After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Yet George V was a strange mixture of cowardice and bravery, the petty and the grand. Although his mean-spiritedness towards the Tsar could have cost the Romanovs their lives, he eventually showed great bravery in Ireland. When the king, in 1914, had expressed misgiving about his army shedding blood in Ireland, Asquith had bluntly retorted that the king was ‘no more at its head than he was at the head of every Public Department, and any orders given to the troops was [sic] on the responsibility of Ministers’.20 When the Troubles began after the World War, the king had once again had great disagreement with a prime minister, this time Lloyd George. ‘The King is an old coward,’ complained Lloyd George when Terence MacSwiney, mayor of Cork, went on hunger-strike in a British gaol in 1920, eventually dying, thereby enormously exacerbating anti-British feeling. ‘He is frightened to death and is anxious to make it clear that he has nothing to do with it.’ The king’s attempts to remain distant from the hunger-strike were stridently attacked by his own equerry, Ponsonby. ‘The King and I had a fierce argument on Ireland which ended in a yelling match,’ Ponsonby told his wife.21

  When George V stopped dithering, and eventually dared to be kingly, it had a powerful effect. When a Northern Ireland Parliament was convened in June 1921, he was told by his closest advisers not to go to open it. Such a gesture could only antagonize the Catholic South, and there was a strong danger that he would be assassinated. But in defiance of such caution, George V went to Belfast, rode through the streets in an open landau, and read an admirably conciliatory speech from the throne. The words were written by the former Times journalist Lord Altrincham.

  The eyes of the Empire are on Ireland today – that Empire in which so many nations and races came together in spite of the ancient feuds, and in which new nations have come to birth within the lifetime of the youngest in this hall. I am emboldened by that thought to look beyond the sorrow and anxiety which have clouded of late my vision of Irish affairs. I speak from a full heart when I pray that my coming to Ireland today may prove to be the first step towards the end of strife amongst her people, whatever their race or creed …

  With a balance of viewpoint which only a Times leader writer could have achieved, the monarch concluded:

  The future lies in the hands of my Irish people themselves. May this historic gathering be the prelude of the day in which the Irish people, north and south, under one Parliament or two, as those Parliaments may themselves decide, shall work together for a common love of Ireland upon the sure foundation of mutual justice and respect.22

  Over eighty years later, the world is still waiting for the consummation of this devout wish. At the time, however, it made a great impression, and a period of virtual peace, until the mid-1960s, followed.

  In 1924, Hilaire Belloc – poet, journalist, and sometime radical Liberal MP for Salford – ‘made a sort of pilgrimage to see Mussolini … I had the honour of a long conversation with him alone, discovering and receiving his judgements. What a contrast with the sly and shifty talk of your parliamentarian! What a sense of decision, of sincerity, of serving the nation, and of serving it to a known end with a definite will! Meeting this man after talking to the parliamentarians in other countries was like meeting with some athletic friend of one’s boyhood after an afternoon with racing touts; or it was like coming upon good wine in a Pyrenean village after compulsory draughts of marsh water in the mosses of the moors above, during some long day’s travel over the range.’23 Belloc was very far from being alone in his high estimation of Il Duce. Winston Churchill, when he had met Mussolini, wrote to him: ‘If I were an Italian, I am sure I would have been with you from the beginning to the end in your struggle against the bestial appetites of Leninism.’ In a speech in 1933, Churchill went further.

  The Roman genius impersonated in Mussolini, the greatest law-giver among living men, has shown to many nations how they can resist the pressures of Socialism and has indicated the path that a nation can follow when courageously led. With the Fascist regime, Mussolini has established a centre of orientation from which countries which are engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with Socialism must not hesitate to be guided.24

  Gandhi described him as a ‘superman’. The archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, was sure that he was ‘the one giant figure in Europe’.25

  16

  The Silly Generation – From Oswald Spengler to Noël Coward

  ‘Dance, dance, dance, little lady,’ sang Noël Coward in This Year of Grace, in 1928.

  Youth is fleeting – to the rhythm beating

  In your mind.

