Surely there never was any time in the life of the world when it was so good, in the way of obvious material comfort, to be alive and fairly well-to-do as it was before the war. Think of the speed and comfort and relative cheapness of the Orient Express; of the way you could wander, unruined, through long aesthetic holidays in Italy and semi-aesthetic, semi-athletic holidays in the Alps; of the weekend accessibility of London from Northern England; of the accessibility of public schools for the sons of the average parson or doctor; of the penny post, crown of our civilization—torn from us while the abhorred halfpenny post for circulars was yet left; of the Income Tax just large enough to give us a pleasant sense of grievance patriotically borne, but not to prostrate us, winter and summer, with two “elbow jolts” or “Mary Ann punches” like those of the perfected modern prizefighter.
Many sanguine well-to-do people dreamt, in the August of 1914, that the war, besides attaining its primary purpose of beating the enemy, would disarrange none of these blessings; that it would even have as a byproduct a kind of “old-time Merrie England,” with the working classes cured of the thirst for wages and deeply convinced that everyone who was not one of themselves was a natural ruler over them. For any little expense to which the war might put us the Germans would pay, and our troops would return home to dismiss all trade-union officials and to regard the upper and middle classes thenceforth as a race of heaven-sent colonels—men to be followed, feared, and loved. Ah, happy vision, beautiful dream!—like Thackeray’s reverie about having a very old and rich aunt. The dreamer awakes among the snows of the Mont Cenis with a horrid smell in the corridor and the hot-water pipes out of order. And so war has gone out of fashion, even among cheery well-to-do-people.
II
But may it not come into fashion again? Do not all the great fashions move in cycles, like stars? When our wars with Napoleon were just over, and all the bills still to be paid, and the number of visibly one-legged men at its provisional maximum, must not many simple minds have thought that surely man would never idealize any business so beastly and costly again? And then see what happened. We were all tranquilly feeding, good as gold, in the deep and pleasant meadows of the long Victorian peace when from some of the frailest animals in the pasture there rose a plaintive bleat for war. It was the very lambs that began it. “Shall we never have carnage?” Stevenson, the consumptive, sighed to a friend. Henley, the cripple, wrote a longing “Song of the Sword.” Out of the weak came forth violence. Bookish men began to hug the belief that they had lost their way in life; they felt that they were Neys or Nelsons manqués, or cavalry leaders lost to the world. “If I had been born a corsair or a pirate,” thought Mr. Tappertit, musing among the ninepins, “I should have been all right.” Fragile dons became connoisseurs, faute de mieux, of prizefighting; they talked, nineteen to the dozen, about the still, strong man and “straight-flung words and few,” adored “naked force,” averred they were not cotton-spinners all, and deplored the cankers of a quiet world and a long peace. Some of them entered quite hotly, if not always expertly, into the joys and sorrows of what they called “Tommies,” and chafed at the many rumoured refusals of British innkeepers to serve them, little knowing that only by these great acts of renunciation on the part of licensees has many a gallant private been saved from falling into that morgue an “officer house,” and having his beer congealed in the glass by the refrigerative company of colonels.
The father and mother of this virilistic movement among the well-read were Mr. Andrew Lang, the most donnish of wits, and one of the wittiest. Lang would review a new book in a great many places at once. So, when he blessed, his blessing would carry as far as the more wholly literal myrrh and frankincense wafted abroad by the hundred hands of Messrs. Boot. The fame of Mr. Rider Haggard was one of Lang’s major products. Mr. Haggard was really a man of some mettle. By persons fitted to judge he was believed to have at his fingers’ ends all the best of what is known and thought by mankind about turnips and other crops with which they may honourably and usefully rotate.
