In the Days of the Comet (25 page)

We common people of the old time based our conception of our
statesmen almost entirely on the caricatures that formed the most
powerful weapon in political controversy. Like almost every main
feature of the old condition of things these caricatures were an
unanticipated development, they were a sort of parasitic outgrowth
from, which had finally altogether replaced, the thin and vague
aspirations of the original democratic ideals. They presented
not only the personalities who led our public life, but the most
sacred structural conceptions of that life, in ludicrous, vulgar,
and dishonorable aspects that in the end came near to destroying
entirely all grave and honorable emotion or motive toward the State.
The state of Britain was represented nearly always by a red-faced,
purse-proud farmer with an enormous belly, that fine dream
of freedom, the United States, by a cunning, lean-faced rascal
in striped trousers and a blue coat. The chief ministers of state
were pickpockets, washerwomen, clowns, whales, asses, elephants,
and what not, and issues that affected the welfare of millions of
men were dressed and judged like a rally in some idiotic pantomime.
A tragic war in South Africa, that wrecked many thousand homes,
impoverished two whole lands, and brought death and disablement
to fifty thousand men, was presented as a quite comical quarrel
between a violent queer being named Chamberlain, with an eyeglass,
an orchid, and a short temper, and "old Kroojer," an obstinate
and very cunning old man in a shocking bad hat. The conflict was
carried through in a mood sometimes of brutish irritability and
sometimes of lax slovenliness, the merry peculator plied his trade
congenially in that asinine squabble, and behind these fooleries
and masked by them, marched Fate—until at last the clowning of
the booth opened and revealed—hunger and suffering, brands burning
and swords and shame. . . . These men had come to fame and power in
that atmosphere, and to me that day there was the oddest suggestion
in them of actors who have suddenly laid aside grotesque and foolish
parts; the paint was washed from their faces, the posing put aside.

Even when the presentation was not frankly grotesque and degrading
it was entirely misleading. When I read of Laycock, for example,
there arises a picture of a large, active, if a little wrong-headed,
intelligence in a compact heroic body, emitting that "Goliath" speech
of his that did so much to precipitate hostilities, it tallies not
at all with the stammering, high-pitched, slightly bald, and very
conscience-stricken personage I saw, nor with Melmount's contemptuous
first description of him. I doubt if the world at large will ever
get a proper vision of those men as they were before the Change.
Each year they pass more and more incredibly beyond our intellectual
sympathy. Our estrangement cannot, indeed, rob them of their
portion in the past, but it will rob them of any effect of reality.
The whole of their history becomes more and more foreign, more and
more like some queer barbaric drama played in a forgotten tongue.
There they strut through their weird metamorphoses of caricature,
those premiers and presidents, their height preposterously exaggerated by
political buskins, their faces covered by great resonant inhuman
masks, their voices couched in the foolish idiom of public
utterance, disguised beyond any semblance to sane humanity, roaring
and squeaking through the public press. There it stands, this
incomprehensible faded show, a thing left on one side, and now still
and deserted by any interest, its many emptinesses as inexplicable
now as the cruelties of medieval Venice, the theology of old Byzantium.
And they ruled and influenced the lives of nearly a quarter of
mankind, these politicians, their clownish conflicts swayed the
world, made mirth perhaps, made excitement, and permitted—infinite
misery.

I saw these men quickened indeed by the Change, but still wearing
the queer clothing of the old time, the manners and conventions of
the old time; if they had disengaged themselves from the outlook
of the old time they still had to refer back to it constantly as a
common starting-point. My refreshed intelligence was equal to that,
so that I think I did indeed see them. There was Gorrell-Browning,
the Chancellor of the Duchy; I remember him as a big round-faced
man, the essential vanity and foolishness of whose expression, whose
habit of voluminous platitudinous speech, triumphed absurdly once
or twice over the roused spirit within. He struggled with it, he
burlesqued himself, and laughed. Suddenly he said simply, intensely—it
was a moment for every one of clean, clear pain, "I have been a
vain and self-indulgent and presumptuous old man. I am of little
use here. I have given myself to politics and intrigues, and life
is gone from me." Then for a long time he sat still. There was
Carton, the Lord Chancellor, a white-faced man with understanding,
he had a heavy, shaven face that might have stood among the busts
of the Caesars, a slow, elaborating voice, with self-indulgent,
slightly oblique, and triumphant lips, and a momentary, voluntary,
humorous twinkle. "We have to forgive," he said. "We have to
forgive—even ourselves."

