 gulf between idealists and practical men 
 Cromer's record of Gordon is curious. He 
 recognised his "lively though sometimes ill- 
 directed repugnance to injustice, oppression, 
 and meanness of every description and con- 
 siderable power of acquiring influence on 
 those, necessarily limited in numbers, with 
 whom he was brought into personal contact." 
 
SPORT AND FREEDOM 167 
 
 But — "as a matter of personal morality" he 
 did not think "his process of reasoning de- 
 fensible." Words that might have appeared 
 in Pilate's Judean memoirs of Another Great 
 Idealist. Pilate was the prototype of all Eng- 
 lish officials — with his condescending yet con- 
 temptuous manner to natives, his tolerant 
 scorn of their beliefs, and his occasional fee- 
 ble generosity toward patriots or prophets. 
 Pilate had good points and was canonised by 
 the Abyssinian Church. Cromer, like any 
 English official, could not have understood 
 why Gordon should prefer a lonely death to 
 "hailing the tram of the world" (Gordon's 
 phrase), or why an Egyptian Moslem should 
 prefer death for his prophet to prosperity un- 
 der Christian rule. 
 
 To compare Egypt in the eighties with 
 Palestine under the Romans would afford a 
 parallel. The British and Roman Empires 
 have been more alike than any other. If the 
 old khedive out-Heroded Herod, and Cromer 
 displayed the governing qualities of a Pilate, 
 the Mahdi and Gordon between them supplied 
 some historical inkling to the position and 
 political effect of Christ — plunged as He found 
 Himself in another perilous meeting-ground 
 between East and West. 
 
 Monsignor Sibarra, the Pope's representa- 
 
168 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 tive in the Soudan, held Gordon to be a saint 
 and kept his cigar-case as a relic. He had 
 seen Gordon pray in ecstasy like a mediaeval 
 contemplative, and he was an official judge of 
 such matters. He wished to go with him to 
 Khartoum but Gordon bade him wait and 
 pray. 
 
 If the British Empire has shown religious 
 tolerance, she has lacked the higher gift of 
 imagination. Her motto, " Imperium et Liber- 
 tas" is really a contradiction in terms. A 
 sporting pity for inferiors like the fellaheen, 
 together with a decided respect for fighting 
 equals like the Boers, has made modern im- 
 perialism the glittering excuse for a wider 
 liberty than is consistent with armed rule over 
 conquered races. 
 
 Not that it has repressed a native and na- 
 tionalist view. It is from England herself 
 that the strongest criticisms of the invasions 
 of Egypt, Afghanistan, the Boer Republics, 
 and Thibet have come. Defenceless invasions 
 of the defenceless they appeared to many 
 honest Englishmen who said so. 
 
 Whoever writes the lining of English his- 
 tory must consult the little-known mono- 
 graphs of Wilfred Blunt criticising English 
 rule in Ireland, Egypt, and India. His par- 
 
SPORT AND FREEDOM 169 
 
 tisanship may be as sharp as salt, but his 
 view makes a necessary condiment to an im- 
 partial history. 
 
 Yet Wilfred Blunt is one of the most Eng- 
 lish of Englishmen I know, with his stubborn 
 individualism and his chivalrous sense of 
 fair play. A poet himself and a breeder of 
 Arabian horses, a Catholic with Mohammedan 
 sympathies, a Sussex landlord, and an Ori- 
 ental politician — he is not far removed from 
 the Byronic tradition which has made English 
 gentlemen the symbol of madness and gen- 
 erosity abroad. 
 
 Wilfred Blunt did not hesitate to adopt 
 the cause of Ireland, and was thrown into 
 Galway Gaol by his own cousin Mr. Balfour, 
 then Irish Secretary. It is difficult to be 
 serious in Ireland without becoming ridiculous, 
 for some unexplained but historical reason. 
 Blunt used to distribute his photograph in 
 convict kit to his friends. King Edward see- 
 ing one of these, was puzzled by the uniform. 
 "It is your Majesty's," he was informed. 
 
 Perhaps Wilfred Blunt is a better symbol 
 of English character than the procurators and 
 viceroys whom his books assail. I have never 
 seen him obstruct the motors of financiers 
 with his beautiful horses in Sussex lanes with- 
 
170 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 out realising the English love of individual 
 freedom, and distaste of the machine. In spite 
 of herself has England become imperialistic. 
 Her better self has condemned and striven to 
 rectify her treatment of the Irish and the 
 Boers. It is possible that such races of man- 
 kind as have settled down under British rule 
 during the nineteenth century have enjoyed 
 the same admixture of peace and toleration 
 with which the Flavian and Antonine em- 
 perors made happy the world — at least as 
 happy as historical conditions ever seem likely 
 to permit. 
 
SOCIETY IN DECAY 
 
 Within memory of many people living, Eng- 
 lish society was a feudal club without right of 
 entry from outside. The Whigs of pedigree 
 stood at the head of a great patrician stud. 
 Though eugenics as a science were unknown, 
 the social value of good breeding was even 
 overappreciated. Blood, whatever its merits, 
 led to position and success. The advantages 
 and the defects of aristocratic inbreeding are 
 always noticeable. Peerage, baronetage, and 
 gentry formed limited circles. Betwixt the 
 squirarchy and the plebs there was a gulf 
 fixed. The remnants of the old Catholic 
 peerage were the most exclusive of all. Their 
 blood was changed during Victoria's reign by 
 the Oxford converts in the same way that the 
 American brides later freshened the veins of 
 the peerage as a whole. 
 
