Now, of this soul in masculine ‘good form’, this slight but genuine element of a manly modesty in conventions, the public made King Edward a typical and appropriate representative. They like to think of him appearing as a soldier among soldiers, a sailor among sailors, a Freemason at his Lodge, or a Peer among his Peers. For this reason they even tolerated the comic idea of his being a Prussian Colonel when he was in Prussia; and they took a positive pleasure in the idea of his being a Parisian boulevardier when he was in Paris. Since he was thus a public symbol of the more generous and fraternal uses of conventionality, we may be well content with a conventional scheme of mourning; especially when in this case, as in not a few other cases, the conventional merely means the democratic. King Edward’s popularity was such a very popular kind of popularity that it would be rather more appropriate to make his funeral vulgar than to make it aesthetic. It is true that legend connects his name with two or three attempts to modify the ungainliness and gloom of our modern male costume; but he hardly insisted on any of them, and none of them was of a kind specially to satisfy Sir William Richmond. The aesthetes might perhaps smile on the notion of knee breeches; but I fear that brass buttons on evening coats would seem to them an aggravation of their wrong. Even where King Edward was an innovator, he was an innovator along popular and well-recognized lines; a man who would have liked a funeral to be funereal, as he would have liked a bail to be gay. We need not, therefore, feel it so very inappropriate even if in the last resort the celebrations are in the most humdrum or even jog-trot style, if they satisfy the heart of the public, though not the eye of the artist.

  And yet again, in connexion with those aspects of the late King which may be and are approved on more serious and statesmanlike grounds (as, for instance, his international attitude towards peace), this value of a working convention can still be found. It is easy to say airily, in an ethical textbook or a debating club resolution, that Spaniards should love Chinamen, or that Highlanders should suddenly embrace Hindus. But, as men are in daily life, such brotherhood is corrupted and confused, though never actually contradicted. It is the fundamental fact that we are all men; but there are circumstances that permit us to feel it keenly and other circumstances that almost prevent us from feeling it at all. It is here that convention (which only means a coming together) makes smooth the path of primal sympathy, and by getting people, if only for an hour, to act alike, begins to make them feel alike. I have said much against aristocracy and 3iiall continue to do so, but I will never deny that aristocracy has certain queer advantages, not very often mentioned. One of them is that which affects European diplomacy: that a gentleman is the same all over Europe, while a peasant or even a merchant, may be very different. A Dutch gentleman and an Irish gentleman stand on a special and level platform; a Dutch peasant and an Irish peasant are divided by all dynastic and divine wars. Of course, this means that a peasant is superior to a gentle man — more genuine, more historic, more national; but that, surely, is obvious. Nevertheless, for cosmopolitan purposes, such as diplomacy, a gentleman may be used — with caution. And the reason that has made aristocrats effective as diplomatists is the same that made King Edward effective; the existence of a convention or convenient form that is understood everywhere and makes action and utterance easy for everyone. Language itself is only an enormous ceremony. King Edward completely understood that nameless Volapuk or Esperanto on which modern Europe practically reposes. He never put himself in a position that Europe could possibly misunderstand, as the Kaiser did by his theocratic outbursts, even if they were logical; or the Tsar by his sweeping repressions, even if they were provoked. Partly a German, by blood, partly a Frenchman, by preference, inter-married with all the thrones of Europe and quite conscious of their very various perplexities, he had the right to be called a great citizen of Europe. There are only two things that can bind men together; a convention and a creed. King Edward was the last, the most popular, and probably the most triumphant example of Europe combining with success upon a large and genial convention. Tact and habit and humanity had in him their final exponent in all the Courts, reviews, race-courses, and hotels of Christendom. If these are not enough, if it is not found sufficient for Europe to have a healthy convention, then Europe must once more have a creed. The coming of the creed will be a terrible business.

  KING GEORGE V

  THE passing of King George the Fifth from the scene of his labours, labours admittedly among the most devoted and unselfish of the public duties of our time, marks in more ways than one a special achievement in our national history. It is self-evident, and has therefore been said by many and seen by all, that through all this lifetime the English Crown has remained popular and secure, in a time when Crowns were falling on every side. But the remotest rim of this rending storm never even touched the outer coasts of this country, or raised anything worth calling a whisper about the continuity of our historic compromise. This is a historical fact, whether men rejoice in it or no; and a very remarkable and impressive fact too, when we come to consider it. But, though this is obvious, what may be called the converse is almost equally obvious. The world is coming to a conflict of extremes, and the popularity of King George had as little to do with the one sort of extreme as the other. The Republican had grown accustomed to a monarch; the Royalist had grown accustomed to a constitutional monarch; the monarch owed little to the new cult of monarchy. Continental States which have already been shaken by revolutions are under constant fear of being shaken again by restorations. But it is simply the fact touching our selves, and our own unique insular tradition, that, when we have all said with deep and sincere sorrow, ‘The King is dead,’ not a soul thinks seriously of saying any thing except ‘Long live the King!’

