1
I have told of my gradual abandonment of the pretensions and habits of
party Liberalism. In a sense I was moving towards aristocracy. Regarding
the development of the social and individual mental hinterland as the
essential thing in human progress, I passed on very naturally to the
practical assumption that we wanted what I may call “hinterlanders.” Of
course I do not mean by aristocracy the changing unorganised medley of
rich people and privileged people who dominate the civilised world of
to-day, but as opposed to this, a possibility of co-ordinating the will
of the finer individuals, by habit and literature, into a broad common
aim. We must have an aristocracy--not of privilege, but of understanding
and purpose--or mankind will fail. I find this dawning more and more
clearly when I look through my various writings of the years between
1903 and 1910. I was already emerging to plain statements in 1908.
I reasoned after this fashion. The line of human improvement and the
expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and finer
initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far beyond anything
that is now provided, if it cannot collectively invent devices and solve
problems on a much richer, broader scale than it does at the present
time, it cannot hope to achieve any very much finer order or any more
general happiness than it now enjoys. We must believe, therefore, that
it CAN develop such a training and education, or we must abandon secular
constructive hope. And here my peculiar difficulty as against crude
democracy comes in. If humanity at large is capable of that high
education and those creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must
its better and more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have
power and leisure now, and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals,
cannot be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole
of humanity cannot be won to that. From that one passes to what
has become my general conception in politics, the conception of the
constructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful
people, clever people, enterprising people, influential people, amidst
whom power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-conscious, highly
selective, open-minded, devoted aristocratic culture, which seems to me
to be the necessary next phase in the development of human affairs.
I see human progress, not as the spontaneous product of crowds of raw
minds swayed by elementary needs, but as a natural but elaborate result
of intricate human interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity
liberated and acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, modified
and redirected by literature and art....
But now the reader will understand how it came about that, disappointed
by the essential littleness of Liberalism, and disillusioned about the
representative quality of the professed Socialists, I turned my
mind more and more to a scrutiny of the big people, the wealthy and
influential people, against whom Liberalism pits its forces. I was
asking myself definitely whether, after all, it was not my particular
job to work through them and not against them. Was I not altogether out
of my element as an Anti-? Weren't there big bold qualities about these
people that common men lack, and the possibility of far more splendid
dreams? Were they really the obstacles, might they not be rather the
vehicles of the possible new braveries of life?
2
The faults of the Imperialist movement were obvious enough. The
conception of the Boer War had been clumsy and puerile, the costly
errors of that struggle appalling, and the subsequent campaign of Mr.
Chamberlain for Tariff Reform seemed calculated to combine the financial
adventurers of the Empire in one vast conspiracy against the consumer.
The cant of Imperialism was easy to learn and use; it was speedily
adopted by all sorts of base enterprises and turned to all sorts of base
ends. But a big child is permitted big mischief, and my mind was
now continually returning to the persuasion that after all in some
development of the idea of Imperial patriotism might be found that wide,
rough, politically acceptable expression of a constructive dream capable
of sustaining a great educational and philosophical movement such as
no formula of Liberalism supplied. The fact that it readily took vulgar
forms only witnessed to its strong popular appeal. Mixed in with the
noisiness and humbug of the movement there appeared a real regard for
social efficiency, a real spirit of animation and enterprise. There
suddenly appeared in my world--I saw them first, I think, in 1908--a
new sort of little boy, a most agreeable development of the slouching,
cunning, cigarette-smoking, town-bred youngster, a small boy in a khaki
hat, and with bare knees and athletic bearing, earnestly engaged in
wholesome and invigorating games up to and occasionally a little beyond
his strength--the Boy Scout. I liked the Boy Scout, and I find it
difficult to express how much it mattered to me, with my growing bias in
favour of deliberate national training, that Liberalism hadn't been able
to produce, and had indeed never attempted to produce, anything of this
kind.