  Time and tide and trouble

  Never, never wait:

  Let the cauldron bubble –

  Justify your fate.

  Dance, dance, dance, little lady

  Leave tomorrow behind.1

  It’s a migraine of a song, whose speed and rhythm are doubly menacing when sung by Coward himself. It was a decade of wonderful songs – ‘Ma, he’s Making Eyes at Me’ (1922), ‘Yes We Have No Bananas’ (1923), ‘California, Here I Come’ (1924), ‘Tea for Two’ (1925), ‘Valencia’, ‘Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue’, ‘Fascinating Rhythm’ (1926), ‘Chinatown’, ‘Ain’t She Sweet’ (1927), ‘Ol’ Man River’, ‘Sonny Boy’, ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby’ (1928), ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’, ‘Blue Moon’, ‘You’re the Cream in My Coffee’, ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ (1929).2 We are singing them still. This was because so many people had gramophones, and increasing numbers had wireless. (But gramophones remained expensive. A table gramophone with a pleated diaphragm instead of a sound-box or horn cost £22.10s. in 1924, when a stock-broker’s senior clerk earned £4.15s. a week.) On 15 June 1920, Dame Nellie Melba sang from the Marconi station at Chelmsford, Essex, at the invitation of the Daily Mail, which paid the singer the colossal sum of £1,000. Her voice was clearly heard in Berlin and Paris. By the end of 1921 more than three thousand wireless amateurs had asked the Post Office, who controlled wireless telegraphy in Britain, to provide regular programmes. In America, over a million people now had receiving sets on which they could ‘listen in’, as the phrase went, to concerts, market prices, weather reports, sermons and speeches.

  After considerable deliberation, the Post Office entrusted the task of entertaining the nation to a single company, the British Broadcasting Corporation. By December 1922 the BBC was broadcasting for forty hours a week. Listening in was a solemn ritual. Long poles for aerials had to be erected at the end of your garden. At first you had to listen on headphones to a crystal set, but soon devices were contrived in which the coils, wireless, loudspeaker and controls were contained within a single box or cabinet, and some advanced households even concealed their aerial in the attic. In 1924 the king acquired a set. ‘How soon shall we be able to see by radio?’ asked a newspaper correspondent in 1925. J. L. Baird had demonstrated that a still photograph could be transmitted and received by radio, and on 27 January 1926 in an upper room in Frith Street, Soho, he demonstrated ‘television’.

  But although serious-minded people hoped the wireless would be a means of improving the populace, it was inevitable that its most popular programmes should have been dance bands such as Jack Hylton’s orchestra, playing the latest foxtrot, or comedians developing the unique opportunities for humour which radio offered: Tommy Handley, Stainless Stephen and Vivian Foster (the Vicar of Mirth) became household names, and more people listened in to them than to the real clergy, such as the bishop of London, who was cut off in mid-sentence from the Savoy Hill Studio, as listeners heard him remarking: ‘I don’t think that was too long, do you?’3

  Cinema added a new imaginative dimension, not only to people’s lives but to their shared inner lives. 1920–29 has been called the Golden Age of Hollywood. The truly remarkable thing about this was that, especially since it was also the last decade of the silent film, America for the first time became the centre of the cultural world. You did not need to know a language to sit enthralled by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Ronal
d Colman, Greta Garbo, Harold Lloyd and Clive Brook. Chaplin seems eerily unfunny today, as do back numbers of supposedly funny magazines like Punch. But what survives is his extraordinary mimetic, almost tragically mimetic, gift. Rudolph Valentino, born Rodolpho Alphonso Guglielmi di Valentino d’Antonguolla, settled in America in 1913. He began playing bit parts in Hollywood in 1918, but it was in the 1920s that he rose to glory. Perhaps aptly, his first big role was as one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse in Rex Ingram’s film of that name in 1921. His face, twice or thrice life size, stared over towns all over Europe from placards and posters. Animated, on the flickering black and white screen of darkened cinemas, he led men and women into realms of new fantasy in such popular works as The Sheik (1921), Blood and Sand (1922), The Young Rajah (1922) and Monsieur Beaucaire (1924). When he visited England in 1925 for the premiere of The Eagle, he was mobbed. The Second Coming could hardly have attracted more hysterical attention, and when he died the next year, thousands attended his funeral, openly weeping.

