CHAPTER V

MR. DABNEY OF _THE BALANCE_ LETS HIMSELF GO

I had not long been over Bemerton's when Mrs. Duckie knocked at the door to ask if Mr. Dabney, the gentleman upstairs, the gentleman on the press, might have a few words with me.

Of course I said yes, and in a minute or so he came in--a man of the ordinary age in London just now, clean shaved, with prematurely grey hair, a slightly discontented expression, and a sensitive, critical mouth.

He made the usual apologies that a well-bred man makes to a stranger with whom he intends to be friendly, and attributed his visit to a remark of Mrs. Duckie's to the effect that I had been living in Buenos Ayres since 1875 and had only just returned. "It seemed to me," he added, "that to an observant man London and the English generally must after so long an exile present many changes, and I thought you would perhaps allow me to ask you a few questions about your impressions for an article in my paper."

I said that provided my name was not mentioned I had no objection whatever, although I doubted, &c. &c.; but I might, as it happened, have spared myself that excursion into conventional false modesty, for I soon found that Mr. Dabney had no real intention of interviewing me at all, but only wanted the stimulus of my experience, or the excuse of my mere existence, to interview himself. As he talked on I wondered if that is the way that all interviews by the more capable and thoughtful journalists are done. May be.

His paper, it seems, is _The Balance_, a weekly critical review which he runs almost single-handed ("Everything that means anything," he says, "is done by one man"), the financial backing coming from a source which he said he was not in a position to reveal, to me or indeed to any one. _The Balance_ has a circulation of less than two thousand; but, as Mr. Dabney says, every one who counts has to read it. Its aim is to be sane, impartial, and fearless (the aim of all of us), and Mr. Dabney really believes that it achieves this end; but his mind, I should say, with all its vigour and acumen, though naturally inclined to justice and courage, is about as capable of impartiality as a prize-fighter is capable of metaphysics.

None the less, Mr. Dabney's paper, which I have since studied carefully, makes the right effort, and it comes as a corrective to the party organs that can see no good in any Bill brought forward by the other side at any time, and particularly so when it chances to be a measure promised vaguely by their own.

It is one of the least satisfactory thoughts that come to a reader of the papers that so many men with the gift of expressing themselves well and seeing fairly clearly into things should be so willing to adapt their intellects to the party machine. We are all, of course, born, as the poet says, Liberal or Conservative; but from journalists one expects a rather more complex psychology. We look to journalists to see a little farther not only into the future but also into the past than ordinary persons. Unhappily in England just now, as I remarked to Mr. Dabney, thus incurring his most vitriolic agreement, the type of journalist who seems to have most readers is permitted to be the least sagacious and the least independent.

Mr. Dabney is by nature a pessimist--so much so that one wonders what he would do if any of the reforms he desires were to come into force. He is one of those eloquent and clear-sighted men who must be in revolt to be articulate and well-directed. He was for a long time leader-writer on a daily paper, but gradually found himself more and more irked by the necessity of expressing not his own views but his editor's. At last, unable to bear it any longer, he retired. The circumstance was recorded in the press in a paragraph in the ordinary way, and the very next day Mr. Dabney received a letter from a stranger asking him to prepare an estimate of the cost of a weekly journal that should represent his own views and contain also a sufficiency of acceptable various matter. He did so, on the most disadvantageous scale that even his pessimism could devise, and the next day he received a cheque for the first year's expenses and instructions to begin at once. Under such unworldly conditions was _The Balance_ born.

"You say you left England in 1875," Mr. Dabney began. "Then you are now in a position to observe some very curious developments, for the changes in London alone since that date have been extraordinary. Our whole character seems to have undergone a revolution. We used to be economical, home-keeping: we have become gad-abouts, pleasure-hunters. We pour our money into the hands of entertainers and restaurateurs. Remember, I speak of London. To what extent England resembles London I am not in a position to say. But London becomes daily more hedonistic, more atheistic. Plain living and high thinking are discredited. High living and low thinking have it all to themselves."

Mr. Dabney spoke with concentrated fury, through his teeth, as if I were the primary cause of this calamity. I believe that of all uncomfortable conversationalists (and the world is full of them) the most uncomfortable are those who would convert you to your own way of thinking. This is Mr. Dabney's weakness: he conceives of all his interlocutors as heretics and antagonists.

"But to what," I asked him, "do you attribute this effect?"

"To too long a period of prosperity; to peace; and"--he almost spat the words from him--"to the modern press. The new journalism may not have produced it, but it has fostered it. Since you left England there has sprung up a totally new press--a press that does not dictate but flatters; that finds out what the mob wants and gives it them. A press without any mind--nothing but an infernal instinct for success. A press in the hands of young men in a hurry, without knowledge, experience, or conviction. Opportunists, improvisers, cynics."

"But surely there are good papers too?"

"One or two. But it is those others that have the public ear. They are the true organs of the democracy."

"And yet," I said, "at the last General Election did not these popular papers lose almost every seat?"