These two were at the top corner of the table, so that I saw their
faces well. Madgett, the Home Secretary, a smaller man with wrinkled
eyebrows and a frozen smile on his thin wry mouth, came next to
Carton; he contributed little to the discussion save intelligent
comments, and when the electric lights above glowed out, the shadows
deepened queerly in his eye-sockets and gave him the quizzical
expression of an ironical goblin. Next him was that great peer,
the Earl of Richover, whose self-indulgent indolence had accepted
the role of a twentieth-century British Roman patrician of culture,
who had divided his time almost equally between his jockeys,
politics, and the composition of literary studies in the key of
his role. "We have done nothing worth doing," he said. "As for me,
I have cut a figure!" He reflected—no doubt on his ample patrician
years, on the fine great houses that had been his setting, the
teeming race-courses that had roared his name, the enthusiastic
meetings he had fed with fine hopes, the futile Olympian beginnings.
. . . "I have been a fool," he said compactly. They heard him in
a sympathetic and respectful silence.

Gurker, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was partially occulted, so
far as I was concerned, by the back of Lord Adisham. Ever and again
Gurker protruded into the discussion, swaying forward, a deep throaty
voice, a big nose, a coarse mouth with a drooping everted lower lip,
eyes peering amidst folds and wrinkles. He made his confession for
his race. "We Jews," he said, "have gone through the system of this
world, creating nothing, consolidating many things, destroying much.
Our racial self-conceit has been monstrous. We seem to have used our
ample coarse intellectuality for no other purpose than to develop
and master and maintain the convention of property, to turn life into
a sort of mercantile chess and spend our winnings grossly. . . . We
have had no sense of service to mankind. Beauty which is godhead—we
made it a possession."

These men and these sayings particularly remain in my memory.
Perhaps, indeed, I wrote them down at the time, but that I do not
now remember. How Sir Digby Privet, Revel, Markheimer, and the others
sat I do not now recall; they came in as voices, interruptions,
imperfectly assigned comments. . . .

One got a queer impression that except perhaps for Gurker or Revel
these men had not particularly wanted the power they held; had
desired to do nothing very much in the positions they had secured.
They had found themselves in the cabinet, and until this moment
of illumination they had not been ashamed; but they had made no
ungentlemanly fuss about the matter. Eight of that fifteen came from
the same school, had gone through an entirely parallel education;
some Greek linguistics, some elementary mathematics, some emasculated
"science," a little history, a little reading in the silent or
timidly orthodox English literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth,
and nineteenth centuries, all eight had imbibed the same dull gentlemanly
tradition of behavior; essentially boyish, unimaginative—with
neither keen swords nor art in it, a tradition apt to slobber into
sentiment at a crisis and make a great virtue of a simple duty rather
clumsily done. None of these eight had made any real experiments
with life, they had lived in blinkers, they had been passed from
nurse to governess, from governess to preparatory school, from Eton
to Oxford, from Oxford to the politico-social routine. Even their
vices and lapses had been according to certain conceptions of good
form. They had all gone to the races surreptitiously from Eton, had
all cut up to town from Oxford to see life—music-hall life—had
all come to heel again. Now suddenly they discovered their
limitations. . . .

