1
I have been planning and replanning, writing and rewriting, this next
portion of my book for many days. I perceive I must leave it raw edged
and ill joined. I have learnt something of the impossibility of History.
For all I have had to tell is the story of one man's convictions and
aims and how they reacted upon his life; and I find it too subtle and
involved and intricate for the doing. I find it taxes all my powers to
convey even the main forms and forces in that development. It is like
looking through moving media of changing hue and variable refraction
at something vitally unstable. Broad theories and generalisations are
mingled with personal influences, with prevalent prejudices; and
not only coloured but altered by phases of hopefulness and moods of
depression. The web is made up of the most diverse elements, beyond
treatment multitudinous.... For a week or so I desisted altogether,
and walked over the mountains and returned to sit through the warm soft
mornings among the shaded rocks above this little perched-up house of
ours, discussing my difficulties with Isabel and I think on the whole
complicating them further in the effort to simplify them to manageable
and stateable elements.
Let me, nevertheless, attempt a rough preliminary analysis of this
confused process. A main strand is quite easily traceable. This main
strand is the story of my obvious life, my life as it must have looked
to most of my acquaintances. It presents you with a young couple,
bright, hopeful, and energetic, starting out under Altiora's auspices to
make a career. You figure us well dressed and active, running about in
motor-cars, visiting in great people's houses, dining amidst brilliant
companies, going to the theatre, meeting in the lobby. Margaret wore
hundreds of beautiful dresses. We must have had an air of succeeding
meritoriously during that time.
We did very continually and faithfully serve our joint career. I thought
about it a great deal, and did and refrained from doing ten thousand
things for the sake of it. I kept up a solicitude for it, as it were by
inertia, long after things had happened and changes occurred in me
that rendered its completion impossible. Under certain very artless
pretences, we wanted steadfastly to make a handsome position in the
world, achieve respect, SUCCEED. Enormous unseen changes had been in
progress for years in my mind and the realities of my life, before
our general circle could have had any inkling of their existence, or
suspected the appearances of our life. Then suddenly our proceedings
began to be deflected, our outward unanimity visibly strained and marred
by the insurgence of these so long-hidden developments.
That career had its own hidden side, of course; but when I write
of these unseen factors I do not mean that but something altogether
broader. I do not mean the everyday pettinesses which gave the cynical
observer scope and told of a narrower, baser aspect of the fair but
limited ambitions of my ostensible self. This “sub-careerist” element
noted little things that affected the career, made me suspicious of the
rivalry of so-and-so, propitiatory to so-and-so, whom, as a matter of
fact, I didn't respect or feel in the least sympathetic towards; guarded
with that man, who for all his charm and interest wasn't helpful, and
a little touchy at the appearance of neglect from that. No, I mean
something greater and not something smaller when I write of a hidden
life.
In the ostensible self who glowed under the approbation of Altiora
Bailey, and was envied and discussed, praised and depreciated, in the
House and in smoking-room gossip, you really have as much of a man as
usually figures in a novel or an obituary notice. But I am tremendously
impressed now in the retrospect by the realisation of how little that
frontage represented me, and just how little such frontages do represent
the complexities of the intelligent contemporary. Behind it, yet
struggling to disorganise and alter it, altogether, was a far more
essential reality, a self less personal, less individualised, and
broader in its references. Its aims were never simply to get on; it
had an altogether different system of demands and satisfactions. It
was critical, curious, more than a little unfeeling--and relentlessly
illuminating.
It is just the existence and development of this more generalised
self-behind-the-frontage that is making modern life so much more subtle
and intricate to render, and so much more hopeful in its relations
to the perplexities of the universe. I see this mental and spiritual
hinterland vary enormously in the people about me, from a type which
seems to keep, as people say, all its goods in the window, to others
who, like myself, come to regard the ostensible existence more and more
as a mere experimental feeder and agent for that greater personality
behind. And this back-self has its history of phases, its crises and
happy accidents and irrevocable conclusions, more or less distinct from
the adventures and achievements of the ostensible self. It meets persons
and phrases, it assimilates the spirit of a book, it is startled into
new realisations by some accident that seems altogether irrelevant to
the general tenor of one's life. Its increasing independence of the
ostensible career makes it the organ of corrective criticism; it
accumulates disturbing energy. Then it breaks our overt promises and
repudiates our pledges, coming down at last like an overbearing mentor
upon the small engagements of the pupil.