 For good or for bad the old society decayed, 
 and was succeeded by another whose decay 
 may also be questioned. A caste of some 
 five hundred privileged trustees has extended 
 into a mob of ten thousand, few of whom are 
 native gentry, and the most prominent seldom 
 
 171 
 
172 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 Europeans. On the one hand, American women 
 charmed their way into the charmed circle, 
 while, on the other, Jews and mercantile princes 
 entered by all manner of hooks and crooks. 
 The Jew has a better position in England than 
 America, where he is socially boycotted by a 
 society which is as rich or richer. English 
 society is poorer both in possessions and pride. 
 From being so unknown in society that Dis- 
 raeli was only admitted as a drawing-room 
 freak, the Jew has come to permeate London 
 society. He entered under the gonfalon of 
 the Rothschilds. Bringing the first news of 
 Waterloo made the Rothschilds great among 
 a nation of stock-brokers. During the nine- 
 teenth century the Jews have taken a part in 
 every department of life. No profession and 
 no party can claim them. Their Joshuas and 
 Calebs have carried away no ignoble fruits 
 from the land. Within half a century a 
 Disraeli became Premier, a Hershel Lord 
 Chancellor, a Jessel Master of the Rolls, a 
 Montefiore Lord Mayor, an Isaacs Chief Jus- 
 tice, a Solomon Royal Academician, and a 
 Nathan Colonial Governor. Jewish names 
 were even found at times among the state 
 bishops. The English archbishoprics remain, 
 however, a Scotch monopoly. 
 
SOCIETY IN DECAY 173 
 
 Individual Jews have by their services been 
 of national benefit. But the society-seeking 
 swarm has had doubtful results. Their in- 
 discriminate entry has changed such standards 
 as made social privileges worth while. It was 
 a curious fact that Edward VII as Prince and 
 King was the most responsible for pressing 
 them into the front seats. 
 
 Anti-Semitic feeling is as degrading and out 
 of date as the pillory, but social discrimina- 
 tion can be an ethical necessity. It is dif- 
 ficult to press the social charge home — for, on 
 the one hand, the Jews show a higher religious 
 and moral life than English society. But 
 nationally they are out of place, as is shown 
 by their total lack of the sporting sense, ex- 
 cept in the occasional guise of magnificent 
 patrons. The silly Gentile has not understood 
 so well in England as in America that the cho- 
 sen people are wiser than the children of the 
 world, and that the meek do inherit the earth. 
 Nevertheless, Jewish versatility demands ad- 
 miration in modern England. They win vic- 
 tories on the turf and conduct debate in the 
 House of Commons as successfully as they 
 run newspapers and banks. Parliament is 
 their wash-pot, and over the Empire they have 
 cast their shoe. 
 
174 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 The only professions in which they have not 
 risen are those of arms and diplomacy. They 
 have not entered the Army, owing not so much 
 to lack of courage as to the smallness of the 
 remuneration, which might well challenge the 
 divine injunction to soldiers to be satisfied 
 with their pay. Sir William Butler used to 
 say that Gordon was the only soldier he knew 
 who was. 
 
 From English diplomacy Jews are excluded 
 because cleverness is not its first qualification. 
 Nor have Jews taken to the Navy. The Phoe- 
 nicians performed sea-service for them in old 
 days and the ships of England secure the 
 carriage of their commerce to-day. 
 
 The decay or soundness of society influences 
 every profession except the Navy. There may 
 be "political" generals, but the admiral in 
 politics is rare. It required so bluff and breezy 
 a type as Lord Charles Beresford to carry off 
 the role. Isaac Butt, Parnell's predecessor, 
 once suggested that Beresford should lead the 
 Irish party. He has, however, represented the 
 Navy in the House. Nobody can be too 
 thankful for his text that "Battleships are 
 cheaper than battles." His criticism has been 
 sound when naval and not political, but as 
 an Irish admiral in English politics, he has 
 
SOCIETY IN DECAY 175 
 
 sometimes found himself sitting between some- 
 what unmusical chairs. 
 
 The distinction of the English Navy as well 
 as its safeguard is in being outside society. 
 The Navy is always absent on its mission 
 upon the sea. Naval officers are devoted to 
 their service like Levites from their youth 
 up. Yeoman and seafaring blood predom- 
 inates among them. No alien may serve in 
 the ships. The Army included men of sport 
 and society, as well as the professional strate- 
 gist. But the naval officer finds his profession 
 paramount and absorbing. It is for him to 
 leave parents and family and to serve unre- 
 mittingly upon the altars of the deep. Hard 
 toil and scant pay through long years are his, 
 that others may be safe in gathering the 
 riches of the world. 
 
 The Navy is the force which never ceases 
 to be in action. Their warfare against other 
 navies has proven a direct continuation of 
 their previous life. To mobilise they do not 
 have to leave their homes. The sailors have 
 always been in the trenches, and their trenches 
 are the seven seas. Their traditions have 
 been untouched by the lowering of ideals 
 which has invaded every other class and pro- 
 fession. The saviour of society owes its 
 
176 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 strength to the fact that it remains apart and 
 uncontaminated by society itself. 
 