"What are we to do?" asked Melmount. "We have awakened; this empire
in our hands. . . ." I know this will seem the most fabulous of all
the things I have to tell of the old order, but, indeed, I saw it
with my eyes, I heard it with my ears. It is a fact that this group
of men who constituted the Government of one-fifth of the habitable
land of the earth, who ruled over a million of armed men, who
had such navies as mankind had never seen before, whose empire of
nations, tongues, peoples still dazzles in these greater days, had
no common idea whatever of what they meant to do with the world.
They had been a Government for three long years, and before the
Change came to them it had never even occurred to them that it was
necessary to have no common idea. There was no common idea at all.
That great empire was no more than a thing adrift, an aimless thing
that ate and drank and slept and bore arms, and was inordinately
proud of itself because it had chanced to happen. It had no plan,
no intention; it meant nothing at all. And the other great empires
adrift, perilously adrift like marine mines, were in the self-same
case. Absurd as a British cabinet council must seem to you now, it
was no whit more absurd than the controlling ganglion, autocratic
council, president's committee, or what not, of each of
its blind rivals. . . .

I remember as one thing that struck me very forcibly at the time,
the absence of any discussion, any difference of opinion, about the
broad principles of our present state. These men had lived hitherto
in a system of conventions and acquired motives, loyalty to a party,
loyalty to various secret agreements and understandings, loyalty
to the Crown; they had all been capable of the keenest attention
to precedence, all capable of the most complete suppression of
subversive doubts and inquiries, all had their religious emotions
under perfect control. They had seemed protected by invisible but
impenetrable barriers from all the heady and destructive speculations,
the socialistic, republican, and communistic theories that one may
still trace through the literature of the last days of the comet.
But now it was as if the very moment of the awakening those barriers
and defences had vanished, as if the green vapors had washed
through their minds and dissolved and swept away a hundred once
rigid boundaries and obstacles. They had admitted and assimilated
at once all that was good in the ill-dressed propagandas that had
clamored so vehemently and vainly at the doors of their minds in
the former days. It was exactly like the awakening from an absurd
and limiting dream. They had come out together naturally and
inevitably upon the broad daylight platform of obvious and reasonable
agreement upon which we and all the order of our world now stand.

Let me try to give the chief things that had vanished from their
minds. There was, first, the ancient system of "ownership" that
made such an extraordinary tangle of our administration of the
land upon which we lived. In the old time no one believed in that
as either just or ideally convenient, but every one accepted it.
The community which lived upon the land was supposed to have waived
its necessary connection with the land, except in certain limited
instances of highway and common. All the rest of the land was
cut up in the maddest way into patches and oblongs and triangles
of various sizes between a hundred square miles and a few acres,
and placed under the nearly absolute government of a series of
administrators called landowners. They owned the land almost as
a man now owns his hat; they bought it and sold it, and cut it up
like cheese or ham; they were free to ruin it, or leave it waste,
or erect upon it horrible and devastating eyesores. If the community
needed a road or a tramway, if it wanted a town or a village in any
position, nay, even if it wanted to go to and fro, it had to do so
by exorbitant treaties with each of the monarchs whose territory
was involved. No man could find foothold on the face of the earth
until he had paid toll and homage to one of them. They had practically
no relations and no duties to the nominal, municipal, or national
Government amidst whose larger areas their own dominions lay. . . .
This sounds, I know, like a lunatic's dream, but mankind was that
lunatic; and not only in the old countries of Europe and Asia,
where this system had arisen out of the rational delegation of local
control to territorial magnates, who had in the universal baseness
of those times at last altogether evaded and escaped their duties,
did it obtain, but the "new countries," as we called them then—the
United States of America, the Cape Colony, Australia, and New
Zealand—spent much of the nineteenth century in the frantic giving
away of land for ever to any casual person who would take it. Was
there coal, was there petroleum or gold, was there rich soil or
harborage, or the site for a fine city, these obsessed and witless
Governments cried out for scramblers, and a stream of shabby,
tricky, and violent adventurers set out to found a new section of
the landed aristocracy of the world. After a brief century of hope
and pride, the great republic of the United States of America,
the hope as it was deemed of mankind, became for the most part a
drifting crowd of landless men; landlords and railway lords, food
lords (for the land is food) and mineral lords ruled its life,
gave it Universities as one gave coins to a mendicant, and spent
its resources upon such vain, tawdry, and foolish luxuries as the
world had never seen before. Here was a thing none of these statesmen
before the Change would have regarded as anything but the natural
order of the world, which not one of them now regarded as anything
but the mad and vanished illusion of a period of dementia.