The Proud Tower (7 page)

In their luxurious and lavish world, self-indulgence was the natural law. Notable eccentrics like the nocturnal Duke of Portland and bad-tempered autocrats like Sir George Sitwell and Sir William Eden were merely representatives of their class in whom the habit of having their own way had gone to extremes. But for the majority it was easy to be agreeable when everything was done to keep them in comfort and ease and to make life for the great and wealthy as uninterruptedly pleasant as possible.

The lordly manner was the result. When Colonel Brabazon, who affected a fashionable difficulty with his
r
’s, arrived late at the railroad station to be informed that the train for London had just left, he instructed the station master, “Then bwing me another.” Gentlemen who did not relish a cold wait at a country station or a slow journey on a local made a habit of special trains which cost £25 for an average journey. There were not a few among them who, like Queen Victoria, had never seen a railway ticket. Ladies had one-of-a-kind dresses designed exclusively for them by Worth or Doucet, who devoted as much care to each client as if he were painting her portrait. “So as to be different from other people,” the English-born beauty, Daisy, Princess of Pless, had “a fringe of real violets” sewn down the train of her court dress, which was of transparent lace lined with blue chiffon and sprinkled with gold sequins.

Fed upon privilege, the patricians flourished. Five at least of the leading ministers in Lord Salisbury’s Government were over six feet tall, far above the normal stature of the time. Of the nineteen members of the Cabinet, all but two lived to be over seventy, seven exceeded eighty, and two exceeded ninety at a time when the average life expectancy of a male at birth was forty-four and of a man who had reached twenty-one was sixty-two. On their diet of privilege they acquired a certain quality which Lady Warwick could define only in the words, “They have an air!”

Now and then the sound of the distant rumble in the atmosphere caused them vague apprehensions of changes coming to spoil the fun. With port after dinner the gentlemen talked about the growth of democracy and the threat of Socialism. Cartoons in newspapers pictured John Bull looking over a fence at a bull called Labour. Most people were aware of problems without seriously imagining any major change in the present order of things, but a few were deeply disturbed. Young Arthur Ponsonby saw every night along the embankment from Westminster to Waterloo Bridge the “squalid throng of homeless, wretched outcasts sleeping on the benches,” and broke with the courtier tradition of his father and brother to become a Socialist. Lady Warwick tried to smother nagging doubts about a life devoted to the pursuit of pleasure in “recurrent fits of philanthropy” which she indulged in from “an impelling desire to help put things right and a deep conviction that things as they were, were not right.” In 1895, on reading an attack by the Socialist editor Robert Blatchford in his paper the
Clarion
on a great ball given at Warwick Castle to celebrate her husband’s accession to the title, she rushed in anger to London, leaving a house full of guests, to confront the enemy. She explained to him how during a hard winter when many were out of work the Warwick celebrations provided employment. Mr. Blatchford explained to his beautiful caller the nature of productive labour and the principles of Socialist theory. She returned to Warwick in a daze of new ideas and thereafter devoted her energy, money arid influence to propagating them, to the acute discomfort of her circle.

Lady Warwick was a straw, not a trend. As a nation, Britain in 1895 had an air of careless supremacy which galled her neighbors. The attitude, called “splendid isolation,” was both a state of mind and a fact. Britain did not worry seriously about potential enemies, felt no need of allies and had no friends. In a world in which other national energies were bursting old limits, this happy condition gave no great promise of permanence. On July 20, when Salisbury’s Government was less than a month old, it was suddenly and surprisingly challenged from an unexpected quarter, the United States. The affair concerned a long-disputed frontier between British Guiana and Venezuela. Claiming that the British were expanding territorially at their expense in violation of the Monroe Doctrine, the Venezuelans had been goading the United States to open that famous umbrella and insist on arbitration. Although the American President, Grover Cleveland, was a man of ordinarily sound judgment and common sense, his countrymen were in a mood of swelling self-assertion and, as Rudyard Kipling pointed out, for purposes of venting chauvinist sentiments, France had Germany, Britain had Russia, and America had Britain, the only feasible country “for the American public speaker to trample upon.” On July 20, Cleveland’s Secretary of State, Richard Olney, delivered a Note to Great Britain stating that disregard of the Monroe Doctrine would be “deemed an act of unfriendliness toward the United States,” whom he described in terms of not very veiled belligerence as “master of the situation and practically invulnerable against any and all comers.”

