The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  The part of England for which Newbolt spoke should have been represented in verse by Alfred Austin who, until 1913, was Poet Laureate, but he did not possess the talent to express either adequately or frequently the imperial echo. His appointment owed more to his politics than to the quality of his verse. Before he was called into Queen Victoria’s poetic service, he was a journalist of Conservative persuasion. On appointment, he immediately performed the task which was expected of him by composing an ode in praise of the Jameson Raid. There was almost universal agreement, even among the jingoists’ of the period, that his job should have gone to Rudyard Kipling, said to have been denied the laurel wreath because of a poem which was entitled ‘The Widow of Windsor’. Kipling had a talent for capturing the spirit of Empire, but after the death of ‘Mrs Victoria’ (as the offending poem called the Queen) he chose not to do so. Only Newbolt was left to write of England’s glory. He did so in lines of imperishable triviality.

  Admirals all for England’s sake

  Honour be yours, and fame!

  And honour, as long as waves shall break,

  To Nelson’s peerless name.

  Kipling, in contrast, was a grown-up patriot, who despised both ‘muddied oafs’ and ‘flannelled fools’. It is impossible to imagine him describing an Englishman awaiting death at the hands of rebellious native tribesmen and thinking, as the day of execution dawned, of his school sports day.

  He saw the School Close, sunny and green,

  The runner beside him, the stand by the parapet wall,

  The distant tape, and the crowd roaring between,

  His own name over all.

  Newbolt wrote of England in the language of a man who was untroubled by doubt – an essentially Victorian attitude to life. Admirers of Newbolt described his defining characteristic (with some justification) as love of country. And it may well be that affection for England, in all its different forms, is the quality which binds Edwardian poets together – that and the constant presence in all their drawing rooms of Ford Maddox Heuffer, a minor but ubiquitous novelist, and J. B. Pinker, a literary agent and entrepreneur.

  The idealised view of England, wistfully observed from exile, is generally thought to be best represented by Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’. There is, however, at least a possibility that Brooke – a man with radical inclinations as well as a tendency to write bad love poetry – wrote about the Cambridge village as a satire on the romantic view of Edwardian England. ‘Grantchester’ may be a utopia in which time is suspended.7 ‘Stands the Church clock at ten to three?’ If it is satire, ‘Grantchester’ is very good satire indeed. It makes the Cambridgeshire village part of a rural idyll.

  And after, ere the night is born

  Do hares come out about the corn?

  Oh, is the water sweet and cool

  Gentle and brown above the pool?

  And laughs the immortal river still

  Under the mill, under the mill?

  The enquiry about honey with which the poem ends is probably intended as an attack on sentiment as distinct from romance. But it was possible to write about the sights and sounds of England without indulging in either excess, as Robert Bridges demonstrated.

  When men were all asleep the snow came flying

  In large white flakes, falling on the city brown,

  Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,

  Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town.

  Bridges, to prove his affection for all things English, also wrote about football, but it is unlikely that his poem on that subject was crucial in securing him the Laureate’s crown when Austin died in 1913.

  Thus in our English sport, the spectacular game

  Where tens of thousands flock, throttling the entrance gates.

  Bridges’ first collection of poems was published in 1873, his last in 1929. A. E. Housman’s poetic career lasted almost as long. A Shropshire Lad was published, at his own expense, in 1896, his last anthology in 1936. But, unlike Bridges, he offered the public nothing new at all during the whole Edwardian period. He was busy writing poetry and translating (usually bawdy verse) from the classics throughout his years of silence. Between 1896 and the publication of the first extract from what he called his ‘notebook’ in 1922, nothing appeared in print. He is best thought of as a Victorian.

  So is G. K. Chesterton – at least as a serious poet. He spent much of the twentieth century’s first decade writing light essays, literary criticism and religious polemics. His poems of the period were conspicuously a celebration of England’s Englishness and a defence of the values he thought to be embodied in beer and beef. ‘The Rolling English Road’ is a tribute to English eccentricity and it is impossible to pretend that what that rumbustious poem has to say has much in common with Walter de la Mare’s ‘England’.

