After Haidee’s death Lucian left Paris, and during the rest of the spring and summer of that year went wandering hither and thither about Europe. His mind was at this time in a state of quiescence; he lounged from one place to another, faintly interested and lazily amused. He was beginning to be a little bored by life, and a little tempted to drift with its stream. It was in this frame of mind that he returned to London in the following autumn. There, soon after his return, he sprang into unwonted activity.
It was on the very eve of the outbreak of the war in South Africa. Men were wondering what was going to happen. Some, clearer of vision than their fellows, saw that nothing but war would solve the problem which had assumed vast proportions and strange intricacies because of the vacillating policy of a weak Government of twenty years before; the Empire was going to pay now, with millions of its treasure and thousands of its men, for the fatal error which had brought the name of England into contempt in the Transvaal and given the Boers a false notion of English strength and character. Others were all for a policy of smoothing things over, for spreading green boughs over pitfalls—not that any one should fall into them, but in order to make believe that the pitfalls were not there. Others again, of a breed that has but lately sprung into existence in these islands, advocated, not without success, a policy of surrender to everybody and everything. There was much talking at street corners and in the market-place; much angry debate and acrimonious discussion. Men began to be labelled by new names, and few took the trouble to understand each other. In the meantime, events developed as inevitable consequence always develops them in such situations. Amidst the chattering of tiny voices the thunders of war burst loud and clear.{236}
Lucian was furious with indignation. Fond as he was of insisting on his Italian nationality, he was passionately devoted to England and the English, and had a great admiration for the history and traditions of the country of his adoption. There had once been a question in his mind as to whether he should write in English or in Italian—he had elected to serve England for many reasons, but chiefly because he recognised her greatness and believed in her destiny. Like all Italians, he loved her for what she had done for Greece and for Italy. England and Liberty were synonymous names; of all nations in the world, none had made for freedom as England had. His blood had leapt in his veins many a time at the thought of the thousand and one great things she had done, the mighty battles she had fought for truth and liberty; he had drunk in the notion from boyhood that England stood in the very vanguard of the army of deliverance. And now she was sending out her armies, marshalling her forces, pouring out her money like water, to crush a tiny folk, a nation of farmers, a sturdy, simple-minded race, one of the least amongst the peoples of the earth! He shook his head as if he had been asleep, and asked himself if the nation had suddenly gone mad with lust of blood. It was inconceivable that the England of his dreams could do this thing. He looked for her, and found her nowhere. The streets were hot all day with the tramping of armed men. The first tidings of reverse filled the land with the old savage determination to fight things out to the end, even though all the world should range itself on the other side.
Lucian flung all his feelings of rage, indignation, sorrow, and infinite amazement into a passionate sonnet which appeared next morning in large type, well leaded and spaced, in the columns of a London daily newspaper that favoured the views of the peace-at-any-price party. He followed it up with others. At first there was more sorrow and surprise than anything else in these admonitions; but as the days went on their tone altered. He had endeavoured to bring the giant to his senses by an{237} appeal to certain feelings which the giant was too much engaged to feel at that moment; eliciting no response, he became troublesome, and strove to attract the giant’s attention by pricking him with pins. The giant paid small attention to this; he looked down, saw a small thing hanging about his feet with apparently mischievous intentions, and calmly pushed it away. Then Lucian began the assault in dead earnest. He could dip his pen in vitriol with the best of them, and when he realised that the giant was drunk with the lust of blood he fell upon him with fury. The vials of poetic wrath had never been emptied of such a flood of righteous anger since the days wherein Milton called for vengeance upon the murderers of the Piedmontese.
It is an ill thing to fight against the prevalent temper of a nation. Lucian soon discovered that you may kick and prick John Bull for a long time with safety to yourself, because of his good nature, his dislike of bothering about trifles, and his natural sluggishness, but that he always draws a line somewhere, and brings down a heavy fist upon the man who crosses it. He began to find people fighting shy of his company; invitations became less in number; men nodded who used to shake hands; strong things were said in newspapers; and he was warned by friends that he was carrying things too far.