This was truly astonishing language for diplomatic usage; but it was deliberately provocative on Olney’s part, because, as he said, “in English eyes the United States was then so completely a negligible quantity” that he felt “only words the equivalent of blows would be effective.” Upon Lord Salisbury who was acting as his own Foreign Secretary they failed of effect. He was no more disposed to respond to this kind of prodding than he would have been if his tailor had suddenly challenged him to a duel. Foreign policy had been his métier for twenty years. He had been at the Congress of Berlin with Disraeli in 1878 and had maneuvered through all the twists and turns of that perennial entanglement, the Eastern Question. His method was not that of Lord Palmerston, whom the Prince of Wales admired because he “knew his own mind and put down his foot.” Issues in foreign affairs were no longer as forthright as in the days of Lord Palmerston’s flourishing, and Lord Salisbury sought no dramatic successes in their conduct. The victories of diplomacy, he said, were won by “a series of microscopic advantages; a judicious suggestion here, an opportune civility there, a wise concession at one moment and a farsighted persistence at another; of sleepless tact, immovable calmness and patience that no folly, no provocation, no blunder can shake.” But he regarded these refinements as wasted on a democracy like the United States, just as he regarded the vote as too good for the working class. He simply let Olney’s note go unanswered for four months.

When he finally replied on November 26 it was to remark coldly that “the disputed frontier of Venezuela has nothing to do with any of the questions dealt with by President Monroe” and to refuse flatly to arbitrate “the frontier of a British possession which belonged to the Throne of England before the Republic of Venezuela came into existence.” He did not even bother to obey diplomacy’s primary rule: leave room for negotiation. The rebuff was too much even for Cleveland. In a Message to Congress on December 17 he announced that after an American Committee of Inquiry had investigated and established a boundary line, any British extension over the line would be regarded as “wilful aggression” upon the rights and interests of the United States. Cleveland became a hero; a tornado of jingoism swept the country; “
WAR IF NECESSARY
,” proclaimed the New York
Sun.
The word “war” was soon being used as recklessly as if it concerned an expedition against the Iroquois or the Barbary pirates.

Britain was amazed, with opinion dividing according to party. The Liberals were mortified by Lord Salisbury’s haughty tone, the Tories angered at American presumption. “No Englishman with imperial instincts,” wrote the Tory journalist and novelist Morley Roberts in the inevitable letter to
The Times
, “can look with anything but contempt on the Monroe Doctrine. The English and not the inhabitants of the United States are the greatest power in the two Americas; and no dog of a Republic can open its mouth to bark without our good leave.” If the tone was overdone, the outrage was real. Although the absurdity of the issue was recognized on both sides of the Atlantic, belligerence surged and blood boiled. Aggressiveness born of power and prosperity was near the surface. The quarrel was becoming increasingly difficult to terminate when happily a third force caused a distraction.

No one was more useful as a magnet of other nations’ animosities than that catalyst of his epoch, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Forever spoiling to emphasize his own and his country’s importance, to play a role, to strike a pose, to twist the course of history, he never overlooked an opportunity. He hankered to be influential and usually was.

On December 29, 1895, the long-standing conflict between the Boer Republic of the Transvaal and the British of the Cape Colony was broken open by the Jameson Raid. Nominally under British suzerainty but virtually independent, the Boer Republic was a block in the march of British red down the length of Africa and an oppressor of the Uitlanders within its borders. These were British and other foreigners who, drawn by gold, had flocked to, and settled in, the Transvaal until they now outnumbered the Boers, but were kept by them without suffrage and other civil rights, and were seething with grievances. Inspired by imperialism’s impatient genius, Cecil Rhodes, Dr. Jameson led six hundred horsemen over the border with intent to bring about an uprising of the Uitlanders, overthrow the Boer government and bring the South African Republic under British control. His troop was surrounded and captured within three days, but his mission released a train of events that was to take full effect four years later.