"Ah!" he said, "that is so. But that is not, I fear, any proof of their want of influence generally. Political changes are deeper than that. The mob is moved politically never by opinions but always by personality. We don't in England vote for Liberals or Conservatives: we vote for men. Sentiment controls us. We vote for one man because we are sorry for him; for another, because we once met him somewhere and he was very pleasant; for another, because his father's horse won the Derby; for another, because his opponent is So-and-so whom we detest. In England we never accept any one as a simple fellow-creature: we must always fix not only an adjective upon him but some personal feeling. That is why papers lose their influence when elections are on. But at other times they can be steadily operative for good or bad; they can vulgarise all they touch or dignify it. The new press vulgarises. Its gods are false. It knows no shame. When found out, it slavers. When chastised, it says, How charmingly you use the whip."

Mr. Dabney was now happy. His face shone--it might have been with the reflected glow of his molten words. He was the Savonarola of Fleet Street.

"Cynicism," he went on, "is not the only fault. A gross sensuality has also come upon us. A journalist should be something of an ascetic, a recluse: an observer from without. He should not be in the social machine; he should not know every one. How can you keep your hands clean if you know every one? His dress suit should be rusty; one cannot dine out without consuming salt, and by salt are we captured. Journalists now eat too much and too well. It was a bad day for England when a journalist first ate a plover's egg."

"Journalists, in short," I said, "should live over Bemerton's."

He grunted a short acknowledgment of my mild humour, and continued: "Every nation, according to Arnold, has the papers it deserves. That is true. The greater part of this nation, suffering just now from swelled head and swelled stomach and swelled pockets, has the paper it deserves. Cynicism and self-esteem run through everything. Christian of course we never were, and never shall be, not even in adversity; but we are no longer in the least afraid of God. We are getting nasty, too. We buy messy little indecent novels by the thousand, as far removed from honest British coarseness as the poles are asunder. We have given up respecting the Bible.

"I will give you an instance of our new cynicism, our carelessness. The other day, at one of the large music halls, a dancer appeared nightly in nothing whatever but a skirt of beads, and capered as provocatively as she was able round a waxen head. The dancer affected to be Salome, the daughter of Herodias, while the waxen head was intended for that of the decapitated John the Baptist, the forerunner, if I remember aright, of our Lord. This in a London music hall! The exhibition rapidly became the rage, and several other halls, in the usual slavish imitative way, had their Salomes too. Every one went to see and applaud the principal one, including the Prime Minister, who subsequently, to mark his especial approval, entertained the lady at 10 Downing Street. So far as I could discover, I, who am a professed sceptic, was practically the only person in London whose feelings were outraged. I call the incident deplorably significant.

"It seemed to me," Mr. Dabney continued, "sufficiently offensive that a sacred figure such as John the Baptist--a figure of peculiar sanctity to Christians--should be subjected to the indignity of taking part in a music-hall performance at all, amid knockabouts and comic singers and all the other seaminesses of those places; but it was far worse that English people of high position should flock to see it. For any head, you must see, would have done as well. The girl had to dance more or less naked to some waxwork property: that we will take for granted. Then why not the head, say, of Holofernes, who is only in the _Apocrypha_? The spectacle might then have drawn merely the Leader of the Opposition, but it should have served."

Mr. Dabney smiled a ghastly smile as he made his final joke and paused for breath.

"Were there no protests at all?" I asked.

"There may have been a few," he said: "I was exaggerating a little; but very few. Where were they to appear? A press that lives largely by advertisements does not lightly advise people to stay away from places of entertainment. Do you know," he added, "that my paper is the only paper in London that does not take advertisements. So long as there are advertisements there cannot be absolutely free speech. It is not humanly possible.

"You may say," he went on (but I had said nothing of the kind. I had, as a matter of fact, hardly opened my mouth: he had given me no chance). "You may say," he went on, "that we are not more cynical now than we were in the days of the Regency. True, perhaps. But that is what makes it so serious. Because since the Regency we have had eighty years or so of seriousness and steady improvement--the Victorian Era, with its fine political and intellectual and religious activity, its Reform Bill, its Tractarian movement, its Dickens and Carlyle, its Browning and Ruskin, its awakening to new ideas. To-day we are steadily going back on all that. We believe only in pleasure and success: our one ideal is wealth."

"Well," I said, for I was getting a little tired, and perhaps I was a little piqued too at the turn the "interview" had taken, "and what is the remedy for all this evil?"

"War," he said. "Nothing more or less. A bloody war--not a punitive expedition or 'a sort of a war'" (he quoted these words with white fury). "That might get us right again."

"At great cost," I said.

"A surgical operation," he replied, "if the only means of saving life, cannot be called expensive."

"But supposing we went under?"

"If we did, it would be better so. Then we should begin again in a new spirit. Loss would be gain."

"A very dreadful form of cure," I said.

"True. But not more dreadful than the decay that comes from complacency. A nation fighting for its life makes for me a finer spectacle than a nation overeating at a banquet.