In the life of the individual it takes the role that the growth of
philosophy, science, and creative literature may play in the development
of mankind.
2
It is curious to recall how Britten helped shatter that obvious,
lucidly explicable presentation of myself upon which I had embarked
with Margaret. He returned to revive a memory of adolescent dreams and a
habit of adolescent frankness; he reached through my shallow frontage
as no one else seemed capable of doing, and dragged that back-self into
relation with it.
I remember very distinctly a dinner and a subsequent walk with him
which presents itself now as altogether typical of the quality of his
influence.
I had come upon him one day while lunching with Somers and Sutton at
the Playwrights' Club, and had asked him to dinner on the spur of the
moment. He was oddly the same curly-headed, red-faced ventriloquist, and
oddly different, rather seedy as well as untidy, and at first a little
inclined to make comparisons with my sleek successfulness. But that
disposition presently evaporated, and his talk was good and fresh and
provocative. And something that had long been straining at its checks in
my mind flapped over, and he and I found ourselves of one accord.
Altiora wasn't at this dinner. When she came matters were apt to become
confusedly strenuous. There was always a slight and ineffectual struggle
at the end on the part of Margaret to anticipate Altiora's overpowering
tendency to a rally and the establishment of some entirely unjustifiable
conclusion by a COUP-DE-MAIN. When, however, Altiora was absent, the
quieter influence of the Cramptons prevailed; temperance and information
for its own sake prevailed excessively over dinner and the play of
thought.... Good Lord! what bores the Cramptons were! I wonder I
endured them as I did. They had all of them the trick of lying in wait
conversationally; they had no sense of the self-exposures, the gallant
experiments in statement that are necessary for good conversation. They
would watch one talking with an expression exactly like peeping through
bushes. Then they would, as it were, dash out, dissent succinctly,
contradict some secondary fact, and back to cover. They gave one
twilight nerves. Their wives were easier but still difficult at a
stretch; they talked a good deal about children and servants, but with
an air caught from Altiora of making observations upon sociological
types. Lewis gossiped about the House in an entirely finite manner. He
never raised a discussion; nobody ever raised a discussion. He would ask
what we thought of Evesham's question that afternoon, and Edward would
say it was good, and Mrs. Willie, who had been behind the grille, would
think it was very good, and then Willie, parting the branches, would say
rather conclusively that he didn't think it was very much good, and I
would deny hearing the question in order to evade a profitless statement
of views in that vacuum, and then we would cast about in our minds for
some other topic of equal interest....
On this occasion Altiora was absent, and to qualify our Young Liberal
bleakness we had Mrs. Millingham, with her white hair and her fresh mind
and complexion, and Esmeer. Willie Crampton was with us, but not his
wife, who was having her third baby on principle; his brother Edward was
present, and the Lewises, and of course the Bunting Harblows. There was
also some other lady. I remember her as pale blue, but for the life of
me I cannot remember her name.
Quite early there was a little breeze between Edward Crampton and
Esmeer, who had ventured an opinion about the partition of Poland.
Edward was at work then upon the seventh volume of his monumental Life
of Kosciusko, and a little impatient with views perhaps not altogether
false but betraying a lamentable ignorance of accessible literature. At
any rate, his correction of Esmeer was magisterial. After that there was
a distinct and not altogether delightful pause, and then some one, it
may have been the pale-blue lady, asked Mrs. Lewis whether her aunt Lady
Carmixter had returned from her rest-and-sun-cure in Italy. That led to
a rather anxiously sustained talk about regimen, and Willie told us how
he had profited by the no-breakfast system. It had increased his power
of work enormously. He could get through ten hours a day now without
inconvenience.
“What do you do?” said Esmeer abruptly.
“Oh! no end of work. There's all the estate and looking after things.”
“But publicly?”
“I asked three questions yesterday. And for one of them I had to consult
nine books!”