 Parenthetically, it may be noticed that the 
 navy as a service retains much of the old 
 religious sense. Admiral Beresford notes truly 
 that the men swear but do not blaspheme. 
 In Germany the navy is the secondary service, 
 and the calibre of the middle-class atheists 
 who pace her decks cannot compare with the 
 Christian gentlemen under the white ensign. 
 The English fleet has been aptly compared 
 to the Roman legions cut off from a decadent 
 capital, to guard the world from the barbarians. 
 Whether English society was suffering from 
 decay or development, symptoms made their 
 appearance not far different from those which 
 historians tell of the last phase of Roman 
 history. The Colosseum once contained the 
 same crowds of pallid unfit that watched 
 the muddy arenas of English football. A 
 similar indolent and half -educated bourgeoisie 
 loafed in the imperial baths as attended Eng- 
 lish cricket. In the higher stage of society 
 there was the same revulsion from the old- 
 fashioned virtues and an expressed contempt 
 for whatever belonged to the Augustan, or in 
 the latter case Victorian, age in writing or 
 morals. London churches were deserted for 
 
SOCIETY IN DECAY 177 
 
 week-end parties exactly as the temples were 
 scorned by the jaded pleasure-seekers of Rome. 
 Nobody in England took the sovereign's De- 
 fensorship of the faith more seriously than the 
 Romans took the deification of their emperors. 
 The state religion in London had a less hold 
 on many than the charlatan, the theosophist, 
 and the necromancer, just as Capitoline Jove 
 and the matronly Juno were deserted for the 
 more exciting deities of the East. Society 
 women in London exchanged family lockets 
 for immodest charms. Porte-bonheurs and 
 talismans of jade found more sale than crosses 
 or "Rizpah" brooches. The frequent conver- 
 sions and cross-conversions denoted an era of 
 dissolving rather than growing faith. I heard 
 of a parson who became a priest and then a 
 parson again, by which time he believed in 
 nothing. He was chaplain to a Protestant 
 workhouse. He told us that, remembering 
 that in the presence of death Canon Law gave 
 him back his privileges, he used to confess and 
 baptise dying paupers and pack them off 
 heavenward as good Catholics before they 
 knew where they were ! The dramatic situa- 
 tion was not unlike that described in Balzac's 
 Atheist's Mass. Neurotic criminology attracted 
 more interest than unselfish charity. The 
 
178 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 signs were present, even if the decay was not 
 as deep as German sociologists wished to be- 
 lieve. War instantly restored the old stoical 
 and patriotic virtues. 
 
 It is very difficult to gauge any society at 
 any given time. But its soundness or decay 
 may be tested by its view of morality j its 
 practice of humour, and its attitude toward 
 woman (who incidentally is the mixture of 
 morality and humour). The Anglo-Saxon 
 treatment of women is considered highly 
 chivalrous by Anglo-Saxons, but supremely 
 ridiculous by Latins. In Latin countries 
 women have little legal right, but they enjoy 
 (from their point of view) the best husbands — 
 at least husbands who are less family men 
 than romantic lovers. The position of women 
 in England is based partly on legal rights and 
 partly on the unwritten law. The dual posi- 
 tion has produced confusion, irritation, and 
 suffragism. 
 
 In America (the country where the Anglo- 
 Saxon loses his sense of compromise) the 
 woman is a man's legal, in some places his 
 electoral, equal. As a result Americans may 
 be more moral husbands than Latins, but 
 they are disappointing to the wives whom they 
 treat as beautiful housekeepers to await their 
 
SOCIETY IN DECAY 179 
 
 evening return from business with diamond 
 tiaras for lace caps. This is, perhaps, the 
 psychological reason why American women 
 marry foreigners, though the native man is a 
 cleaner and more generous type. A Latin 
 considers that to leave a wife alone all day 
 is equivalent to desertion. There is a differ- 
 ence again between the Latin cavalier and the 
 Anglo-Saxon gentleman. The latter treats 
 all women as virtuous until they plainly de- 
 clare the contrary. The former looks upon 
 every woman as a possible source of romance 
 until she closes his hopes. The sexual polite- 
 ness of Latins is most apparent in the drawing- 
 room. A sinking liner is the proper back- 
 ground for the more stolid chivalry of the 
 Anglo-Saxon. Latins often taunt Englishmen 
 that they show the same pride and fondness to- 
 ward their wives as for their horses. "Fine" 
 is a word they apply exactly to both. 
 
 In its clumsy and illogical way English 
 morality has held together. It is often loose 
 but seldom decadent. The British matron is 
 righteous, and the general run of Englishmen 
 are bored if not contemptuous at the vices 
 of abroad. An easy-going virtue cements 
 more English marriages than the subtler emo- 
 tions could. Even American wives brought 
 
180 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 less romance than emancipation into Eng- 
 land. 
 
 American women have played a brilliant 
 and eugenic part in modern society. They 
 have restored many of the old English virtues 
 which seemed at one time likely to survive 
 only with the middle class. They have made 
 some counterpart against the more foreign 
 admixture which has entered London. The 
 Americans taught tact and learned reverence of 
 Englishwomen. The quickest instance of tact 
 I ever saw in an American hostess was in a 
 church. She was entertaining a member of the 
 royal family in a back-country district. The 
 plate was handed round at collection and roy- 
 alty carelessly dropped silver. Quick as light- 
 ning the hostess covered it with gold. Each 
 vestryman was asked by his wife what the 
 visitor had given and royal munificence has 
 been a byword in those parts ever since ! 
 
