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 4LTR PRESS
BILLINGSLEY + GITMAN + JOEHNK

PFIN PERSONAL FINANCE

7

PFIN
7
BILLINGSLEY + GITMAN + JOEHNK

STUDENT EDITION
NOW WITH MINDTAP

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SE/Billingsley + Gitman + Joehnk, Title, 7th Edition   ISBN 978-0-357-03360-9 ©2020 Designer: Chris Doughman
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Inside Front Cover (8.5”) Inside Back Cover (8.5")

 PFin personal finance
7

billingsley + gitman + joehnk

Australia d Brazil d Mexico d Singapore d United Kingdom d United States

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 PFIN7 © 2020, 2018 Cengage Learning, Inc.
Randall S. Billingsley, Lawrence J. Gitman,
and Michael D. Joehnk Unless otherwise noted, all content is © Cengage.

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 PFin
G i t ma n/J o e h n k/B i l l i n G s l e y

7 Brief Contents

Part 1 Foundations oF Financial Planning

1 Understanding the Financial Planning Process 2
2 Using Financial Statements and Budgets 28
3 Preparing Your Taxes 56

Part 2 Managing Basic assets

4 Managing Your Cash and Savings 84
5 Making Automobile and Housing Decisions 110

Part 3 Managing credit

6 Using Credit 144
7 Using Consumer Loans 172

Part 4 Managing insurance needs

8 Insuring Your Life 198
9 Insuring Your Health 228
10 Protecting Your Property 256

Part 5 Managing investMents

11 Investment Planning 282
12 Investing in Stocks and Bonds 314
13 Investing in Mutual Funds, ETFs, and Real Estate 346

Part 6 retireMent and estate Planning

14 Planning for Retirement 376
15 Preserving Your Estate 404

Appendix A 430
Appendix B 431
Appendix C 432
Appendix D 433
Appendix E 434
Index 436
© Fanatic Studio/Getty Images

Brief Contents iii

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 ContentS
About the Authors vii 2-5 Cash In and Cash Out: Preparing and
Acknowledgements ix Using Budgets 41
2-6 The Time Value of Money: Placing a Dollar Value on
Financial Goals 45
2-7 Inflation and Interest Rates 50
Part 1
Foundations oF 3 Preparing Your Taxes 56
Financial Planning 3-1 Understanding Federal Income Tax Principles
3-2 It’s Taxable Income that Matters 60
57

3-3 Calculating and Filing Your Taxes 65

3-4 Other Filing Considerations 72
3-5 Effective Tax Planning 76
JGI/Jamie Grill/Blend Images/Getty Images

Part 2
Managing Basic
assets
1 Understanding the
Financial Planning
Process 2
rCarner/Shutterstock.com

1-1 The Rewards of Sound Financial Planning 3

1-2 The Personal Financial Planning Process 6
1-3 From Goals to Plans: A Lifetime of Planning 11
1-4 The Planning Environment 19
1-5 What Determines Your Personal Income? 22

2 Using Financial Statements 4 Managing Your Cash and

Savings 84
and Budgets 28
2-1 Mapping Out Your Financial Future 29 4-1 The Role of Cash Management in Personal
Financial Planning 85
2-2 The Balance Sheet: How Much Are You
Worth Today? 30 4-2 Today’s Financial Services Marketplace 87

2-3 The Income and Expense Statement: What We Earn 4-3 A Full Menu of Cash Management Products 90
and Where It Goes 35 4-4 Maintaining a Checking Account 95
2-4 Using Your Personal Financial Statements 39 4-5 Establishing a Savings Program 101
iv Contents

33609_fm_ptg01.indd 4 21/12/18 4:21 PM

 5 Making Automobile and
Housing Decisions 110
Part 4
5-1 Buying an Automobile 111
Managing
5-2 Leasing a Car 116 insurance needs
5-3 Meeting Housing Needs: Buy or Rent? 118
5-4 How Much Housing Can You Afford? 124
5-5 The Home-Buying Process 132
5-6 Financing the Transaction 135

Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock.com
Part 3
Managing credit
8 Insuring Your Life 198
8-1 Basic Insurance Concepts 199
8-2 Why Buy Life Insurance? 200
8-3 How Much Life Insurance is Right for You? 201
Mark Viker/Getty Images

8-4 What Kind of Policy is Right for You? 206

8-5 Buying Life Insurance 215
8-6 Key Features of Life Insurance Policies 218

9 Insuring Your Health 228

6 Using Credit 144 9-1 The Importance of Health Insurance
Coverage 229
6-1 The Basic Concepts of Credit 145
9-2 Health Insurance Plans 230
6-2 Credit Cards and Other Types of Open
9-3 Health Insurance Decisions 236
Account Credit 148
9-4 MedIcal Expense Coverage and Policy
6-3 Obtaining and Managing Open Forms of Credit 157
Provisions 240
6-4 Using Credit Wisely 164
9-5 Long-Term-Care Insurance 245

7 Using Consumer Loans 172

9-6 Disability Income Insurance 248

7-1 Basic Features of Consumer Loans

7-2 Managing Your Credit 179
173 10 Protecting Your Property 256
10-1 Basic Principles of Property Insurance 257
7-3 Single-Payment Loans 182
10-2 Homeowner’s Insurance 261
7-4 Installment Loans 187
Contents v

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 10-3 Automobile Insurance 268
10-4 Other Property and Liability Insurance 274 Part 6
10-5 Buying Insurance and Settling Claims 275
retireMent and
Part 5
estate Planning
Managing
investMents

Cathy Yeulet/123RF
Jan Stromme/the Image Bank/Getty Images

14 Planning for Retirement 376

14-1 An Overview of Retirement Planning 377
14-2 Social Security 383

11 Investment Planning 282

14-3 Pension Plans and Retirement Programs 386
14-4 Annuities 395
11-1 The Objectives and Rewards of Investing 283
11-2 Securities Markets 289
11-3 Making Transactions in the Securities Markets 295
15 Preserving Your Estate 404
15-1 Principles of Estate Planning 405
11-4 Becoming an Informed Investor 299
15-2 Thy Will Be Done… 409
11-5 Online Investing 303
15-3 Trusts 417
11-6 Managing Your Investment Holdings 305
15-4 Federal Unified Transfer Taxes 420

12 Investing
Bonds 314
in Stocks and
15-5 Calculating Estate Taxes 424
15-6 Estate Planning Techniques 424

12-1 The Risks and Rewards of Investing 315 Appendix A 430

12-2 Investing in Common Stock 321 Appendix B 431
12-3 Investing in Bonds 331 Appendix C 432
Appendix D

13 Investing
433
Appendix E 434
in Mutual Funds,
ETFs, and Real Estate 346 Index 436

13-1 Mutual Funds and Exchange Traded Funds:

Some Basics 347
13-2 Types of Funds and Fund Services 355
13-3 Making Mutual Fund and ETF Investments 362
13-4 Investing in Real Estate 368

vi Contents

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 ABout the AuthoRS
Randall S. BillingSley is a finance professor in Financial Management, The Financial Review, the
at Virginia Tech. He received his bachelor’s degree in Journal of Financial Planning, the Journal of Risk and
economics from Texas Tech University and received Insurance, the Financial Services Review, the Journal of
both an M.S. in economics and a Ph.D. in finance from Financial Research, Financial Practice and Education,
Texas A&M University. Professor Billingsley holds the the Journal of Financial Education, and other scholarly
Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), Financial Risk publications.
Manager (FRM), and Certified Rate of Return Analyst His major textbooks include Introduction to Busi-
(CRRA) professional designations. An award-winning ness, co-authored with Carl McDaniel, et. al.; and
teacher at the undergraduate and graduate levels, his Fundamentals of Investing, Thirteenth Edition, which
research, consulting, and teaching focus on investment is co-authored with Michael D. Joehnk and Scott B.
analysis and issues relevant to practicing financial ad- Smart. Gitman and Joehnk also wrote Investment
visors. Formerly a vice-president at the Association Fundamentals: A Guide to Becoming a Knowledgeable
for Investment Management and Research (now the Investor, which was selected as one of 1988’s 10 best
CFA Institute), Professor Billingsley’s published equity personal finance books by Money magazine; and Prin-
valuation case study of Merck & Company was assigned ciples of Managerial Finance, Sixth Brief Edition, co-
reading in the CFA curriculum for several years. In 2006, authored with Chad J. Zutter.
the Wharton School published his book, Understanding An active member of numerous professional organi-
Arbitrage: An Intuitive Approach to Financial Analysis. zations, Professor Gitman is past president of the Acad-
In addition, his research has been published in refereed emy of Financial Services, the San Diego Chapter of the
journals that include the Journal of Portfolio Manage- Financial Executives Institute, the Midwest Finance
ment, the Journal of Banking and Finance, Financial Association, and the FMA National Honor Society. In
Management, the Journal of Financial Research, and addition, he is a Certified Financial Planner® (CFP®).
the Journal of Futures Markets. Professor Billingsley Gitman formerly served as a director on the CFP®
advises the Student-Managed Endowment for Educa- Board of Governors, as vice-president–financial edu-
tional Development (SEED) at Virginia Tech, which cation for the Financial Management Association, and
manages an equity portfolio of about $5 million on be- as director of the San Diego MIT Enterprise Forum.
half of the Virginia Tech Foundation. Gitman has two grown children and lives with his wife
Professor Billingsley’s consulting to date has focused in La Jolla, California, where he is an avid bicyclist.
on two areas of expertise. First, he has acted extensively
michael d. Joehnk is an emeritus professor of
as an expert witness on financial issues. Second, he has
finance at Arizona State University. In addition to his ac-
taught seminars and published materials that prepare in-
ademic appointments at ASU, Professor Joehnk spent a
vestment professionals for the CFA examinations. This
year (1999) as a visiting professor of finance at the Univer-
has afforded him the opportunity to explore the relation-
sity of Otago in New Zealand. He received his bachelor’s
ships among diverse areas of investment analysis. His
and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Arizona and
consulting endeavors have taken him across the United
his M.B.A. from Arizona State University. A Chartered
States and to Canada, Europe, and Asia. A primary goal of
Financial Analyst (CFA), he has served as a member
Professor Billingsley’s consulting is to apply the findings of
of the Candidate Curriculum Committee and of the
academic financial research to practical investment deci-
Council of Examiners of the Institute of Chartered
sion making and personal financial planning.
Financial Analysts. He has also served as a director of the
lawRence J. gitman is an emeritus professor of Phoenix Society of Financial Analysts and as secretary/
finance at San Diego State University. He received his treasurer of the Western Finance Association, and he was
bachelor’s degree from Purdue University, his M.B.A. elected to two terms as a vice-president of the Financial
from the University of Dayton, and his Ph.D. from the Management Association. Professor Joehnk is the author
University of Cincinnati. Professor Gitman is a prolific or co-author of some 50 articles, five books, and numer-
textbook author and has more than 50 articles appearing ous monographs. His articles have appeared in Financial

