“I believe we could do--extensive things,” I insisted.
“Revivals and revisions of Toryism have been tried so often,” said
Thorns, “from the Young England movement onward.”
“Not one but has produced its enduring effects,” I said. “It's the
peculiarity of English conservatism that it's persistently progressive
and rejuvenescent.”
I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled our
presence, after some clumsy sentence that I decided upon reflection was
intended to remind me of my duty to my party.
Then I remember Thorns firing doubts at me obliquely across the table.
“You can't run a country through its spoilt children,” he said. “What
you call aristocrats are really spoilt children. They've had too much of
everything, except bracing experience.”
“Children can always be educated,” said Crupp.
“I said SPOILT children,” said Thorns.
“Look here, Thorns!” said I. “If this Budget row leads to a storm, and
these big people get their power clipped, what's going to happen? Have
you thought of that? When they go out lock, stock, and barrel, who comes
in?”
“Nature abhors a Vacuum,” said Crupp, supporting me.
“Bailey's trained officials,” suggested Gane.
“Quacks with a certificate of approval from Altiora,” said Thorns. “I
admit the horrors of the alternative. There'd be a massacre in three
years.”
“One may go on trying possibilities for ever,” I said. “One thing
emerges. Whatever accidents happen, our civilisation needs, and almost
consciously needs, a culture of fine creative minds, and all the
necessary tolerances, opennesses, considerations, that march with that.
For my own part, I think that is the Most Vital Thing. Build your ship
of state as you will; get your men as you will; I concentrate on what is
clearly the affair of my sort of man,--I want to ensure the quality of
the quarter deck.”
“Hear, hear!” said Shoesmith, suddenly--his first remark for a long
time. “A first-rate figure,” said Shoesmith, gripping it.
“Our danger is in missing that,” I went on. “Muddle isn't ended by
transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed
many, and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests of
a bureaucracy of sham experts. But that seems the limit of the liberal
imagination. There is no real progress in a country, except a rise
in the level of its free intellectual activity. All other progress is
secondary and dependant. If you take on Bailey's dreams of efficient
machinery and a sort of fanatical discipline with no free-moving brains
behind it, confused ugliness becomes rigid ugliness,--that's all.
No doubt things are moving from looseness to discipline, and from
irresponsible controls to organised controls--and also and rather
contrariwise everything is becoming as people say, democratised; but
all the more need in that, for an ark in which the living element may be
saved.”
“Hear, hear!” said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing.
It must have been in my house afterwards that Shoesmith became
noticeable. He seemed trying to say something vague and difficult that
he didn't get said at all on that occasion. “We could do immense things
with a weekly,” he repeated, echoing Neal, I think. And there he left
off and became a mute expressiveness, and it was only afterwards, when I
was in bed, that I saw we had our capitalist in our hands....
We parted that night on my doorstep in a tremendous glow--but in that
sort of glow one doesn't act upon without much reconsideration, and it
was some months before I made my decision to follow up the indications
of that opening talk.
5
I find my thoughts lingering about the Pentagram Circle. In my
developments it played a large part, not so much by starting new trains
of thought as by confirming the practicability of things I had already
hesitatingly entertained. Discussion with these other men so prominently
involved in current affairs endorsed views that otherwise would have
seemed only a little less remote from actuality than the guardians of
Plato or the labour laws of More. Among other questions that were never
very distant from our discussions, that came apt to every topic, was
the true significance of democracy, Tariff Reform as a method of
international hostility, and the imminence of war. On the first issue
I can still recall little Bailey, glib and winking, explaining that
democracy was really just a dodge for getting assent to the ordinances
of the expert official by means of the polling booth. “If they don't
like things,” said he, “they can vote for the opposition candidate
and see what happens then--and that, you see, is why we don't want
proportional representation to let in the wild men.” I opened my
eyes--the lids had dropped for a moment under the caress of those smooth
sounds--to see if Bailey's artful forefinger wasn't at the side of his
predominant nose.
The international situation exercised us greatly. Our meetings were
pervaded by the feeling that all things moved towards a day of
reckoning with Germany, and I was largely instrumental in keeping up
the suggestion that India was in a state of unstable equilibrium, that
sooner or later something must happen there--something very serious to
our Empire. Dayton frankly detested these topics. He was full of
that old Middle Victorian persuasion that whatever is inconvenient or
disagreeable to the English mind could be annihilated by not thinking
about it. He used to sit low in his chair and look mulish. “Militarism,”
he would declare in a tone of the utmost moral fervour, “is a curse.
