The cruise of the Nona The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners
who have passed with honours through the eyes of needles. Dungeness
slowly crawling out to sea still seems the same. The only material
change in all that passage is the dangerous failure called Dover
Harbour, against which the rushing tide of the Straits tumbles angrily,
finding interference after so many æons of freedom: so that just
outside Dover in almost any weather you are tossed by a confused and
irritated sea. But all the rest, the Forelands Light and the Goodwins,
are what I have always known. Up and down that stretch of water there
is somewhat more building on the land, slightly changing the aspect of
the distant shore. There is the curious long group of huts on Shoreham
beach, Seaford sending up red brick on to the green of the heights
above it, and Bexhill to-day where once was loneliness. But take it
all in all, it is the same scene, after nearly forty years of sailing
on that sea and watching that land with Highdown still for the best
sea-mark, and with the clump of Chanctonbury—yes, even the stump of
Halnacker Mill, though it is now all ruins. The marks are the same. I
might turn boy again and set sailing and not find the sea-things other
than I had known them.
But on land—in the heart of man—what a transformation! There went
into it the England of the seventies—an England aristocratic, free,
with ease of movement within and acting externally, at will, upon all
nations. An England with a sense of increasing wealth and of increasing
knowledge, and an England English. Of all the men and women you met,
most had been born in the villages, or little market towns, which are
the roots of England. It was one society: that of to-day is another,
almost foreign to the first.
Of all this revolutionary change, covering the short space of half
a lifetime, two effects are most prominent: the fall of Parliament
from great honour to contempt, and the change in the press. Of these
the change in the press is the most obvious, and perhaps the most
remarkable.
The press of England has passed, as a whole, in that space of time from
one social condition to another totally new. There are still dignified
exceptions, but they are survivals and abnormal. The general spirit of
the press has utterly changed. It is as great a change as a man might
experience who, having been brought up, let us say, as an English
public school boy and university man, should so sink as to pass his
middle age up-country in a strange colony far overseas, as a labourer
among labourers.
At the beginning of the period, England had a press—daily, weekly,
monthly, and quarterly—especially designed for, and consonant to, an
aristocracy: not designed for, and consonant to, lords and ladies;
but designed for, and consonant to, a highly cultivated governing
class whose power was unquestioned, and which then directed the whole
community. The intellectual life of the nation was concentrated in that
class: it included men of all births, but having in common the same
cultivation of spirit, the same manner of talking, the same sufficient
knowledge of the European past, the same less, but still sufficient
knowledge, of contemporary Europe: and, what was most important, the
same philosophy and social outlook.
This class (the gentry, or whatever you like to call it), had its own
press, the great daily papers, the weekly reviews, the serious monthly
and quarterly reviews. Side by side with that press there was a frankly
popular press, which had no sort of power, and which was intended to
amuse the non-political mass below. It was represented in two or three
very vulgar Sunday newspapers full of police court cases, and murders,
and the rest; and weekly papers with tittle-tattle about the superiors
of the class which read them; but it was the press of the educated
class which represented, mirrored, and to some extent influenced the
general action of England.
In that press you had, for its daily papers, information more rapidly
acquired, better balanced, more detailed, and more extensive by far
than was to be found in the press of any other country. Everything of
importance was known to the governing class of England through that
press, and was known at once; and, on the whole, was known in something
like the right proportion. The weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies
were powerful organs of intellectual expression, and set also a
literary standard. You saw in them the names of Tennyson or Browning,
of Huxley and the Duke of Argyll, of Lord Salisbury, of Arnold. There
was about the whole atmosphere of this press something of that tone of
equality, ease, and sure touch which is the mark of a governing class
in any aristocratic state.
To-day, you have a press in which the less vital of these
characteristics remain; the essential have wholly disappeared.
Information is still rapidly acquired (though the English press here
has no longer any advantage over the Continental, such as it used
to have a generation ago), but the type of information is wholly
different; and as for that quality vital to truth, the sense of
proportion, it has vanished. The knowledge of Europe has fallen to
a level negligible or contemptible. All the most weighty things are
either hidden for private purposes, or (this is much the most common
fault) unappreciated. While the Italian, French, and German papers
are giving with full detail and with right balance the aspects of
our contemporary civilisation; while men like Ferrero or Maurras are
perpetually before the eyes of the Continent, we have here men who are
no more than the servants of wealthy, half-educated, or uneducated
millionaires, their owners: men who write to order any nonsense about
Europe which those owners desire to publish. Therefore the great
movements abroad, reacting upon the national life of this country, are
misunderstood and invariably take opinion by surprise. I will give two
examples which will be fresh in the memory of all.