  The virtues of King George were rather specially of a sort to correct the confusions and corruptions that have made modern government so insecure. What has most harmed modern government, including what we call representative government, is a certain quality that is seldom mentioned, though I think I have mentioned it, for I think it very serious. It is the loss of the old ideal which associated a love of liberty with a scorn of luxury. The first and best of the democratic idealists were always definite on this point. They demanded that a republican senator should show a republican simplicity. It was that which was to distinguish the senator from the courtier, and from the effeminacy of the Court. We have lived to see the Court set something of an example to the Senates. The King had considerably more republican simplicity, in that sense, than a good many republican plutocrats and millionaires. Nobody ever accused him of being a leader of the Smart Set, or of frequenting those bizarre night clubs where he might have found not a few of the popularly elected politicians. He had little appetite for luxury; he can hardly have had a very definite itch even for leisure. The declaration of abstinence which he made at the beginning of the War was very typical of him. It was not merely ritual or royal gesture; if he had been born in any other station there would have been something about him that was thus thrifty and vigilant and ready to renounce. And whether we agree or not with the theory of this or that renunciation, it is certain that this sort of thing was in trenchant contrast with the general use of social emancipation around him. There can be no doubt that it provided what has been very badly needed in our time, a sort of core of orderly and sensible living, in the very midst of a society which, like some pagan societies of the past, is in many ways not far from madness.

  The popular suspicion which poisons so much of popular government today is directly connected with the exaggerated pursuit of pleasure. It is a suspicion, not only of wealth, but of the waste of wealth. It is a suspicion that almost anything may be a mere ladder to the life of the rich, even an attack on the rich. A friend of mine expressed it long ago, on the occasion of a political election, in lines which I hope are familiar —

  The evil power that buttressed privilege

  And went with women and champagne and bridge,

  Broke, and Democracy resumed her reign

  Which went with bridge and women and champagne.

  Against this sort of impression, the whole attitude of the late King was a very valuable corrective. It reminded us, in a permanent personal manifestation, of the other and better side of English administration; and especially of the patience and loyalty of the public services, and of those great permanent officials of whom he was the first. Upon this side of public business and bureaucratic devotion there is a general testimony to his thoroughness. I myself, though not in the way of such things, have met many men who were impressed by his knowledge of detail in departments which they had imagined to be almost private experiences of their own. He had certainly learned much more, in all departments of life, than he ever presented as pretensions to the public; and in that sense it might be said that his public life was only too private, and had hardly enough of the old parade of popular monarchy.

  As a patriotic ruler and a public servant, especially in the matter of responsibility and hard work, his reputation, was a thing universally assured. But as a private individual, I rather fancy that he was a good deal misunderstood. He had not, as his father had, the gesture of public life, the presence that seems to fill platforms, the smile that includes crowds; and therefore he adopted in such things a less expansive dignity not without a touch of doggedness, and produced on some strangers an impression of being stolid. But, as a social personality, he was not stolid. Those who met him for the first time, with nothing but this previous impression of public occasions, were almost startled by his vivacity. He spoke frankly, sometimes very frankly, and did not disguise his healthy likes and dislikes. He was probably of the kind that would always prefer talking in private to speaking in public, but not because he had any inherent reluctance to speak. As is often the case with what would seem a mere popular sentiment, there was a certain instinctive accuracy about the phrase that called him the Sailor King. For his personality most immediately recalled a certain sort of lively though experienced naval officer; animated, anecdotal, fond of talking about important things in a casual way. Naturally, this aspect could not be known to most of us, except by accident or incidental privilege; but the in direct effects of it can be felt in innumerable stories even at second and third hand. If he was unfitted for the flamboyant kingcraft of Potsdam, he was the very reverse of a man who merely adopted the pose of the impenetrable, or tried to suggest significance by silence. He had views on a great variety of things, and did not hesitate to express them; only his self-expression was naturally conversational rather than oratorical. There is one thing, however, which is universally attested, both by the direct and the indirect impressions. He was quite unusually considerate; not only in the loose sense of being kindly, but in the literal sense of considering how to be kind. The strongest impressions of his thoughtfulness for others came from those who had been in the closest relation with him for many years, under conditions of Court life which generally breed an endless crop of complaints and rivalries and bitter recollections. ‘Even in a palace life can be lived well,’ said the emperor of the world; and in one or two cases, such as King George’s, it can be added that it could hardly be lived anywhere more simply, or with less evil of pride.

  ON LYING IN STATE

  BEFORE the funeral of that good and faithful servant who had inherited the Crown of the Confessor and the Conqueror, the body lay in state, in the ceremonial phrase, in that most historical hall which the Conqueror’s son had built, and in which an English King had once been tried for his life. The fact that the first King was murdered and the second executed, and this third King venerated as he actually was in death, may give cause for thought to those who simplify all history into a mere advancing antagonism against principalities and powers. But the ceremonial phrase itself is of some interest; precisely because such simplifiers would have called it ‘merely’ ceremonial. In recent times, especially at the end of the eighteenth century, when royal ritual and etiquette had piled up to the top of their complexity, as things always do before they crash, there was a widespread reaction against ceremonial; not merely among rationalists, but also among reasonable men. In that reaction the real meaning of such ceremonial was largely lost. Popular anger was aroused against those very pageants that had originally been instituted because they were popular.