"The most sacred and valuable treasure that the English have lost," he went on more gravely, "is the capacity for self-denial. The old figure of John Bull was never to my mind admirable. He not only looked too secure in his own wealth and rectitude but too apoplectic. But he was a better national symbol for the English than the new John Bull that one would have to draw now were one a satirical artist with critical vision--a John Bull more like a Maida Vale Jew. John Bull grows materialistic and sensual. An anxious war would mend that. Set him fighting for very existence, and you will bring out his good qualities again."

"I don't agree with you," I said, "about war. Its horrors are too horrible. What I think we want is a saint."

"You won't get one," said Mr. Dabney, "and besides, every saint has a bee in his halo."

"I don't know that that matters," said I. "It is the bees that do the work. The bee is often the most original part of the man's brain, just as the skeleton is often the only really living thing in the family's cupboard. Most people are dead.

"The saint," I went on, "that England needs is a saint of extraordinary personal magnetism--a saint (as I see it dimly) whom our young men and women will follow in enthusiastic ecstasy; a saint----"

"A counsel of perfection," Mr. Dabney interrupted. "Will your saint begin as a curate?" he inquired icily. "Remember that a pulpit engaged in the struggle for existence is doomed as a friend. The Church to-day is too much represented by angry casuists in the Commons and anxious fathers of families in the vicarages; while Nonconformity has become largely the preserve of astute and prosperous journalists. One listens in vain for the unworldly voice.

"The most successful revival of our time," he continued, "had to be put frankly upon a gross material basis before it had a chance--General Booth's progress as a social ameliorator being marked by heartiness, shrewdness, and humour, much more than by any beauty of holiness; while it is free from any suggestion of pure sacrifice, since the _quid_ offered for the _quo_ is so splendid--happiness here and an everlasting crown to follow, in exchange for giving up merely a few oaths, merely a few debauches, merely a few blows on a wife's body.

"England," he continued, "is still full of conscience, as it always will be; but its activities have of late become more and more altruistic. It is our neighbours that we have become so careful for, rather than ourselves. We spend hours in Boulter's Lock on Sundays meditating on the wisdom of keeping weaker vessels out of exhibitions on that day, and statesmen solve knotty points of the Licensing Bill over champagne at their clubs. Virtue we still consider the best goal for others: but for ourselves, success. Success is the new god, and will be, I suppose, for some time yet, so zealously is the altar flame guarded.

"I think your plea for a saint is very charming, but I don't believe in it. I don't think the English would know what to do with a saint if they found one. Wales might, and Ireland might, but not England. A saint, to work any kind of effect, must have an emotional, self-forgetting material to work upon. There is very little here. Sentiment we have, but not emotion. And we are too much afraid of the ridicule of the people next door.

"I have often amused myself by speculating on the probable reception that Christ would have were he now to appear in London. A character sketch expressing the profoundest admiration in _The Daily Mail_; his portrait in _The Daily Mirror_, probably beside that of public men whom he more or less resembled; a guarded leader in _The Church Times_; and in _The British Weekly_ an appeal to Nonconformists not to lose their heads--yet--not until a little more was known.

"But now tell me," said Mr. Dabney, "what you have observed yourself. For it seems to me I have done most of the talking."

"Oh," I said, "my observations have not been so profound as yours. I have merely walked about the streets and seen the surface of things. Of that kind," I said, "the most noticeable change that has struck me--although it may, in common with all my other impressions, be sheer illusion--is the increase of sarcastic facetiousness. London has always, I imagine, indulged in this disguise of its real feelings--this armour, one might almost say, against fate--but the habit seems to be more diffused than I remembered. I think I discern also an increase of genuine cynicism, as indeed you have said--cynicism rather than pessimism, I should say; by cynicism meaning a natural acceptance of the ills of life without grumbling at them. The frame of mind comes, I suppose with you, largely from irreligion, materialism; but it has been fostered, no doubt, by the English climate. Not that the English climate has changed, but the English people, in their increased love of pleasure and pursuit of it, have come to think more of fine weather than they did, and not finding it, have acquired a new bitterness. So at least it amuses me to fancy. For the increased love of pleasure is visible on every side."

Mr. Dabney agreed--very heartily, considering how little disapproval there was in my voice. As he seemed in danger of resuming his eager and caustic monologue, I hastily went on to say that I also agreed in the main with him, but was disposed to think that the worst of the case was confined to London and that the great heart of the country was not cankered. "And even in London," I added, "I have noticed as I walked about quite a number of kindly deeds, indicating that good-heartedness and thought for others are still powerful here. I watch your fine fury that such things can be," I added, "and I hear of preachers lamenting the wickedness of the world; but I cannot share either passion. My wonder is that people are so good. I think that the courage and endurance and optimism of human beings are amazing. Nothing is done for them: the brave hopefulness with which they rise morning after morning is dashed by noon; but still they go on, doing their best. And the more sceptical we grow, surely the more is it to our credit to be brave and decent."