Establishments I Have Known
By HESKETH PEARSON first time it occurred to me that establish- ' ments existed outside the Established Church was in 1913. I was then secretary of The British Empire Shakespeare Society, in which capacity I had read all the works by the recognised Shake- spearian sages, from Coleridge to Bradley. I had also accidentally discovered The Man Shake- speare by Frank Harris, and to my mind it put all the others in the shade. Here at last was a vivid vital portrait of a real man with parts and passions, not an abstract godlike creature who stood outside life, contemplative and omniscient. The book was so much more stimulating and invigorating than anything produced by the pan- jandrums of criticism that could not keep it out of my conversation, and wheneVer in the course of my duties I met such leading Shakespearian authorities as Sidney Lee, Israel Gollancz, Walter Raleigh, Quiller-Couch, George Saintsbury and A. C. Bradley, 1 canvassed their opinions on Harris. Without exception they were hostile, some of them bitterly so, and I came to the conclusion that, as they could scarcely have failed to recog- nise t le merit of Harris's book, they had formed a sort of scholars' ring' or 'closed shop' which no one could enter without their sanction, Harris was an outsider who had trespassed on their ground and broken the articles 'of their associa- tion by treating Shakespeare as a fallible human being. As the years went by I perceived many faults in his book, but I still regard it as epoch- making and believe that the antagonism of the dons was due to the fear of originality always displayed by people with conventional minds, who, in self-defence, form a mutual-protection society which in effect becomes an establishment. Not that I used the word at that date. Many years were spent in reading the lives of notable men before I perceived that every profession has its establishment, which punishes, or tries to punish, those who act in a manner inimical to its interests. I discussed the animosity Harris had aroused with Bernard Shaw, who gave me another reason for it. Frank, she said, was socially impossible: 'For instance. if you asked him to meet an actress of world-wide notoriety as a loose and immoral character, he'd probably talk "sweet religion" to her for hours together. But if you asked him to meet the wife of a bishop, he'd be just as likely to pull out a picture by Fdlicien Bops of a nude woman seated at an organ, every pipe of which represented a phallus.' But Shaw hit the nail clean on the head when he told Harris that what had damaged him .socially was the fact that one could not ask t on to meet Mrs. Humphrey Ward. You may say -God be praised for that! I never wanted to meet Mrs. Humphrey Ward." All the same, you cannot have a career in London as a journalist and politician unless you can be trusted to take Mrs. Humphrey Ward in to dinner and leave her under the impression that you are either a very respectable or a very charming man.' Society being far more diffused, no one today has a posi- tion comparable to Mrs. Humphrey Ward's in the so jai world of the Nineties, when she spoke with the authentic voice of the establishment. beide ttallt one critic foresaw how Harris's work would be received by the pundits. In 1916 Des- mond MacCarthy wrote a letter to Shaw in which he said that Harris was the only author to whom he had written as a stranger expressing admiration for his work : 'When his book on Shakespeare came out 1 could not help doing so. It seemed to me so excellent and so certain to be underrated. I knew the professors would first crab and then crib him.'
Many years later I heard from Shaw how the establishment of his own profession had treated him. 'The Dramatists' Club,' he said, 'began as a clique of old stagers who insisted on excluding everyone who was not "a dramatist of established reputation," which was their definition of one of themselves. They invited me to join in the sure and certain hope that I would refuse; but as I was for years trying to get them to organise the profession—any sort of organisa- tion being better than none — I joined and made a duty of attending their lunches for quite a long time. They hated me, and would have enjoyed nothing more than putting me and Ibsen into a fiery furnace heated seventy times seven. But all they could do was to blackball every candidate I proposed. I soon gave up my attempts to declique the place. They were on the point of blackballing Gilbert Murray when Pinero, of whom they were mortally afraid, appeared and sternly ordered them to elect him. . . . When the war came they thought they had me on the run. There was a lunch which I did not attend, and which was attended, only by Henry Arthur Jones, Justin Huntly McCarthy and a few comparative nobodies. They thereupon, without notice, solemnly expelled me. This occurred after the torpedoing of the Lusitania, when everyone went stark mad.' (Shaw having implied that it was a trifle compared with the daily horrors on the Western Front.) 'I pointed out that their proceeding was null and void, and that I was still a member of the club, but that to please them I would resign. A few members resigned as a protest, including Granville-Barker, who had a sovereign contempt for them and never attended the lunches. Zangwill would have re- signed, but I persuaded him to stay and carry on his campaign for the admission of women to the club. . . . Later on the Dramatists' Club, now open to women, and probably enormously un- proved thereby, invited me to dinner as guest of honour; but though I bore no malice I had had enough of them and made some excuse. Anyone who is a pioneer in art is hated by the old gang and should not join their clubs, as it enables them Ic expel him and to that extent places him in their power. Wagner was a perfect example of this sort of professional hatred. It is the novices and amateurs who carry the day for him.'