About the Authors vii

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 Management, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Sake. Dr. Joehnk was also the editor of Institutional
Bank Research, the Journal of Portfolio Management, Asset Allocation, which was sponsored by the Institute
the Journal of Consumer Affairs, the Journal of Financial of Chartered Financial Analysts and published by Dow
and Quantitative Analysis, the AAII Journal, the Journal Jones-Irwin. He was a contributor to the Handbook
of Financial Research, the Bell Journal of Economics, for Fixed Income Securities and to Investing and Risk
the Daily Bond Buyer, Financial Planner, and other Management, Volume 1 of the Library of Investment
publications. Banking. In addition, he served a six-year term as ex-
ecutive co-editor of the Journal of Financial Research.
In addition to co-authoring several books with Lawrence
He and his wife live in Prescott, Arizona.
J. Gitman, Professor Joehnk was the author of a highly
successful paperback trade book, Investing for Safety’s

viii About the Authors

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 ACKnoWLeDGeMentS
In addition to the many individuals who made significant L. Brown Agency for his help on life and property insur-
contributions to the book by their expertise, classroom ance issues.
experience, guidance, general advice, and reassurance, The editorial staff at Cengage Learning has been
we also appreciate the students and faculty who used the most helpful in our endeavors. We particularly wish
book and provided valuable feedback, confirming our to thank Joe Sabatino, the Product Manager; Chris
conviction that a truly teachable personal financial plan- Valentine, Content Manager; Renee Schnee, Product
ning text could be developed. Assistant, and Brittany Waitt, Learning Designer.
We are indebted to the academicians and practi- Finally, our wives – Bonnie, Robin, and Charlene –
tioners who have created the body of knowledge con- have provided needed support during the writing of this
tained in this text. We particularly wish to thank several book. We are forever grateful to them.
people who gave the most significant help in developing
and revising it. They include Eric Johnsen, ChFC, CLU, Randall S. Billingsley, Ph.D, FRM, CFA
LTCP, of StateFarm for his helpful insights on insurance Virginia Tech
products and planning; Sam Hicks, Associate Professor
Lawrence J. Gitman, Ph.D., CFP®
Emeritus, Virginia Tech, CPA (retired, Tennessee), San Diego State University
for his thorough review of the entire book; Professor
Hongbok Lee, of Western Illinois University, for helpful Michael D. Joehnk, Ph.D., CFA
observations, and Thomas C. Via Jr., CLU, of Leonard Arizona State University

Acknowledgements ix

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 Understanding the
1 Financial Planning
Process
JGI/Jamie Grill/Blend Images/Getty Images

LEARNING ObjEctIvEs
After studying this chapter, you will be able to…

1-1 Identify the benefits of using personal financial planning techniques to manage your finances.
After finishing
1-2 Describe the personal financial planning process and define your goals.
this chapter go
1-3 Explain the life cycle of financial plans, their role in achieving your financial goals, how to deal
with special planning concerns, and the use of professional financial planners. to PAGE26 for
1-4 Examine the economic environment’s influence on personal financial planning. stUDY tOOLs
1-5 Evaluate the impact of age, education, and geographic location on personal income.

1-6 Understand the importance of career choices and their relationship to personal financial planning.

2 PART ONE: Foundations of Financial Planning

33609_ch01_ptg01.indd 2 20/12/18 10:31 PM

 hOw wILL thIs AffEct ME?
The heart of financial planning is making sure your values line up with
how you spend and save. That means knowing where you are financially
and planning on how to get where you want to be in the future no matter
what life throws at you. For example, how should your plan handle the
projection that Social Security costs may exceed revenues by 2034? And
what if the government decides to raise marginal tax rates to help cover the
federal deficit? An informed financial plan should reflect such uncertainties
and more.
This chapter describes the financial planning process and explains its context.
Topics include how financial plans change to accommodate your current stage
in life and the role that financial planners can play in helping you achieve your
objectives. After reading this chapter you will have a good perspective on how to
organize your overall personal financial plan.

1-1 thE REwARDs Of sOUND Social Security. Creating flexible plans and regularly
revising them is the key to building a sound financial
fINANcIAL PLANNING future.
Successful financial planning also brings rewards
LO1 What does living “the good life” mean to you? that include greater flexibility, an improved standard of
Does it mean having the flexibility to pursue your living, wiser spending habits, and increased wealth. Of
dreams and goals in life? Is it owning a home in a cer- course, planning alone does not guarantee success; but
tain part of town, starting a company, being debt free, having an effective, consistent plan can help you use
driving a particular type of car, taking luxury vacations, your resources wisely. Careful financial planning in-
or having a large investment portfolio? Today’s complex, creases the chance your financial goals will be achieved
fast-paced world offers a bewildering array of choices. and that you will have sufficient flexibility to handle
Rapidly changing economic, political, technological, such contingencies as illness, job loss, and even finan-
and social environments make it increasingly difficult cial crises.
to develop solid financial strategies that will improve The goal of this book is to remove the mystery from
your lifestyle consistently. Moreover, the financial crisis the personal financial planning process and replace it
of 2007–2008 dramatizes the need to plan for financial with the tools you need to take charge of your personal
contingencies. No matter how you define it, the good finances. To organize this process, the text is divided into
life requires sound planning to turn financial goals six parts, as follows:
into reality. ▶ Part 1: Foundations of Financial Planning
The best way to achieve financial objectives is
▶ Part 2: Managing Basic Assets
through personal financial planning, which helps de-
fine your financial goals and develop appropriate strat- ▶ Part 3: Managing Credit
egies to reach them. And being financially self-aware ▶ Part 4: Managing Insurance Needs
provides more insight into the range of available fi- ▶ Part 5: Managing Investments
nancial choices and their trade-offs. Your comfortable ▶ Part 6: Retirement and Estate Planning
retirement should not depend solely on employee or
government benefits—such as steady salary increases Each part explains a different aspect of personal finan-
or adequate funding from employer-paid pensions or cial planning, as shown in Exhibit 1.1. This organizational

CHAPTER 1: Understanding the Financial Planning Process 3

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 Exhibit 1.1
Organizational Planning Model
This text emphasizes making financial decisions regarding assets, credit, insurance, investments, and retirement and estates.

Financial Actions

Financial Basic asset decisions Financial

Plans Credit decisions Results
Insurance decisions
Investment decisions
Retirement and estate decisions

scheme revolves around financial decision making have risen sharply as a result. About 75 percent of mar-
that’s firmly based on an operational set of financial ried adults say that they and their mate share all their
plans. We believe that sound financial planning enables money. Two incomes not only buy more, but they also
individuals to make decisions that will yield their desired require greater responsibility to manage the money
results. wisely.

1-1a Improving Your Standard

1-1b Spending Money Wisely
of Living
Using money wisely is a major benefit of financial
With personal financial planning we learn to acquire, use, planning. Whatever your income, you can either
and control our financial resources more efficiently. It al- spend it now or save some of it for the future. De-
lows us to gain more enjoyment from our income and thus termining your current and future spending pat-
to improve our standard of living—the necessities, com- terns is an important part of personal money manage-
forts, and luxuries we have or desire. ment. The goal, of course, is to spend your money so
Our quality of life is closely tied to our standard that you get the most satisfaction from each dollar.
of living. Although other factors—geographic location,
public facilities, local cost of living, pollution, traffic, and Current Needs Your current spending level is
population density—also affect quality of life, wealth is based on the necessities of life and your average
commonly viewed as a key determinant. Material items propensity to consume, which is the percentage
such as a house, car, and clothing as well as money of each dollar of income, on average, that is spent
available for health care, education, art, music, travel, for current needs rather than savings. A minimum
and entertainment all contribute to our quality of life. level of spending would allow you to obtain only the
Of course, many so-called wealthy people live “plain” necessities of life: food, clothing, and shelter. Al-
lives, choosing to save, invest, or support philanthropic though the quantity and type of food, clothing, and
organizations with their money rather than indulge in shelter purchased may differ among individuals
luxuries. depending on their wealth, we all need these items
One trend pro- to survive.
standard of living the necessities, foundly affecting our Some people with high average propensities to
comforts, and luxuries enjoyed or standard of living is consume earn low incomes and spend a large portion
desired by an individual or family the two-income family. of it on basic necessities. On the other hand, individu-
average propensity to What was relatively rare als earning large amounts quite often have low average
consume the percentage of each in the early 1970s has propensities to consume, in part because the cost of ne-
dollar of income, on average, that
become commonplace cessities represents only a small portion of their income.
a person spends for current needs
rather than savings today, and the incomes Still, two people with significantly different in-
of millions of families comes could have the same average propensity to
4 PART ONE: Foundations of Financial Planning