We were drifting, I could see, towards Doctor Haig's system of dietary,
and whether the exclusion or inclusion of fish and chicken were most
conducive to high efficiency, when Britten, who had refused lemonade
and claret and demanded Burgundy, broke out, and was discovered to be
demanding in his throat just what we Young Liberals thought we were up
to?
“I want,” said Britten, repeating his challenge a little louder, “to
hear just exactly what you think you are doing in Parliament?”
Lewis laughed nervously, and thought we were “Seeking the Good of the
Community.”
“HOW?”
“Beneficient Legislation,” said Lewis.
“Beneficient in what direction?” insisted Britten. “I want to know where
you think you are going.”
“Amelioration of Social Conditions,” said Lewis.
“That's only a phrase!”
“You wouldn't have me sketch bills at dinner?”
“I'd like you to indicate directions,” said Britten, and waited.
“Upward and On,” said Lewis with conscious neatness, and turned to ask
Mrs. Bunting Harblow about her little boy's French.
For a time talk frothed over Britten's head, but the natural mischief
in Mrs. Millingham had been stirred, and she was presently echoing his
demand in lisping, quasi-confidential undertones. “What ARE we Liberals
doing?” Then Esmeer fell in with the revolutionaries.
To begin with, I was a little shocked by this clamour for
fundamentals--and a little disconcerted. I had the experience that I
suppose comes to every one at times of discovering oneself together with
two different sets of people with whom one has maintained two different
sets of attitudes. It had always been, I perceived, an instinctive
suppression in our circle that we shouldn't be more than vague about our
political ideals. It had almost become part of my morality to respect
this convention. It was understood we were all working hard, and keeping
ourselves fit, tremendously fit, under Altiora's inspiration, Pro Bono
Publico. Bunting Harblow had his under-secretaryship, and Lewis was on
the verge of the Cabinet, and these things we considered to be in the
nature of confirmations.... It added to the discomfort of the situation
that these plunging enquiries were being made in the presence of our
wives.
The rebel section of our party forced the talk.
Edward Crampton was presently declaring--I forget in what relation: “The
country is with us.”
My long-controlled hatred of the Cramptons' stereotyped phrases about
the Country and the House got the better of me. I showed my cloven hoof
to my friends for the first time.
“We don't respect the Country as we used to do,” I said. “We haven't
the same belief we used to have in the will of the people. It's no
good, Crampton, trying to keep that up. We Liberals know as a matter of
fact--nowadays every one knows--that the monster that brought us into
power has, among other deficiencies, no head. We've got to give it
one--if possible with brains and a will. That lies in the future. For
the present if the country is with us, it means merely that we happen to
have hold of its tether.”
Lewis was shocked. A “mandate” from the Country was sacred to his system
of pretences.
Britten wasn't subdued by his first rebuff; presently he was at
us again. There were several attempts to check his outbreak of
interrogation; I remember the Cramptons asked questions about the
welfare of various cousins of Lewis who were unknown to the rest of us,
and Margaret tried to engage Britten in a sympathetic discussion of the
Arts and Crafts exhibition. But Britten and Esmeer were persistent, Mrs.
Millingham was mischievous, and in the end our rising hopes of Young
Liberalism took to their thickets for good, while we talked all over
them of the prevalent vacuity of political intentions. Margaret was
perplexed by me. It is only now I perceive just how perplexing I must
have been. “Of course, she said with that faint stress of apprehension
in her eyes, one must have aims.” And, “it isn't always easy to put
everything into phrases.” “Don't be long,” said Mrs. Edward Crampton
to her husband as the wives trooped out. And afterwards when we went
upstairs I had an indefinable persuasion that the ladies had been
criticising Britten's share in our talk in an altogether unfavourable
spirit. Mrs. Edward evidently thought him aggressive and impertinent,
and Margaret with a quiet firmness that brooked no resistance, took him
at once into a corner and showed him Italian photographs by Coburn. We
dispersed early.
I walked with Britten along the Chelsea back streets towards Battersea
Bridge--he lodged on the south side.
“Mrs. Millingham's a dear,” he began.
“She's a dear.”
“I liked her demand for a hansom because a four-wheeler was too safe.”
“She was worked up,” I said. “She's a woman of faultless character, but
her instincts, as Altiora would say, are anarchistic--when she gives
them a chance.”
