43 One Hundred Years of England in a Work Both Scholarly and Timely (Review, 1941)*

Pageant of England (1840–1940), by Arthur Bryant. New York: Harper & Brothers, New York, 338 pages. $3.50.

The important thing about this sort of book is not so much what its author thinks, as the power he has of assimilating, selecting and conveying pertinent data. The reader skips the obvious generalization, relishes the illuminating detail and then does the thinking. Nor is a timely book necessarily a hastily written one and Mr. Bryant’s brilliantly documented work certainly cannot be accused of sacrificing scholarly retrospection to the purposes of current politics. True, his literary style tends to lapse into the “iron horse” and “Shanks’s pony” kind of stuff; and such refinements as the sudden definition: “England’s leading comic journal,” after numerous references to plain Punch, are old sins against crispness; but long-windedness and the ready-made phrase seem slight defects when one considers the very satisfying picture which the richly colored jigsaw bits of quotation and allusion gradually form under the author’s able supervision.

Incontestably, the mellowest parts of this volume are the chapters devoted to the forties and the fifties. Mr. Bryant has finely illustrated the dual nature of nineteenth century England, the contrast between the nightmare filth of the old-fashioned factory town and the philosophy of highly cultured men whose devotion to a creed of self-help and freedom allowed social injustice to be freely done. “The poor,” as the author puts it, “were left to Vestries and Providence.” A Morlock-like race of deformed beings, black vermin rather than men,1 horribly toiled underground while independent scholars in secluded nooks read Plato with their feet on the fender, and “London hall-porters sat in vast hooded chairs with a footrest and a foaming tankard as witness of their masters’ absence in the country.”

Although a “dual nature” was a typical feature of other civilizations too, its British aspect was tinged with a special national temperament unknown in any other land. The comparative method is not used by the author, and indeed he could not very well have indulged in it without writing companion volumes describing the correspondent period in the history of other countries; but he might for instance have refrained from stating bluntly that “public opinion did not exist” in Russia in the days of the Crimean war.2 Incidentally, his description of the siege of Sebastopol misses the rather subtle point that if the invaders were all heroes, there might be something to be said too for the besieged moujiks, who somehow held out for a year with the poorest of equipment.

The era of reforms and prosperity, the great exhibition in 1851 (with the trees of the park bursting out into a crop of eager urchins whom no policemen could dislodge), the development of the railway, Disraeli, colonial expansion and finally the First Great War, are intelligently and generously illustrated by contemporary observations in picture, prose and verse, though the colors get a little blurred toward the end and the figures of Britain’s great men acquire a more symbolic aspect the nearer we get to modern times, which is a common optical illusion in Clio’s Wonderland, as Mr. Bryant might have said. On the whole, his work, without condoning the many blunders committed by various Governments in England, stresses the wonderful capacity of the British to make up for lost time and lost opportunities in the last split second before disaster. An inborn sense of freedom has always been the main quality of that lovable nation and when one thinks of the moods and methods of some other European powers, one is somehow inclined to forgive Kipling his “sahibitions” and Rhodes his clay feet. “We are the first race in the world and the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race”—this contention which, if seriously meant, would be merely ridiculous in the mouth of a German and pathetic in that of other Europeans, may be irritating but not wholly incongruous when voiced by the Anglo-Saxon, and criticism of such a contention can be only based on the curious aversion of other races to forfeit their dignity by accepting the idea of alien supremacy, involving as it does a nation’s professional pride (just as an artist may not mind being informed that his neighbor is a better businessman than he, but will be incensed if told that the other fellow has a finer sense of color). The progeny of those to whom injustice was done in the past may become a source of national weakness and division; an England that is a good country for the healthy and successful but a fearful one for the clumsy and weak, may not be exactly perfect; the kindliness of British mastery in her colonies may be questioned; but the fact remains that others have done worse, and worse faults of officialdom may be abundantly discovered elsewhere. On the roads from Mons to the Marne River, in the agony of Somme and Passchendaele, on Dunkirk beach, and in the roaring starlight above the Channel, the national character of the British proved more important than the best laws devised by the best men; and (reverting to current politics) one cannot help applying to our times, that doggerel quoted by Mr. Bryant, the salutation addressed by Punch to the United States in the middle of last century (when even France had fallen a willing prey to despotism): “Oh Jonathan! Dear Jonathan! A wretched world we see; there’s scarce a freeman in it now excepting you and me.”