First and Last (5 page)

He imagined, nay he was convinced, that he was existing fifty years in the future, and that the interest of his conversation for others would lie in his reminiscence of the state of society in which we are actually living today. If anyone who had not been warned was imprudent enough to suggest that the conversation was taking place in 1909 would smile gently, nod, and say rather bitterly, "Yes, I know, I know," as though recognizing a universal plot against him which he was too weary to combat. But when he had said this he would continue to talk on as though both parties to the conversation were equally convinced that the year was really 1960 or thereabouts. Whether to add zest to what he said or from some part of his malady consonant with all the rest, my poor friend (who had been a journalist and will very possibly be a journalist again) presupposed that the whole structure of society as we now know it had changed and that his reminiscences were those of a past time which, on account of some great revolution or other, men imperfectly comprehended, so that it must be of the highest interest and advantage to listen to the testimony of an eye-witness upon them.

What especially delighted him (for he was a zealous admirer of the society he described) was the method of government.

"There was no possibility of going wrong," he said to me with curious zeal, "not a shadow of danger! It would be difficult for you to understand now how easily the system worked!" And here he sighed profoundly. "And why on earth," he continued, "men should have destroyed such an instrument when they had it is more than I can understand. There it was in every country in Europe; there were elections; all the men voted. And mind you, the elections were not so very far apart. Most people living at one election could remember the last, so there was no time for abuses to spring up.... Well, everybody voted. If a man wanted one thing he voted one way, and if he wanted another thing he voted the other way. The people for whom he voted would then meet, and with a sense of duty which I cannot exaggerate they would work month after month exactly to reproduce the will of those who had appointed them. It was a great time!"

"Yet," said I, "even so there must have been occasional divergences between what these people did and what the nation wanted."

"I see what you mean," he said, musing, "you mean that all the devotion in the world, the purest of motives and the most devoted sense of duty, could not keep the elected always in contact with the electors. You are right. But you must remember that in every country there was a machinery, with regard to the most important measures at least, which could throw the matter before the electors to be re-decided. I can remember no important occasion upon which the machinery was not brought into use."

"But, after all, the value of the decisions of the electorate you are describing," said I, continuing to humour him, "would depend upon the information which the electorate had received as well as upon their judgment."

"As for their judgment," he said, a little shortly, "it is not for our time to criticize theirs. Human judgment is not infallible, but I can well remember how in every nation of Europe it was the fixed conviction of the citizens that judgment was their chief characteristic, and especially judgment in national affairs. I cannot believe that so universal an attitude of the mind could have arisen had it not been justified. But as for information, they had the Press ... a free Press!" Here he fell into a reverie, so powerfully did his supposed memories affect him.

I was willing to lead him on, because this kind of illness is best met by sympathy, and also because I was not uninterested to discover how his own trade had affected him.

"You would hardly understand it," he said sadly; "what you hear from me is nothing but words.... I wish I could have shown you one of those great houses with information pouring in as rapid, as light, and as clear, from every hidden corner of the world, digested by master brains into the most lucid and terse presentment of it possible, and then whirled out on great wheels to be distributed by the thousand and the hundred thousand, to the hungry intelligence of Europe. There was nothing escaped it--nothing. In every capital were crowds of men dispatched from the other capitals of our civilization, moving with ease in the wealthiest houses, and exquisitely in touch with the most delicate phases of national life everywhere. And these men were such experts in selection that a picture of Europe as a whole was presented every morning to each particular part of Europe; and nowhere was this more successfully accomplished than in my own beloved town of London."

"It must have been useful," I said, "not only for the political purposes you describe, but also for investors. Indeed, I should imagine that the two things ran together." "You are right," he said with interest, "the wide knowledge which even the poorest of the people possessed upon foreign affairs, through the action of the Press, was, further, of the utmost and most beneficent effect in teaching even the smallest proprietor what he need do with his capital. A discovery of metallic ore--especially of gold--a new invention, anything which might require development, was at once presented in its most exact aspect to the reader."

"It was probably upon that account," said I, "that property was so equally distributed, and that so general a prosperity reigned as you have often described to me."

"You are right," said he; "it was mainly this accurate and universal daily information which produced such excellent results."

"But it occurs to me," said I, by way of stimulating his conversation with an objection, "that if so passionate and tenacious a habit of telling the exact truth upon innumerable things was present in this old institution of which you speak, it cannot but have bred a certain amount of dissension, and it must sometimes even have done definite harm to individuals whose private actions were thus exposed."

"You are right," said he; "the danger of such misfortunes was always present, and with the greatest desire in the world to support only what was worthy the writers of the journals of which I speak would occasionally blunder against private interests; but there was a remedy."

"What was that?" I asked.

"Why, the law provided that in this matter twelve men called a jury, instructed by a judge, after the matter had been fully explained to them by two other men whose business it was to examine the truth boldly for the sake of justice--I say the law provided that the twelve men after this process should decide whether the person injured should receive money from the newspaper or no, and if so, in what amount. And, lest there should still be any manner of doubt, the judge was permitted to set aside their verdict if he thought it unjust. To secure his absolute impartiality as between rich and poor he was paid somewhat over £100 a week, a large salary in those days, and he was further granted the right of imprisoning people at will or of taking away their property if he believed them to obstruct his judgment. Nor were these the only safeguards. For in the case of very rich men, to whom justice might not be done on account of the natural envy of their poorer fellow-citizens, it was arranged that the jury should consist only of rich men. In this way it was absolutely certain that a complete impartiality would reign. We shall never see those days again," he concluded.

