The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [332]
And in the East End the crowds marched like one creature, stirring its huge length out of the sloth, or subjection, or lack of knowledge of its own power, that had kept it down.
But there was no place there for him. He couldn’t dance, and he couldn’t march, or not with any sense of common purpose, and abolishing the Poor Law was not going to undo Trotter’s argument.
The Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, went on August 17th to meet representatives of the railwaymen’s unions. He offered them a Royal Commission on their grievances. He spoke from the height of his position. The alternative to the long deliberations of a Royal Commission appeared to be the use of force against the workers. They went away, consulted, and came back. They refused, flatly, to accept the Commission or to return to work. Mr. Asquith was distinctly heard, as he walked out of the room, to say “Then your blood be upon your own head.” Winston Churchill despatched troops to stand by for trouble with the miners. Tension and boiling indignation persisted.
In the autumn of 1911 Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, in its entirety, was performed at Covent Garden. Bloomsbury had seats, and the Fabian Nursery had seats: Rupert Brooke and James Strachey and the lovely daughters of Sir Sidney Olivier juggled tickets and sat in rows together. The black elves tapped their hammers in violent rhythms in Nibelheim, one-eyed Wotan and Loge the trickster, the fire god, descended to the underworld and tricked its king out of his gold ring of power, and his helmet of invisibility. Fire rose and shimmered around Brunnhilde the Valkyrie sleeping on her rock, and Brynhild Olivier applauded. Wotan had mutilated the World Ash to make laws and treaties for his dispensation, which, all too human, slowly foundered in its own inanity and inadequate beliefs about good and evil. Human beings were either corrupt, or deluded, or victims, although the Rhine and the music—and indeed the flames of fire—rippled and sang.
Griselda Wellwood went with Julian, Charles/Karl, Wolfgang and Florence. Griselda was interested in what she thought were Wagner’s own adaptations of the myths in the Edda and the Nibelungenlied. She told Julian that there was no source for the cutting-down of the World Ash to set fire to the World and Valhalla. It was Wagner’s own invention, his addition to the story. Julian said the singing made him feel impotent. Charles/Karl, still interested in groups and instinct, said an audience was a different animal from a man reading on his own. An audience—if the work was good—was a creature. Like a dragon, said Griselda. You can lull dragons with music. Julian said a dissatisfied audience was a creature too, its emotions were common, it worked itself up. Wolfgang said, be quiet, pay attention, the music begins again. And the dangerous sound hung in tantalising strands, and answered itself, and grew stronger, and wove itself together.
Margot Asquith, the Prime Minister’s wife, wrote in her journal in 1906: “I have not one woman friend who knows or cares about politics—they love the personal aspect, the prestige, the Cabinet-making.” She had written: “Women are d—d stupid really, and only have instinct, which after all animals have. They have no size or reason—very little humour, hardly any sense of honour or truth, no sort or sense of proportion, merely blind powers of personal devotion and all the animal qualities of the more heroic sort.” She despised and feared the suffrage agitators, who spat at her at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet and in 1908 threw stones through her windows in Downing Street, making her fear for her infant son.
“I nearly vomited with terror that he should wake and scream. Why should my life be burdened by these worthless, vicious, cruel women? They say men would not be so seriously