Charles F. G. Masterman

“ This “Life Worship” becomes revealed as a gluttonous grasping at the present, the sucking of the rind and core of its delights; a response to the consciousness of the crowd; a refusal to accept any standard but the standard of Life, before which many impulses and all inhibitions stand judged and condemned. “I believe in the Body,” is the beginning of the Creed. “I believe all manner of asceticism to be the vilest blasphemy; blasphemy towards the whole of the human race. I believe in the flesh and the body, which is worthy of worship.... The ascetics are the only persons that are impure.” ”

“ The one cloud in the landscape comes from the knowledge that it will change and vanish: that, behind, are always the hurrying of the inexorable hours and the beating of the great wings of Death. But if the transitoriness of love and beauty causes some pang of sadness, the intensity of it is deepened by this conviction of its passing. The shadow creeping slowly over the dial, the vision of bare November with its ruined choirs in the splendour of the August afternoon, can excite a longing wild with all regret. ”

“ Its fear to-day is Socialism: Socialism which it does not understand, but which presents itself as an uprising of the uneducated, suddenly breaking into its houses; their clumsy feet on the mantelpiece, their clumsy hands seizing and destroying all beautiful and pleasant things. So it lies awake at night, listening fearfully to the tramp of the rising host: the revolt of the slave against his master. From Socialism—as a code of economic organisation, ordering life on a military, disciplinary, and rational basis—it has perhaps less to fear than it sometimes imagines. ”

“ But no one to-day would seek in the ruined villages and dwindling population of the countryside the spirit of an “England” four-fifths of whose people have now crowded into the cities. The little red-roofed towns and hamlets, the labourer in the fields at noontide or evening, the old English service in the old English village church, now stand but as the historical survival of a once great and splendid past. Is “England” then to be discovered in the feverish industrial energy of the manufacturing cities? In the vast welter and chaos of the capital of Empire? ”

“ Mankind after the European, as after the Roman, civilisation fell back into darkness. A catastrophe of centuries was occupied by the evening, the midnight, and the dawn. As once the barbarians walked with wonder along the deserted Roman roads or suddenly emerged from forest and plain to gaze astonished on the vast ruins of aqueducts and coliseums and once populous cities, so the new child peoples which survived the cosmic catastrophe contemplated the embankments, the crumbling bridges, the tattered, torn fragments of deserted towns which marked the memories of our dead race. ”

“ In similar vision the streets of those cities are always filled with this tumultuous and curious Crowd: restless, leaderless, astonished at itself and at the world, finding little intelligible either in the universe without or the universe within. Before which assembly in perpetual session there pass the phantom figures of those who appeal for its favour and its judgment: at first to a Crowd contemptuous, then to a Crowd acquiescent and astonished, ultimately to a Crowd applauding: themselves members of it, yet standing always separate and apart; because they alone are working towards an end. ”

“ Amid the splendour of the natural scene, the granite rock and heather in the setting sun, poverty, selfishness, superstition, ignorance, indifferent cruelty compete for mastery. The priest tyrannises and bullies, the farmer cheats the labourer; furtive cunning and idleness and revengeful memories occupy the place of the simple devotion and pastoral rejoicings of the popular picture. But the new world which is to civilise this dreary swamp of humanity out of existence offers to the observer food no more satisfying to the hungry heart of man. ”

“ And here was a civilisation which [236] could be approved or condemned, but which at least stood as a coherent thing—a rule of life, a code of conduct, an organic society. But as he grows to manhood, Bladesover is sinking into decay, perishing, not knowing that it is perishing, thinking that it will endure for ever. The man who is living amid that long-drawn decline is wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. It is an age in passing. What is coming to replace it? No one knows. The religion, the moral affirmations and denials of Bladesover are vanishing with it. ”

“ Rebellion will endure so long as the human will affirms itself free, and passion can draw its inspiration from some fire beyond the boundaries of the world. That fire descends in the Divine fury of all revolutions; which burn up and suddenly consume the civilisation which has become orderly and comfortable and weary of it all. It descends also when to some remote obscure human being, set in the enormous city, life suddenly acquires significance and high meaning, in utter devotion to a person or a cause. ”

“ Here, also, are sudden vicissitudes of fortune, passionate human affections, love of woman and of child, fear of violence and of death. It is life lived close to the margin, in perpetual familiarity with the reality of common things; darkness and cold, hunger and despair. It is life lived, that is to say, as perhaps the majority of mankind are living it to-day; never so far removed from the possibility of privation and of danger as to be able to settle down tranquil in a universe of security. ”

“ He sees a literature which vindicates an unequal distribution of wealth, in the necessity for leisure and a secured comfort for a certain proportion of the people, if there is to survive an amenity of manners, a cultivation of the arts, the traditions of a governing class. He sees a literature which stretches gaunt fingers over the costly clothes and furniture, and exhibits upon them the stains of blood. No reasoned or intellectual appeal will compel him to accept the one side or the other, to appear as the advocate of order or the advocate of change. ”

“ So, while the white hotels rise on all the shores of England, and the apparatus of pleasure is developing into ever new and ingenious forms of entertainment, continues through the nights and days the grey struggle of the Abyss. It is the indomitable will to live, resisting always that press of circumstance which would squeeze out the life of the disinherited, and leave a solitude where once was industry and action. ”

“ The old lights have fallen from the sky, existence has become too complex and crowded for the influences of wide spaces reaching to a far horizon. Summer and winter pass over these little lamplit streets, to-day the lilac and syringa, to-morrow the scattered autumn leaves, in an experience of tranquillity and repose. But with the ear to the ground there is audible the noise of stranger echoes in the labyrinthine ways which stretch beyond the boundaries of these pleasant places; full of restlessness and disappointment, and longing, with a note of menace in it ”