33609_ch01_ptg01.indd 4 20/12/18 10:31 PM

 consume because of differences in their standard say they need at least $5 million to feel rich. And more
of living. The person making more money may be- generally, most people say that it would take about
lieve it is essential to buy better-quality items or more twice their current net
items and will thus, on average, spend the same per- worth to feel wealthy.
centage of each dollar of in- The more we earn and
come as the person making the less we devote to

canbedone/Shutterstock.com
far less. current spending, the
more we can commit to
Future Needs A care- meeting future needs.
fully developed financial Regardless of income or
plan should set aside a por- wealth, some portion of
tion of current income for current income should
future spending. Placing be set aside regularly for
these funds in various sav- future use. Doing so cre-
ings and investment vehicles ates good saving habits
allows you to earn a return on and provides for your fu-
your funds until you need them. For example, you may ture needs.
want to build up a retirement fund to maintain a desirable
standard of living in your later years. Instead of spending
1-1c Accumulating Wealth
the money now, you defer actual spending until the fu-
ture when you retire. Nearly 35 percent of Americans In addition to using current income to pay for ev-
say retirement planning is their most pressing financial eryday living expenses, we often spend it to acquire
concern. Other examples of deferred spending include assets such as cars, a home, or stocks and bonds. Our
saving for a child’s education, a primary residence or va- assets largely determine how wealthy we are. Personal
cation home, a major acquisition (such as a car or home financial planning plays a critical role in the accumula-
entertainment center), or even a vacation. tion of wealth by directing our financial resources to
The portion of current income we commit to future the most productive areas.
needs depends on how much we earn and also on our One’s wealth is the net total value of all the
average propensity to consume. Many affluent Americans items that the individual owns. Wealth consists of
financial and tangible assets. Financial assets are
intangible, paper assets such as savings accounts
and securities (stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and

Financial Planning Tips so forth). They are earning assets that are held for
their expected future returns. Tangible assets,
BE SMART In PlAnnIng YoUR FInAncIAl goAlS in contrast, are physical assets such as real estate
and automobiles. These assets can be held for ei-
Success is most likely if your goals are: ther consumption (e.g., your home, car, artwork,
Specific: What do I want to achieve? What is or jewelry) or investment purposes (e.g., a duplex
required of me, and what are my constraints? purchased for rental income). The goal of most
Measurable: How much money is needed? How people is to accumulate as much wealth as possible
will I know if I am succeeding? while maintaining
Attainable: How can I do this? Is this consistent current consumption
with my other financial goals? at a level that pro- wealth the total value of all items owned
by an individual, such as savings accounts,
Realistic: Am I willing and able to do this? vides the desired
stocks, bonds, home, and automobiles
standard of living.
Timely: What is my target date? What short-term financial assets intangible assets, such
To see how you com-
goals must be achieved along the way to achieve as savings accounts and securities, that are
my longer-term goals? pare with the typical
acquired for some promised future return
American in finan-
Inspired by Paul J. Meyers, Attitude Is Everything, The Meyer Re- cial terms, check tangible assets physical assets, such
source Group, 2003. as real estate and automobiles, that can be
out the statistics in
held for either consumption or investment
Exhibit 1.2. purposes

CHAPTER 1: Understanding the Financial Planning Process 5

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Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 CHAPTER XIII
GREAT MEN OF THE DAY

Every artist is his own masterpiece.—Burstall.

I n beginning this chapter, I very nearly fell into the old mistake of
saying “I suppose young people don’t read Dickens nowadays.” It
is curious how generation after generation of us seniors fall into that
trap. Miss Linthorpe said it to me once, when I was in the
schoolroom, upon which I offered to submit to a Dickens
examination, and passed it with flying colours. I said it myself to
Francis one day, when he was lying on the floor with a book, and he
held up the book, which was Martin Chuzzlewit. So I will make no
apology this time for talking of Mrs. Leo Hunter as if she were a
character familiar to my readers. She was a real old lady, who lived at
Ipswich (I think) and had some phenomenal number of children, and
wrote verses quite as bad as the “Dying Frog.” But indeed she was
not one woman, she was every woman—every woman who has
sufficient station in the world to be able to choose her own company.
We all want to collect lions—none the less since we ourselves began
to be Managing Directresses, and Q.C.’s, and Members of
Parliament. So I am not ashamed of having hunted the lions in my
day; and I have kept them for a separate chapter—just a few of them,
who will be worth exhibiting, because everybody still remembers
their names, and yet my younger readers never saw or only saw them
at a distance.
I suppose it would be generally agreed that the greatest man of the
period (I am speaking of the period round about 1960) was Lord
Chief Justice Poltwhistle. He dated from the old days of the English
Bar, before women could plead (“barbarous days, Lady Porstock”) or
sit on juries. In his young days, he said, it was still customary for
lawyers to demand their fees, even when they lost the case; and he
could quote instances in which men had risen to great fame at the
Bar without ever winning a single important case. “We took it all in a
more sporting spirit then,” he would say, in his quaint old way. “You
might win a moral victory as a pleader, although you failed to get a
verdict owing to the intrinsic badness of your cause. But of course at
that time counsel weren’t required to take any oath as to what they
thought of the rights and wrongs of the case, and it was not contrary
to etiquette to defend a man although you were morally certain he
was guilty. Even the moral theologians allowed that; and you must
understand, Lady Porstock, that a moral theologian has a conscience
just one point less elastic than a lawyer’s. I recollect when the Act
was passed in ’42 an old company-promoter called Blofeld sitting
next to O’Leary, who was a prominent K.C. in those days, and saying,
‘Well, the next time I get into the Courts it seems as if I’d have to find
either a knave or a fool to defend me.’ ‘And you’ll have your pick of
the Bar,’ says O’Leary. Wonderful smart chap he was, O’Leary. ‘It
isn’t fair on us Catholics,’ he’d say to me (there weren’t very many of
us practising in those days), ‘for the Protestants all think we’re such
liars, when I’ve defended a man it’s all I can do to prevent him
getting up and pleading Guilty.’ In those days, too, you could accept
any brief you liked, and accepted the party that offered the biggest
retaining fee, instead of having to wait your turn. It nearly broke
O’Leary’s heart when the Retaining Fees Bill went through. I
remember Lord Hopedale saying to him, ‘Surely you don’t defend the
old system? You wouldn’t have a man get the best counsel because he
can pay the biggest fee?’ and he just looked up with a twinkle in his
eye and said, ‘I do defend it. Aren’t those that want the best counsel
the biggest rogues? And aren’t the biggest rogues the rich people who
can afford to pay for the best counsel?’ Oh, he was a wonderful smart
chap, O’Leary.” And so the old gentleman would wander on,
charming us with anecdotes of the bad old times that, just because
they are so distant, still win our rebellious sympathies.
Another of our guests was Mrs. Justice Partridge, who was one of
the first of my sex to take the silk, and actually the first, I believe, to
attain the Bench. She used to tell the story of one of the first cases
she had to try. The offence was criminal wife-beating, and everybody
was expecting her, as a woman, to be particularly severe over it. The
accused, an Irishman, was equal to the occasion, and explained that
he was “just taychin’ her her place in the house, the same as you
would your old man, yer Honour.”
Talking of Irishmen reminds me of another distinguished visitor of
ours, Daniel Geraghty, the Prime Minister of Ireland at that time. I
remember asking him why it was that Ireland, since her liberation in
the twenties, had never done much that was memorable in the way of
literature, having produced so much till then. “It’s a simple thing,” he
said, “it’s just that we Irishmen have no imagination. We’re hard,
business folk by nature. When you English had it all your own way,
you always liked to believe, and always wanted us to believe, that we
were just dreamy sort of fellows, only fit to dream in a pig-sty or a
garret, the way we’d starve contented. It’s always the way with you
conquering races, you admire your subjects for the qualities that
won’t be dangerous to you. Excudent alii—it’s the same all the world
over.” I have never made up my mind whether he was right, but it
certainly looks as if he was justified.
At another time, we entertained Fothergill—the younger
Fothergill, of course, not the one who wrote Fifteen Years in a Fijian
Larder. He came to us when he had just had the distinction of
discovering the last race that was left to be discovered—the Ibquo’s
in South America. He said they were a fascinating people, very
simple in their character and very primitive in their habits. They
knew nothing of flying, of electricity, or even of steam, and they used
petrol only as an intoxicant. When they had to travel a long distance,
or to pull heavy weights, they would take one of their tame mustangs
and fasten it to a wheeled cart, and then drive it along with a whip,
pulling the cart behind it. Their cooking was done over a fire, usually
of coal; and their sacrificial meals were always cooked in vessels of
iron, not aluminium, because it would be “bad magic.” They believed
in a good Spirit which ruled the world, and in a bad Spirit which only
had power to hurt them if they did wrong. They had great respect for
old age, and generally chose some of the older men of the tribe to be
their counsellors; if a child disobeyed its parents, it was punished.
They also regarded their women with great veneration, and you
would often see a man getting up from his place by the fire to make
room for a woman who had none. When there was a marriage, the
bride was solemnly escorted by her friends to the house of her future
husband, where she was henceforward to live. The men worked in
the fields; the women stayed at home and cooked for them, and also
looked after the children, of whom there were often as many as eight
or nine in one family. I seldom remember spending such an
interesting evening.
It was not at my own house but at Lady Leek’s that I used to meet
the literary men of the period. I did not care for having them at
Greylands, or even at Chiswick, because they were liable to wear such
odd clothes, and to talk so very loud, and to bring the strangest
people in with them, quite uninvited. But they were very interesting
people to meet, there is no doubt. The trouble about their writings
was that they spent almost all their time writing about one another;
sometimes in appreciation, sometimes in criticism. Occasionally one
of them would break away from the tradition by writing about the
men of a previous generation—there was Bernard Sykes, for example,
who wrote a book that was very much talked about at the time, in
which he tried to show that Lord Kitchener was a bad general, and
that Herbert Wells was not really religious. But mostly they stuck to
their own generation and criticized each other’s works about each
other. The novelists could not do this exactly, but even in the novels
the heroes were always novelists and the heroines female novelists,
and they all settled down in Chelsea and lived unhappily ever after.
Novels were very long in those days, running to three, or four, or
even five volumes. Archie Lock used to say that he always took
Debrett with him when he went on a journey, because it was the only
book you could still get in one volume. “And very creditable to them,”
he added, “considering the pressure on their space.” Of course the
old “adventure stories” had not quite died out, but they were dying
out rapidly—the Tarzan Syndicate, for example, decided to confine
itself to films about this time. Publishing was already so expensive
that all books except technical ones had to be produced by
subscription. So the only novels one had were very long and very
literary. It was only Jenkins’ invention in the seventies that made
them cheap again.
I once met Henricourt and heard from him the story of his early
struggles. He was a Civil Servant on £600 a year when he wrote his
first masterpiece, The Kleptomaniac. It was one of the most realistic
books of the century, and critics said that Chapter LXVII of the first
volume, which begins with the hero falling into a deep, dreamless
sleep, and ends just before he wakes up, was one of the most
powerful things ever written. He took it to a publisher, who said
there was a printers’ strike on, and they were not producing anything
but school books at the moment; why didn’t he film it? He said he
had thought of that, but the manager had said it would want a reel
about as long as the Equator, and asked him to cut it: he said that
would be false to his Art. The publisher said he’d better store the
manuscript somewhere and write another book that would catch on
with the public—his reminiscences, for example—and then have the
Klep. in reserve. He said it was the one thing they weren’t allowed to
do in the Civil Service, write Reminiscences, it was so apt to create a
false impression. Couldn’t the publisher see his way to producing the
first volume, anyhow, dividing the risks? The publisher said it
couldn’t be done unless he could guarantee a sale of 4,000. In
despair, he went to a Touting Agency, and asked them if they could
find him 4,000 subscribers for what was really rather a remarkable
novel. They asked if any important public characters came into the
book under pseudonyms. He said no, that was against the principles
of his Art. Finally the agent said he thought he could get the
signatures if Henricourt wouldn’t mind his pretending that the book
was a translation from the Lithuanian, written by a blind Lithuanian
patriot. Henricourt agreed to this, and so the subscribers were
procured and the great work was produced after all.
Poetry in those days had hardly felt the influence of the neo-
classical school, and our poets still went in for using the language of
common life, the commoner the better. To show the sort of thing that
was popular, I don’t think I can do better than give you a page from
the Index of First Lines in a volume of collected Edwardian Poetry,
which Lady Travers-Grant[14] gave me on my fiftieth birthday:
EDWARDIAN POETRY 1960‒1965—INDEX