3
In those days there existed a dining club called--there was some lost
allusion to the exorcism of party feeling in its title--the Pentagram
Circle. It included Bailey and Dayton and myself, Sir Herbert Thorns,
Lord Charles Kindling, Minns the poet, Gerbault the big railway man,
Lord Gane, fresh from the settlement of Framboya, and Rumbold, who later
became Home Secretary and left us. We were men of all parties and very
various experiences, and our object was to discuss the welfare of the
Empire in a disinterested spirit. We dined monthly at the Mermaid in
Westminster, and for a couple of years we kept up an average attendance
of ten out of fourteen. The dinner-time was given up to desultory
conversation, and it is odd how warm and good the social atmosphere of
that little gathering became as time went on; then over the dessert, so
soon as the waiters had swept away the crumbs and ceased to fret us, one
of us would open with perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes' exposition
of some specially prepared question, and after him we would deliver
ourselves in turn, each for three or four minutes. When every one
present had spoken once talk became general again, and it was rare we
emerged upon Hendon Street before midnight. Sometimes, as my house
was conveniently near, a knot of men would come home with me and go on
talking and smoking in my dining-room until two or three. We had Fred
Neal, that wild Irish journalist, among us towards the end, and his
stupendous flow of words materially prolonged our closing discussions
and made our continuance impossible.
I learned very much and very many things at those dinners, but more
particularly did I become familiarised with the habits of mind of such
men as Neal, Crupp, Gane, and the one or two other New Imperialists
who belonged to us. They were nearly all like Bailey Oxford men, though
mostly of a younger generation, and they were all mysteriously and
inexplicably advocates of Tariff Reform, as if it were the principal
instead of at best a secondary aspect of constructive policy. They
seemed obsessed by the idea that streams of trade could be diverted
violently so as to link the parts of the Empire by common interests, and
they were persuaded, I still think mistakenly, that Tariff Reform would
have an immense popular appeal. They were also very keen on military
organisation, and with a curious little martinet twist in their minds
that boded ill for that side of public liberty. So much against them.
But they were disposed to spend money much more generously on education
and research of all sorts than our formless host of Liberals seemed
likely to do; and they were altogether more accessible than the Young
Liberals to bold, constructive ideas affecting the universities and
upper classes. The Liberals are abjectly afraid of the universities.
I found myself constantly falling into line with these men in our
discussions, and more and more hostile to Dayton's sentimentalising
evasions of definite schemes and Minns' trust in such things as the
“Spirit of our People” and the “General Trend of Progress.” It wasn't
that I thought them very much righter than their opponents; I believe
all definite party “sides” at any time are bound to be about equally
right and equally lop-sided; but that I thought I could get more out
of them and what was more important to me, more out of myself if I
co-operated with them. By 1908 I had already arrived at a point where I
could be definitely considering a transfer of my political allegiance.
These abstract questions are inseparably interwoven with my memory of a
shining long white table, and our hock bottles and burgundy bottles, and
bottles of Perrier and St. Galmier and the disturbed central trophy of
dessert, and scattered glasses and nut-shells and cigarette-ends and
menu-cards used for memoranda. I see old Dayton sitting back and cocking
his eye to the ceiling in a way he had while he threw warmth into the
ancient platitudes of Liberalism, and Minns leaning forward, and a
little like a cockatoo with a taste for confidences, telling us in a
hushed voice of his faith in the Destiny of Mankind. Thorns lounges,
rolling his round face and round eyes from speaker to speaker and
sounding the visible depths of misery whenever Neal begins. Gerbault
and Gane were given to conversation in undertones, and Bailey pursued
mysterious purposes in lisping whispers. It was Crupp attracted me most.
He had, as people say, his eye on me from the beginning. He used to
speak at me, and drifted into a custom of coming home with me very
regularly for an after-talk.
He opened his heart to me.
“Neither of us,” he said, “are dukes, and neither of us are horny-handed
sons of toil. We want to get hold of the handles, and to do that, one
must go where the power is, and give it just as constructive a twist as
we can. That's MY Toryism.”
“Is it Kindling's--or Gerbault's?”