 English morality is inscrutable and illogical. 
 Magna Charta apparently allows a man to 
 parade the worst woman in London at a 
 watering-place, but the local by-laws forbid 
 a boy bathing with his mother. Society is 
 weird in its acceptances and exclusions. The 
 most bankrupt and disreputable peer passes 
 as a decayed gentleman, but a nobleman who 
 
SOCIETY IN DECAY 181 
 
 has cheated at cards enters the class that 
 Orientals call "the untouchables." The most 
 famous of society card cheaters was none the 
 less tabooed, though it appeared he had cheated 
 in order to support an aged mother! An act 
 which seems as pardonable as that of the fash- 
 ionable lady who forged her husband's check 
 to subscribe to a cathedral. The unpleasant 
 obverse of all British morality is the national 
 hypocrisy, the "ostrich" policy of burying 
 the head rather than face moral problems. 
 The ostrich feathers in the Prince of Wales's 
 crest are a national symbol. The English 
 nation will not allow a spade to be called a 
 spade, or else they will insist on a charitable 
 supposition that it is a shovel. In England 
 a man may live with whom he will, provided 
 only England never knows. Parnell was no 
 degenerate, but he married his mistress (which 
 is more than most Englishmen would have 
 grace to do). Sir George Lewis, his lawyer, 
 urged him to contest the divorce suit against 
 O'Shea, as he believed it could not be pressed 
 after cross-examination. Parnell's only an- 
 swer, as I learned from Lady Lewis, was: 
 "My first duty is to the lady." It may be 
 said that he sacrificed his public to his pri- 
 vate honour. 
 
182 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 Sir George Lewis had, perhaps, the best 
 knowledge of English society that was pos- 
 sible to a clever and experienced lawyer. 
 He kept a central clearing-house for family 
 scandals and skeletons, and could cancel one 
 against the other with calculated precision. 
 It is difficult not to believe that necessity 
 will arise for his professional services on the 
 Day of Judgment. One of his acts was of 
 rare generosity. He was opposed to Dilke on 
 the occasion of his divorce trial, but offered 
 him as good advice as he later offered Parnell. 
 Perceiving there was no damning question 
 they could really ask him, he advised him pri- 
 vately to enter the witness-box rather than 
 allow a great career to be ruined. Unfortu- 
 nately Dilke took other advice. 
 
 The two most promising careers in English 
 and Irish politics were sacrificed at their 
 zenith, owing to the moral sense of English 
 dissenters, and with political results extending 
 far further than the two principals. 
 
 It is curious, though idle, to try to inquire 
 what the effect of these causes celebres had 
 upon history. If Parnell had remained chair- 
 man of the Irish party, Home Rule would have 
 probably been passed in 1894, and England 
 would not have been threatened by an Irish 
 
SOCIETY IN DECAY 183 
 
 civil war twenty years later, when she needed 
 all her wits to face the menace of Germany. 
 
 If Dilke had succeeded Gladstone as his 
 party had hoped, and occupied Asquith's 
 shoes until his death in 1909, it is possible 
 that Germany might have had reasons to re- 
 consider her decision in 1914. Though Dilke 
 was a red Radical and a personal friend of 
 Gambetta, he wrote text-books on The Brit- 
 ish Army and Greater Britain, both of them 
 subjects removed from the Liberal mind. He 
 might have made England readier for war. 
 Gambetta had no doubt influenced him with 
 the experiences of France. 
 
 Forms of humour are a subtle medium for 
 testing a human society. To tell a nation's 
 jokes is to tell its moral code. Humour is 
 the element which is most quickly irradiated 
 or corroded by the surrounding age. The 
 humour of the later Roman Empire or the 
 second French Empire was a sign-post of 
 decadence. English humour still spells rowdi- 
 ness rather than riot. The practical joke was 
 always a Teutonic institution. The Latin 
 jests with his curling lips, the Anglo-Saxon 
 by clumsy horse-play. 
 
 It is true that the finer wit of the eighteenth 
 century has disappeared from London with the 
 
184 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 old-fashioned wines. Gossip and sparkling 
 cheapness have taken its place. Mrs. Robert 
 Crawshay remains the only wit whose bons 
 mots would have been considered classical in 
 the days of Curran and Sheridan. Her famous 
 description of the last and talkative Lord 
 Erne and his well-chiselled lady was taken 
 from one line in Gray's Elegy: 
 
 " Storied Urn and animated bust." 
 
 When Chamberlain introduced tariff reform, 
 she asked Mr. Balfour if "England expects 
 every man to pay her duty?" 
 
 The last parliamentary mot in the old style 
 was made by Lord Hugh Cecil. He was told 
 to expect a challenge to duel after his attack 
 on Brodrick's management of the War Office. 
 
 "I should win/' he answered with equa- 
 nimity. "Brodrick is sure to use an obsolete 
 weapon!" 
 
 The first hint of the coming of the war 
 spread in some circles by a jest. Somebody 
 inquired if the diplomatists in London looked 
 so dogged as rumours said. Worse, was the 
 reply, the Russian ambassador has got his 
 Dogger look! It will be remembered that he 
 staved off war on the Dogger Bank incident 
 after a terrible strain. 
 
SOCIETY IN DECAY 185 
 
 Unfortunately the lowest and most ungen- 
 erous forms of abuse now prevail in a House, 
 where 'tis folly to be either witty or wise. 
 The expressions and monosyllables which the 
 national representatives bandy may be collated 
 to any extent among the wits of Whitechapel 
 and Limehouse. 
 
 As a matter of fact, there never was any 
 native English wit. It was largely imported 
 by Irishmen. The practical joke was the 
 English form of humour — concrete and clumsy 
 if not coarse. English memoirs record many 
 of these heavy pleasantries in the place where 
 French writers embalm examples of the na- 
 tional gift for the glittering phrase. 
 