Damn all these lousy pamphleteers 87

Damn and blast, blast and damn 36
Damnation! has that flat-faced woman gone? 103
Damn Billy Smith, he’s pinched my girl 45
Damned if I care what these nincompoops say of me 156
Damned if that stud hasn’t come loose once more 43
 Damned if we’ll sweat, you greasy sycophant 52
Damned in these mucky estuaries of hell 113
Damn her! Where did she get those saffron eyes 11
Damn him! 73
Damn him! What the 128
Damn it all, I’ve swabbed these beetle-squashers 59
Damn kindness! damn faith! damn humanity! 97
Damn my eyes, if yonder paling moonlight 77
Damn Nero for a mawkish hypocrite 80
Damnonian maidens, in your sluttish smocks 34
Damn silly? Yet if this damned silliness 62
Damn the Church and damn the State 39
Damn those little ears of yours, my darling 101
Damn you, Charles, you’ve spoilt it all 1
Damp as the Morgue on autumn afternoons 100
I suppose the mechanical school of poets are hardly to be found at
all in modern bookshelves, and yet there was a time when Edgar
Pirbright was enthusiastically reviewed, and you would see his book,
“By Helico to Helicon,” lying on the tables of all his personal friends.
He was obsessed with the idea that mechanical triumphs, being part
of Man’s self-assertion on the planet, are infinitely better subjects to
be celebrated by the poet’s typewriter than Nature, “that irrelevant
mass of geological strata and atmospheric effects,” as he called it. He
even went so far as to bring out an anthology from the older poets, in
which he included a great deal of Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold
and other writers who had shown themselves hostile to the march of
civilization; but he had, as he said, adapted them—which meant that
he had altered them freely so as to suit his own doctrines. Some of it
was ingenious, and even contained a good deal of original work: for
instance, when you read the stanza:
Our fathers watered with their tears
The sea of time whereon we sail;
They watered it for years and years,
But found its tides of no avail;
Still the same ocean round us raves,
But we have utilized its waves!—
when you read a stanza like that, you did not realize all at once that it
was the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse which Pirbright was
“utilizing” to celebrate the glories of the tide-trap. And there was a
certain forcefulness about lines like:
But still my heart with rapture fills,
And dances with the cotton-mills:

but you felt the thing was going too far when you came across a poem
called “Sky-writing,” which opened:
My heart leaps up when I behold
An advert in the sky.

I used to have the book, but I have lost it; it was full of things like
that.
And then, of course, there was the Futurist school, which ran into
all sorts of extremes; but none more curious, I think, than the “Page-
decorating” group of writers, who said that neither sense nor
grammar nor even sound counted for anything in poetry; an
immediate, telling effect ought to be produced by the mere look of
the letters on the page. I can give an example of it from an old album
of mine: it is no use trying to make head or tail of it, but if you look at
it with your eyes half-shut, so to speak, you can just see that the first
verse contains pretty and the second contains ugly letters, or groups
of letters:
 St. Just-in-Roseland! St. Just-in-Roseland!
All vervein, desirable vervein, and melilot.
Here veined agrimony swoons, with fumes calamitous, daintily;
Arable fallows assoil sly fingers;
Purple woofs incarnate of swishy meadows,
Dilapidated obloquies amorously urgent, all anyhow, wayward fingers,
Transience unimaginably rapid,
Languorous ditties, that opiates inhibit,
Rosy anodynes, albeit rigorously voluble,
Alcantara!

Kircudbright!
Gutted offsets, bombastic in groping hot-houses, endways:
Fungoid sprockets, puddle-bedripped, ungainly,
Rectitudes, angularly awkward, perspectives,
Elucubrate dross, grinning potsherds, warps,
Stinking of frogs, knock-kneed scorpion gargoyles,
Wreathed mouthings of something quarrelsome, brutish,
Newts hag-ridden, huddled responsibilities,
Spawn umbellated, coughing, slobbering,
Heckmondwike!

