RE-ASSESSMENT
Liberal England
By ALAN WATKINS
The Strange Death of Liberal England, in fact, is something of a private possession; one of those books (Percy Cradock's Recollections of the Cambridge Union is another example) which owe their fame, such as it is, more to personal recommendation than to frequent mentions in the weeklies and Sundays; rather like a small, cheap, good restaurant one has heard about from one's friends. Certainly it was difficult to get hold of a copy. First published in this country in 1935, it sold badly and was soon out of print; in 1961, however, an American paperback edition appeared; this has since been made available here.
Dangerfield's theme is the violence and ten- sion of British political life in the years 1910-14. The glitter of the style clearly owes much to Lytton Strachey. Here, for instance, is Danger- held on F. E. Smith: 'He was tall, dark, slender and a little over-dressed. His eyes and hair were lustrous; the first from nature, the second from too much oil.' Or take, again, Dangerfield on Lord Willoughby de Broke : 'A genial and sport- ing young peer, whose face bore a pleasing resemblance to the horse. . . . He had quite a gift for writing, thought clearly and was not more than two hundred years behind his time.' The impression which brilliance of this kind creates is that Dangerfield, like G. M. Young, was a one- book writer consciously producing his solitary masterpiece. This-at any rate was the first impres- sion the book made on me. Indeed, I went fur- ther, creating a romanticised Dangerfield figure. He was, I decided, a country schoolmaster, or Perhaps an obscure civil servant, or even an under-employed Daily Mail feature writer who, having published his one great work, went un- recognised and disappointed to an early grave. On making inquiries, I discovered I was not so very far wrong, though happily Dangerfield is Still alive. He was born in ,1906, the son of the Rector of Finmere-with-Mixbury, Oxfordshire, and was educated privately and at Hertford College, Oxford. Subsequently he taught English at Prague and Hamburg. In 1930 he went to New York, becoming for a short time literary editor of Vanity Fair. He has lived in America almost continuously ever since.
Dangerfield explores his theme by concentrat- ing almost exclusively on live topics—the House of Lords crisis, the suffragette movement, the Irish question, the labour unrest and the poetry of Rupert Brooke. In fact, the scope of the book IS narrower, though none the worse for that, than even this list suggests: for the description of the
*Capricorn Books, New York/Constable, 14s.
Lords crisis is a prologue, and the brief discussion of. Brooke an epilogue, to_the main body ,of the work. The premise which informs the whole— for it is a premise rather than a conclusion—is that the Liberal government, representing as it did a dying civilisation, a liberal civilisation, was unable to comprehend or control the terrible twentieth century, and in the end did more harm than anything else. This is an attractive thesis. It is also by now a familiar one. Indeed, Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge has founded an entire journalistic career upon it. But it is. I believe, a mistaken thesis.
For the last Liberal government was not really a Liberal government at all. Its best ideas came either from the Germans or from the Fabians. One way of perceiving its non-Liberalism is to examine the beliefs of its two most dominat- ing members, Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. Now whatever else these two might be—and many attempts have been made to attach labels to them—they were certainly not Liberals at any stage in their careers. If Churchill is to be called anything, Tory Radical is probably the description that fits best. Then there is Lloyd George, a politician of the most limited and illiberal ideas, endlessly quoting the Bible and inveighing against landlords, brewers and the Church of England. Dangerfield's descrip- tions of this are particularly good. Here, for example, is Lloyd George trying, to recover popularity after the Marconi scandal:
He rallied as best he could. In a speech on July 3, he declared that he was a petrel which had ridden the storm; he also likened himself to a Samson, and to a Sebastian whose hands were tied behind his back while arrows were shot into him from all sides. Pursuing these sacred analogies a little further, he announced that his Health *Insurance Act was 'doing the work of the Man of Nazareth.' But even this sublime comparison, strange to say, did him no good.
Elsewhere Dangerfield points out, I think cor- rectly, that Lloyd George neither liked nor under- stood modern industrial society. When he orated about the iniquities of landlords, about the lord's pheasants consuming the tenant farmer's mangel- wurzels (as he did in one notably ludicrous speech), his audiences simply did not understand what he was talking about. To them, the land- lord was the rent collector, not the lord of the manor. But it is illegitimate to conclude, as Dangerfield seems to, that because Lloyd George's speeches were meaningless to poor town-dwellers they were also meaningless to Lloyd George. As Dr. Kenneth Morgan has recently pointed out, Lloyd George was a North Welsh agrarian radi- cal, different in outlook from the Liberals of London and of South Wales alike.
Yet the fundamentally non-Liberal character of the last Liberal government was due to deeper causes than the personalities of two of its leading members. The Liberal party as a substan- tial political force was destroyed not in 1929 or 1922 or 1914, but in 1885. It was killed by the split over Home Rule. After that, its policies became increasingly pettifogging and irrelevant. One can see some of these nasty, inean-minded little policies being put into effect in 1906-14- -the Education Bill and the Licensing Bill and the Bill to disestablish the Welsh Church. All of these were products of an intellectually bankrupt political party.
• Admittedly, even before 1885 it was difficult to say precisely in what the Liberal party be- lieved. Even at its apogee it was no more than a loose coalition of Whigs and manufacturers and nonconformists and grocers and free- thinkers. Of course, there was such a thing as Liberalism as a political credo. And it was pos- sible to point to certain individuals and meaningfully say: he is a Liberal. The paradigm was Morley. But did the Liberal party accept Liberalism? Was Gladstone really a Liberal? Could Liberalism be combined with acute re- ligious mania of the High Church variety? Perhaps not. And yet there was undoubtedly a difference between the pre-1885 Liberal govern- ments and the government of 1906. For whatever Gladstonian administrations did in practice, whatever interests sustained them in office, there was in existence a body of Liberal doctrine which in theory they accepted and to which they could and did appeal. Perhaps 'doctrine' is an over-emphatic word. There was a climate of opinion. In 1910 there was no such climate.
Earlier in this piece I compared Dangerfield to G. M. Young. In his Portrait of an Age, Young is essentially writing about the same sub- ject as Dangerfield. Though Young was a Con- servative, he had a profound respect for Liberal England. And Liberal England, according to him, died with the mid-Victorian era; it died with the rise of finance and imperialism, and the decline of manufacture and technical innova- tion. Basically, says Yoong, the cause was Britain's failure in the late nineteenth century to devise an adequate system of secondary edu- cation. The end came in the violence and unrest of 1910-14: but what was dead was imperial England or plutocratic England; Liberal England had died many, many years before.
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