  The politicians and aspirant politicians of the new era could not fail to notice the hypnotic effects of the new technology. The endearing amateurism of real bishops and politicians could only send listeners to sleep, but it did not take much imagination to see how demagogues could use radio and film. When the facetious Punch humorist and detective story-writer Father Ronald Knox broadcast in 1926 an account of an unemployment riot in London, hundreds telephoned Savoy Hill in alarm. They had believed his description of mobs attacking the Houses of Parliament and people being roasted alive in Trafalgar Square.4 The mass media increased levels of public credulity. The world awaited leaders who could combine the bloodcurdling imagination of Knox and the hypnotic appearance of Valentino. No human being, even Napoleon, had been idolized as Valentino was. The new Napoleons could become faces staring from every cinema, voices yelling from every wireless set.

  I’m so ashamed of it,

  But I must admit

  The sleepless nights I’ve had about the boy.

  On the Silver Screen

  He melts my foolish heart in every single scene.5

  One of the things which cinema and radio could accomplish was the illusion that purely passive viewers and listeners were somehow sharing in the action of a new age. Tuning in on the crystal set to the Savoy Orpheans, broadcast from 10.30 to 11.30 each night, you could imagine yourself a flapper in the heart of London, even though you were a factory girl in Bootle or a secretary in Wolverhampton. Purchasing the Melody Maker (founded 1926) you could read all about the latest jazz bands, and buy their records, even if you lived miles from anywhere that they might have been performing. The agitated sense that everyone was having, or meant to be having, a good time in the aftermath of war added, presumably, to the gloom of those who were not, and increased the frenzy of those who were. People became obsessed by speed. In 1926, the land speed record was gained by Parry Thomas on Pendine Sands, Carmarthenshire, at 178 mph. On 3 March of the following year, he was killed in his Thomas special when the driving chain broke and he was decapitated.6 Pleasure itself had to be dangerous, and harder work than work. The nightclub, that self-punishing institution for the hedonist, flourished as never before. Alec Waugh in his novel Kept (1925) described them as ‘second-rate places for third-rate people’.

  Queen of the third-raters, if this was true, was Kate or ‘Ma’ Meyrick, born in Dublin, who married a medical student in England, lived in Brighton and bore him four children. In 1919 the Meyricks separated, Ma Meyrick came up to London and her jollities began. After a police raid on Dalton’s Club, next to the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square, Ma Meyrick protested strongly, both at having to pay £25 fine and at having her ‘innocent venture’ described by a magistrate as ‘a den of iniquity’. She moved over the Charing Cross Road and started another club, Brett’s, which she sold after only a year for £1,000. Then she started the ‘43 club, which was raided after only two months. Ma Meyrick was fined for selling drinks after closing hours. The ‘43 became a cult, with such illustrious clients as King Carol of Romania, the Crown Prince of Sweden, Rudolph Valentino and Tallulah Bankhead having been seen there at least once. Alas for Ma Meyrick, she was eventually sentenced to fifteen months’ hard labour for bribing a policeman, Station-Sergeant George Goddard. His pay was £6 a week, but he was found by investigating officers with £12,000 in cash in one of his residences. He owned a house in Streatham, a car and two safe-deposit accounts, stuffed with notes. Several of the notes could be traced to Ma Meyrick and her girls. Goddard did eighteen months with hard labour. When Ma Meyrick was released, the Bright Young Things sang:

  Come all you birds

  And sing a roundelay.

  Now Mrs Meyrick’s

  Out of Holloway.