Perhaps it was time the neo-classical school came along to give us

a new lead! But of course it was far more of a revolution in Art than it
was in letters. I am afraid I am a very poor first-hand witness about
the artistic movements of my time, for the old painters used to expect
such a lot of you! They exhibited, of course, at the Academy and
other accessible places every now and then, but even so it was rather
trying to have the artists standing on guard, as they always did, and
explaining to the sight-seer, not what their pictures were about, but
what sort of emotions they ought to evoke! Some of them went
further, and said you must not look at their pictures unless you were
fasting, or unless you had recently taken opium. (Opium-smoking
was not as common then as it is now, but already you were
sometimes offered it in Chelsea.) I was too busy in one way and
another to devote my life to picture-inspecting; and indeed, it was
only a small group of people who took any interest in painting at all.
But I did once come in close touch with it, when I sat for my own
portrait to Sanderson, the great Præteritist. In those days, when
chromography gave very little help to the artist, you would often have
to “sit” twice or three times before the painter caught what he
considered a likeness. It was during the enforced idleness of one of
these “sittings” that I had a long conversation with him which
interested me so much that I wrote down notes of it afterwards.
We talked of Futurism; he said it was all very well, but the trouble
about it was it had no future. He told me (what I did not know) that
the term “futurism,” when it was first invented, in the early part of
the century (“before you were born, my dear”—waving his brush at
me), meant simply a dissatisfaction with present standards in art and
a determination to find new methods: it was only with Lennox and
Burstall that it took on its new meaning. The old Futurists refused,
indeed, to draw the thing as they saw it, but they had not reached the
idea of portraying things as one day they would be. It was Lennox’s
Ruins of Westminster Cathedral that first heralded this much-
criticized departure; and it was Burstall who developed the notion in
portrait-painting. He was something of a missionary: unhappily
married himself, he maintained that it was one of the functions of
Art to show the evanescence of beauty, and when débutantes came to
sit to him he represented them as those wrinkled old women whom
we still see and admire (he was speaking, of course, in 1960) in his
portraits. He was a missionary, and something of a martyr; in
consequence of his decision, he had to struggle for a long time with
neglect and poverty; and it was only his portrait of Prince Albert,
then three years old, as six foot high and a Colonel of Hussars, that
drew attention to him once more. He got all the babies after that.
I said I supposed the Futuribilists were a necessary, or at least a
logical, sequel to the Futurists. He said no, except in so far as they
continued the tradition of drawing anything rather than what you
saw in front of you; “and that, after all,” he added, “we Præteritists
maintain as strongly as anybody.” The idea of painting what might
have been was a quite different inspiration from the idea of painting
what probably would be. (The names, he said, were all wrong; the
Futurists ought to have been called Futuribilists, and the
Futuribilists Potentialists, or something of that sort.) Besides,
Futuribilism started in Belgium, and came out of the Electricist
school, which we in England had barely heard of; had I ever seen an
Electric picture, such as Bavet’s Windmill? I said no. “Well,” he said,
“it represents simply a mass of electrons butting in and out. It was a
craze that caught on for a bit, but there was a sameness about it.
Then there were the Vitalists, but they never mattered much; and
then Mosheim and his crowd began the Potentialist movement. It
was still life, chiefly, game and so on; and the idea was to represent it
not as what it was, but as what it might have become ... well, they
weren’t very pleasant pictures, and our modern taste has decided,
perhaps rightly, against them. It hardly started in England till
Murchison’s Decay of a Leaf was exhibited: and even then it didn’t
catch on until they began to treat human subjects, like Moffatt with
his Influenza Patient, and Rosenstein with his Triumph of the Red
Corpuscles.”
Here he had to get up and readjust the convex lenses, so our
conversation was interrupted. When he was back at the easel I asked
him why he said Futurism had no future. He said because it lived by
innovation; it did not develop gradually, like the mind or the tastes of
a man as he grows up, but found its successive inspirations in
continual revolt from the latest fashion: “it’s a series of kicks,” he
said, “like the old petrol tanks.” That meant that the public simply
didn’t care about pictures, because they—the laymen—hadn’t leisure
to follow all the latest movements in art criticism. In the old days you
took years to learn how to paint a picture, and only a fortnight to
learn how to criticize one; now it was the other way about. Only
artists looked at pictures, and they chiefly to see how they could
invent a new method, and turn the old ones on to the scrap-heap.
“They didn’t always succeed,” he explained. “You’d be too young to
remember the commotion there was in the early thirties, when
nobody would talk about anything but relativity, and Manning
Barker suddenly laid it down that there could be no such thing as
Truth, even in Art, without velocity. His school would only paint for
the screen, and you had to sit for a quarter of an hour to see the
portrait of a Cabinet minister. I remember Lady Marrett, who was a
beauty in those days, being released in nearly a quarter of a mile of
film, and you never saw more than a square inch of her at any given
moment. It was hard for the sculptors, you see: they wanted Billing
to do an avenue of statues up the old Hammersmith Broadway, but
the police wouldn’t allow it on account of the cars having to go forty
miles an hour to get the values properly. Some of the movements fail,
and some stick, but it can’t go on like this.”
“But what about you?” I asked. “Aren’t you one of the revolts?” I
am afraid my question was a tactless one, because he painted for a
time in complete silence, and then said, yes, he was only one of the
reactions; he was only a fashion: one day people would see no more
in him than they saw in Whistler or Pennell. (“Not that I should be
surprised if some of those fellows came into vogue again,” he put in.
“I was at a smart house the other day where my hostess, who is
rather a crank, was thinking of having her house decorated with
pictures, as they used to in our young days.”) But he painted in his
way because he believed in it. “Every line on your face,” he said, “and
every play of movement on your face, was predetermined for it by
your smiles and frowns and pouts and fidgetings when you were a
baby in arms. I must track Truth to its source, so I see you as a baby
still—you must excuse me saying that, but it’s my creed. It will last
my time; but you’re young, and you may live to see a reaction. These
neo-classical people are attracting a lot of attention: I’m an old fogey,
and I can’t see anything in these new ideas, but I daresay your
daughters will.” It was a bold prophecy for a man to make in the
early sixties; but he was quite right. What would he have said to our
neo-romantics!
Talking of Futurism, I noticed in the paper the other day that
Dame Beatrice Goodge was criticizing the old Futurists on the
ground that they never produced any architecture: she would not be
old enough to remember it, but I have actually seen a row of Cubist
houses! It was when I was house-hunting, with Juliet Savage, in ’41,
and we were trying our luck at the “Garden City” at Welwyn. The
architect’s idea was a very simple one, which was to build a series of
octagonal passages, just like a honeycomb: after all, bees built like
that, and bees ought to know. Juliet said if I were shaped like a bee
and spent all my time in the City making honey, one of these would
just suit me. Only a very few tenants were ever secured, and these did
not last long: profane neighbours, I believe, used to call them the
Hivites. What a mad world it is, and how few men and women you
will find who have not a blind spot somewhere.
“Men and women”—we still write the words in that order, though
the Feminists, at the period of which I am typing, did their best to get
it inverted. I cannot say that I sympathized at all with this agitation; I
have always been old-fashioned, and felt that the proper sphere of
woman is the flat. But I used to see a good deal in those days of
Esther Margate, who was one of our most fanatical Feminists; and I
think she ought to have her mention in this chapter, because there
was a sort of mad consistency about her, which I believe to be a
necessary element in all greatness of the reforming kind. She would
always say, for example, “I do not suppose there is a woman, man or
child in this country ... etc.,” because she maintained that woman
was intellectually and morally man’s superior, and ought therefore to
have the place of honour. I can still remember her asking Lord
Billericay at dinner whether he didn’t think the women and men of
London were better dressed now than they used to be: he said he was
a bad judge, because he only came up to London once a year, for the
Harrow and Eton match (he meant the cricket match, of course), and
as a rule only stayed there till the Cambridge and Oxford match.
Nobody ever quite knew whether Esther Margate realized what he
was getting at. She used to dilate, too, on the unfairness of talking
about “Man,” when you meant the human race in general: Archie
Lock asked her if we ought to say “The proper study of mankind is
Woman”; she answered quite sharply, no, “womankind,” of course. I
believe some of her disciples went so far as to change their names;
and you certainly do meet people called Goodwoman and
Newwoman now, which you never used to. But her attempt to
confine the suffrage to women was foredoomed to failure, even if
Juliet Savage had not organized her campaign against it. It was
conclusively shown that at least 27 per cent. of the men who had
votes regularly exercised their right.
This seems to be a very rambling sort of chapter, but who has a
right to ramble if it be not an old lady who has seen more than
seventy summers? I must not finish this chapter without giving a
place in it to George Hammond the historian. I never knew, I think, a
more delightful conversationalist. He was often at Greylands, and I
was always trying to draw him out, having that worst habit of
hostesses, the habit of making a man talk on his own subject. Once,
for example, I asked him what he thought was the really salient
characteristic of the early twentieth century (his special period)
which distinguished the people of that time from ourselves. “I have
often wondered,” he said, “but I think you get nearest to the truth by
saying that they had no sense of humour—that is, they had not got
what we mean by the sense of humour. I’ve been at the British
Museum a good deal lately (that it, at the Cippenham annexe),
looking through the old newspapers of that period, the cheap
newspapers especially, and I think it’s quite impossible to suppose
that the people who liked to have that kind of thing served up with
their breakfasts had any sense of humour at all. If you took one of
our grandfathers and put him down opposite a series of drawings
like, say, McGillivray’s, I don’t think he’d see anything in them. Or
take that joke in Punch last week—did you see last week’s Punch?
Well, there are two men travelling by railway, and one looks out of
the window and says, ‘Cholsey and Moulsford, change for
Wallingford.’ And the other man says, ‘I should jolly well think you
did.’ Clever, isn’t it? But, you know, I don’t believe they’d have seen
anything funny in it in the twenties.”
There, I had forgotten the humorists! Lancelot Briggs-Wilde, what
a creator of merriment! And then there was the old Bishop of
Birkenhead, who had the reputation of being quite unrivalled as a
raconteur. It was he, I remember, who described to us how once at a
missionary festival he had a very shy curate staying with him; and at
breakfast, it seems, the eggs were not all that they should have been.
The curate had one that was really very far gone, and the Bishop, by
way of apology, said, “I’m afraid, Mr. So-and-so, your egg’s not very
good.” “Oh, not at all,” was the mild reply, “it’s excellent in parts.”
We all told the Bishop that he ought to send that up to Punch, but I
don’t know if he ever did.
We did not, I am afraid, see a great deal of the Anglican
episcopate, but of course Cardinal Smith was our near neighbour at
Hare Street. He was a great walker: and when he came over to
luncheon he would nearly always come on foot, although the distance
was nearly three miles, and he had an excellent helico. “I don’t like
going the pace in this part of Hertfordshire, Lady Porstock,” he once
told me. “You see, I was brought up in these parts—twelve years of
my life—and somehow I’ve got the leisurely spirit of them into my
bones. When I die, I want them to bury me under the station
platform at St. Margaret’s, so that I can wait for the Day of Judgment
there; it’s easier waiting when you’re accustomed to it.”
 CHAPTER XIV
AN OLD WAY OF MAKING A NEW
DEPARTURE

Nor blame the Rock, whose slippery edge was splashed

Only by waves your frantic struggling washed.
E. P. Mason.

M y political career did not survive my husband’s death. The

Holroyd ministry, it will be remembered, went out in ’63, and
the sense of loneliness and depression I then felt did not allow me to
stand again. Since, however, a certain misunderstanding has arisen
about this, and it is necessary for me to clear, not only my own
character, but the august memory of James Holroyd, I may be
pardoned for printing here the letter which I received from him on
its being made known that I did not intend to seek re-election:
Aix-les-Bains, Oct. 12.