Long before Shaw told me this I had noted the operation of the various establishments in the careers of men who refused to toe the line and could not be trusted to support authority whatever the circumstances, or whose free and easy com- ments made them 'unsafe.' Naturally religion pro- vided the more glaring examples. The strictest of all establishments is the Church of Rome, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Church of England had a powerful hierarchy, backed by the political establishment, which exercised con- siderable caution. Swift did more for the Tories than all the pamphleteers and politicians of the time, but the brilliance of his work A Tale of a Tub shook the bigwigs of Church and State, who rightly thought him dangerous to' their welfare, and instead of the bishopric he had a right to expect he was fobbed off with a remote deanery. This was a lesson to the opposition party, and when a century 'later Sydney Smith wrote his anonymous letters in favour of Catholic emanci- pation Lord Holland reminded a fellow peer that Swift had lost a bishopric for his wittiest per- formance and that if the Whigs ever obtained power it would be their duty to prove themselves more grateful and liberal than the Tories. But when the Whigs found themselves in office, they agreed with George ill that Sydney was 'a very clever fellow, but he will never be a bishop.' They were frightened to death of a man who could say, 'I must believe in the Apostolic Succession, there being no other way of accounting for the descent of the Bishop of Exeter from Judas Iscariot.' and in due course he who was foremost in the tight against Tory misgovernment had to be content with a canonry. Lord Melbourne showed a spark of shame: 'Sydney Smith has done more for the Whigs than all the clergy put together, and our not making him a bishop is mere cowardice.' But looked at from their point of view the establish- ment showed sense, because Canon Smith soon discomforted the entire bench of bishops with his extremely uncanonical letters on the Ecclesiastical Commission in 1837. The actions of establish- ments change with the fashions in belief, and the dean who lost a bishopric in Victoria's reign by referring in a sermon to 'the extraordinary conduct of Judas Iscariot' might have received the mitre a century earlier.
in' the course of my biographical researches I came across several remarkable characters who would have reached .the top of their professions if they had been able to conform with the safety- first policy of establishments: e.g. John Philpot Curran, who as a barristerhad defended the Irish revolutionists of 1798; Thomas Cochrane, tenth Earl of Dundonald, whose magnificent services.in the naval war against Napoleon were offset by his independent criticism of authority, which exasperated the establishment, ruined his career, and drove him to command the Chilean. Brazilian and Greek navies; Sir Richard Burton. whose independence of thought and speech terrified the official world, and instead of being used in Egypt he was prudently exiled as consul at Trieste. Then there were the men whose natures compelled them to expose or ridicule the establishments, such as Samuel Butler, who was ignored by the scientific mandarins of his age, and W. S. Gilbert, who laughed at all autItority, rounded off his career as a librettist by poking fun at the National Anthem, and did not receive a knighthood until h: was considered too old to be awkward. One. remembers, too,. that the medical establishment refused to acknowledge the famous osteopath Herbert Barker, Mille the War Office declined his oiler of free treatment for soldiers in the 1914 war; a mental attitude that barred recognition
a great unregistered physician, Raphael Roche, who cured many diseases supposed by the faculty to be incurable.
Occasionally a genius has upheld the establish- ment. Dr. Johnson was one, but he also frightened it The routineers arc never quite comfortable with such alarming brain-power behind them. On the other hand they welcome exceptional talent within their ranks. A Churchill in politics, an loge in the Church, are permitted to tilt the apple- cart, they can be relied upon never to upset it. Perhaps the best example of a born all-round anti- establishment man was Henry Labouchere, whose Ivo played with devastating impartiality on every establishment in the kingdom, from the Royal Family to the beer barons. Queen Victoria hated him. and when to point his strictures on the Royal Grants he parodied the National Anthem she failed to catch the infection of his fun:
Orandehildren not a few With great-grandchildren too, She blest has been.
We've been their sureties, Paid them gratuities,
Pensions, annuities.
God save the Queen.
While I was writing his life in 1935 I happened Om; . day to be discussing the whole question of institutionalism with Hugh Kingsmill and Mal- colm Nluggeridge. I remember We laughed heartily over the fact that Charles Darwin, whose evolu- tionary theories had horrified the Church of Eng- Iadd ut I859. was yet buried in Westminster Abbey twenty-three years later; and we concluded tl!at the Church had quickly adapted the Book of Genesis to the new revelation. The latest fashion of belief was too widespread to be resisted, and. as Shakespeare says.
tis odds against arithmetic,
And manhood is called foolery. when it stands Again.,[ a falling fabric.
course of our talk we certainly bandied the word 'establishment,' and I developed the theme tinder that name in my biography Labbv, which came out the following year.
Apart from the financial power, the strongest establishment in' the world today centres on the Kremlin, if the Pasternak affair is anything to go by; but with the weakening of ecclesiastical and political authority in England, the chief strong- holds here are the trade unions, from which in- dependent workers are excommunicated as once were independent thinkers from the Church. The queer thing about' establishments is that they are liable to turn against their founders, the reason being that they often derive from genius and always flourish on mediocrity. Back in the Nine- ties Shaw and the Webbs with their tracts and speeches formed an opposition e.siablishinent called the Labour Party. But when that party was in power, SilelW confided to me almost at the end of his life : 'I sin not persuna grata with the Cabinet just now. Like Tom Paine, he would have kicked over the traces of any establishment, in- cluding one of his own creation.
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