“No. But theirs is soft, and mine's hard. Mine will wear theirs out. You
and I and Bailey are all after the same thing, and why aren't we working
together?”
“Are you a Confederate?” I asked suddenly.
“That's a secret nobody tells,” he said.
“What are the Confederates after?”
“Making aristocracy work, I suppose. Just as, I gather, you want to
do.”...
The Confederates were being heard of at that time. They were at once
attractive and repellent to me, an odd secret society whose membership
nobody knew, pledged, it was said, to impose Tariff Reform and an ample
constructive policy upon the Conservatives. In the press, at any rate,
they had an air of deliberately organised power. I have no doubt the
rumour of them greatly influenced my ideas....
In the end I made some very rapid decisions, but for nearly two years I
was hesitating. Hesitations were inevitable in such a matter. I was
not dealing with any simple question of principle, but with elusive and
fluctuating estimates of the trend of diverse forces and of the nature
of my own powers. All through that period I was asking over and over
again: how far are these Confederates mere dreamers? How far--and this
was more vital--are they rendering lip-service to social organisations?
Is it true they desire war because it confirms the ascendency of their
class? How far can Conservatism be induced to plan and construct before
it resists the thrust towards change. Is it really in bulk anything more
than a mass of prejudice and conceit, cynical indulgence, and a hard
suspicion of and hostility to the expropriated classes in the community?
That is a research which yields no statistics, an enquiry like asking
what is the ruling colour of a chameleon. The shadowy answer varied
with my health, varied with my mood and the conduct of the people I was
watching. How fine can people be? How generous?--not incidentally, but
all round? How far can you educate sons beyond the outlook of their
fathers, and how far lift a rich, proud, self-indulgent class above the
protests of its business agents and solicitors and its own habits and
vanity? Is chivalry in a class possible?--was it ever, indeed, or will
it ever indeed be possible? Is the progress that seems attainable in
certain directions worth the retrogression that may be its price?
4
It was to the Pentagram Circle that I first broached the new conceptions
that were developing in my mind. I count the evening of my paper the
beginning of the movement that created the BLUE WEEKLY and our wing of
the present New Tory party. I do that without any excessive egotism,
because my essay was no solitary man's production; it was my reaction
to forces that had come to me very large through my fellow-members; its
quick reception by them showed that I was, so to speak, merely the first
of the chestnuts to pop. The atmospheric quality of the evening stands
out very vividly in my memory. The night, I remember, was warmly foggy
when after midnight we went to finish our talk at my house.
We had recently changed the rules of the club to admit visitors, and
so it happened that I had brought Britten, and Crupp introduced Arnold
Shoesmith, my former schoolfellow at City Merchants, and now the
wealthy successor of his father and elder brother. I remember his heavy,
inexpressively handsome face lighting to his rare smile at the sight of
me, and how little I dreamt of the tragic entanglement that was destined
to involve us both. Gane was present, and Esmeer, a newly-added
member, but I think Bailey was absent. Either he was absent, or he said
something so entirely characteristic and undistinguished that it has
left no impression on my mind.
I had broken a little from the traditions of the club even in my title,
which was deliberately a challenge to the liberal idea: it was, “The
World Exists for Exceptional People.” It is not the title I should
choose now--for since that time I have got my phrase of “mental
hinterlander” into journalistic use. I should say now, “The World Exists
for Mental Hinterland.”
The notes I made of that opening have long since vanished with a
thousand other papers, but some odd chance has preserved and brought
with me to Italy the menu for the evening; its back black with the
scrawled notes I made of the discussion for my reply. I found it the
other day among some letters from Margaret and a copy of the 1909 Report
of the Poor Law Commission, also rich with pencilled marginalia.
My opening was a criticism of the democratic idea and method, upon lines
such as I have already sufficiently indicated in the preceding sections.