No newspaper here either foresaw or, when it arrived, made
comprehensible the Italian movement which led to the resurrection of
the country by Mussolini. Compare such astonishing ignorance with
the state of affairs in England a lifetime ago, when Italy was first
rising to her modern position. _Then_ the English papers closely
followed all the ferment in Italy. It was to their columns that foreign
statesmen turned for the facts and news on the progress of Savoy.
To-day no Continental statesman looks at our press, save now and then
to protest against some childish blunder. Again, even as I write,
there is taking place in London a highly important conference between
the bankers and politicians, the object of which, on the one side, is
to diminish French power and, on the other, to maintain it. I turn to
the ‘Temps,’ or to the ‘Corriere,’ and I find in the first paper very
full and detailed accounts of the debates of the committees with an
adequate educated judgment upon the results attained. In the second
paper, I find a good, balanced judgment upon the situation with a
leaning towards the English interest regarded as nearly identical with
the Italian. But I defy any one to make out from ‘The Times’ what is
really going on at that conference! You will read plenty of abuse of
the French; plenty of self-praise and acres of generalities. But you
will not find yourself informed—although the great business is going
on here in London right under our eyes.
I thought it the part of a contemporary to follow the affair as
closely as I could. I soon found it necessary to give up looking at
the English papers, and to buy the papers of the Continent in order to
instruct myself. The method had the disadvantage of delay, but had the
advantage of giving me real information. The few papers which still
keep up the façade of culture in their form, though certainly not in
their contents, are, again, of less importance than the new popular
press which makes no pretence to culture in any form, which is owned by
impossible adventurers, such as no one a generation ago would have had
in his house, even had they then existed;and it is this popular press
now which is the main instrument in the moulding of opinion.
The revolution is complete. It is as complete as though the education
of the country were to pass from the hands of the classicists and the
mathematicians to those of Big Business, and boys were to be taught
advertisement and salesmanship instead of the humanities. And this our
passing from one mode of public expression, and control by suggestion,
to another utterly different and far baser system, has come silently
and has worked its effect unnoticed. It is only by contrasting _then_
with _now_ that we notice it.
We are arrived in England to-day at a condition in which the popular
newspaper gives its owner a power in the State comparable only to the
power of finance and far superior to the nominal power of those poor
play-actors, embarrassed, furtive, who still bear titles of authority:
Secretaries of State for this or that. And yet, by the very nature of
the organism, this new instrument of power, the mob press, must be
ill-informed, unreal, and—what is not without its importance—morally
vile.
Less obvious than the complete change in the press, in its functions
and character, perhaps less pronounced and less advanced, yet certainly
of great moment, is the fall of the House of Commons and of Parliament
in general from authority and dignity to well-deserved contempt.
But for this evil there is more hope of remedy than there is for the
evil of the press. When any organ of government reaches a certain
degree of decay, some other automatically takes its place, and if the
substitution is made promptly enough, the state may bridge over the
passage without disaster.
Such substitution lies ready to our hand. We have only to increase the
power of the Crown, and that would indeed give truth to the boast too
often repeated that the continuity of names is valuable to society. The
monarchy is still there in name, and the giving of true power to it is
therefore still possible.
The decline of Parliamentary authority and dignity has been wholly a
rot from within. The people of England did not desire it; they desired
nothing better than to continue their old respect for that aristocratic
institution at Westminster round which every activity of the nation had
centred. The damage was done by permitting personal corruption to go
unpunished. When once the habit arose of condoning the use of public
position for private enrichment—and that secret—it was impossible
for the strength of the institution to survive. The temptation of the
politician to enrich himself at the expense of the public good (to
take bribes, to sell monopolies and contracts and policies) is so very
strong that, unless it is met by as strong a check of discipline, it
is bound to run riot, and it has done so. It has come on in a flood,
especially during the last twenty years, taking every conceivable form,
but all those forms proceeding from the immunity of the evil-doers. Men
possessed of political power create public monopolies which they handle
for their own enrichment: they take bribes, they give out contracts
as against payment. They will assign a valuable state right to some
company and then, resigning office, take up a highly salaried post in
that company. The traffic in honours for the private advantage of those
who bestow them is the least of these cancers which are eating away the
body of Parliament. The habitual practice of blackmail in the course of
personal intrigue for power (it is mutual between the politicians and
the newspaper-owners) is the worst. But all are excessive in degree,
and between them they have done their work. It is now impossible to
restore to politics, which are now professional politics, the old