“So she takes it out in hansom cabs.”
“Hansom cabs.”
“She's wise,” said Britten....
“I hope, Remington,” he went on after a pause, “I didn't rag your other
guests too much. I've a sort of feeling at moments--Remington, those
chaps are so infernally not--not bloody. It's part of a man's duty
sometimes at least to eat red beef and get drunk. How is he to
understand government if he doesn't? It scares me to think of your
lot--by a sort of misapprehension--being in power. A kind of neuralgia
in the head, by way of government. I don't understand where YOU come in.
Those others--they've no lusts. Their ideal is anaemia. You and I,
we had at least a lust to take hold of life and make something of it.
They--they want to take hold of life and make nothing of it. They want
to cut out all the stimulants. Just as though life was anything else but
a reaction to stimulation!”...
He began to talk of his own life. He had had ill-fortune through most
of it. He was poor and unsuccessful, and a girl he had been very fond
of had been attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a very horrible
manner. These things had wounded and tortured him, but they hadn't
broken him. They had, it seemed to me, made a kind of crippled and ugly
demigod of him. He was, I began to perceive, so much better than I had
any right to expect. At first I had been rather struck by his unkempt
look, and it made my reaction all the stronger. There was about him
something, a kind of raw and bleeding faith in the deep things of
life, that stirred me profoundly as he showed it. My set of people had
irritated him and disappointed him. I discovered at his touch how they
irritated him. He reproached me boldly. He made me feel ashamed of my
easy acquiescences as I walked in my sleek tall neatness beside his
rather old coat, his rather battered hat, his sturdier shorter shape,
and listened to his denunciations of our self-satisfied New Liberalism
and Progressivism.
“It has the same relation to progress--the reality of progress--that the
things they paint on door panels in the suburbs have to art and beauty.
There's a sort of filiation.... Your Altiora's just the political
equivalent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for embroidery; she's
a dealer in Refined Social Reform for the Parlour. The real progress,
Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller thing and a slower thing
altogether. Look! THAT”--and he pointed to where under a boarding in the
light of a gas lamp a dingy prostitute stood lurking--“was in Babylon
and Nineveh. Your little lot make believe there won't be anything of the
sort after this Parliament! They're going to vanish at a few top notes
from Altiora Bailey! Remington!--it's foolery. It's prigs at play.
It's make-believe, make-believe! Your people there haven't got hold of
things, aren't beginning to get hold of things, don't know anything of
life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean rooms
and talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night goes by
outside--untouched. Those Crampton fools slink by all this,”--he
waved at the woman again--“pretend it doesn't exist, or is going to be
banished root and branch by an Act to keep children in the wet outside
public-houses. Do you think they really care, Remington? I don't. It's
make-believe. What they want to do, what Lewis wants to do, what Mrs.
Bunting Harblow wants her husband to do, is to sit and feel very grave
and necessary and respected on the Government benches. They think of
putting their feet out like statesmen, and tilting shiny hats with
becoming brims down over their successful noses. Presentation portrait
to a club at fifty. That's their Reality. That's their scope. They
don't, it's manifest, WANT to think beyond that. The things there ARE,
Remington, they'll never face! the wonder and the depth of life,--lust,
and the night-sky,--pain.”
“But the good intention,” I pleaded, “the Good Will!”
“Sentimentality,” said Britten. “No Good Will is anything but dishonesty
unless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man. That lot of
yours have nothing but a good will to think they have good will. Do you
think they lie awake of nights searching their hearts as we do? Lewis?
Crampton? Or those neat, admiring, satisfied little wives? See how they
shrank from the probe!”
“We all,” I said, “shrink from the probe.”
“God help us!” said Britten....
“We are but vermin at the best, Remington,” he broke out, “and the
greatest saint only a worm that has lifted its head for a moment from
the dust. We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral animalculae
building upward, upward in a sea of damnation. But of all the damned
things that ever were damned, your damned shirking, temperate,
sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make-believe,
Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is the utterly damnedest.” He paused for
a moment, and resumed in an entirely different note: “Which is why I was
so surprised, Remington, to find YOU in this set!”