Dear Lady Porstock,—

I cannot tell you how sorry I am to hear that we are to lose your help at the
forthcoming election. It is just the moment when splendid talents such as yours
would be most useful to us. But I must not, of course, ask you to reconsider your
decision. My own regret is shared, I need hardly tell you, in the fullest sense by
my colleagues. I had a wireless only yesterday from Lord Brede to say, “Please
express deep regret Lady Porstock very natural decision she has taken none more
sorry than self to see ranks of old comrades in arms depleted tout lasse tout casse
tout passe ac.ac.ac. Brede.” You will be glad to hear that Sir Hugh ffynes has
consented to fill the Manchester N.W. (3) coupon, so that Liberalism in that
constituency will not be without its worthy representative.
 Yours sincerely,
James Holroyd

About this time Francis and Gervase, who had both done very well
at Eton, got leaving scholarships into the Guards. It was not so much
the financial side of this that appealed to me (the scholarships had
the effect of reducing the premium to £500) as the consciousness
that my boys were well thought of by their masters and were worthy
grandsons of Herbert Blisworth. And now what was left for me but to
retire into the background? And what is left for me, you will ask, but
to retire into the background, and bring these inconsequent memoirs
to a conclusion? Well, I confess that I have finished with public
affairs; and if any of my readers goes beyond this point, he must do it
on the clear understanding that he has let himself be betrayed into
taking an interest in the private affairs of a talkative old woman who
was not, after all, much of a personage even in her day. Her private
affairs, nay, her very private affairs, for what is so personal to each of
us as his or her attitude towards religion? And that is all I have left to
speak of. It is what we older folk begin to worry about when the
interests of youth desert us and the friends of youth are taken from
our side, and we find ourselves no longer battling with the winds of
circumstance, but volplaning steadily towards the drome that waits
for all of us at the last.
I know I have figured in these pages as a careless sort of butterfly,
untroubled by any thought of my last end. Perhaps my readers will
be disappointed in me at finding such a reversal of my old ways of
thought. But, be that as it may, old age and bereavement and the lack
of absorbing occupations combined to drive me in upon myself, and
make me think about my last landing. It was natural that in this
position I should turn for guidance to one who from quite an early
age had manifested an interest in my spiritual affairs, who, indeed,
had laughingly described himself as my “father professor,” Canon
Dives. Canon Dives I have written, for so I shall always remember
him, but indeed by this time he had attained that preferment for
which his exceptional qualities had long marked him out, as
Episcopal Bishop of Norwich.[15] So long as the Established Church
remained a single body (only weakened by the secession of the
Feminists in ’46, and the Enthusiasts in ’53), the Westernizing party
had still sufficient weight to hinder the advancement of one who had
always been so outspoken a champion of “relativist” views. But, as
those of my readers who are interested in such subjects will
remember, in 1964, only five years after Disestablishment became an
accomplished fact, the ecclesiastical map was yet further complicated
by a schism within the old Church of England. The Westernizers
succeeded in securing for themselves that recognition by the
Orthodox Churches of the East which remained theirs till, on the
outbreak of the Great War, they were solemnly anathematized and
cut off from Communion. But they secured this advantage at the
price of separating themselves from the whole relativist party, which
contained within itself so much that was most striking in the intellect
of contemporary Christianity. At West Mill, our parish church had
remained Anglican (it was only in the towns that the old churches
were divided up among the various denominations), and at the
schism Mr. Rowlands, after much hesitation, pronounced in favour
of the relativists—it would have cost him a divorce to do otherwise—
so that, at least for his lifetime, the position of the parish was
defined. I was not very much influenced by this fact; but old
friendship and the outstanding personality of the new Bishop of
Norwich made me, as I say, turn to him.
I wrote, then, to Bishop Dives asking him for an exposition of the
Christian religion suited to the beginner—to one who had been
accustomed to regard the supernatural as not real, or, if real, not
vital. He was kind enough to send me by return a record taken from
one of his own recent sermons, preached at Holy Trinity Church,
Brompton. It was part of a course, but he said it was exactly the thing
for one in my state of mind. I mean to print the relevant part of it
here.
“Everything is relative to a thinker. That is clear from the mere
force of words; for what is a thing but a thought? When I think a
thing I at the same time thing it: I give it thingness by thinking it.
Now, that all thought is relative to a thinker has long been clear so
far as the process of thought, what we call nowadays the thinkage, is
concerned. It is the boast of modern philosophy, trained, and proud
to have been trained, in the school of relativist Science, that it has
gone further than this. It assures us (I trust I make my meaning
clear) that it is not only our thinkage but our thoughtage that is
relative to a thinker. If I think that two and two are four—allowing,
for the sake of argument, that this is so, though I know well that
there are serious difficulties about believing it to be so—if I think that
two and two are four, then the fourness, if I may so express myself, of
the two and the two combined is part of my thoughtage, and relative
to me as a thinker.
“But not, let us hasten to add, of my thoughtage only. It is part of
the race-thoughtage, the thoughtage which rises like an upgushing
stream from the harmonious and simultaneous thinkage of the
human species. I think we may go further, and say that it upgushes
equally from the thinkage of all other spiritual beings, if there are
any other spiritual beings in existence, and in so far as they exist.
Now, when a thing is merely the thoughtage of my thinkage, what
does that prove? Why, nothing or next to nothing; merely that it is
thinkable. But when it is the thoughtage not only of my thinkage but
of the world-thinkage, then we go further; then we are not content to
say, This is thinkable; we must needs add, This is thinkworthy. More
than that we do not know, and we shall never know. The old
confidence that objects exist, outside of and apart from our thinkage,
is gone. The old confidence that things are true, outside of and apart
from our thinkage, is gone. That confidence, valuable as it has been
in the training of our race, and powerfully as it has contributed to the
development of our history, is no longer ours. It made the fatal
mistake of distinguishing and abstracting our thoughtage from our
thinkage. To repeat that mistake to-day would be to argue as if
Mosenheim and Poschling had never existed—I mean, in so far as
they ever did exist.
“Well, when first we realize that there is no such thing, properly
speaking, as existence, and no such thing, as truth, we feel, for a
time, unmanned. We are like aviators plane-wrecked on some little
island far from all help, with nothing around us but sea and air. And
we naturally ask ourselves, do we not, what have we saved from the
wreck? If we are no longer allowed to say, ‘This exists,’ or ‘This is
true’—or, at any rate, not allowed to say it without a great deal of
qualification, a very great deal of qualification—what can we say? Oh,
it is all right, my dear sisters and brothers, we have just one little
plank saved to us from the wreck. And what is that plank? Why, we
can still say, ‘This is thinkworthy.’ Oh, beautiful word,
thinkworthiness! And beautiful thing, thoughtworthiness, I mean
think—thoughtthinkiness, no, I don’t mean that (here the record is
somewhat blurred, and it would appear as if Bishop Dives must have
blown his nose). Oh, beautiful thing, thinkworthiness! If indeed
thinkworthiness can be called a thing, and in so far as it is right to do
so.
“It is thinkworthy, my dear sisters and brothers, that two and two
make, or rather, in a phrase of less apparent grammar but more
spiritual meaning, makes, four. It is thinkworthy that any two sides
of a triangle are greater than the third. It is thinkworthy that thinks
which are equal to the same think—I mean, things which are equal to
the same thing, are equal to one another.
“Now, it is plain that all this is going to have a great influence, a
very great influence indeed, upon the religious conceptions of our
day. We used to say, for example, ‘The soul exists after death.’ We
can no longer say that; we have to reduce our thought, that is our
thinkage, to simpler elements. We have to say, ‘It is thinkworthy that
if that thing which we call the soul is thinkworthy at all, then that
thinkworthiness is still thinkworthy after death.’ Try it over a few
times, and you will find it quite easy. And do not suppose that
because such a formula as that has a less absolute and a less defiant
ring about it than our old formula, ‘The soul exists after death,’
therefore we have lost something, and are poorer than our
forefathers. No, oh no, quite the contrary. For we know now, what
they did not know, that thingness and thinkworthiness are one. It
cannot be too often repeated; in thinking a thing we thing it: our
thinkage—wonderful thought! I mean, wonderful thoughtage!—
thinks thingness into the thing! It cannot be too often repeated, the
man who thinks things things things!
“And another great advantage arises, once we have mastered this
salutary doctrine. The old religious formulas were always trying to
make our thoughts correspond with realities conceived as real, truths
conceived as true, outside of and apart from ourselves. They were
always saying, I believe in this, I believe in that—oh dear, oh dear, oh
dear! A generation or so back, there was a slang phrase which was
used to express incredulity; when you meant, ‘That is not true,’ you
said, ‘I don’t think!’ My dear sisters and brothers, there was a vast
deal of profound philosophy in that simple piece of slang!
Mosenheim himself would not have had them express themselves
otherwise. If there is no such thing as truth, and you may take it from
me that there is not, except in a very special sense which it would
take too long to explain to you now—if there is no such thing as truth,
then we are not going to burn one another for denying that this or
that is true. We are going to abandon Truth, and go forward boldly,
none knows whither.
“What, then, is religion? The best definition that has been given of
it is, I suppose, Poschling’s: ‘Religion is that realization of the Ego
under the stimulus, real or apparent, of the Non-ego, which finds its
hyper-egoization in de-egoization and its de-egoization in hyper-
egoization.’ Let it stand at that. We will now return to the short-
sighted policy of Baasha”—the rest of Bishop Dives’ sermon did not
bear upon my immediate difficulties.
I confess I was somewhat troubled by the tone of Bishop Dives’
utterance. It seemed to me to show all his old grasp of philosophical
subtleties, but less than his old confidence in the claims of the
supernatural. Could it be, I asked myself, that my oracle had himself
changed with the change of the years, and gave forth now a different
note? I was so troubled by this thought that I wrote again, asking him
quite frankly to tell me if he thought his views were the same as when
I knew him at Oxford, or different; and, if different, whether they
had now reached a standstill, or whether they were still developing,
and if so in what direction? His answer was a candid avowal:
Dear Lady Porstock—