 Theodore Hook (Disraeli's Stanislaus Hoax) 
 was the epitome of English humour. His 
 ventures in bon mot were childishly ridiculous, 
 but his Berner's Street hoax held up the traffic 
 of London. 
 
 It is difficult not to mention a remarkable 
 practical joker who added so much to the 
 humour of the forgotten days of King Ed- 
 ward VII. J. J. Cole was a contemporary of 
 mine at Cambridge. I was fortunate enough 
 to witness the famous visit he paid in 1905 
 to the University, of which he was a student, 
 disguised as the Sultan of Zanzibar. Accom- 
 
186 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 panied by a suite selected among his friends, 
 he was driven in the mayor's carriage to view 
 the familiar sights. His next feat was to 
 emulate Koepenick and inspect a British 
 battleship disguised as a foreign prince, and 
 to distribute decorations to the simple-minded 
 sailors — (who, however, caught and caned 
 him long afterward). He was last heard of as 
 the guest of the Irish viceroy in Dublin, where 
 I believe he tested the local detective force 
 by simulating an attack on the viceroy, and 
 waiting, watch in hand, for the members of 
 the secret service to arrive, too late to be of 
 any assistance ! 
 
 On the whole, English humour and English 
 morality have broadened but not decayed. 
 Rottenness and deterioration have fastened 
 upon sections of English society, but wholesale 
 decadence is not there. The war has purged 
 away much dross and allowed some of the 
 original metal to come to the surface. But 
 new metals and new moulds will be needed in 
 the period after the war. 
 
POST-VICTORIANISM 
 
 Edward VII led his subjects in their natural 
 desire to set aside Victorian things. For 
 years he had chafed under the strict surveil- 
 lance imposed by the Prince Consort. A re- 
 action was the result, and as Prince of Wales 
 he found his friends elsewhere than at court, 
 and his interests in other capitals than his 
 mother's. The humiliating and dependent 
 position in which the Queen retained him 
 made him the first Englishman to break with 
 Victorianism. He shocked Victoria's subjects, 
 as he afterward delighted his own. In his 
 reign everybody was anxious to be different 
 from their Victorian grandparents. The Vic- 
 torian attitude had upheld all conventions, 
 literary, political, or religious. Enthusiasm 
 for the new or scepticism of the old had been 
 regarded as too American or too French. 
 The Oxford movement which might have 
 developed a national religion was embittered 
 to take refuge in the arms of Rome. The 
 aesthetic movement which might have led 
 to a national art was ridiculed into preciosity 
 
 187 
 
188 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 and early decadence. The Victorians laughed 
 at their prophets. 
 
 But in the reigns of Edward and George 
 new movements were taken up with such 
 speed and enthusiasm that they were liable 
 to dissipate into thin absurdity of themselves. 
 Everybody set out to break rules and sup- 
 plant conventions. The latest "craze" or 
 "rage" superseded the old staple diet. There 
 was an unholy cry for strange meats. The at- 
 mosphere was agitated by crank artists and 
 preposterous poseurs, and became hectic and 
 unbalanced. Patriotism came to be regarded 
 as old-fashioned and morality as stupid. To 
 be serious was a social defect. Even society's 
 sinners were not serious enough to be really 
 bad. People were willing to forego their sin- 
 ning, provided they were not mistaken for 
 good. Young men who in a sterner age would 
 have enjoyed being taken for arctic explorers 
 preferred being suspected of decadence. Quite 
 bourgeois people, without the ability or oc- 
 casions to be fast, simulated moral speed. 
 Doubtless there were psychological thrills, 
 and the old Victorian blood cried to Heaven 
 and Hell for thrills. Society indulged in what 
 theologians call the sins of association. 
 
 In literature Browning and Tennyson were 
 
POST-VICTORIANISM 189 
 
 dismissed as grandmotherly. The latter was 
 sent to Coventry and the former to Boston. 
 Swinburne was hailed as the only poet of his 
 era, about twenty years after he had ceased 
 to write good poetry. It was discovered that 
 the "yellow" nineties had been the only 
 artistic decade of the previous century. A 
 feverish rechauffe of Wilde, Beardsley, and 
 Pater followed. A post- Victorian literature 
 was not long in starting on its own account 
 with flashiness for its hall-mark and paradox 
 as the test of its sterling. Literary values be- 
 came entirely superficial. The glitter without 
 the weight of gold was accepted and honoured. 
 English literature passed from an Augustan 
 age straight to that of brass. There was no 
 intermediary age of silver. 
 
 Commencement-de-siecle writers arose as bril- 
 liant and soundful as brass, who insisted 
 on writing against time, though they had a 
 fresh century ahead of them. They seemed 
 to share a consciousness with Edward Rex 
 that their day was short — as though some 
 early cataclysm threatened to make an end 
 of them and of all their works. As a result, 
 there was little scientific or philosophic writ- 
 ing. The three-volumed novel was succeeded 
 by the six-penny one. Writers learned to 
 
190 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 heighten and intensify the produce of the 
 moment. The ablest and most distinct of 
 Edwardian writers was Chesterton. He wrote 
 like some Dr. Johnson condemned to set forth 
 the coils of his expression by cable code. As 
 a result, he substituted the paradox for the 
 period. In a literary tour de force he defended 
 orthodoxy by writing a book about Heretics, 
 and he exactly hit his age in laying down 
 "the golden rule that there is no golden rule." 
 Very exactly also he probed the thought of 
 all contemporary writing in the choice saying: 
 "Everything matters except everything." He 
 perfected the game of literary "reversi" in 
 which pieces that were red one moment are 
 seen to be green the next. An irritating but 
 scintillant style. Smilingly he stood Truth 
 upon her head to explain the Universal An- 
 tipodes in which we all have our being. 
 