“You're just the old plunger you used to be, Britten,” I said. “You're
going too far with all your might for the sake of the damns. Like a
donkey that drags its cart up a bank to get thistles. There's depths in
Liberalism--”
“We were talking about Liberals.”
“Liberty!”
“Liberty! What do YOOR little lot know of liberty?”
“What does any little lot know of liberty?”
“It waits outside, too big for our understanding. Like the night and the
stars. And lust, Remington! lust and bitterness! Don't I know them? with
all the sweetness and hope of life bitten and trampled, the dear eyes
and the brain that loved and understood--and my poor mumble of a life
going on! I'm within sight of being a drunkard, Remington! I'm a failure
by most standards! Life has cut me to the bone. But I'm not afraid of it
any more. I've paid something of the price, I've seen something of the
meaning.”
He flew off at a tangent. “I'd rather die in Delirium Tremens,” he
cried, “than be a Crampton or a Lewis....”
“Make-believe. Make-believe.” The phrase and Britten's squat gestures
haunted me as I walked homeward alone. I went to my room and stood
before my desk and surveyed papers and files and Margaret's admirable
equipment of me.
I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions that so it was
Mr. George Alexander would have mounted a statesman's private room....
3
I was never at any stage a loyal party man. I doubt if party will
ever again be the force it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Men are becoming increasingly constructive and selective,
less patient under tradition and the bondage of initial circumstances.
As education becomes more universal and liberating, men will sort
themselves more and more by their intellectual temperaments and less and
less by their accidental associations. The past will rule them less; the
future more. It is not simply party but school and college and county
and country that lose their glamour. One does not hear nearly as much
as our forefathers did of the “old Harrovian,” “old Arvonian,” “old
Etonian” claim to this or that unfair advantage or unearnt sympathy.
Even the Scotch and the Devonians weaken a little in their clannishness.
A widening sense of fair play destroys such things. They follow
freemasonry down--freemasonry of which one is chiefly reminded nowadays
in England by propitiatory symbols outside shady public-houses....
There is, of course, a type of man which clings very obstinately to
party ties. These are the men with strong reproductive imaginations
and no imaginative initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example, or
Dayton. They are the scholars-at-large in life. For them the fact that
the party system has been essential in the history of England for two
hundred years gives it an overwhelming glamour. They have read histories
and memoirs, they see the great grey pile of Westminster not so much
for what it is as for what it was, rich with dramatic memories, populous
with glorious ghosts, phrasing itself inevitably in anecdotes and
quotations. It seems almost scandalous that new things should continue
to happen, swamping with strange qualities the savour of these old
associations.
That Mr. Ramsay Macdonald should walk through Westminster Hall, thrust
himself, it may be, through the very piece of space that once held
Charles the Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible profanation to
Dayton, a last posthumous outrage; and he would, I think, like to have
the front benches left empty now for ever, or at most adorned with
laureated ivory tablets: “Here Dizzy sat,” and “On this Spot William
Ewart Gladstone made his First Budget Speech.” Failing this, he demands,
if only as signs of modesty and respect on the part of the survivors,
meticulous imitation. “Mr. G.,” he murmurs, “would not have done that,”
and laments a vanished subtlety even while Mr. Evesham is speaking. He
is always gloomily disposed to lapse into wonderings about what
things are coming to, wonderings that have no grain of curiosity. His
conception of perfect conduct is industrious persistence along the
worn-down, well-marked grooves of the great recorded days. So infinitely
more important to him is the documented, respected thing than the
elusive present.
Cladingbowl and Dayton do not shine in the House, though Cladingbowl is
a sound man on a committee, and Dayton keeps the OLD COUNTRY GAZETTE,
the most gentlemanly paper in London. They prevail, however, in their
clubs at lunch time. There, with the pleasant consciousness of a
morning's work free from either zeal or shirking, they mingle with
permanent officials, prominent lawyers, even a few of the soberer type
of business men, and relax their minds in the discussion of the morning
paper, of the architecture of the West End, and of the latest public
appointments, of golf, of holiday resorts, of the last judicial
witticisms and forensic “crushers.” The New Year and Birthday honours
lists are always very sagely and exhaustively considered, and anecdotes
are popular and keenly judged. They do not talk of the things that are
really active in their minds, but in the formal and habitual manner they
suppose to be proper to intelligent but still honourable men. Socialism,
individual money matters, and religion are forbidden topics, and sex and
women only in so far as they appear in the law courts. It is to me
the strangest of conventions, this assumption of unreal loyalties and
traditional respects, this repudiation and concealment of passionate
interests. It is like wearing gloves in summer fields, or bathing in a
gown, or falling in love with the heroine of a novel, or writing under a
pseudonym, or becoming a masked Tuareg....
