< previous page page_36 next page >

Page 36

1918, when it began effectively to be supplanted by the Labour Party.

Its terminal decline arguably dates from 1910: a year which, marked by the death of King Edward VII and an ominous appearance of Halley’s Comet, brought compensatory highlights in the form of the no less bright star of Q’s knighthood. Awarded primarily as a recognition of his political activities, the honor virtually confirmed him as one of his country’s leading embodiments of Liberalism. On returning to Fowey from the investiture, he was greeted by the town brass band playing “He’s A Fine Old English Gentleman.” What further qualification, it might be asked, could be required—at least in 1912—of a Professor of English?

Nevertheless, to quote Danger-field again, the year 1910 also “stands out against a peculiar background of flame. For it was in 1910 that fires long smouldering in the English spirit suddenly flared up, so that by the end of 1913 Liberal England was reduced to ashes” (1961:viii). However questionable a thesis of general conflagration might be, there can be little doubt that a succession of incendiary outbreaks lit the national sky. Amongst them were the Party’s momentous and successful battle to curb the powers of the House of Lords, a victory from which it never recovered; the prospect of a rebellion in Ulster as a result of movements toward Irish Home Rule; increasing militancy of the suffragette movement; and a gathering momentum of strikes marking growing trade union unrest and the prospect of revolutionary working-class alliances. The war which began in 1914 merely postponed the resolution of these developments, heralding a new, harsher world in which inherited Liberal visions and imaginings would be forever swept away. In the England that emerged from its Armageddon, there remained only the ghostly memory of what Dangerfield describes as ‘‘that other England, the England where the Grantchester church clock stood at ten to three, where there was Beauty and Certainty and Quiet, and where nothing was real” (1961:441–42). By then, Q’s only son was also dead.

III Other Eden

Confronted, as it were, with things dying, the Liberal professor committed himself to things new-born. The full impact of Quiller-Couch’s appointment in Cambridge was to prove momentous. Whether or not his personal contribution should be seen in terms

< previous page page_36 next page >