 Chesterton had serious motives behind his 
 paradoxes, but others were sensational for 
 sensation's sake. Bernard Shaw may have 
 had an artistic and a dramatic message to 
 deliver, but he could not forego the cheapest 
 advertisement of the prophet. It was not 
 until after the death of Victoria that Shaw 
 could be appreciated or tolerated. Though 
 in France he would only have been considered 
 
POST-VICTORIANISM 191 
 
 an outmoded Voltairian, he passed in Eng- 
 land for the apogee of human daring and 
 originality. The vogue endured until the 
 futurists swept into undisputed mastery of 
 the powers of topsyturvydom. Nevertheless, 
 both Shaw and Chesterton had sane lessons 
 to teach the Victorian. The futurist only 
 wished to destroy him and as a preliminary 
 to drive him mad. 
 
 The influences which corroded literature 
 worked with tenfold corruption through the 
 press. The Daily Mail, ochre offspring of 
 the yellow nineties, reached its zenith in Ed- 
 wardian days, when its proprietor became 
 proprietor of the Times. Harmsworth showed 
 himself a transatlantic Hearst, but he secured 
 prestige and immunity by supporting the 
 side of reaction in politics. Hailed as a paper 
 Napoleon, he chose the title of Northcliffe, 
 enabling him to copy the Napoleonic initial 
 in his signature. Under his aegis rose a school 
 of journalists, each of whom carried an editor's 
 pen in his knapsack. Journalism and litera- 
 ture became as indistinguishable as republi- 
 canism and Empery under Napoleon. 
 
 The infection of sensationalism spread to 
 the pulpit. The Bishop of London used 
 flashy novels, like When It Was Dark, as the 
 
192 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 subject of sermons in St. Paul's Cathedral. 
 Dissenting preachers developed a church slang 
 and even called on their hearers to stand by 
 the old firm, "God and Son" J Only the shop- 
 keeping soul could ever have conceived the 
 Trinity under such a figure. The Catholic 
 pulpit was liable to the same necessity. Only 
 by sensation apparently could credence be 
 attracted. Father Vaughan, decrying the Sins 
 of Society to audiences, which were neither 
 sinners nor society, was in symbolic relations 
 with his times. 
 
 The novelists followed on the same track. 
 A bright mildew pervaded their pages. Their 
 Victorian fathers had eaten sour grapes in 
 the garden of Mrs. Grundy and the children's 
 teeth were set on edge. There was a cry for 
 something wilder than Scott, for something 
 more gloomy than the Brontes, for something 
 more sexual than George Eliot. Dickens and 
 Miss Austen were as forgotten as the Penta- 
 teuch. Even novelists who had begun writ- 
 ing in the Victorian age developed new and 
 unexpected methods. Wells poured the labora- 
 tory, and George Moore the lavatory, into 
 their books. Wells became the chemical and 
 mechanised romanticist of his time. An inter- 
 est in science served him and his readers in 
 
POST-VICTORIANISM 193 
 
 place of a love of chivalry. There arose a cry 
 for the future instead of the past. 
 
 George Moore was a French writer of the 
 naturalist school writing in English. His 
 novels were as great a tour de force as though 
 a Greek erotic writer endeavoured to express 
 himself in clumsy Latin. Of their school, 
 Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa are not likely 
 to be replaced in English. It was typical of 
 the Victorian and post- Victorian ages that up 
 to 1900 everybody pretended they had not 
 read George Moore, while under King Edward 
 they pretended they had. After interesting 
 himself in the Gaelic movement Moore pro- 
 duced a trilogy of novels which had the ironic 
 result of immortalising the revivalists of Irish 
 letters in the English literature they once 
 had hopes of supplanting. He sketched the 
 portraits of his familiar friends with an un- 
 abashed pen. A. E., Douglas Hyde, Lady 
 Gregory, Edward Martyn, and Yeats live with 
 all their idiosyncrasies in his pages. Since 
 Boswell jotted Johnson there has been no such 
 photography. 
 
 Even the Catholic novelist Hugh Benson 
 could not help exhibiting the contemporary 
 symptoms. He wrote fascinating novels in the 
 nature of propaganda. He burned flash-lights 
 
194 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 before the altars of Rome. He once confided 
 to me that his novel The Conventionalists was 
 written to madden the critics. He had just 
 converted a clever contemporary of mine at 
 Cambridge by a process of exciting mysticism. 
 That process he elaborated in his next novel, 
 The Conventionalists. Not content with sketch- 
 ing his penitent, he leaped into his own pages 
 under his own name and triumphantly con- 
 verted his hero over again ! He mingled mys- 
 ticism and wove the tags of theology into his 
 novels exactly as Wells transferred the sweep- 
 ings of science to his. 
 