  The clouds – how often have I

  Watched their bright towers of silence steal

  Into infinity

  John Masefield’s Edwardian affection for England is often thought to be confined to the seas around Britain’s coast. His reputation largely rests on Salt Water Ballads – and one poem in that collection, ‘Sea Fever’, expresses perfectly the urge to sail which typifies much of his work. But he too had a landlubber’s affection for the English landscape.

  The dawn comes cold: the haystack smokes

  The green twigs crackle in the fire

  The dew is dripping from the oaks

  The sleeping men bear milking yokes

  Slowly towards the cattle byre.

  By the time that the second (not entirely maritime) Masefield anthology was published in 1910, Thomas Hardy, who knew more about dripping oaks and smoking haystacks than any man alive, had forsaken Wessex for Napoleonic France. The Dynasts, part pageant and part verse play, had two conflicting characteristics. Hardy was obsessed by the need for accurate detail. But, because he wanted his drama of destiny and death to be performed on stage, he sacrificed truth for dramatic effect. So Nelson soliloquised on the eve of Trafalgar about his impending death and the pangs of guilt which are the reward of adultery.

  Some contemporary critics judged that The Dynasts was the high-water mark of Edwardian poetry. Lascelles Abercrombie wrote that it had ‘attained something that the age of Tennyson and Browning quite failed to effect’. He built that dubious proposition on what he believed to be the Zeitgeist. Napoleon, the doomed titan, illustrated the Edwardians’ loss of faith in heroes and men of destiny. If that was so, nobody had told Sir Henry Newbolt.

  To describe Hardy (or any Englishman) as the best poet to live, write or publish in the reign of King Edward VII is to forget that Ireland, in its entirety, was then part of the United Kingdom. For in Dublin in 1900 William Butler Yeats – a poet of uncontested and incontestable genius – published The Shadowy Waters. Yeats (born in Ireland but partly educated in England) intended, in youth, to become an artist, but turned instead to literature. There was always something of the mystic in him. It is revealed by his study, long before he could call himself a professional writer, of William Blake. His interest in unseen forces naturally turned towards Irish mythology. The result was The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems and Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. The music of Blake’s mysticism echoes through his earlier poems and his regret that he does not possess ‘heaven’s embroidered cloths, enwrought with golden and silver light’. That poem ends with one of the most famous, as well as the most evocative, lines in the English language. ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’

  Yeats’s enthusiasm for mysticism, in its lowest form, encouraged involvement in a number of probably disreputable and certainly risible secret societies. He became Chief Instructor in Mystical Philosophy to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He was a Freemason and a Rosicrucian. At a higher level of romantic perception, he thought of himself as a literary Pre-Raphaelite, committed to the noble values of a less materialistic age and determined to reveal its beauty in language
as clear and colourful as the paintings of William Morris. T. S. Eliot was elegantly offensive about the combination of Pre-Raphaelite values, mystical inclination and Irish folklore. ‘The Shadowy Waters seems to me one of the most perfect expressions of the vague, enchanted beauty of that school. Yet it strikes me … as the western seas descried through the back window of a house in Kensington, Irish myth for the Kelmscott Press.’8

  Yeats moved on from Irish mythology to the creation of the institutions of Irish culture – the New Irish Library, Irish literary societies in London and Dublin, and the Irish Literary Theatre, which became (with the help of Anne Horniman, a regular benefactor of Irish causes) first the New Irish and then the Abbey Theatre. In 1902, the theatre produced Yeats’s play Cathleen ni Houlihan. The part of the mythological queen was played by Maud Gonne. It marked the end of Yeats’s celebration of the ‘Celtic Twilight’ – a phrase he invented to express, not the decline that it has come to represent, but an age of Irish greatness which was shrouded in the mists of antiquity.