"But do you not think," I said before I left him, "that the social perfection of the kind you have described must rather have been due to some spirit of the time than to particular institutions? For after all the zealous love of justice and the sense of duty which you describe are not social elements to be produced by laws."

"Possibly," he said, wearily, "possibly, but we shall never see it again!"

And I left him looking into the fire with infinite sadness and reflecting upon his lost youth and the year 1909: a pathetic figure, and one whose upkeep during the period of his deficiency was a very serious drain upon the resources of his family.

There are some truths which seem to get old almost as soon as they are born, and that simply because they are so astonishingly true that people soon get to feel as though they have known them all their lives; and such a truth is that which first one writer and then another in the last five years has been insisting upon, until it is already a perfect commonplace that nations do not know their own qualities. The inmost, the characteristic thing, that which differentiates one community from another, as tastes or colours differentiate things--
that
a nation hardly ever knows until it is pointed out to it by some foreigner or by some observer from within. It cannot know it, because one cannot tell the very atmosphere in which one lives. It is universal and therefore unnoticed. Now, if this is true of any nation, it is particularly true of England. And English people need to be told morning, noon, and night, not indeed the particular national characteristic which they have, since for this no particular name could be found, but rather what its evidences are; as, for instance, spontaneity in design, a passion for the mystical in poetry and the arts; a power in water-colour, in which they are perhaps quite alone, and certainly the first in Europe; and, above all, the chief, the master thing of all, humour.

There is not nor ever will be anything like English humour. It is a thing quite apart, and by it for now more than two hundred years you may know England. It does not puzzle the foreigner (as the more blatant kind of intellectual man is too fond of boasting that it does); he simply admires it as a rule and wonders at it always; sometimes he actually dislikes it, but by it he knows that the thing he is reading is English and has the savour and taste of England.

It is impossible to define it, because it is so full of stuff and so organic a quality; but in our own time it was principally the pencil of Charles Keene that has summed it up and presented it in a moment and at once to the eye--the pencil of Charles Keene and that profound instinct whereby he chose the legends for his drawing, whether he found them by his own sympathy with the people or whether they were suggested to him by friends.

It is the verdict of the men most competent perhaps to judge upon these things that he had the greatest graphic power of his time, and that no one had had that power to such an extent since Hogarth. Upon these things the men of the trade must dispute; the layman cannot doubt that he had here a genius and a genius comprehensively national. It is the essence of a good draughtsman that what he wants to draw, that he draws. The line that he desires to see upon the paper appears there as his fingers move. It is a quality extremely rare in its perfection. And Charles Keene had it in perfection, as in totally different manner had the offensive and diseased talent of Beardsley.

But more important than the power to do is the quality of the thing done, and the work of Charles Keene, multitudinous, varied, always great, is an inheritance for English people comparable to the inheritance they have in Dickens. It has also what Dickens had, a power of representing, as it were, the essential English. Just that which makes people say (with some truth) that Dickens never drew a gentleman would make them say with equal truth that what was interesting in the gentlemen of Charles Keene (and he perpetually drew them) was not the externals upon which gentlemen so pride themselves, but the soul. Thus I have in mind one picture wherein Keene drew a gentleman; true, he was a gentleman who had just swallowed a bad oyster, and therefore he was a man as well. I recall another of an old gentleman complaining of the caterpillar on his chop: he is a gentleman of the professional rather than the territorial classes, and, great heavens! what a power of line! All you see beneath the round of his hat is the end of his nose, the curve of his mouth, and two bushy ends of whiskers. Yet one can tell all about that man; one could write a book on him. One knows his economics, his religion, his accent, and what he thought of the Third Napoleon and what of Garibaldi. I have called draughtsmanship of this quality an inheritance--I might have called it perhaps with better propriety a monument. It is possible that England in the near future will look back with great envy, as she will certainly look back with great pride, to the generation preceding our own: they were a solid and a happy community of men. How much they owed to fortune, how much to themselves, it is not the place of such random stuff as mine to consider.

They were nearly impregnable in their island; they were not bellicose. They made and sold for all the world. Whether the very different future which we are now entering is to be laid to their door or to our own, that generation will still remain one of the principal things in English history, like the Elizabethan generation, or the group of men who organized the Seven Years' War, or the group of men who fought in the Peninsula. And of that generation the note of health and of stability is represented by its humour. I am not sure that of all things educational to young men with no personal memory of that time, and especially to young men with no family tradition of it to reflect it in their books and their furniture; and--this yet more particularly--to young men born out of England yet claiming communion with England, the Anglo-Indians and the Colonials--I am not sure, I say, that the thing most educational to these would not be some hundred of Charles Keene's drawings, for therein they would find what it was that gave them the power and the wealth that can hardly be defended unless its traditions are continued. Note how Victorian England dealt with the humour of a Volunteer review; note how it dealt with the humour of excessive wealth; and note how it dealt with the humour of schools and of Dons. One might almost define it by negations. There is in all of it no--but here I lack a word.... When things ring false it is because they have got by exaggeration or by some other form of falsity
beside
themselves. Appreciation of rank or even of worth becomes snobbishness; appreciation of another's judgment false taste; and patriotism, the most beautiful, the noblest, the most necessary of the great emotions, corrupts into something very vile indeed.

Well, the Victorians, and notably this man of whose power of the pencil I am speaking, did lack that false savour, that savour of just missing what one wishes to say or to feel, which haunts us to-day; and I should imagine that whether it were cause or effect the salt present in the preservation of the moral health of that society was humour. Let us enjoy it like an heirloom. It is more national than the language; at least it is more national than what the language has become under foreign pressure; it is infinitely more national than our problems and our tragedies. It is so national that--who knows?--it may crop up again of itself one of these days; and may that not be long.