I remember how old Dayton fretted in his chair, and tushed and pished
at that, even as I gave it, and afterwards we were treated to one of his
platitudinous harangues, he sitting back in his chair with that small
obstinate eye of his fixed on the ceiling, and a sort of cadaverous glow
upon his face, repeating--quite regardless of all my reasoning and all
that had been said by others in the debate--the sacred empty phrases
that were his soul's refuge from reality. “You may think it very
clever,” he said with a nod of his head to mark his sense of his point,
“not to Trust in the People. I do.” And so on. Nothing in his life or
work had ever shown that he did trust in the people, but that was
beside the mark. He was the party Liberal, and these were the party
incantations.
After my preliminary attack on vague democracy I went on to show that
all human life was virtually aristocratic; people must either recognise
aristocracy in general or else follow leaders, which is aristocracy in
particular, and so I came to my point that the reality of human progress
lay necessarily through the establishment of freedoms for the human best
and a collective receptivity and understanding. There was a disgusted
grunt from Dayton, “Superman rubbish--Nietzsche. Shaw! Ugh!” I sailed on
over him to my next propositions. The prime essential in a progressive
civilisation was the establishment of a more effective selective process
for the privilege of higher education, and the very highest educational
opportunity for the educable. We were too apt to patronise scholarship
winners, as though a scholarship was toffee given as a reward for
virtue. It wasn't any reward at all; it was an invitation to capacity.
We had no more right to drag in virtue, or any merit but quality, than
we had to involve it in a search for the tallest man. We didn't want a
mere process for the selection of good as distinguished from gifted and
able boys--“No, you DON'T,” from Dayton--we wanted all the brilliant
stuff in the world concentrated upon the development of the world.
Just to exasperate Dayton further I put in a plea for gifts as against
character in educational, artistic, and legislative work. “Good
teaching,” I said, “is better than good conduct. We are becoming idiotic
about character.”
Dayton was too moved to speak. He slewed round upon me an eye of
agonised aversion.
I expatiated on the small proportion of the available ability that is
really serving humanity to-day. “I suppose to-day all the thought, all
the art, all the increments of knowledge that matter, are supplied so
far as the English-speaking community is concerned by--how many?--by
three or four thousand individuals. ['Less,' said Thorns.) To be
more precise, by the mental hinterlands of three or four thousand
individuals. We who know some of the band entertain no illusions as to
their innate rarity. We know that they are just the few out of many, the
few who got in our world of chance and confusion, the timely stimulus,
the apt suggestion at the fortunate moment, the needed training, the
leisure. The rest are lost in the crowd, fail through the defects of
their qualities, become commonplace workmen and second-rate professional
men, marry commonplace wives, are as much waste as the driftage of
superfluous pollen in a pine forest is waste.”
“Decent honest lives!” said Dayton to his bread-crumbs, with his chin in
his necktie. “WASTE!”
“And the people who do get what we call opportunity get it usually
in extremely limited and cramping forms. No man lives a life of
intellectual productivity alone; he needs not only material and
opportunity, but helpers, resonators. Round and about what I might
call the REAL men, you want the sympathetic cooperators, who help by
understanding. It isn't that our--SALT of three or four thousand is
needlessly rare; it is sustained by far too small and undifferentiated a
public. Most of the good men we know are not really doing the very
best work of their gifts; nearly all are a little adapted, most are
shockingly adapted to some second-best use. Now, I take it, this is the
very centre and origin of the muddle, futility, and unhappiness that
distresses us; it's the cardinal problem of the state--to discover,
develop, and use the exceptional gifts of men. And I see that best
done--I drift more and more away from the common stuff of legislative
and administrative activity--by a quite revolutionary development of the
educational machinery, but by a still more unprecedented attempt to
keep science going, to keep literature going, and to keep what is
the necessary spur of all science and literature, an intelligent and
appreciative criticism going. You know none of these things have ever
been kept going hitherto; they've come unexpectedly and inexplicably.”
“Hear, hear!” from Dayton, cough, nodding of the head, and an expression
of mystical profundity.
“They've lit up a civilisation and vanished, to give place to darkness
again. Now the modern state doesn't mean to go back to darkness
again--and so it's got to keep its light burning.” I went on to attack
the present organisation of our schools and universities, which
seemed elaborately designed to turn the well-behaved, uncritical, and
uncreative men of each generation into the authoritative leaders of the
next, and I suggested remedies upon lines that I have already indicated
in the earlier chapters of this story....