  Yeats met Maud Gonne in 1889.* He described the meeting as ‘the moment when the troubles of my life began’. From then on his obsessive love – unrequited and unreciprocated – dominated his whole existence. Much of his most moving poetry was either dedicated to Maud Gonne or provoked by her inability to love him as he loved her. In November 1902, he described himself as in ‘the best good spirits’ and wrote of a happy day spent with Maud.

  We sat together at one summer’s end

  That beautiful mild woman your close friend

  And you and I talked of poetry.

  It was not one of his best poems. Perhaps he was only inspired by sadness. If so, he did not have to wait long for the muse to return. A month later, Maud Gonne – who could never have loved him and never pretended otherwise – left for Paris to meet John MacBride, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who had become a hero of Irish nationalism by fighting with the Boers against the British in South Africa.

  Yeats had first proposed to Maud Gonne ten years earlier and she had refused him for reasons which she refused to explain. She had become convinced – part of the dark side of her mysticism – that her dead child (about whom Yeats knew nothing) would be reincarnated if she conceived again, with the same father, on holy ground. At least the bizarre episode produced Yeats’s greatest love poem.9

  When you are old and grey and full of sleep

  And nodding by the fire, take down this book

  And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

  Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep

  The ‘reincarnation’ of Maud Gonne’s son had taken place in 1890. Unfortunately the new baby was not the same gender as the dead sibling. Despite the arrival of the mystical child, Yeats remained anxious to marry Maud. But she was still unwilling to marry him. Her marriage to MacBride – probably precipitated by the desertion of the father of her two illegitimate children – left Yeats with a permanent feeling of betrayal. But anger never diminished his love. It was because of her that his cultural nationalism turned into support for violent revolution. And it was for her that he wrote the most moving of his early poems. ‘No Second Troy’ balanced resentment against gratitude. ‘The Folly of Being Comforted’ laments with love ‘the little shadows come about her eyes’. Yeats was to write better poems as the century moved on. But Maud Gonne was part of most of them.

  Although it was blessed with Yeats, the Edwardian era was not notable for its poets and poetry. That shortcoming has been attributed to the philistinism of the age, which is too often remembered only for its sybaritic King. But, if there was a cultural malaise in the century’s early years, it did not depress the quality of the period’s fiction. At least one classic novel was published in almost every year – Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh was posthumously published in 1900, Galsworthy’s The Man of Property in 1906, Conrad’s The Secret Agent in 1907, Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale in 1908, Wells’s Tono-Bungay in 1909, Forster’s Howards End in 1910, Wells’s The New Machiavelli in 1911 and Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers in 1913. And the reign began with three novels from the greatest novelist of his time, Henry James. The Wings of the Dove was published in 1902, The Ambassadors in 1903 and The Golden Bowl in 1904.

  James celebrated the new century by shaving off his whiskers, moustache and beard. He thought that changing the way he looked was symbolic of the different way in which he looked at the world. The United States, which he had left, had invaded Cuba and become an imperialistic power. Britain, which he had made his home, had behaved with equal vulgarity by fighting the Boers. His natural pacifism was in brutal conflict with his instinctive patriotism. Half hoping for a quick victory and half fearing a slow defeat, he was in a constant state of turmoil. The result was an increase in the detachment which he felt from both his origins and the country of his adoption.

  The beginning of the century was marked, like every other time in James’s life, with an incessant social round. But he still managed to draw up an outline of a new novel. It was to be called The Ambassadors. It took longer to complete than he anticipated and he then had to wait for what he called ‘the vulgar Harper serialisation’.10 James then contracted a debilitating bowel infection which, together with his extensive social life, held up publication for even longer. As a result, his three greatest novels – each of them substantial as well as inspired – were published in three successive years.

