9
My ideas about statecraft have passed through three main phases to the
final convictions that remain. There was the first immediacy of my dream
of ports and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and administered
territories--the vision I had seen in the haze from that little church
above Locarno. Slowly that had passed into a more elaborate legislative
constructiveness, which had led to my uneasy association with the
Baileys and the professedly constructive Young Liberals. To get that
ordered life I had realised the need of organisation, knowledge,
expertness, a wide movement of co-ordinated methods. On the individual
side I thought that a life of urgent industry, temperance, and close
attention was indicated by my perception of these ends. I married
Margaret and set to work. But something in my mind refused from the
outset to accept these determinations as final. There was always a doubt
lurking below, always a faint resentment, a protesting criticism, a
feeling of vitally important omissions.
I arrived at last at the clear realisation that my political associates,
and I in my association with them, were oddly narrow, priggish, and
unreal, that the Socialists with whom we were attempting co-operation
were preposterously irrelevant to their own theories, that my political
life didn't in some way comprehend more than itself, that rather
perplexingly I was missing the thing I was seeking. Britten's footnotes
to Altiora's self-assertions, her fits of energetic planning, her
quarrels and rallies and vanities, his illuminating attacks on
Cramptonism and the heavy-spirited triviality of such Liberalism as the
Children's Charter, served to point my way to my present conclusions.
I had been trying to deal all along with human progress as something
immediate in life, something to be immediately attacked by political
parties and groups pointing primarily to that end. I now began to
see that just as in my own being there was the rather shallow, rather
vulgar, self-seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and
bustled self-consciously through the lobby, and a much greater and
indefinitely growing unpublished personality behind him--my hinterland,
I have called it--so in human affairs generally the permanent reality
is also a hinterland, which is never really immediate, which draws
continually upon human experience and influences human action more and
more, but which is itself never the actual player upon the stage. It is
the unseen dramatist who never takes a call. Now it was just through the
fact that our group about the Baileys didn't understand this, that with
a sort of frantic energy they were trying to develop that sham expert
officialdom of theirs to plan, regulate, and direct the affairs of
humanity, that the perplexing note of silliness and shallowness that I
had always felt and felt now most acutely under Britten's gibes, came
in. They were neglecting human life altogether in social organisation.
In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of
statesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and all
organising spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and
achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders of
men, have always slipped into the error of assuming that they can think
out the whole--or at any rate completely think out definite parts--of
the purpose and future of man, clearly and finally; they have set
themselves to legislate and construct on that assumption, and,
experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have
taken to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secretive education; and
all the stupidities of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of their
good intentions they have not hesitated to conceal fact, suppress
thought, crush disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental
desires. And so it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with
the making, that any extension of social organisation is at present
achieved.
Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is
grasped, directly the dominating importance of this critical, less
personal, mental hinterland in the individual and of the collective mind
in the race is understood, the whole problem of the statesman and
his attitude towards politics gain a new significance, and becomes
accessible to a new series of solutions. He wants no longer to “fix
up,” as people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces to the
development of that needed intellectual life without which all his
shallow attempts at fixing up are futile. He ceases to build on the
sands, and sets himself to gather foundations.
You see, I began in my teens by wanting to plan and build cities and
harbours for mankind; I ended in the middle thirties by desiring only
to serve and increase a general process of thought, a process fearless,
critical, real-spirited, that would in its own time give cities,
harbours, air, happiness, everything at a scale and quality and in
a light altogether beyond the match-striking imaginations of a
contemporary mind. I wanted freedom of speech and suggestion, vigour of
thought, and the cultivation of that impulse of veracity that lurks
more or less discouraged in every man. With that I felt there must go an
emotion. I hit upon a phrase that became at last something of a refrain
in my speech and writings, to convey the spirit that I felt was at the
very heart of real human progress--love and fine thinking.
(I suppose that nowadays no newspaper in England gets through a week
without the repetition of that phrase.)
My convictions crystallised more and more definitely upon this. The
more of love and fine thinking the better for men, I said; the less,
the worse. And upon this fresh basis I set myself to examine what I as
a politician might do. I perceived I was at last finding an adequate
expression for all that was in me, for those forces that had rebelled at
the crude presentations of Bromstead, at the secrecies and suppressions
of my youth, at the dull unrealities of City Merchants, at the
conventions and timidities of the Pinky Dinkys, at the philosophical
recluse of Trinity and the phrases and tradition-worship of my political
associates. None of these things were half alive, and I wanted life to
be intensely alive and awake. I wanted thought like an edge of steel and
desire like a flame. The real work before mankind now, I realised once
and for all, is the enlargement of human expression, the release and
intensification of human thought, the vivider utilisation of experience
and the invigoration of research--and whatever one does in human affairs
has or lacks value as it helps or hinders that.
With that I had got my problem clear, and the solution, so far as I
was concerned, lay in finding out the point in the ostensible life of
politics at which I could most subserve these ends. I was still against
the muddles of Bromstead, but I had hunted them down now to their
essential form. The jerry-built slums, the roads that went nowhere,
the tarred fences, litigious notice-boards and barbed wire fencing, the
litter and the heaps of dump, were only the outward appearances whose
ultimate realities were jerry-built conclusions, hasty purposes, aimless
habits of thought, and imbecile bars and prohibitions in the thoughts
and souls of men. How are we through politics to get at that confusion?
We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education. We want to create a
sustained counter effort to the perpetual tendency of all educational
organisations towards classicalism, secondary issues, and the evasion of
life.
We want to stimulate the expression of life through art and literature,
and its exploration through research.
We want to make the best and finest thought accessible to every one,
and more particularly to create and sustain an enormous free criticism,
without which art, literature, and research alike degenerate into
tradition or imposture.
Then all the other problems which are now so insoluble, destitution,
disease, the difficulty of maintaining international peace, the scarcely
faced possibility of making life generally and continually beautiful,
become--EASY....
It was clear to me that the most vital activities in which I could
engage would be those which most directly affected the Church, public
habits of thought, education, organised research, literature, and the
channels of general discussion. I had to ask myself how my position
as Liberal member for Kinghamstead squared with and conduced to this
essential work.