It is not, I think, that men of my species are insensitive to the great
past that is embodied in Westminster and its traditions; we are not so
much wanting in the historical sense as alive to the greatness of our
present opportunities and the still vaster future that is possible to
us. London is the most interesting, beautiful, and wonderful city in the
world to me, delicate in her incidental and multitudinous littleness,
and stupendous in her pregnant totality; I cannot bring myself to use
her as a museum or an old bookshop. When I think of Whitehall that
little affair on the scaffold outside the Banqueting Hall seems trivial
and remote in comparison with the possibilities that offer themselves to
my imagination within the great grey Government buildings close at hand.
It gives me a qualm of nostalgia even to name those places now. I think
of St. Stephen's tower streaming upwards into the misty London night and
the great wet quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which the hansom cabs
of my first experiences were ousted more and more by taxicabs as the
second Parliament of King Edward the Seventh aged; I think of the
Admiralty and War office with their tall Marconi masts sending out
invisible threads of direction to the armies in the camps, to great
fleets about the world. The crowded, darkly shining river goes flooding
through my memory once again, on to those narrow seas that part us
from our rival nations; I see quadrangles and corridors of spacious
grey-toned offices in which undistinguished little men and little files
of papers link us to islands in the tropics, to frozen wildernesses
gashed for gold, to vast temple-studded plains, to forest worlds
and mountain worlds, to ports and fortresses and lighthouses and
watch-towers and grazing lands and corn lands all about the globe. Once
more I traverse Victoria Street, grimy and dark, where the Agents of the
Empire jostle one another, pass the big embassies in the West End
with their flags and scutcheons, follow the broad avenue that leads to
Buckingham Palace, witness the coming and going of troops and officials
and guests along it from every land on earth.... Interwoven in the
texture of it all, mocking, perplexing, stimulating beyond measure, is
the gleaming consciousness, the challenging knowledge: “You and your
kind might still, if you could but grasp it here, mould all the destiny
of Man!”
4
My first three years in Parliament were years of active discontent. The
little group of younger Liberals to which I belonged was very ignorant
of the traditions and qualities of our older leaders, and quite out of
touch with the mass of the party. For a time Parliament was enormously
taken up with moribund issues and old quarrels. The early Educational
legislation was sectarian and unenterprising, and the Licensing Bill
went little further than the attempted rectification of a Conservative
mistake. I was altogether for the nationalisation of the public-houses,
and of this end the Bill gave no intimations. It was just beer-baiting.
I was recalcitrant almost from the beginning, and spoke against the
Government so early as the second reading of the first Education Bill,
the one the Lords rejected in 1906. I went a little beyond my intention
in the heat of speaking,--it is a way with inexperienced man. I called
the Bill timid, narrow, a mere sop to the jealousies of sects and
little-minded people. I contrasted its aim and methods with the manifest
needs of the time.
I am not a particularly good speaker; after the manner of a writer I
worry to find my meaning too much; but this was one of my successes. I
spoke after dinner and to a fairly full House, for people were already
a little curious about me because of my writings. Several of the
Conservative leaders were present and stayed, and Mr. Evesham,
I remember, came ostentatiously to hear me, with that engaging
friendliness of his, and gave me at the first chance an approving “Hear,
Hear!” I can still recall quite distinctly my two futile attempts to
catch the Speaker's eye before I was able to begin, the nervous quiver
of my rather too prepared opening, the effect of hearing my own voice
and my subconscious wonder as to what I could possibly be talking
about, the realisation that I was getting on fairly well, the immense
satisfaction afterwards of having on the whole brought it off, and the
absurd gratitude I felt for that encouraging cheer.