 The post- Victorian concert was a mad one 
 while it lasted. In the midst Bernard Shaw 
 sang solos in minor blasphemy, while Chester- 
 ton wrung fantastic fugues from a Gothic 
 organ. The notes sounded by others were 
 too superficial to need criticism, but their in- 
 spiration was typified by the sensation-seeker 
 who noted in the account he wrote of himself 
 in a Who's Who — "married — (for money). " 
 If readers remained sane it was because they no 
 more took literature seriously than the writers 
 thereof. Eventually, perhaps, they came to 
 share Chesterton's "insane dread of insanity." 
 They needed rest more than change, and it 
 must be confessed that it was out of sheer 
 
POST-VICTORIANISM 195 
 
 vertigo that Kipling, Chesterton, and Belloc 
 began to hymn such English simplicities as 
 Sussex, Beer, and Chalk. 
 
 Outside the circle of a literature which, 
 however disfigured by cleverness, was seldom 
 offensive, a thoroughly unpleasant output of 
 memoirs marked the taste of the age. Egre- 
 gious personalities masqueraded as reminis- 
 cences. Heading the charge of "light" litera- 
 ture, Lady Cardigan achieved the Balaclava 
 of scurrility. The type of author known as 
 the literary ghost (or ghoul) appeared and 
 compiled the recollections of the Crown Prin- 
 cess of Saxony and Countess Larisch. The 
 sale for such works multiplied. During the 
 last few weeks before the war the public were 
 admitted to Lord Alfred Douglas's confidences 
 on Oscar Wilde and to Mrs. Parnell's inti- 
 macies with the dead Irish leader. It was, per- 
 haps, time that Thor came knocking upon the 
 gates. 
 
 The same portents were visible in politics 
 as in literature. Chivalry, restraint, and de- 
 corum, whatever their demerits, took a back 
 place. The House of Commons took its tone 
 from the new Labour party. Acrimonious and 
 senseless revilings took the place of argument 
 on both sides. The younger men who at- 
 
196 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 tained prominence were advanced for their 
 glib smartness. Mr. F. E. Smith rose to the 
 forefront of the Tory party after a single 
 speech of overcharged epigram. It was re- 
 marked that in earlier days he would only 
 have qualified to be Disraeli's secretary. An- 
 other career which would have been impossible 
 in Victorian days was that of Horatio Bot- 
 tomley. He may be summarised as a modern 
 Socrates, "the gadfly of the state," but a 
 Socrates who has taken to journalism. His 
 criticisms were not scurrilous or delivered 
 below the belt, but his sheet John Bull be- 
 came endeared to the public for sensation's 
 sake. There is a sensationalism of morality 
 as well as of vice. 
 
 The last few months of politics and political 
 gossip before the war broke out were sad and 
 ignominious to recall. Stagnation, suspicion, 
 and slander combined to poison the atmos- 
 phere. Never were dissensions in English 
 life so acrimonious or tongues so malicious. 
 Mr. Asquith's salary would not have paid 
 the duty on all the wine Tory hostesses in- 
 sisted he was drinking. Chief Justice Isaacs 
 was accused of financial sharping, and Winston 
 Churchill of organising a cold-blooded pogrom 
 in Ulster. The extremes of bitterness and 
 
POST-VICTORIANISM 197 
 
 fabrication were reached in reference to naval 
 questions. Lords of Admiralty were arraigned 
 as traitors or Cingalees ! The latter incred- 
 ible assertion was hurled by opponents at 
 Lord Fisher, who certainly began life as he 
 is ending it — a very stolid and pugnacious 
 Englishman. 
 
 Of the protagonists in the naval debates 
 Admiral Beresford was my father's cousin, 
 and Winston Churchill was my own, and I 
 must admit that the blows and counterblows 
 which they exchanged were manly and above 
 the belt. Amid a crowd of sneaking partisans 
 they fought disinterestedly for what each 
 believed to be the best for the Navy. When 
 the war broke out I was gratified to hear 
 Beresford say that England could never be 
 sufficiently grateful for what Winston had 
 done in mobilising the fleet, while Winston ad- 
 mitted in a characteristic burst of generosity 
 that the Admiralty had profited from Beres- 
 ford's previous criticism. 
 
 With the single exception of the Admiralty, 
 the English social machine politically, edu- 
 cationally, and even morally was unprepared 
 and reluctant for war. The Empire as a whole 
 had sat down to rest upon her laurels. Her 
 expansion was at an end. She tipped from 
 
198 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 Lhasa to Alaska — from Cairo to Cape — from 
 Victoria Nyanza to King Edward VII's land. 
 "Thinking imperially" showed signs of ex- 
 haustion. Energy and discussion were con- 
 centrated on domestic affairs, Home Rule, 
 Disestablishment, the House of Lords. The 
 maelstrom of politics became more and more 
 agitated. England staggered in the transition 
 stage between the old-fashioned and limited 
 rule of her political aristocrats to the un- 
 limited supremacy of social democrats. The 
 cabinet showed transitional symptoms. It 
 contained a farrago of Whigs, Liberals, and 
 Socialists endeavouring to be progressive in 
 harmony. Within five years Lloyd George 
 changed English life — whether for good or for 
 bad historians will have to probe far-reaching 
 results to decide. As far as national balance 
 and efficiency were concerned, Lloyd George 
 came either too soon or too late. The war 
 found the scales between the classes and 
 masses not only unadjusted but in dangerous 
 agitation. The atmosphere was rent with 
 their violent dissensions and the streets were 
 filled with trampled suffragettes. Ireland was 
 tossed in the brew of civil war and Wales 
 became a sectarian cockpit. In England the 
 menace of trade-unions overshadowed even 
 
POST-VICTORIANISM 199 
 
 the question of lords and education — both 
 subjects of unrelenting hostilities. 
 
