THE NEW PROVINCIALISM.
IrHE world has lost its wishing-cap. It is no longer within the power of the richest man in the richest city of the Empire to have what he would like for dinner, to command as much labour as he can pay for, to go to what corner of the earth he desires, to associate exclusively with whom he chooses, to buy what he wants, to work at what he prefers, or to play at what he pleases. We are in the bondage of a great purpose and we are all bound. Of course there never was a time when those who were not rich could have their will in all these matters. Nevertheless we all had our little wishing-caps, especially those of us who lived in or near the greater cities of the Empire. Within our means, every- thing was ours—and if we did not have very much, we had a sense that many things we went without were yet not outside our reach. Poverty insists on renunciation, but unless it reaches the point of misery it leaves its victims a wide field of choice. If a man is willing to forgo this, he can have that. He is free to economize or dispense within limits as he likes, and of this freedom while it is his he is always conscious. All this was never so true as it has been in the last fifty years before the war. Means of communication had become perfect. The machinery which enabled a man to satisfy his wants, his wishes, or his whims by putting pounds, shillings, or pence into a slot was far more complete than it has ever been since the world began ; indeed, he somehow forgot that it was machinery at all, and regarded the social organization as some sort of derivative of the law of Nature. He began to think that, like Nature, it was uniform, and to disbelieve in the miracle which could alter it. Now the machinery is broken—in vain he tries to make it work.
Every one who is not a child is startled. Who could have dreamed four years ago that to-day every person in the kingdom would be in practically the same position with regard to the staple foods, and that the seeming fact that everything pertaining to the "lust of the eyes and the pride of life" depended on money would prove to be a theory ?
Obviously no one knows how long this state of things may
continue, but its effect must last for at least a generation. Consider the children whom the war overtook in their earliest teens. They aro still too young to work for the war, and not too old to be moulded in character by its conditions. They will all know the meaning of sparing, and they will all be familiar with the thought of equality. It seems natural to them that every one should work, and that few, where the necessaries of life are concerned, should either waste or give. They will be steadied by a great national interest, but, so far as the lighter side of life is concerned (which, after all, can never be eliminated), they will perhaps be hampered by a certain provincialism. It is not easy, no doubt, to say what provincialism moans. It has no longer any exclusively local suggestion. It suggests limits rather than locality, and all limitations are narrow- ing whether they are imposed upon us by the circumstances of our peaceful village environment or by the world catastrophe of a great war. The children in their teens will not see the energies of women spent upon the maintenance of enjoyable social con- ditions. A great economy of time will make it impossible. This means less effort to please, less of the polish which comes of leisure. The basis of hospitality is, after all, food. A certain lavishness became the English. If we have only enough for ourselves, we may still with an effort entertain our friends, but such an effort will not be very generally made. Besides, it is not so easy to get at our friends, even if they have time to visit or receive us. We must perforce in great measure " keep ourselves to ourselves," and the eccentricities of the family will thus develop. The prevalence of sorrow and anxiety must intensify the new tendency, and corners will not be rubbed off. The servant question in the middle and upper middle classes is become acute. Friends are less welcome when they increase work, and they naturally hesitate to put their former hostesses to trouble. Already the professional man and woman feel a new sympathy for the poor—not a new pity, but a new understanding of the limitations imposed by lack of leisure, especially the lack of society. The middle-class world presents to the fifteen-year-old child an utterly different aspect from that which it presented to his or her mother. Some social intercourse is, however, a necessity, and we must, metaphorically speaking, seek it next door, whether our neighbour is one with whom we are in natural sympathy or not. The result is that we shall never feel quite at home. There will be the slight social discomfort which exists in a provincial society in which people come together because they must, not because they want to. They are a little critical, a little reserved, a little careful, not perfectly at their ease. In some ways it is a very good thing, but it does not make women of the world.
The subject of housekeeping is just now an absorbing one. There was a time not long ago when it may be said to have been a matter of good manners to put it aside in conversation, and it would be hardly too much to say that it was for many women a matter of principle to relegate it to a secondary place in their "thoughts. Reaction as well as rations have altered all this. At the very moment when so many young women are breaking altogether with home life and offering their whole strength to the nation, the mothers and wives whose age or whose circumstances forbid their serving Their country directly talk of little but household management. No farmer's wife of the early " sixties " ever thought more about providing for her family, about cooking receipts, house-cleaning, and dressmaking, than the London professional man's wife does now. Her obsession will not be without effect upon the minds of her children, who will almost certainly revert to an earlier and to what we have been accustomed to think a more provincial type. When every household difficulty could be solved by " ringing up," or a few years earlier by sending a postcard, it could be dismissed in a few moments. But if the boiler leaks now we must think how we can manage for a week or two without it, as the far-away farmer's wife did seventy years ago ; and if some- thing prevents the arrival of the meat or the butter, we must be immersed in the consideration of how to keep the wolf from the door. It may still be possible to consider less mundane subjects, and very serious thoughts must come in the train of war. The presence of death turns the most housewifely woman into a theo- logian or a spiritualist. But youth in the long-legged and short- memoried stage will not long endure contemplation or sorrow. There is in the atmosphere a sort of scorn of what is not practical, of books and philosophies, moods and melancholies. There is a tendency to regard as indoor self-indulgence all occupations or meditations undertaken under a roof other than hard work, or set pleasure like the play. Outdoor games are as much depre- cated, and " the land " will almost certainly deliver the next gener- ation of young women from athleticism. Atmospheres change as the wind changes, but the children growing to maturity in the war atmosphere will never throw off its effect. They have seen
duty very close, too close to see it whole perhaps, and only the heroes and saints on the one hand and the bad lots on the other will lose the very stern impression of a very partial vision. The new generation will be no soft one, for good or evil.
Whatever may be in store for the country in the way of social changes, and the most conservative are prepared to face some measure of revolutionary legislation, the changes will not find us where we were five years ago. The young men of the nation, rich and poor, have together been through an experience too great to come within the scope of this article. The women and children at home have also moved nearer to one another, and must, we think, henceforth regard life more nearly from the same point of view, a more matter-of-fact and primitive one, a more limited and realistic one, than—so far as educated women are concerned— they have ever done before. Is this regrettable ? We suppose not ; but it is idle to say that many of us will not regret it. It was wrong, no doubt, of the better-off folk to take the ease of life for granted, to forget the endless toil which made of the great towns one huge shop where everything had its price and nothing that could be desired could not be seen and where an artificial life seemed the only natural one. If we live another ten or twenty years, we shall many of us look back to it and tell young people about it as a time of great happiness. It produced a type which has been very suddenly broken. The stamp of the war broke it. No very young people belong to it even now, and in the growing children it cannot be traced. The world is a new and, to all but the youngest of us, a very strange place.
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