Gotham Diary:
The Third Reading
16 June 2014
If I had lived in a mythic dimension on another planet, I could not now be more detached from whatever it was that caused me to acquire and to read George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England: 1910-1914. I don’t even remember when it happened! Early mid Seventies is my guess. Someone told me, I’m sure, that it was much more than its title suggested, that it was a book that “everybody” (meaning exactly the opposite) ought to read: a secret handshake, almost. I was a sucker for that kind of private advertising, so I bought the book, and I read it. I don’t know what I got out of it, except that bits of it were very funny, and that all of it was much more sophisticated in tone than regular history books, but I certainly didn’t understand Dangerfield’s argument. I came away from the first reading, and from a second reading ten or fifteen years later, thinking that it was regrettable that the Liberal Party died. This was a sentiment that I came to the book with, and that Dangerfield, given my distracted reading, was powerless to correct.
I liked the idea of the Liberal Party, because it was “just right.” Not extreme, as Labour and the Tories were. And not anti-intellectual, either. (Labour was ideological — a manner of not thinking — and the Tories were simply idiots.) I was not living in Britain, mind you, but I worried that the two parties that vied for power over the gap left by the Liberal Party of Lord Aberdeen, Gladstone, and Harty-Tarty were tearing dear old England apart. I suspect that I believed, in my heart of hearts, that the Liberals, could they be revived, would possess the secret of stopping English history altogether. There’s no getting round it: the Home Counties, which I never even visited until 1977, were my own private Disneyland. You don’t have to be a Romantic to wallow in pleasing delusions.
In any case, this time, on the third reading (shades of the Home Rule Bill!), I got it. It helped, of course, that I had just read The Sleepwalkers and John Keegan’s The First World War. In The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark doesn’t talk about England much beyond Sir Edward Grey and the Cabinet meetings of the July Crisis, although he does mention that the Tories were pro-war simply for distraction’s sake: a European conflict would indefinitely postpone British action against the all-but-openly rebellious Ulster Volunteers. But Clark’s Britain appears to be serene and aloof, in full possession of the option not to fall into the abyss. You would never imagine that a book such as George Dangerfield’s could be written about it.
Dangerfield never quite says that the onslaught of World War I saved Britain, but he suggests it constantly. The three “rebellions” that are analyzed in the heart of Strange Death — the Tories’ (over Home Rule), the women’s (window-smashing suffragettes), and the workers’ (pursuing a minimum wage) — were all approaching critical outbreaks in the spring of 1914. For example, a general strike of miners, railway workers, and dock hands was expected for September, 1914; while, in March, dozens of Army officers had resigned their commissions rather than make supervisory but provocative moves in Northern Island. These rebellions had obviously different objectives, but they shared a total loss of faith in Parliamentary government, which was from 1906 until well into the War in Liberal hands — in the hands, primarily, of HH Asquith. Dangerfield’s Asquith embodies the emotional bankruptcy of the Liberal Party, its energies spent in the antagonism between progressive causes (such as Home Rule, which had split the party in the previous generation) and a Trollopean regard for the propertied classes. Asquith spends the bulk of the book pausing ten yards beyond the cliff of which he has just been tempted to run, still unaware of his impending drop.
A touch of flamboyance in the long white hair, a hint of fantasy at the corners of the mouth gave the face a certain incongruity, as though a passage of correct and scholarly prose had been set up in too fanciful a type. Mr Asquith was essentially a prosaic character. (4)
For the worst thing about Asquith was that he was “safe.”
There is a fantasy abroad that World War I came as a bolt from the blue, interrupting a sequence of dreamy years in which it was widely believed that war was a thing of the past. But the only two groups who shared this belief were self-absorbed members of the rising bourgeoisie, more kitted out with new gadgets than ever, and royals who believed that a conference of three or four emperors could avert disaster. The fantasy of widespread dismayed awakenings is a retrospective, douceur de la vie daydream. The slow-motion grind of the July crisis (in which, for the most part, the coming belligerents sat round waiting for the friends and foes to do something) does indeed emit the incompatible whiffs of greased lightning and suspended animation. But, in Britain at any rate, crisis was already very much in the air.