  They were a long way from the struggles of the working classes in the big industrial towns, from the growing pains of the incipient League of Nations, from the agonized inhabitants of the occupied Ruhr, from the warring Irish and the oppressed Indians. And yet, the noise of young people partying, dancing their Charlestons and singing their songs seemed emblematic of their times. There was a palpable sense of self-conscious decadence in the air, as on the airwaves; decadence in the most literal sense of things slithering downwards. When, in June 1922, the Leeds choral society gave a superb performance of Sir Edward Elgar’s The Apostles at the Queen’s Hall, according to George Bernard Shaw there were only Princess Mary, Viscount Lascelles and about four other people in the stalls. ‘The occasion’, said Shaw, ‘was infinitely more important than the Derby, Goodwood, the Cup Finals, the Carpentier fights or any of the occasions on which the official leaders of society are photographed and cinematographed laboriously shaking hands with persons on whom Molière’s patron, Louis XIV, and Bach’s patron, Frederick the Great, would not have condescended to wipe their boots.’7

  Shaw was giving expression to a widespread view among intellectuals that something had happened, not just to concert audiences in London, and not just to England, but to Western civilization in general. Whether the war had caused or promoted or only reflected this something was incidental to the fact that it had happened: Western civilization had gone down the drain. Shaw’s invocation of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great resonates with the idea, which many of his contemporaries shared, that they had moved into a new era altogether. It was possible to imagine Frederick the Great holding a conversation with Tennyson or Carlyle, but not to imagine him (much as he might have enjoyed it for all sorts of reasons) sitting through Rudolph Valentino’s Monsieur Beaucaire.

  The arch-exponent of the idea that the twentieth century marked a new era, the end of a culture, was Oswald Spengler in his immensely long Der Untergang des Abendlandes – The Decline of the West.

  One day in the early 1930s, after his return to Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein arrived at the rooms of his friend Miles Drury looking distressed. ‘I was walking about in Cambridge and passed a bookshop, and in the window were portraits of Russell, Freud and Einstein. A little further on, in a music shop, I saw portraits of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. Comparing these portraits I felt intensely the terrible degeneration that had come over the human spirit in the course of only a hundred years.’ Wittgenstein’s biographer, Ray Monk, sees the anecdote as what amounts to ‘a pictorial representation’ of one of Wittgenstein’s favourite books, The Decline of the West.

  Spengler does not offer any arguments to substantiate his vision of history. His book, rather like the lectures of Hegel on the Philosophy of History, which it copied, or Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History, which it influenced, is one of those catch-all visions of human things which irritate the empirical, and delight a certain type of Idealist, mind. Using an analogy of Goethe’s quasi-scientific work Die Metamorphose der Pflanze, Spengler saw cultures as evolving like plant-forms, flourishing and then atrophying. In a huge schema, he classified and categorized nine cultures, to which he gave arcane names – the Egyptian culture was ‘Magian’, the Russian culture ‘Flat plane’,
the ancient Roman and Greek world the Apollonian. Modern culture was Faustian. Whereas the culture of Apollo conceived of man as living in an enclosed, finite space, the Faustian sees humanity as belonging to infinite space. So Western painting develops perspective, Gothic spires soar upward and Cecil Rhodes dreams of further dominions and conquests for the British Empire.

  Each culture has a cycle of four seasons. In the spring, there is the time of seminal myths – for our culture this was the High Middle Ages, for the Apollonian it was the Homeric age. Then comes summer – for the Faustians, the growth of cities, the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Galileo and the triumphs of the uncorrupted intellect. Autumn is the time of ripening, with hints of exhaustion, heard by Spengler in the philosophy of Kant and the music of Mozart. Finally comes winter, the time of the world city, a rootless proletariat, plutocracy, imperialism, tyranny. Culture ceases to be culture and ossifies into mere ‘civilization’. The highest works of the imagination are achieved not by artists but by scientists.

  Spengler’s book was enormously widely read and discussed on the European mainland, as well it might be after a destructive war. When he finished it before the war he could not find a publisher. In 1918, it exactly suited the pessimistic mood of the German-speaking world and it became a bestseller – not published in English until 1923. It was inevitable that Spengler was seen as a proto-Nazi, since, like Carlyle before him, he saw the only possibility of salvation in the rise of a new hero to visit and redeem his people. In fact, he did not see Hitler as that hero at all, his works were not admired by the Nazi ideologues, and when he died in 1936, Spengler was bitter and resentful that his work was not any longer appreciated in the land of his birth.