It's an unmitigated curse.” Then he would cough shortly and twitch his
head back and frown, and seem astonished beyond measure that after this
conclusive statement we could still go on talking of war.
All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of international
conflict, and their influence revived for a time those uneasinesses that
had been aroused in me for the first time by my continental journey
with Willersley and by Meredith's “One of Our Conquerors.” That
quite justifiable dread of a punishment for all the slackness, mental
dishonesty, presumption, mercenary respectability and sentimentalised
commercialism of the Victorian period, at the hands of the better
organised, more vigorous, and now far more highly civilised peoples
of Central Europe, seemed to me to have both a good and bad series of
consequences. It seemed the only thing capable of bracing English minds
to education, sustained constructive effort and research; but on the
other hand it produced the quality of a panic, hasty preparation,
impatience of thought, a wasteful and sometimes quite futile immediacy.
In 1909, for example, there was a vast clamour for eight additional
Dreadnoughts--
“We want eight
And we won't wait,”
but no clamour at all about our national waste of inventive talent, our
mean standard of intellectual attainment, our disingenuous criticism,
and the consequent failure to distinguish men of the quality needed to
carry on the modern type of war. Almost universally we have the wrong
men in our places of responsibility and the right men in no place
at all, almost universally we have poorly qualified, hesitating, and
resentful subordinates, because our criticism is worthless and, so
habitually as to be now almost unconsciously, dishonest. Germany is
beating England in every matter upon which competition is possible,
because she attended sedulously to her collective mind for sixty
pregnant years, because in spite of tremendous defects she is still far
more anxious for quality in achievement than we are. I remember saying
that in my paper. From that, I remember, I went on to an image that had
flashed into my mind. “The British Empire,” I said, “is like some of
those early vertebrated monsters, the Brontosaurus and the Atlantosaurus
and such-like; it sacrifices intellect to character; its backbone,
that is to say,--especially in the visceral region--is bigger than its
cranium. It's no accident that things are so. We've worked for backbone.
We brag about backbone, and if the joints are anchylosed so much the
better. We're still but only half awake to our error. You can't change
that suddenly.”
“Turn it round and make it go backwards,” interjected Thorns.
“It's trying to do that,” I said, “in places.”
And afterwards Crupp declared I had begotten a nightmare which haunted
him of nights; he was trying desperately and belatedly to blow a brain
as one blows soap-bubbles on such a mezoroic saurian as I had conjured
up, while the clumsy monster's fate, all teeth and brains, crept nearer
and nearer....
I've grown, I think, since those days out of the urgency of that
apprehension. I still think a European war, and conceivably a very
humiliating war for England, may occur at no very distant date, but I
do not think there is any such heroic quality in our governing class
as will make that war catastrophic. The prevailing spirit in English
life--it is one of the essential secrets of our imperial endurance--is
one of underbred aggression in prosperity and diplomatic compromise in
moments of danger; we bully haughtily where we can and assimilate where
we must. It is not for nothing that our upper and middle-class youth is
educated by teachers of the highest character, scholars and gentlemen,
men who can pretend quite honestly that Darwinism hasn't upset the
historical fall of man, that cricket is moral training, and that
Socialism is an outrage upon the teachings of Christ. A sort of
dignified dexterity of evasion is the national reward. Germany, with a
larger population, a vigorous and irreconcilable proletariat, a bolder
intellectual training, a harsher spirit, can scarcely fail to drive us
at last to a realisation of intolerable strain. So we may never fight at
all. The war of preparations that has been going on for thirty years may
end like a sham-fight at last in an umpire's decision. We shall proudly
but very firmly take the second place. For my own part, since I love
England as much as I detest her present lethargy of soul, I pray for a
chastening war--I wouldn't mind her flag in the dirt if only her spirit
would come out of it. So I was able to shake off that earlier fear of
some final and irrevocable destruction truncating all my schemes. At the
most, a European war would be a dramatic episode in the reconstruction I
had in view.