Addressing the House of Commons is like no other public speaking in the
world. Its semi-colloquial methods give it an air of being easy, but
its shifting audience, the comings and goings and hesitations of members
behind the chair--not mere audience units, but men who matter--the
desolating emptiness that spreads itself round the man who fails to
interest, the little compact, disciplined crowd in the strangers'
gallery, the light, elusive, flickering movements high up behind the
grill, the wigged, attentive, weary Speaker, the table and the mace
and the chapel-like Gothic background with its sombre shadows, conspire
together, produce a confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I was
walking upon a pavement full of trap-doors and patches of uncovered
morass. A misplaced, well-meant “Hear, Hear!” is apt to be
extraordinarily disconcerting, and under no other circumstances have I
had to speak with quite the same sideways twist that the arrangement of
the House imposes. One does not recognise one's own voice threading out
into the stirring brown. Unless I was excited or speaking to the mind of
some particular person in the house, I was apt to lose my feeling of an
auditor. I had no sense of whither my sentences were going, such as one
has with a public meeting well under one's eye. And to lose one's sense
of an auditor is for a man of my temperament to lose one's sense of the
immediate, and to become prolix and vague with qualifications.
5
My discontents with the Liberal party and my mental exploration of
the quality of party generally is curiously mixed up with certain
impressions of things and people in the National Liberal Club. The
National Liberal Club is Liberalism made visible in the flesh--and
Doultonware. It is an extraordinary big club done in a bold, wholesale,
shiny, marbled style, richly furnished with numerous paintings, steel
engravings, busts, and full-length statues of the late Mr. Gladstone;
and its spacious dining-rooms, its long, hazy, crowded smoking-room with
innumerable little tables and groups of men in armchairs, its
magazine room and library upstairs, have just that undistinguished and
unconcentrated diversity which is for me the Liberal note. The pensive
member sits and hears perplexing dialects and even fragments of foreign
speech, and among the clustering masses of less insistent whites his
roving eye catches profiles and complexions that send his mind afield to
Calcutta or Rangoon or the West Indies or Sierra Leone or the Cape....
I was not infrequently that pensive member. I used to go to the Club to
doubt about Liberalism.
About two o'clock in the day the great smoking-room is crowded with
countless little groups. They sit about small round tables, or in
circles of chairs, and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the great
narrow place, with its pillars and bays, to infinity. Some of the groups
are big, as many as a dozen men talk in loud tones; some are duologues,
and there is always a sprinkling of lonely, dissociated men. At first
one gets an impression of men going from group to group and as it were
linking them, but as one watches closely one finds that these men just
visit three or four groups at the outside, and know nothing of the
others. One begins to perceive more and more distinctly that one is
dealing with a sort of human mosaic; that each patch in that great place
is of a different quality and colour from the next and never to be mixed
with it. Most clubs have a common link, a lowest common denominator in
the Club Bore, who spares no one, but even the National Liberal bores
are specialised and sectional. As one looks round one sees here a clump
of men from the North Country or the Potteries, here an island of
South London politicians, here a couple of young Jews ascendant from
Whitechapel, here a circle of journalists and writers, here a group of
Irish politicians, here two East Indians, here a priest or so, here
a clump of old-fashioned Protestants, here a little knot of eminent
Rationalists indulging in a blasphemous story SOTTO VOCE. Next them are
a group of anglicised Germans and highly specialised chess-players,
and then two of the oddest-looking persons--bulging with documents and
intent upon extraordinary business transactions over long cigars....
I would listen to a stormy sea of babblement, and try to extract some
constructive intimations. Every now and then I got a whiff of politics.
It was clear they were against the Lords--against plutocrats--against
Cossington's newspapers--against the brewers.... It was tremendously
clear what they were against. The trouble was to find out what on earth
they were for!...
As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled pillars and wall, the
various views, aspects, and portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the
partitions of polished mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, would
dissolve and vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample of
miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests and a universal
littleness of imagination enlarged, unlimited, no longer a sample but a
community, spreading, stretching out to infinity--all in little groups
and duologues and circles, all with their special and narrow concerns,
all with their backs to most of the others.
What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes together?