‘Endeavour,’ said one man, an acquaintance of some years’ standing, for whose character and abilities he had a great regard, ‘endeavour to get some accurate sense of the position. You are blackguarding us every day with your sonorous sonnets as if we were cut-throats and thieves going out on a murdering and marauding expedition. We are nothing of the sort. We are a great nation, with a very painful sense of responsibility, engaged in a very difficult task. The war is bringing us together like brothers—out of its blood and ashes there will spring an Empire such as the world has never seen. You are belittling everything to the level of Hooliganism.’
‘What is it but Hooliganism?’ retorted Lucian. ‘The{238} most powerful nation in the world seizing one of the weakest by the throat!’
‘It is nothing of the sort,’ said the other. ‘You know it is your great curse, my dear Lucian, that you never get a clear notion of the truth. You have a trick of seeing things as you think they ought to be; you will not see them as they are. Just because the Boers happen to be numerically small, to lead a pastoral life, and to have gone into the desert like the Israelites of old, you have brought that far too powerful imagination of yours to bear upon them, and have elevated them into a class with the Swiss and the Italians, who fought for their country.’
‘What are the Boers fighting for?’ asked Lucian.
‘At present to grab somebody else’s property,’ returned the other. ‘Don’t get sentimental about them. After all, much as you love us, you’re only half an Englishman, and you don’t understand the English feeling. Are the English folk not suffering, and is a Boer widow or a Boer orphan more worthy of pity than a Yorkshire lass whose lad is lying dead out there, or a Scottish child whose father will never come back again?’
Lucian swept these small and insignificant details aside with some impatience.
‘You are the mightiest nation the world has ever seen,’ he said. ‘You have a past—such a past as no other people can boast. You have a responsibility because of that past, and at present you have thrown all sense of it away, and are behaving like the drunken brute who rises gorged with flesh and wine, and yells for blood. This is an England with vine-leaves in her hair—it is not the England of Cromwell.’
‘I thank God it is not!’ said the other man with heartfelt reverence. ‘We wish for no dictatorship here. Come, leave off slanging us in this bloodthirsty fashion, and try to arrive at a sensible view of things. Turn your energies to a practical direction—write a new romantic play for Harcourt, something that will cheer us in these dark days, and give the money for bandages{239} and warm socks and tobacco for poor Tommy out at the front. He isn’t as picturesque—so it’s said—as Brother Boer, but he’s a man after all, and has a stomach.’
But Lucian would neither be cajoled nor chaffed out of his r?le of prophet. He became that most objectionable of all things—the man who believes he has a message, and must deliver it. He continued to hurl his philippics at the British public through the ever-ready columns of the peace-at-any-price paper, and the man in the street, who is not given to the drawing of fine distinctions, called him a pro-Boer. Lucian, in strict reality, was not a pro-Boer—he merely saw the artistry of the pro-Boer position. He remembered Byron’s attitude with respect to Greece, and a too generous instinct had led him to compare Mr. Kruger to Cincinnatus. The man in the street knew nothing of these things, and cared less. It seemed to him that Lucian, who was, after all, nothing but an ink-slinger, a blooming poet, was slanging the quarter of a million men who were hurrying to Table Bay as rapidly as the War Office could get them there. To this sort of thing the man in the street objected. He did not care if Lucian’s instincts were all on the side of the weaker party, nor was it an excuse that Lucian himself, in the matter of strict nationality, was an Italian. He had chosen to write his poems in England, said the man in the street, and also in the English language, and he had made a good thing out of it too, and no error, and the best thing he could do now was to keep a civil tongue in his head, or, rather, pen in his hand. This was no time for the cuckoo to foul the nest wherein he had had free quarters for so long.
The opinion of the man in the street is t............