In India, too, I no longer foresee, as once I was inclined to
see, disaster. The English rule in India is surely one of the most
extraordinary accidents that has ever happened in history. We are there
like a man who has fallen off a ladder on to the neck of an elephant,
and doesn't know what to do or how to get down. Until something happens
he remains. Our functions in India are absurd. We English do not own
that country, do not even rule it. We make nothing happen; at the most
we prevent things happening. We suppress our own literature there. Most
English people cannot even go to this land they possess; the authorities
would prevent it. If Messrs. Perowne or Cook organised a cheap tour
of Manchester operatives, it would be stopped. No one dare bring the
average English voter face to face with the reality of India, or let
the Indian native have a glimpse of the English voter. In my time I
have talked to English statesmen, Indian officials and ex-officials,
viceroys, soldiers, every one who might be supposed to know what India
signifies, and I have prayed them to tell me what they thought we were
up to there. I am not writing without my book in these matters. And
beyond a phrase or so about “even-handed justice”--and look at our
sedition trials!--they told me nothing. Time after time I have heard
of that apocryphal native ruler in the north-west, who, when asked what
would happen if we left India, replied that in a week his men would be
in the saddle, and in six months not a rupee nor a virgin would be left
in Lower Bengal. That is always given as our conclusive justification.
But is it our business to preserve the rupees and virgins of Lower
Bengal in a sort of magic inconclusiveness? Better plunder than
paralysis, better fire and sword than futility. Our flag is spread over
the peninsula, without plans, without intentions--a vast preventive.
The sum total of our policy is to arrest any discussion, any conferences
that would enable the Indians to work out a tolerable scheme of the
future for themselves. But that does not arrest the resentment of men
held back from life. Consider what it must be for the educated Indian
sitting at the feast of contemporary possibilities with his mouth gagged
and his hands bound behind him! The spirit of insurrection breaks out
in spite of espionage and seizures. Our conflict for inaction develops
stupendous absurdities. The other day the British Empire was taking off
and examining printed cotton stomach wraps for seditious emblems and
inscriptions....
In some manner we shall have to come out of India. We have had our
chance, and we have demonstrated nothing but the appalling dulness of
our national imagination. We are not good enough to do anything with
India. Codger and Flack, and Gates and Dayton, Cladingbowl in the club,
and the HOME CHURCHMAN in the home, cant about “character,” worship
of strenuous force and contempt of truth; for the sake of such men and
things as these, we must abandon in fact, if not in appearance, that
empty domination. Had we great schools and a powerful teaching, could we
boast great men, had we the spirit of truth and creation in our lives,
then indeed it might be different. But a race that bears a sceptre must
carry gifts to justify it.
It does not follow that we shall be driven catastrophically from India.
That was my earlier mistake. We are not proud enough in our bones to be
ruined by India as Spain was by her empire. We may be able to abandon
India with an air of still remaining there. It is our new method. We
train our future rulers in the public schools to have a very wholesome
respect for strength, and as soon as a power arises in India in spite of
us, be it a man or a culture, or a native state, we shall be willing to
deal with it. We may or may not have a war, but our governing class will
be quick to learn when we are beaten. Then they will repeat our South
African diplomacy, and arrange for some settlement that will abandon
the reality, such as it is, and preserve the semblance of power. The
conqueror DE FACTO will become the new “loyal Briton,” and the democracy
at home will be invited to celebrate our recession--triumphantly. I am
no believer in the imminent dissolution of our Empire; I am less and
less inclined to see in either India or Germany the probability of an
abrupt truncation of those slow intellectual and moral constructions
which are the essentials of statecraft.
6
I sit writing in this little loggia to the sound of dripping water--this
morning we had rain, and the roof of our little casa is still not dry,
there are pools in the rocks under the sweet chestnuts, and the torrent
that crosses the salita is full and boastful,--and I try to recall the
order of my impressions during that watching, dubious time, before I
went over to the Conservative Party. I was trying--chaotic task--to
gauge the possibilities inherent in the quality of the British
aristocracy. There comes a broad spectacular effect of wide parks,
diversified by woods and bracken valleys, and dappled with deer; of
great smooth lawns shaded by ancient trees; of big facades of sunlit
buildings dominating the country side; of large fine rooms full of
handsome, easy-mannered people. As a sort of representative picture to
set off against those other pictures of Liberals and of Socialists I
have given, I recall one of those huge assemblies the Duchess of Clynes
inaugurated at Stamford House. The place itself is one of the vastest
private houses in London, a huge clustering mass of white and gold
saloons with polished floors and wonderful pictures, and staircases and
galleries on a Gargantuan scale. And there she sought to gather all
that was most representative of English activities, and did, in fact, in
those brilliant nocturnal crowds, get samples of nearly every section
of our social and intellectual life, with a marked predominance upon the
political and social side.