You have, with your usual directness and acumen, touched upon a point over
which I have often questioned myself. Looking back over the years, it seems clear
to me that my religious opinions have modified with time, and that, like the Greek
poet long ago, “I grow old learning many things.” But, let it be observed, in these
successive modifications of my point of view I am only following the example of
what you and I recognize as being the Holy Catholic Church, which has learnt
much, and, I think we may say, learned to forget much, since those early days
when it seemed to dominate the world in the positiveness and self-assuredness of
its youth.
Now, picture to yourself some acrobat who finds it necessary, in the exercise of
his profession, to walk every day, before an audience of neck-craning yokels,
from one point to another over a tight-rope. He finds it easier to accomplish this
(owing to a simple but interesting law of physics) if he carries with him a heavy
pole that assures his balance. By degrees he finds that his skill is becoming
greater; habit has made his task light to him. What does he do? He has six inches
chopped off either end of his pole, so that his performance becomes at once more
hazardous and more remarkable. Six months later, he finds that he can afford to
shorten it once more. And so on, my dear Lady Porstock, and so on, until the pole
in his hand is but a short stump, hardly more significant than the staff with which
Babylonian fancy pictured Jacob as having crossed over Jordan.
Is not that, if we will look into the facts closely, the position of the Church? It
sets before itself one paramount object, the achievement of the Christian ideal;
you and I will not quarrel, I think, as to what we mean by that. It is a difficult
and a delicate task that it has set before itself; and it may well face the prospect
with not much less misgiving than the acrobat who sees stretching before him the
gossamer causeway of the tight-rope. And it starts out with a burden of dogmas
and beliefs which encumbers it, and yet in encumbering it steadies its progress.
And then, just as the acrobat, growing more steady on his narrow bridge of rope,
finds himself capable of walking with less and less of pole to balance him, so the
Church finds that with less and less of dogma, less and less of belief, it can walk
along the narrow path prescribed for it to tread. Until the Reformation, it was
able to steady itself by means of three things, tradition, the Bible, and human
reason; the Reformation was the moment at which it decided that it could steady
itself without tradition. In the nineteenth century, faced with the important
claims of the evolutionary doctrine, it found that it could make a further advance
still, and it cast aside the Bible as it had cast aside tradition, content to steady
itself by human reason alone. It has been left to us in this century to learn that the
human reason itself is an untrustworthy thing, on which it is fatal to repose any
reliance; we are now learning, consequently, to dispense with the human reason
equally.
What, then, is the end of this process, or has it an end at all? For myself, I am
content to believe that it has not. From century to century, it seems to me, we
learn to get on with less and less of belief in supernatural things to encourage or
to justify us, and I see no limit to that development. I go further, and say that I do
not wish to see any limit to that development. The less we believe, clearly, the
more creditable it is in us to call ourselves Christians still. Our object, therefore,
at all times must be to reduce belief to its irreducible minimum; we must believe
as little as we can, and be constantly on the lookout for some method by which we
may be enabled to believe even less. It is not easy, this search of ours; like hill-
climbers, we are bounded by our own horizon, and cannot yet see the full
possibilities of disbelief that lie ahead of us. And just as, surely, we do not blame
Luther because, with his limited perspective, he failed to disbelieve in the Bible;
just as we do not blame Kant because he could not see how to disbelieve in the
human reason; so, let us hope, our descendants will not be too hard on us because
here and there we were guilty, through mere shortsightedness, of setting limits to
our incredulity.
 And thus we come down to the very interesting question, Is there a vanishing-
point? Will there come a time when we are able to call ourselves Christians
without believing anything at all? For myself, I confess that I do not think so. It
seems to me that it is an integral part of our Christian probation, this perpetual
struggle to disbelieve; that, consequently, the residuum of belief must be
conceived, not as a difference which will sooner or later disappear as the result of
successive subtractions, but as a quotient with an infinite divisibility. To the last
end of time, it seems to me, we shall be able to continue offering up the old
prayer, that we may be helped in our unbelief.
There, dear Lady Porstock, you have my view of the case. I only hope that these
stumbling words of mine may help you to know your own mind.
Yours quite sincerely,
Amphibolus Norvic

I had just finished reading this remarkable letter, and was engaged
in considering whether it was exactly what I wanted or exactly what I
did not want, when the teletypewriter that connected with the front
door rang at my elbow, and told me that Cardinal Smith had called.
It was not much past five, but I knew his old-fashioned habits, so I
whistled for tea and went down to show him up. When I saw him I
had a curious experience. There is a certain smile one only sees (I
think) on the faces of Catholic ecclesiastics, a smile which their
friends call sanctified and their enemies cunning. To me it had
always seemed to say, “I can afford to wait,” and it had always
irritated me rather, as if its cocksureness indicated that sooner or
later he was bound to make a proselyte of me. To-day it still seemed
to say, “I can afford to wait,” only I found myself attaching a different
significance to it. Well, he came up, and we had a long talk. I do not
propose to describe it; after all, this is not a religious autobiography.
But soon afterwards, when I was at my Chiswick house, I began to go
to the Oratory for instruction.
This is all twenty years ago now, but I do not feel that I need give
any description of the Oratory and its ways, for whoever goes there
now will find it almost exactly the same as it was then—and has been,
I suppose, from a very much earlier time. I could not, of course,
penetrate beyond the enclosure: no one of my sex, I was told, had
ever done so except once when “Buffalo Bill’s” Indians came to tea—
there were still Red Indians in existence down to my own day, and
some of these used to be shown off as a circus turn in England, most
of them Catholics. At the last moment it was discovered that the good
Fathers could not distinguish braves from squaws, and some of the
latter had already been admitted into the garden by mistake! “But
that was before my time,” said the old priest who had instructed me.
The long brown house, with its old-fashioned carriage-sweep,
watching unwinking the ceaseless grinding flow of the Brompton
Road platform; the stone façade of the church, thrust out like a rock
for the daily tide to eddy round, half trapped, half free; the Fathers
themselves, still, for all their man-of-the-modern-worldliness,
dressed in the very manner of St. Philip, and taking their supper at a
quarter to seven after the manner of Father Faber; the interior of the
church, housing indeed Saints whom Father Faber had never heard
of, yet still the same in its outlines—the same red hangings, the same
cope on the Lady statue, spoils of some old South American emperor,
the same Corpo Santo, grimed now with London dust till it might
have passed for St. Philip himself—all spoke to me of a
changelessness which was not dullness, a peacefulness which was not
stagnation. Oh yes, I know there are plenty of Congregations which
have their roots deeper in the history of the Church, their place in the
story of England yet longer and yet more honourable: but it is the
Oratory, with the life of the sixteenth century thrown on to the screen
of the nineteenth century, and there fixed as if for all time, that stood
and stands to me for type of the eternal tradition.
Am I confusing the merely interminable with the eternal? No, it
was at High Mass at the Oratory that I realized what eternity meant.
The frivolous might find them simply interminable, those long
Mozart masses that the Protestants go to hear. But if you are in the
right spirit to catch the message of the place, then you find eternity.
The three ministers, dwarfed by the height of the building, seem like
ants crawling about in the presence of Something immeasurably
greater than themselves: the Kyrie and the Miserere nobis of the
Gloria sound like what they are, tributes of abject servility to a King
whose audience no unclean thing may approach; the spaciousness of
the whole setting, music, and building, and ceremonies, stands for a
poor sacrament of that Infinitude towards which all this self-
annihilating homage is directed: you see the work of man’s hands as
the little doll’s house it is. In one breathless moment of the Credo the
heart seems to stop still, and all becomes an eternal moment, that
silence which is kept before the throne of God.
 I do not know why I should have said all this, or centred it all
about the Oratory, if it be not that Miss Linthorpe’s warning was
right, and there comes a time when you grow old, and drop out of
your generation, and the mind, satiated with the ceaseless pageant of
the interminable, craves for some outward expression of the eternal.
Anyhow, my conversion was neither a hysterical nor a sensational
one. I kept very quiet about it beforehand—why, I do not know,
unless it be from some vague, inherited instinct. It is true that at the
time of which I type it is doubtful whether one-fifth of the population
of England was Catholic, and that the act of being received into the
Church was not quite the everyday thing it is to us. But already
things were very different from my young days, when the Catholic
Church was still regarded as something desperate and melodramatic,
a conspiracy against the public peace. I remember, for example,
when I was about ten years old how the news reached us that a
family friend had made his submission, and Lady Trecastle, who was
staying with us, talked about it in a hushed, shocked voice as if it
were a thing one could hardly mention in front of children, although
Lady Trecastle herself had no religious beliefs and never went near a
church if she could help it. The day of all that was long over, yet
somehow I felt shy and awkward about my religious intentions, and
mentioned them to nobody—concealed them, I am afraid, rather
deliberately, from Juliet Savage, whose keen criticism I confess that I
dreaded.
Actually it was in coming away from the ceremony of my reception
that I met her in the street. “Come and have luncheon somewhere,”
she said, “I’ve got something to tell you.” When we were comfortably
ensconced at Les Rossignols, she turned to me and said, “Opal, my
dear, I’ve just become a Catholic.” I said in a stupefied way, “So have
I.” Then we giggled idiotically for a little; and cross-questioning
proved that she also had written to Bishop Dives, and had been sent
identically the same sermon-record! She then ordered a rather good
Volnay, and when it appeared, leaning over coquettishly in its basket,
she said, “Let us hope that this is drinkable, if not actually
drinkworthy. Personally, I’ve got a droughtage on me which will
demand a good deal of drinkage.”
 CHAPTER XV
ENGLAND ON THE EVE OF THE GREAT
WAR

Our fathers, a degenerate race,

Begot us scoundrels, to give place
To something meaner yet unborn.
Horace, tr. Stapleton.