“ The ironical foreigner who prefers to resist, beg, cringe, and criticise, presents a figure not wholly heroic. He has fallen back on facts. He has sucked the salt and rind of life. He has deliberately contracted himself out of the universe of make-believe which he sees encompassing the people amongst whom his lot is cast. He enjoys his weakness and his laughter: the machine moves on; doing the work of the world. ”

“ Behind this second generation there was even the vision of a third, growing up in the heart of such a nightmare: a third generation in which there would no longer remain even the memories of the early struggles of the pioneers of great fortunes to connect them with reality.
That reality it is impossible for such a society ever to apprehend. Newspaper criticisms leave them entirely unmoved. The more unblushing the record of scandals and viciousness and foolish, distorted luxury in any “fashionable” paper, the more secure its circulation amongst the very people who are assailed. ”

“ The beauty of English landscape is the beauty of “landlords’ country”—the open woods, the large grass fields and wide hedges, the ample demesnes, which signify a country given up less to industry than to opulence and dignified ease. The one is a park: the other, a source of food supply and the breeding-place of men. The typical English countryside is that of great avenues leading to residences which lack no comfort, broad parks, stretches of private land, sparsely cultivated, but convenient for hunting, shooting, and a kind of stately splendour. ”

“ These observers are justified at least in one contention: that the future, whether in orderly progress or with sudden or gradual retrogression, will be astonished at the “illusion of security” in which to-day society reposes; forgetting that but a thin crust separates it from the central elemental fires, that the heart of the earth is a flame. There are forces of resistance to disintegration and decay, even amongst this shabby crowd which appears to the indignant observer but an aggregation of aimless, impossible lives. ”

“ Then in a moment he will change the note, and now he is telling them of a day in the life of the unemployed: the monotonous search for work, the kindness or insult at each application, the alternation of revolt and wretchedness, fury and apathy, the unwillingness to face the wife again in the evening with nothing with bad news. They all know it, they have mostly been through it; it is a shadow which hangs over them all. And a strange, impressive hush falls over the vast assembly, and men cough or rub their eyes, or turn away from each other’s faces. ”

“ It has no real power either of infecting with disease a civilisation that is healthy, or of healing a civilisation that is sick and tired. For many years, perhaps, aerial navigation may be the sport and plaything of rich and adventurous spirits, like the first motor cars; creating occasional sensations by circling round St Paul’s Cathedral, or descending unexpectedly in other people’s back gardens. That is the stage when mankind will rejoice in the ingenuity of its inventors, heedless of the tremendous changes which such inventors must ultimately originate. ”

“ Divorced from the ancient sanities of manual or skilful labour, of exercise in the open air, absorbed for the bulk of his day in crowded offices adding sums or writing letters, each a unit in a crowd which has drifted away from the realities of life in a complex, artificial city civilisation, he comes to see no other universe than this—the rejoicing over hired sportsmen who play before him, the ingenuities of sedentary guessing competitions, the huge frivolity and ignorance of the world of the music hall and the Yellow newspaper. ”

“ They already contemplated the time when the last piece of gold would have been transported to meet the demands of the insatiable “foreigner,” and the whole country would suddenly realise that its pockets were empty—that it had spent all that it had. Undoubtedly similar if less pleasant arguments of a vigorous fiscal campaign have succeeded in shaking belief in England’s prosperity. It is still possible in train or street, or places where men assemble, to find observers, with an air of sagacity, declaiming upon England’s headlong rush towards poverty and the abyss. ”

“ We have to remember, however, in such an estimate, that each generation stands in the roll-book of the centuries, not as it appears to itself, but as it appears to observers gazing, as from a distance, over a gulf of time. What records will survive, what evidence of existence, when all the pleasantness and amenity of little, comfortable, satisfied people have vanished over the limits of the world? ”

“ He found fresh inspiration for the work of progress in the vision of mankind, at last tranquil and satisfied, occupying its leisure in reading Wordsworth’s poetry. The modern city crowd would allow scant tolerance to such visions as these. They demand excitement, adventure: the vision of that physical activity and control which is denied to themselves. To make two blades of grass grow where one grew before is the ideal of the lower, physical energies. To establish two football contests where only one existed is the translation of it into terms of the soul. ”

“ It is not impossible to conceive of a time when a Middle Class will definitely build up a standard of its own: no longer turning to a wealthy and leisured company above it for effective imitation of a life to which it is unsuited. Becoming conscious, for the first time, that it possesses elements to contribute to the stream of national life which can be provided neither by the rich nor the poor, it may gain that collective respect and pride in itself which it has not yet achieved. ”

“ Dressed up in gorgeous garments, marching through the world with helmet and tin sword, they may pretend that tremendous events accompany every day. If, to the majority, these tremendous events do not accompany every day, they are destined sooner or later to be found out. Lives insurgent and confined may take delight in the vision of strange countries and far horizons, just as Dick Heldar at his window looking over the lights of the enormous city is roused into a sickness of longing by the song of the “Men of the Sea.” ”

“ Outside, an occasional crisis, the panic fear of people to whom wealth means attainment, that their wealth is vanishing, brings the accumulation of vast fortune toppling to the ground. There follows a crop of suicides: then the machine recovers and swings forward again on its blind, staggering progress nowhither. The secret places of the world are ravaged, the wise men subpœnaed, all cunning invention subsidised, that some alchemy may be found which will resist the ravages of time, preserve a beauty that is departing, stay the inexorable chariots of the hours. ”

“ The common impression, amongst those who do not dwell in such a universe, is that existence under such conditions must reel back into savagery or apathy—into a kind of numbness before all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or into the fierce fight for existence upon the sinking ship or in the crumbling earthquake city. ”