 The government maintained its hold on 
 power by filling up the gaping chinks between 
 the social strata with German patchwork. 
 In quick succession they borrowed the systems 
 of labour exchange and old-age pension from 
 beyond the Rhine. Haldane even introduced 
 some elements of Prussian organisation into 
 a bewildered and protesting War Office. 
 
 It was curious to the impartial observer to 
 note how much was being borrowed from 
 Germany at this time. Doctors borrowed their 
 drugs, scholars their texts, labourites their 
 doctrines, the cabinet their schemes, church- 
 men their higher criticism, and, most unlikely 
 of all, Gaelic revivalists obtained their Celtic 
 grammars from the same source of since- 
 repudiated culture. 
 
 As the fatal hour of destiny drew near, 
 shriller grew the cries and more blinded the in- 
 fatuation of the politicians. The diplomatists 
 prophesied smooth things with exceptions like 
 Sir Louis Mallet, and even had they foretold 
 dangers nobody at home was in a mood to 
 listen. Sir Louis Mallet missed a merited 
 position in the Foreign Office because of his 
 anti-German tendencies. He was sent to 
 
200 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 watch the "Great German Myth" in Turkey, 
 whence he returned with the melancholy satis- 
 faction of having been right. Even the state 
 Church reverberated to the Gilbertian atmos- 
 phere. The world crisis found Anglicanism 
 cloven between the rival claims of the Bishops 
 of Uganda and Zanzibar, who had collided in 
 the African mission field, as to whether their 
 amazed converts were Catholics or Protes- 
 tants. If they were Protestants, Dissenters 
 could join them at Communion according 
 to Uganda. But Zanzibar as a Catholic 
 Bishop protested. The Kikuyu question, as it 
 was called, was referred to the worthy Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury, who decided ex cathedra 
 that the Communion of Dissenters was pleas- 
 ing to God, but they must not come again ! 
 Whereat one archangel retired behind a cloud, 
 and two cherubs at least were admonished for 
 laughing. 
 
 July, 1914, found political and ecclesiastical 
 feud and unrest at summer heat. They were 
 hectic and curious days to remember now. 
 Days which have seemed since to be further 
 removed than the days of George IV, for 
 English chronology is now dated ante-bellum 
 and post-bellum. An era has passed. The 
 days of petty strifes at home were followed 
 
POST-VICTORIANISM 201 
 
 by the days of universal war abroad. People 
 have forgotten the days when high dames left 
 the room rather than meet the premier's family 
 — the days of the Russian ballet and the tango 
 — the days when suffragettes were raided in 
 London and guns run to Ireland. The days 
 when expectant Liberals awaited "Lang to 
 mould the church and Haldane stamp the 
 state." 
 
 Society in London danced madly during 
 those last months, as society had danced in 
 Paris toward the close of the Second Empire. 
 The tango was in the ascendant. Sophie 
 Chotec (the Archduchess of Austria) had come 
 to London to be initiated in its variants. For 
 her as for society it was to be a prelude to 
 the dance of death. Even her tragic assas- 
 sination with her husband in June sounded 
 no warning. The whirl of infectious riot con- 
 tinued. People dared life and death. A 
 wild woman had pulled down the King's 
 horse running in the Derby of 1913. A year 
 later a young baronet threw himself after mid- 
 night from a festive launch into the Thames 
 to interest a jaded supper party, and was 
 drowned. It seemed as though the exuberance 
 of the Irishman who felt "blue-mouldy for 
 need of a beating" had seized upon all. Yet 
 
202 THE END OF A CHAPTER 
 
 in their prophetic souls people felt something, 
 some worthy crisis, some invigorating trouble 
 was bound to come. Everything pointed at 
 one time to civil war in Ireland, and men 
 braced themselves for a struggle. Suddenly 
 above the cries in the street, above the do- 
 mestic brawls, sounded the clear challenge of 
 Germany overseas. With no uncertain sound 
 the hammer of Thor beat upon the gates of 
 Empire ! 
 
 After all that had passed or was passing, 
 it was as refreshing as going out after a scrap 
 with domestics to listen to the thunderous 
 skies gathering for a deluge. In a moment 
 of time all the troubles and worries and threat- 
 enings of politics became antediluvian, and the 
 nation stepped down to do battle with the 
 cleansing flood ! 
 
EPILOGUE 
 
 The ominous calm and the paralysing uncer- 
 tainties of July had passed for ever. Few 
 troops were seen to move, and no crowds 
 swayed through the streets. The symptoms 
 without the signs of war marked the first 
 days of August. 
 
 But a strange sight met the eyes of those 
 whom chance had placed in a position to 
 see — men on Irish trawlers gun-running toward 
 Ulster — fishermen in smacks off Devon and 
 off Grimsby — coast watchers upon the chalky 
 headlands — casual holiday-makers on Sussex 
 coasts or on Norfolk broads. These men saw 
 the wonders of Empire, and the grey smoke 
 curling upon the grey horizons, and the grey 
 sinewy ships that slipped through daylight 
 into dusk — and were no more seen. 
 
 For moments only these shapes were visible 
 before they disappeared into the wastes of 
 the North Sea. Not a shot was fired, and no 
 historic pennant was flown. Like a phantasm 
 of clouds they passed on their way, but with 
 them rested the keeping of the world. 
 
 The decisive stroke of the war had been 
 struck before the war began. Some one had 
 mobilised the fleet 
 
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