  The Ambassadors embodied, more completely than anything else he wrote, James’s own view of literature and life. Lewis Lambert Strether, its main character – it would be wrong to call him a hero – leaves America for England in order to discover why a young friend has refused to return from the old world to the new. There is a suspicion that the voluntary exile has become involved with an undesirable older woman. Strether, like James himself, finds that his ideas change in his new environment. Pragmatism becomes more important than principle, and compassion takes precedence over formal morality. Like James, Strether (who is about the same age as his creator) has the ambivalent (and convoluted) satisfaction of being an observer observing himself making observations, not a participant. He embodied James’s heightened sense of ‘looking over his shoulder at where he had come from and where he is now’.11 It was an ideal position from which to view the beginning of the twentieth century.

  The capacity to give the impression of looking forward as well as back made Henry James, in one sense, personify the first years of the new century. But his conduct and character were essentially Victorian. His homosexuality was hidden, not always successfully, behind an apparent preoccupation with grace and good manners; but when he met Rupert Brooke, he felt ‘rather like an unnatural intellectual Pasha visiting a Circassian Harem’,12 and he fell openly, as well as hopelessly, in love with a young Norwegian sculptor. He lived an extravagant social life of fancy-dress balls and formal dinners in London, Florence, Paris and Rome. It was not unusual in Edwardian England for even the most serious of men to regard such things as an essential part of their existence. Mr Asquith left a ball at Hatfield House to discuss with Campbell-Bannerman the role he would play in a soon-to-be elected government. He returned, after midnight, to continue the enjoyment. Henry James was simply a follower of the same theory of living life to excess. Intellect and frivolity were not incompatible.

  James clearly believed that entertainment and education were indistinguishable. In Rome he visited Sargent and Burne-Jones. In Paris he entertained Whistler and Turgenev. In Florence he met Fenimore Cooper. At home, at Lamb House in Rye, he saw G. K. Chesterton (who was a neighbour), H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling, whenever Kipling could be persuaded to send his car to carry James along the coast to Rottingdean. The alternative was to travel up to London by train and down again, by an almost parallel line, to the south coast. And that was not James’s style. He was the writer as grandee and that set him apart from other Edwardian novelists. For fiction, in the early years of the century, came home to the middle classes, the s
uburbs, the shops and factories and the industrial poor. Edwardian fiction portrayed both a changing world and the anxieties which those changes brought about. In The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Chesterton wrote of ‘This strange indifference … the strange loneliness of millions in a crowd.’ It was not a new idea.

  How often in the overflowing streets

  Have I gone forward with the crowd and said

  Unto myself, the face of everyone

  That passes by me is a mystery.

  The Edwardians who felt ‘alone in the city’ were, unlike William Wordsworth, experiencing the effects of a society that they found new and intimidating. In The Author’s Craft, Arnold Bennett wrote of walking through the capital ‘with the intention of perceiving London as if it was a foreign city’.13 But most Edwardian novelists described, not their own detachment, but the alienation of a less fortunate class. E. M. Forster, tucked comfortably away in Cambridge, had very little in common with Leonard Bast, the serial victim in Howard’s End.

  Four of Forster’s five great novels were written in Edwardian England – Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910). All of them are autobiographical in their depiction of places if not people. The pension in which Forster and his mother stayed in 1901, with its room affording a view over the Arno, is easily identified. Howards End (the house) is virtually identical to Rooksnest, Forster’s Hertfordshire home for ten boyhood years. The London house of the formidable Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, was ‘suggested’ to Forster by the layout and decoration (though not the architecture) of the house in All Souls’ Place, London, at which he visited one of his Cambridge teachers, Goldsworthy Lowe Dickinson. Houses – representing an idea, a prejudice, an age or an attitude – play a great part in Edwardian literature. But Howards End has a mystical importance. Margaret Schlegel tells her sister, ‘It is sad to suppose that places may be even more important than people.’ But she comes to realise that the house makes deeper personal relationships possible.14