MUCH time passed. The Government stagnated, but the national life went on, like a river piling its waters against the tottering dam.
Then came the Great Crisis in which the Prime Minister went down. The nation was no longer on the brink of ruin, as the ravens had so long croaked, but in the very midst of it.
There is an all-powerful Guardian of Truth, who avenges every lie. Master, not of the world, which runs by rule, but of the Inward Meaning of it, which is beyond the range of law; Master, not of enterprises and institutions, but of the living souls of things which they rudely symbolise; as the Poet is Master, not of words and verses, but of the thing obscurely hidden in them; as the Musician is Master, not of notes and harmonies, but of the soul made audible in them, like an invisible gossamer thread revealed in dew: He teaches by destroying. The history of Man is the history of the Master’s contempt for lies. The seer of the Inward Truth sings its glory to a world of fools, who mistake his symbols for the Truth itself and the seer for the Master of it, building states and religions of the symbols; whereat the True Master laughs, and the building tumbles, crushing men in its ruins.
Ruins of lies fell upon England, crushing those that dwelt there as they fell. England had reverenced forms and insulted realities. With antiquarian fervour run riotously mad, we had thrust full-blooded, growing realities into the shrunken and tattered livery of old forms, stifling the life out of them; realities of Pure Ethic and Awe of the Insoluble Secret into old liveries of Christian dogma; realities of Anglo-Saxon gospel of universal Freedom into liveries of insolent insular Imperialism; realities of Democracy into old liveries of Feudalism, raising Tailors to high places due to sages and centaurs—summoning Lords of the Shears and Thread to put patches over the rents burst in the garments by the swelling life within, when we should have torn the old fripperies away and let the Titan loose from his bondage.
England was rich in men and minds and money; but the different owners of them stood face to face clutching their wealth, hissing defiance, petrified with jealousy, while the worms crept in and devoured it, and England starved. Good Government costs but little; but these men, rich in hands and brains and the plunder of the centuries, wrangled who should pay for Government, each preferring Anarchy to Government at his own cost; and the foreigners coursed over the seas and took everything but the bare land from us; the foreigners had no need to take that from us for our ruin, for life is not the thing that stands still in its place, but the thing that comes and goes, and while we boasted of our fleet—as the paunchy brewer boasts of his cellar full of vats—and while we boasted that no one dared to invade our country, the pride and the boast turned bitter on our lips, and we found ourselves the starving masters of a sun-sucked ash-heap.
So came the great Famine, punishing the lies; men, women, and children died in their thousands; the poor birds died also, and the dogs and the horses—losing their long faith in the wisdom of imperial man. The Titan’s livery hung loose about him; and the Lord High Tailors shook their heads over their steak and onion, and said that the waist needed taking in.
Men had not died without a struggle; there had been riots and fighting and theft; empty bellies had gone of their own accord through broken windows to fill themselves with guinea loaves, and thence to the crowded gaols to pick oakum into ropes to hang their leaders with; women died patiently, like overloaded horses that fall on the climbing hill, with a last look of the white bewildered eye entreating pardon of their masters for having failed to drag the burden to the top. Children died believing in their mothers; women died believing in some God or Fate; men died believing in nothing but the Police.
At last the Famine abated; the ships of corn came hurrying in. Men are men after all; and what is the function of the Colonies if not to forgive the senile sins of England—to overlook the insults of the Old Dotard’s vanity, and help him in his hour of need?
For England is at once Titan and Dotard. Youth and old age, submissive strength and tyrannous impotence—these are the two forces which make the parallelogram of public life. The hard old father hobbles nobly on his ebony cane in the sunshine of the castle terrace, unwilling to shuffle off his gout and agues and be at peace, because he envies possession to this rugged giant of an heir-in-tail, whom he keeps carrying burdens, like Caliban, in the cattle yard. Happy the day when we shall bear the old man at last, with ceremonious countenances, to the expectant churchyard, and pack him solemnly away in his ancestral vault.
The habit of trusting in symbols instead of realities is not easily put off. Those who have lived in darkness cannot face the sun of truth at once; when the castle falls they run, not to the fields, but to the stalls and sheds. When the vengeance of disaster comes upon a nation, men fly instinctively from the owlish darkness of their ruined symbols to the twilight of other symbols.
Dreading above all things the multiple solitude which hastens every way at once; craving before all things that sureness of direction in space which makes the intensity both of hope and of prayer; fixing their eyes on a personality as the distracted peasant fixes his eyes on an image or an eikon, the crowd betake themselves, of a sudden unanimous impulse, all in one way, shouting the name of a saviour or a scapegoat, clearing confusion by the embodiment of vengeance and deliverance in limited thinkable dimensions. They burn the witch, and clamour round the prophet.
But of forty million men, who can say which is the true prophet?
In times of peace the mass of men live like fish in tanks, aware of dim shades that come and go beyond, recking little of what is outside their own tiny range of weed and gravel. To be great with the mass is not to be a collection of definite great facts, but only a constantly recurring vagueness. ‘I know his name,’ is the sum of ordinary knowledge of great men. But with constant repetition the name of a man or a cause takes on an awe-inspiring, trust-compelling quality, and the fishes cry ecstatically: ‘Napoleon!’ ‘Buller!’ ‘Chamberlain!’ ‘Carter’s Little Liver Pills!’ ‘Hurrah!’—and this makes fame. While the great Poet is starving obscurely into immortality, the crowd without is staring awestruck at the famous Laureate’s feather-nodding coach, as it rolls him to oblivion in St. Paul’s. Why are all these people craning and jostling in the roadway? Is it because they loved the Laureate’s poems? Did he touch some chord in their hearts which the poor Poet’s fingers were too delicate to handle? Not a bit! They know the one man’s verses no better than the other’s; they stand lamenting for the Laureate simply because they have so often heard his name.
And now Dwala’s was such a name. His mind and character were still unknown, even to journalists; but the wavering darkness of his name had long been familiar to the fish in every tank. For months they had read of him in papers and magazines: his wealth, his success, his eccentricity, had been the talk of England. Then he had gone into Parliament and figured large in the comic cartoons. Others, after short notability, had lost favour by their speeches or their deeds; Dwala had left his reputation to grow of itself, like a tree. They felt his largeness. He was talked of everywhere as the capable man of the Cabinet. A Minister, he was remarkable even among ordinary Members as the man who never spoke. He was the ‘strong and silent man in a babbling age.’
In the hour of despair the people clamoured, with as much reason as they usually have for such clamouring: ‘Prince Dwala alone can save us! Down with Glendover! Down with Whitstable! Down with Huggins! Dwala for ever!’ The papers talked of a new era and a new man, who was to ‘cleanse the Augean stable’ and set Old England on its legs again.
For the lobby and the drawing-room all this had to be translated into a new language, full of such terms as ‘popular in the House’—‘the support of the Church Party’—‘keep things going’—‘able to entertain’—‘stop the mouth of the Irish Members.’ The division of ‘politics’ from national life which such phrases indicate does not arise from any cynicism in the ruling classes, but from our system of government itself. The evil begins in the polling booth, where men are elected, not to sit for England, but to sit for a party or for local wants. The interest of the nation is the only interest unrepresented in the House of Commons.
Deafened with the shouts of the people, afraid to venture to his official home through the angry crowds that filled Whitehall, the Premier tendered his resignation, and retired—poor scapegoat—to his gardened grange, to finish his book on Problems of Pure Thought.