  This truth can be traced in the treatment, remote and recent and present, of the very phrase ‘lying in state’. In the recent rationalistic interlude, now largely passing, the tendency was to insist with some irritation on the words ‘in state’. The rational emancipators of humanity insisted that such pageantry was mere pomp; that such pomp was mere pomposity. The only defect of those admirable friends of humanity was that they knew no history. As a fact, the notion of a King lying in state was a part of the popular and not the pompous side of royalty. It was connected with the very ancient idea of the accessibility of the King; not on any later idea, even any new but necessary idea, of the privacy of the King. In the matter of a merely arrogant stateliness, the King was much less ‘in state’ when he showed himself to his people dead or alive, than when he did all his less recognized duties in dealing with State secrets. It meant that the mob might be excluded from the Council-Chamber; but it was admitted to the Death-Chamber.

  To use an old phrase, such customs were founded upon the profound popular proverb that a cat may look at a king; not on any notion that a king would not look at a common man. That this was the historic truth, about the actual history of monarchy, good or bad, is proved by all the other facts of the case. When kingship had risen to its most extraordinary and even exaggerated eminence, as in the great France of the Grand Siècle, people were admitted, not merely to the death-chamber when the King was dead, but to the bed-chamber when he was alive. Crowds poured through the dressing-room of Louis XIV, that almost almighty monarch, and saw him washing and dressing and even drinking emetics. He could be an autocrat, a conqueror, a controller of parliaments; he could be everything but a private person. Buried deep, in the very depths of this singular human institution, was the idea that the people possessed their monarch, like a public monument, or even a public park. He ruled them, but they owned him.

  That this popular vision of the Monarch had grown out of proportion by the time of the Roi Soleil is probably proved by the reaction that followed soon after; the reaction that we call the Revolution. But it had been primarily a popular idea. In fact, it was perhaps more purely popular than most, or many of the best, of the Revolutionists, who were often aristocrats and generally intellectuals. Anyhow, we can see it forming far back in medieval times; and it is always concerned with this almost sacramental conception of access to the body of the King. In the wildest wars of the feudal times, in France and England, and especially in Scotland, we find factions attaching enormous importance to the mere material fact of having the King among them; even as a child or a captive or an imbecile. They carried the King about with them, as if he were a sort of sacred relic or fetish or mascot; and they seem to have felt that the presence even of reluctant royalty gave them an advantage over their rivals. And the reason was, fundamentally, that the King was always popular; as no feudal lord was popular. That submerged instinct of history, which exists in the ignorant in the form of tradition, and is often much truer than history, remembered something that the most wicked kings could not entirely destroy; that far back in the foundations of Christendom, saints and missionaries of the old civilization had dedicated this man to be the father of the people. There had never been any such definite dedication of any mere feudal fighter or raider. He was Dominus Rex, and different from other men; even if he were a tyrant. It has been truly remarked that no medieval Regent was ever a success. King John is our own typical tyrant; but it is only fair to him to remember that he had been a Regent. And in those remote times of the roots of national or modern monarchy, there is perpetually the emphasis upon the bodily presence of the responsible prince. It was so strong that it extended to the idea of a body even when it was only a body.

  It is perhaps a deep criticism of the modern mind that we have fallen into the habit of only talking about a body when we mean a corpse. Even the old phrase Habeas Corpus, as well as older and more sacred and sacramental phrases, recalls a world of feeling in which a living body was also described as a body. But in any case, this old mystical tradition extended from the living body to the dead. As the companions of the Cid brought out even his dead body in battle-armour and on horse-back, that it might be an ensign for the Christians and a trumpet of defiance against the Moors, so the old traditional feeling of the royal presence always extended to the presence of death. It always had this character of a direct popular appeal. Sometimes, for various reasons, it was used for a political appeal. The old Kings were sometimes shown with their faces uncovered; in some cases, for a practical proclamation to the crowd; as, for instance, to show that the King was really dead. But always the idea of a crowd passing before his coffin, when he was dead, was part of the same idea as the right of personally offering petitions when he was alive. It was the idea that the palace was not merely a private house; that it was, in fact, the public’s house. It was a house where the doors stood open. The people owned the King.

  THE ALPHABET OF GIANTS

  IN one sense the most impressive building at Wembley Exhibition was probably the Queen’s Dolls-House. The sense in which I say this refers to, the value of small models of big things. It seems to me that man has made things almost too great for his own imagination to measure. He is too much at home in his house, and sometimes he can not see the city any more than he can see the earth. It may be easier to use the copy rather than the real thing as a working model for real education. For about the remains or ruins of the great art of building there is a curious paradox of popular misconception, which is not easy to describe.