For the moment it provided the ever alert Kaiser with an opening. He telegraphed congratulations to President Kruger of the Boer Republic on his success in repelling the invaders “without appealing to the help of friendly powers.” The implication that such help would be available on future request was clear. Instantly, every British gaze, like spectators’ heads at a tennis match, turned from America to Germany, and British wrath was diverted from President Cleveland, always unlikely in the role of menace, to the Kaiser, who played it so much more suitably. In helping to bring on the ultimate encirclement that he most dreaded, the Kruger telegram was one of the Kaiser’s most effective efforts. It revealed a hostility that startled the British. From that moment the possibility that isolation might prove more hazardous than splendid began to trouble the minds of their policy-makers.

The year 1895 was prolific of shocks, and one that shook society unpleasantly occurred two months before the Conservatives took office. The trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, for acts of gross indecency between males, destroyed both a brilliant man of letters and the mood of decadence he symbolized.

The presumption of decay had been heavily reinforced two years earlier by Max Nordau in a widely discussed book called
Degeneration.
Through six hundred pages of mounting hysteria he traced the decay lurking impartially in the realism of Zola, the symbolism of Mallarmé, the mysticism of Maeterlinck, in Wagner’s music, Ibsen’s dramas, Manet’s pictures, Tolstoy’s novels, Nietzsche’s philosophy, Dr. Jaeger’s woollen clothing, in Anarchism, Socialism, women’s dress, madness, suicide, nervous diseases, drug addiction, dancing, sexual license, all of which were combining to produce a society without self-control, discipline or shame which was “marching to its certain ruin because it is too worn out and flaccid to perform great tasks.”

Wilde, conforming to the duty of a decadent, was already engaged in destroying himself. In his role of aesthete, voluptuary and wit, he had hitherto been protected by the enamel of success. His incomparable talk enraptured friends as his plays did the public. But his arrogance as artist became overweening and his appetites uncontrolled, so that he grew fat and loose and heavy-jowled and, as a friend remarked, “all his bad qualities began to show in his face.” Nor did success satisfy him, for satiety required that he must taste the ultimate sensation of ruin. “I was a problem,” he said in sad self-knowledge, “for which there was no solution.” He precipitated his own arrest by taking action for libel against the Marquess of Queensberry. The ensuing trials tore away Society’s screen of discretion and gave everyone a shuddering look at the livid gleam of vice: panders, male prostitutes, hotel-room assignations with a valet, a groom, a boat-attendant picked up on a beach, and blackmail. No charges were brought against Lord Alfred Douglas, son of the Marquess of Queens-berry, the flowery and seductive young man who shared these practices as well as Wilde’s company and affections. Nor had there been any charges when Lord Arthur Somerset, a son of the Duke of Beaufort and a friend of the Prince of Wales, had been found in a homosexual brothel raided by the police in 1889. He had been allowed to take himself off and live comfortably after his fashion on the Continent while the Prince had asked Lord Salisbury that he might occasionally be permitted to visit his parents quietly in the country “without fear of being apprehended on this awful charge.”

Frank Harris, then editor of the
Fortnightly Review
, thought that the solidarity of the governing class would close protectively around his friend Oscar in the same way. He supposed that aristocratic prejudice was a matter of favoring the exceptional over the common and would operate equally for the lord, the millionaire and the “man of genius.” He was mistaken. Wilde had done the unforgivable in forcing public notice of his sin. And as artist-intellectual caught in scarlet depravity he evoked the howl of the philistines and plunged the British public into one of the most virulent of its periodic fits of morality. The judge was malevolent, the public vituperative, the society which he had amused turned its back, cabbies and newsboys exchanged vulgar jokes about “Oscar,” the press reviled him, his books were withdrawn from sale and his name pasted out on the playbills advertising
The Importance of Being Earnest
, his brightest diamond, then playing to enchanted audiences. His downfall, said the gentleman-Socialist H. M. Hyndman, “was the most grievous thing I have ever known in the literary world.” With it was dissipated, in England, if not on the Continent, the yellow haze of
fin de siècle
decadence.