I suppose it is inevitable that those of us who have lived through a

great world-crisis, such as the late war, should ask themselves or
should be asked by others what it was like just before the crisis
happened? How postured did the time of reckoning find us? Were we
playing on, all unconscious, at the brink of a volcano? Or were we
prepared—materially, morally, spiritually prepared—for what was to
come upon us? The question is obviously not an easy one to answer.
It is not easy to wipe out, even in imagination, the impressions left by
nearly three years of war atmosphere and war strain. But, if only
because there are not many of us left whose birth dates right back to
the Five Years’ War, the last occasion when Europe became an armed
camp, I feel that I ought to try and give my answer to that question,
before I close these memoirs and bow myself out, to make way for
younger authors with other messages.
I do not intend, however, to say anything much about our merely
material preparation for the war. It is, after all, a question for
experts: and the event proved that all the combatant countries were
far better prepared for hostilities than the general public had ever
supposed they would be. It is a commonplace that in any war either
the offensive or the defensive arm is the better equipped, in advance
of its rival. In this case, there can be no doubt at all that our
defensive had outrun our offensive preparations. This was not
generally known; indeed in our own country and in many others the
comparatively small results achieved by our striking force became
the subject of severe and quite undeserved criticism. The truth is,
that Science does not lightly forget her humanitarian purpose; and
(it is important to remember) the amazing efficiency of the Secret
Service work done in the interests of the various belligerents in the
long period between 1919 and 1972 had made it easy for the
authorities in each country to know what was in store for them and
to prepare against it. For the heroic and self-sacrificing work done by
that noble body of men, the Secret Service Agents (mostly of
Japanese origin, I believe), Europe and humanity itself can never be
too grateful.
What was the effect of it? Why, that Mars, as in the old Greek
legend, found himself in fetters. We, like the enemy, had put our
faith in the invincible quality of our heavy artillery, not realizing that
they, like us, had prepared a system of mine defences for their troops
which made heavy artillery a back number. We told ourselves that
our aerial fleet, superior both in numbers and in efficiency to any
Continental fleet, was bound to make life insupportable in the larger
enemy towns: the calculations of our enemy were exactly similar.
Neither of us could foresee that long deadlock which resulted from
the “stranglehold” we exercised over the enemy’s dispositions;
neither of us could foresee that both sides would come out of the war
with their air fleet practically untouched. Again, the typhus-germs
from which we expected so much proved utterly ineffective against
nations which had inoculated their children against typhus from
infancy: and similarly, their dastardly plan (contrary to all the rules
of civilized warfare) of infecting London with bubonic plague came
too late when Milling’s discovery had made the bubonic plague a
matter of three days in bed. In fact, if it had not been for the hitherto
unrealized strength of British propaganda, it is difficult to see how
the war could have resulted in anything but a complete stalemate.
But the question, Were we prepared for the war? involves deeper
and more spiritual issues than this. What manner of men were we
when that sudden strain was put upon our moral fibre? That is what
posterity will want to know. And first of all, let me say that it is of
England, not of the other belligerents, that I intend to speak. After
all, on the admission of her enemies and even of her allies, it was she
who bore the brunt of the conflict. Going into it with less, I suppose,
of religious inspiration than France, with a Government less
efficient, because less autocratic, than that of the United States, and
with material resources not capable of competing with those of
Brazil, she has achieved such a measure of victory as is indicated by
the fact that her war indemnity, if it is ever paid, will amount to little
less than a tenth of her war debt. It is not, then, simply because
England is my own country, and because, a stay-at-home by nature, I
have little inside information about other peoples, but because it was
upon Great Britain that, in those fateful three years, the eyes of the
world were centred, that I confine myself in this chapter to a survey
of English conditions and English ideals.
“Show me,” that great philanthropist Peterson used to say, “how
the poor of a nation live, and I will tell you whether that nation is
alive.” In this respect, it must be confessed, the record of England at
that time was indeed a black one. Huddled together in slums and
rookeries, whose “model” flats often had to contain two families
where only one could live with comfort, the poor were stifled from
the first by overcrowding. It must be remembered that the poorer
classes had, as usual, larger families than the rich, and it was no
uncommon thing to find four or five children living in the same
tenement with their parents. Many of these poor little mites got no
more than a fortnight’s holiday at the seaside every year, and had
nowhere to play in except the public parks. In return for their school
attendance they were paid a mere pittance, and only the simplest
possible fare was provided for them by the school authorities. It was
piteous, as one moved about the poorer parts of London, to see their
untidy hair, their crumpled collars and dirty handkerchiefs. Small
wonder that disease spread quickly in such surroundings, and it was
estimated that child-mortality in the poorer quarters of the large
towns was fully one in a thousand. For a time, of course, the
influence of the school kept them out of harm’s way, but at seventeen
or eighteen, just at the most impressionable period of life, their
schooling must perforce come to an end, and, hardly more than boys,
they were thrust out into the world to shift for themselves. Often, of
course, drink or gambling would be responsible for the worst cases of
poverty; but often, too, it would be mere ill-luck or imprudent under-
insurance that left them stranded when they were out of work. Too
proud to accept relief from any of the thirty-eight organizations that
offered it, these unfortunates would drag out a wretched existence on
such doles as their Union and the National Beneficent Fund could
afford them. It is true, and fortunately true, that we have now done
much to remedy this terrible state of things; but in 1972 it was no
exaggeration to say that the conditions of life in our great cities stood
up in witness against us.
As usual, overcrowding in the towns went hand in hand with, and
was partly caused by, rural depopulation. In all the country districts
it was the same story—you could not get the young people to remain
on the land. It was difficult to blame them; wages were so low that an
unskilled agricultural labourer was hardly paid on the same scale as a
governess; the cottages for the most part were mere eight-roomed
hovels, and the deafening noise and incessant whirr of the machinery
made the farmyard a good imitation of the Inferno. Machinery was
continually replacing human labour, almost faster than the
diminution in the birth-rate could keep pace with the process.
Besides, there were few amusements which could make the country
towns and villages compare in amenity with the large manufacturing
centres: the cinemas often had no afternoon performances, and such
dances as there were seldom lasted later than midnight. It was no
wonder that the lure of the great cities continued to exercise its spell
over the young and the ambitious.
The effect of these bad conditions on the health of the nation was
plainly shown during the war itself, when the various “classes” came
up for medical examination. Of the total manhood of Great Britain,
one-tenth were liable to vertigo, such as prevented them either from
going up in aircraft or else from going down into the pits. Something
like 13 per cent. suffered from Pollock’s inhibition, either in the form
of actonism (reluctance to kill) or of athanism (reluctance to die).
Eight per cent. were declared unfit through psophophobia, which
made them unable to stand loud noises. Another six per cent. had
taxiphobia, and could not serve in the ranks. Ochlophobia,
capnophobia, pyrophobia, zophophobia, atenxipodia, and other
more ordinary nervous diseases, such as Blast’s inhibition, swelled
the total of non-combatants. In all it is doubtful whether 40 per cent.
of the men who were of military age could have been called upon to
fight. Happily, most of the unfit were available for the much needed
work of propaganda, since only a small percentage were troubled
with pseudophobia, which alone was treated as ground for
exemption from this class of work.
But, it hardly needs to be said, these same causes produced moral
results as well as physical. Just before the outbreak of hostilities, we
were all very much concerned about the attitude of organized
Labour, which had never indeed been in power since Ropes’s ill-fated
Government, but had always been a strong political, and a still
stronger economic influence, in the counsels of the country. There
had not for some time been any actual strike on a large scale, the
“secret service” both of employers and of labourers being sufficiently
well informed to prevent any miscalculation: threats of strikes and of
lock-outs were common, but it seldom proved necessary to call your
adversary’s bluff. Still, the Unions were an important power. Ever
since the thirties it had been illegal for any manual worker not to
belong to the union of his trade; and this fact had strengthened the
numerical force of the unions without in any way moderating their
counsels since the time when (I think in the fifties) shop stewards
began to be appointed by examination instead of election. The hot-
heads were always in the controlling positions: what would the effect
of this be in the event of the country going to war? The International
Labour Convention held at Innsbruck in ’67 had passed a series of
unanimous resolutions designed to render all future war impossible
by means of concerted sabotage. Fortunately, the alleged violation of
Article 259 by the British workers, and the suspected violation of
Article 283 by the U.S. workers, had the effect of rendering the whole
compact nugatory. But the temper of Labour in all countries was,
throughout the war, distrustful and frequently menacing.
At the other end of the scale, there can be no doubt that the paying
classes, by the luxury and frivolity of their lives, showed equally little
preparedness for a great emergency. Mere wealth seemed to be the
only passport to Society, and blood counted for nothing: the old
hereditary aristocracy who could trace their honours back to the
beginning of the century were swamped by a crowd of new creations.
No doubt in many ways we were more civilized than our fathers; the
coarse old type that would fill a quarter of a glass with whisky, or
motor at breakneck speed along country lanes, had disappeared; it
was hard to imagine the rude days (which I can just remember) when
the ladies left the dinner-table half an hour or so before the men,
“leaving the gentlemen,” as it was called, “to their wine.” But if we
had lost some of the coarseness, we had also lost much of the
salutary sternness and moral earnestness of my young days. In the
twenties and thirties the Divorce Court, although it was already fairly
busy, did still carry with it, even for non-Catholics, a certain savour
of impropriety. The novels and the plays of the period, although
many of them offend our modern taste by the coarseness of their
expression, must, by comparison with our own, be freed from the
charge of suggestiveness. We gambled in those days, but you still had
to go abroad to do it on a large scale; there was no wireless
installation to report the winning numbers on the tape machines of
our West-End Clubs.
Family life, too, meant far more to us in the early part of the
century than it did in the sixties and seventies. Even in London,
husband and wife would share the same flat and entertain each
other’s friends. When they paid visits of pleasure, to hunt, or to fish
or to shoot deer (they were not content to photograph them as we
do!), they often travelled together; and there would have been
something ludicrous in the idea of a husband and wife meeting one
another unexpectedly at a country-house party or at a dinner.
Fathers would take an active interest in the education of their
children, and sometimes even be called in to reprove them for a fault.
Girls, until the age of seventeen or eighteen, usually lived with their
parents, and did not go about without somebody to take care of
them. Boys did not expect to be provided with latch-keys until they
were twenty-one! For myself, I never had one until I set up my own
establishment; nor did I feel aggrieved at the deprivation. I do not
mean that all these things are particularly important; and indeed, the
old tradition seems fussy and unnecessary to us nowadays; but this
strictness of guardianship did stand for symbol of a certain
orderliness and discipline of behaviour, which I miss sometimes, I
am afraid, among the young ladies and the young gentlemen of a
later generation! There was something to be said, after all, for the
rugged old Puritan school which wore dark suits on Sundays,
thought chewing unladylike, and held that night-clubs were “not the
thing” for young girls.
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