I understood why modern electioneering is more than half of it
denunciation. Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct and deprive,
but not let us do. There is no real appeal to the commonplace mind in
“Let us do.” That calls for the creative imagination, and few have been
accustomed to respond to that call. The other merely needs jealousy and
bate, of which there are great and easily accessible reservoirs in every
human heart....
I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous individuality very
vividly. A seething limitlessness it became at last, like a waste place
covered by crawling locusts that men sweep up by the sackload and drown
by the million in ditches....
Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the sidelong shy
movements of Edward Crampton, seated in a circle of talkers close at
hand. I had a whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold! he was
saying something about the “Will of the People....”
The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life! I forgot the
smoke and jabber of the club altogether; I became a lonely spirit flung
aloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a ledge in some high and
rocky wilderness, and below as far as the eye could reach stretched the
swarming infinitesimals of humanity, like grass upon the field, like
pebbles upon unbounded beaches. Was there ever to be in human life
more than that endless struggling individualism? Was there indeed some
giantry, some immense valiant synthesis, still to come--or present it
might be and still unseen by me, or was this the beginning and withal
the last phase of mankind?...
I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions,
the tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is implicitly
addressed. I was as it were one of a little swarm of would-be reef
builders looking back at the teeming slime upon the ocean floor. All the
history of mankind, all the history of life, has been and will be
the story of something struggling out of the indiscriminated abyss,
struggling to exist and prevail over and comprehend individual lives--an
effort of insidious attraction, an idea of invincible appeal. That
something greater than ourselves, which does not so much exist as seek
existence, palpitating between being and not-being, how marvellous it
is! It has worn the form and visage of ten thousand different gods,
sought a shape for itself in stone and ivory and music and wonderful
words, spoken more and more clearly of a mystery of love, a mystery
of unity, dabbling meanwhile in blood and cruelty beyond the common
impulses of men. It is something that comes and goes, like a light that
shines and is withdrawn, withdrawn so completely that one doubts if it
has ever been....
6
I would mark with a curious interest the stray country member of
the club up in town for a night or so. My mind would be busy with
speculations about him, about his home, his family, his reading, his
horizons, his innumerable fellows who didn't belong and never came up.
I would fill in the outline of him with memories of my uncle and his
Staffordshire neighbours. He was perhaps Alderman This or Councillor
That down there, a great man in his ward, J. P. within seven miles of
the boundary of the borough, and a God in his home. Here he was nobody,
and very shy, and either a little too arrogant or a little too meek
towards our very democratic mannered but still livened waiters. Was
he perhaps the backbone of England? He over-ate himself lest he should
appear mean, went through our Special Dinner conscientiously, drank,
unless he was teetotal, of unfamiliar wines, and did his best, in spite
of the rules, to tip. Afterwards, in a state of flushed repletion, he
would have old brandy, black coffee, and a banded cigar, or in the
name of temperance omit the brandy and have rather more coffee, in
the smoking-room. I would sit and watch that stiff dignity of
self-indulgence, and wonder, wonder....
An infernal clairvoyance would come to me. I would have visions of him
in relation to his wife, checking always, sometimes bullying, sometimes
being ostentatiously “kind”; I would see him glance furtively at his
domestic servants upon his staircase, or stiffen his upper lip against
the reluctant, protesting business employee. We imaginative people
are base enough, heaven knows, but it is only in rare moods of bitter
penetration that we pierce down to the baser lusts, the viler shames,
the everlasting lying and muddle-headed self-justification of the dull.
I would turn my eyes down the crowded room and see others of him and
others. What did he think he was up to? Did he for a moment realise that
his presence under that ceramic glory of a ceiling with me meant, if it
had any rational meaning at all, that we were jointly doing something
with the nation and the empire and mankind?... How on earth could any
one get hold of him, make any noble use of him? He didn't read beyond
his newspaper. He never thought, but only followed imaginings in his
heart. He never discussed. At the first hint of discussion his temper
gave way. He was, I knew, a deep, thinly-covered tank of resentments
and quite irrational moral rages. Yet withal I would have to resist an
impulse to go over to him and nudge him and say to him, “Look here!
What indeed do you think we are doing with the nation and the empire and
mankind? You know--MANKIND!”