So far I had the substance of the club with me, but I opened new
ground and set Crupp agog by confessing my doubt from which party or
combination of groups these developments of science and literature and
educational organisation could most reasonably be expected. I looked up
to find Crupp's dark little eye intent upon me.
There I left it to them.
We had an astonishingly good discussion; Neal burst once, but we emerged
from his flood after a time, and Dayton had his interlude. The rest was
all close, keen examination of my problem.
I see Crupp now with his arm bent before him on the table in a way we
had, as though it was jointed throughout its length like a lobster's
antenna, his plump, short-fingered hand crushing up a walnut shell into
smaller and smaller fragments. “Remington,” he said, “has given us the
data for a movement, a really possible movement. It's not only possible,
but necessary--urgently necessary, I think, if the Empire is to go on.”
“We're working altogether too much at the social basement in education
and training,” said Gane. “Remington is right about our neglect of the
higher levels.”
Britten made a good contribution with an analysis of what he called the
spirit of a country and what made it. “The modern community needs its
serious men to be artistic and its artists to be taken seriously,” I
remember his saying. “The day has gone by for either dull responsibility
or merely witty art.”
I remember very vividly how Shoesmith harped on an idea I had thrown out
of using some sort of review or weekly to express and elaborate these
conceptions of a new, severer, aristocratic culture.
“It would have to be done amazingly well,” said Britten, and my mind
went back to my school days and that ancient enterprise of ours, and how
Cossington had rushed it. Well, Cossington had too many papers nowadays
to interfere with us, and we perhaps had learnt some defensive devices.
“But this thing has to be linked to some political party,” said Crupp,
with his eye on me. “You can't get away from that. The Liberals,” he
added, “have never done anything for research or literature.”
“They had a Royal Commission on the Dramatic Censorship,” said Thorns,
with a note of minute fairness. “It shows what they were made of,” he
added.
“It's what I've told Remington again and again,” said Crupp, “we've
got to pick up the tradition of aristocracy, reorganise it, and make it
work. But he's certainly suggested a method.”
“There won't be much aristocracy to pick up,” said Dayton, darkly to the
ceiling, “if the House of Lords throws out the Budget.”
“All the more reason for picking it up,” said Neal. “For we can't do
without it.”
“Will they go to the bad, or will they rise from the ashes, aristocrats
indeed--if the Liberals come in overwhelmingly?” said Britten.
“It's we who might decide that,” said Crupp, insidiously.
“I agree,” said Gane.
“No one can tell,” said Thorns. “I doubt if they will get beaten.”
It was an odd, fragmentary discussion that night. We were all with ideas
in our minds at once fine and imperfect. We threw out suggestions that
showed themselves at once far inadequate, and we tried to qualify them
by minor self-contradictions. Britten, I think, got more said than any
one. “You all seem to think you want to organise people, particular
groups and classes of individuals,” he insisted. “It isn't that. That's
the standing error of politicians. You want to organise a culture.
Civilisation isn't a matter of concrete groupings; it's a matter of
prevailing ideas. The problem is how to make bold, clear ideas prevail.
The question for Remington and us is just what groups of people will
most help this culture forward.”
“Yes, but how are the Lords going to behave?” said Crupp. “You yourself
were asking that a little while ago.”
“If they win or if they lose,” Gane maintained, “there will be a
movement to reorganise aristocracy--Reform of the House of Lords,
they'll call the political form of it.”
“Bailey thinks that,” said some one.
“The labour people want abolition,” said some one. “Let 'em,” said
Thorns.
He became audible, sketching a possibility of action.
“Suppose all of us were able to work together. It's just one of those
indeterminate, confused, eventful times ahead when a steady jet of ideas
might produce enormous results.”
“Leave me out of it,” said Dayton, “IF you please.”
“We should,” said Thorns under his breath.