Britain was not at peace with itself, and war was bound to break out somewhere. Dangerfield argues that everyone — the Tories, the Lords, the ladies, and the workers — was sick and tired of what he calls “respectable security.” This might seem to be nothing more than a fancy way of saying that people were bored after an extended period of peace, and that the wars that didn’t break out within Britain because of the war that broke out across the channel were mere evidence of human perversity. But “respectable security” was worse than boring. It was static. Parliament, the shining guarantor of this security, was unable to move in any direction, and the downfall of the Liberal Party began, for Dangerfield, at its moment of triumph, when “the Lords decided to die in the dark” and to submit to the dismemberment that Tony Blair would complete decades later. They chose this fate over the disgusting alternative of sharing their House with the five hundred upstarts who would have been ennobled by George V (at the Liberal Party’s “advising”) in the event that they stood their ground against the Liberal budget. That they chose honorable suicide over conciliation is indicative of the temper of the times. “Liberalism,” Dangerfield writes, “implies more than a political creed or an economic philosophy; it is a profoundly conscience-stricken state of mind.” Stricken consciences were out of fashion by the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, and by 1910 they had become just about intolerable.
The Strange Death of Liberal England appeared in 1935, when Winston Churchill, one of Dangerfield’s most reliable comic figures, was living out his Parliamentary wilderness. As if to supply a magic carpet that might transport readers across the chasm that has ever since seemed to separate the years before 1914 from everything that followed, Dangerfield writes in a very high style, often more archly than is conducive to easy comprehension. As an impressionist, however, he is unsurpassed.
At present one can only say that pre-war society was changing in a remarkable manner: one can detect, in that confusing assembly of dances and night clubs and extravagance and vulgarity and emancipation, some evidences of death and of rebirth.
Rebirth. There is the sign-post, pointing the way to that yet undiscovered reality. It is customary to think of that society as a doomed thing, calling in the traditional doomed manner “for madder music and for stronger wine,” and plunged at last, with no time to say its prayers, into the horrors of war. The scene may even be given some of the qualities of a pre-Raphaelite canvas. The sky is massed with tall black clouds; but one last shaft of sunlight, intolerably bright, picks out every detail of leaf and grass; and in the midst of it those little figures go through their paces with the momentary precision of a dream. There is, too, a satisfying irony in this: the spectator knows what is going to happen, the actors do not; they are almost in the happy condition of Oedipus and Jocasta, before the news arrived which made the unhappy gentleman remove his eyes. And the conception is, above all, a convenient one. It is easier to think of Imperial England, beribboned and bestarred and splendid, living in majestic profusion up till the very moment of war. Such indeed was its appearance, the appearance of a somewhat decadent Empire and a careless democracy. But I do not think that its social history will be written on those terms. As has already been shown in the activities of politicians, and women, and workers, there was a new energy which leavened the whole lump of society from top to bottom. You can see this energy flitting, in 1914, across the faces of those middle class people, as they are portrayed in the ingenious pencil of Punch, and you believe that you can hear it, winding its discordant horn amidst the costly merriment of the upper classes. And you know that the abandonment of respectable punctilios and worn conventions, which was such a feature of society after the war, had already begun before the war. It is worth repeating once again that it was not death which gave Imperial England such a disturbing appearance in the spring and summer of 1914: it was life. (393-4)
The first time I read this wonderful book, I was overwhelmed by my own ignorance; I knew very little of the material that Dangerfield all but takes for granted. The second time, I believe, I fastened on the “strange” part of the story, of which the foregoing passage is so illustrative; but the details went in one ear and out the other: Parliament, labor questions, suffragettes, Ireland and especially Northern Island — these were dingy, almost repellent matters, and I wasn’t ashamed to know little about them. By the time I came to Strange Death the third time, that arrogance had long been upended.
If you can get hold of The Strange Death of Liberal England, read it as quietly as you can — and try not to shiver at its moments of uncanny timeliness.
Daily Blague news update: “Secret Weapon.”