of the American people with the monstrous and socially paralysing
party systems that had sprung out of their absurd electoral
arrangements, led to the appearance of what came to be called the
'Modern State' movement, and a galaxy of brilliant writers, in
America, Europe, and the East, stirred up the world to the
thought of bolder rearrangements of social interaction, property,
employment, education, and government, than had ever been
contemplated before. No doubt these Modern State ideas were very
largely the reflection upon social and political thought of the
vast revolution in material things that had been in progress for
two hundred years, but for a long time they seemed to be having
no more influence upon existing institutions than the writings of
Rousseau and Voltaire seemed to have had at the time of the death
of the latter. They were fermenting in men's minds, and it needed
only just such social and political stresses as the coming of the
atomic mechanisms brought about, to thrust them forward abruptly
into crude and startling realisation.
Section 5
Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre is one of those autobiographical
novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades
of the twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must
understand Wander Jahre rather in a spiritual and intellectual
than in a literal sense. It is indeed an allusive title,
carrying the world back to the Wilhelm Meister of Goethe, a
century and a half earlier.
Its author, Frederick Barnet, gives a minute and curious history
of his life and ideas between his nineteenth and his twenty-third
birthdays. He was neither a very original nor a very brilliant
man, but he had a trick of circumstantial writing; and though no
authentic portrait was to survive for the information of
posterity, he betrays by a score of casual phrases that he was
short, sturdy, inclined to be plump, with a 'rather blobby' face,
and full, rather projecting blue eyes. He belonged until the
financial debacle of 1956 to the class of fairly prosperous
people, he was a student in London, he aeroplaned to Italy and
then had a pedestrian tour from Genoa to Rome, crossed in the air
to Greece and Egypt, and came back over the Balkans and Germany.
His family fortunes, which were largely invested in bank shares,
coal mines, and house property, were destroyed. Reduced to
penury, he sought to earn a living. He suffered great hardship,
and was then caught up by the war and had a year of soldiering,
first as an officer in the English infantry and then in the army
of pacification. His book tells all these things so simply and
at the same time so explicitly, that it remains, as it were, an
eye by which future generations may have at least one man's
vision of the years of the Great Change.
And he was, he tells us, a 'Modern State' man 'by instinct' from
the beginning. He breathed in these ideas in the class rooms and
laboratories of the Carnegie Foundation school that rose, a long
and delicately beautiful facade, along the South Bank of the
Thames opposite the ancient dignity of Somerset House. Such
thought was interwoven with the very fabric of that pioneer
school in the educational renascence in England. After the
customary exchange years in Heidelberg and Paris, he went into
the classical school of London University. The older so-called
'classical' education of the British pedagogues, probably the
most paralysing, ineffective, and foolish routine that ever
wasted human life, had already been swept out of this great
institution in favour of modern methods; and he learnt Greek and
Latin as well as he had learnt German, Spanish, and French, so
that he wrote and spoke them freely, and used them with an
unconscious ease in his study of the foundation civilisations of
the European system to which they were the key. (This change was
still so recent that he mentions an encounter in Rome with an
'Oxford don' who 'spoke Latin with a Wiltshire accent and
manifest discomfort, wrote Greek letters with his tongue out, and
seemed to think a Greek sentence a charm when it was a quotation
and an impropriety when it wasn't.')
Barnet saw the last days of the coal-steam engines upon the
English railways and the gradual cleansing of the London
atmosphere as the smoke-creating sea-coal fires gave place to
electric heating. The building of laboratories at Kensington was
still in progress, and he took part in the students' riots that
delayed the removal of the Albert Memorial. He carried a banner
with 'We like Funny Statuary' on one side, and on the other
'Seats and Canopies for Statues, Why should our Great Departed
Stand in the Rain?' He learnt the rather athletic aviation of
those days at the University grounds at Sydenham, and he was
fined for flying over the new prison for political libellers at
Wormwood Scrubs, 'in a manner calculated to exhilarate the
prisoners while at exercise.' That was the time of the attempted
suppression of any criticism of the public judicature and the
place was crowded with journalists who had ventured to call
attention to the dementia of Chief Justice Abrahams. Barnet was
not a very good aviator, he confesses he was always a little
afraid of his machine-there was excellent reason for every one
to be afraid of those clumsy early types-and he never attempted
steep descents or very high flying. He also, he records, owned
one of those oil-driven motor-bicycles whose clumsy complexity
and extravagant filthiness still astonish the visitors to the
museum of machinery at South Kensington. He mentions running
over a dog and complains of the ruinous price of 'spatchcocks' in
Surrey. 'Spatchcocks,' it seems, was a slang term for crushed
hens.
He passed the examinations necessary to reduce his military
service to a minimum, and his want of any special scientific or
technical qualification and a certain precocious corpulence that
handicapped his aviation indicated the infantry of the line as
his sphere of training. That was the most generalised