I remember sitting in one of the recesses at the end of the big saloon
with Mrs. Redmondson, one of those sharp-minded, beautiful rich women
one meets so often in London, who seem to have done nothing and to be
capable of everything, and we watched the crowd--uniforms and splendours
were streaming in from a State ball--and exchanged information. I told
her about the politicians and intellectuals, and she told me about the
aristocrats, and we sharpened our wit on them and counted the percentage
of beautiful people among the latter, and wondered if the general effect
of tallness was or was not an illusion.
They were, we agreed, for the most part bigger than the average of
people in London, and a handsome lot, even when they were not subtly
individualised. “They look so well nurtured,” I said, “well cared for.
I like their quiet, well-trained movements, their pleasant consideration
for each other.”
“Kindly, good tempered, and at bottom utterly selfish,” she said, “like
big, rather carefully trained, rather pampered children. What else can
you expect from them?”
“They are good tempered, anyhow,” I witnessed, “and that's an
achievement. I don't think I could ever be content under a bad-tempered,
sentimentalism, strenuous Government. That's why I couldn't stand the
Roosevelt REGIME in America. One's chief surprise when one comes across
these big people for the first time is their admirable easiness and
a real personal modesty. I confess I admire them. Oh! I like them.
I wouldn't at all mind, I believe, giving over the country to this
aristocracy--given SOMETHING--”
“Which they haven't got.”
“Which they haven't got--or they'd be the finest sort of people in the
world.”
“That something?” she inquired.
“I don't know. I've been puzzling my wits to know. They've done all
sorts of things--”
“That's Lord Wrassleton,” she interrupted, “whose leg was broken--you
remember?--at Spion Kop.”
“It's healed very well. I like the gold lace and the white glove
resting, with quite a nice awkwardness, on the sword. When I was a
little boy I wanted to wear clothes like that. And the stars! He's got
the V. C. Most of these people here have at any rate shown pluck, you
know--brought something off.”
“Not quite enough,” she suggested.
“I think that's it,” I said. “Not quite enough--not quite hard enough,”
I added.
She laughed and looked at me. “You'd like to make us,” she said.
“What?”
“Hard.”
“I don't think you'll go on if you don't get hard.”
“We shan't be so pleasant if we do.”
“Well, there my puzzled wits come in again. I don't see why an
aristocracy shouldn't be rather hard trained, and yet kindly. I'm not
convinced that the resources of education are exhausted. I want to
better this, because it already looks so good.”
“How are we to do it?” asked Mrs. Redmondson.
“Oh, there you have me! I've been spending my time lately in trying to
answer that! It makes me quarrel with”--I held up my fingers and ticked
the items off--“the public schools, the private tutors, the army exams,
the Universities, the Church, the general attitude of the country
towards science and literature--”
“We all do,” said Mrs. Redmondson. “We can't begin again at the
beginning,” she added.
“Couldn't one,” I nodded at the assembly in general, start a movement?
“There's the Confederates,” she said, with a faint smile that masked a
gleam of curiosity.... “You want,” she said, “to say to the aristocracy,
'Be aristocrats. NOBLESSE OBLIGE.' Do you remember what happened to the
monarch who was told to 'Be a King'?”
“Well,” I said, “I want an aristocracy.”
“This,” she said, smiling, “is the pick of them. The backwoodsmen are
off the stage. These are the brilliant ones--the smart and the blues....
They cost a lot of money, you know.”
So far Mrs. Redmondson, but the picture remained full of things not
stated in our speech. They were on the whole handsome people, charitable
minded, happy, and easy. They led spacious lives, and there was
something free and fearless about their bearing that I liked extremely.
The women particularly were wide-reading, fine-thinking. Mrs. Redmondson
talked as fully and widely and boldly as a man, and with those flashes
of intuition, those startling, sudden delicacies of perception few men
display. I liked, too, the relations that held between women and men,
their general tolerance, their antagonism to the harsh jealousies that
are the essence of the middle-class order....
After all, if one's aim resolved itself into the development of a type
and culture of men, why shouldn't one begin at this end?
It is very easy indeed to generalise about a class of human beings, but
much harder to produce a sample. Was old Lady Forthundred, for instance,
fairly a sample? I remember her as a smiling, magnificent presence, a
towering accumulation of figure and wonderful shimmering blue silk and
black lace and black hair, and small fine features and chins and chins
and chins, disposed in a big cane chair with wraps and cushions upon the
great terrace of Champneys. Her eye was blue and hard, and her accent
and intonation were exactly what you would expect from a rather
commonplace dressmaker pretending to be aristocratic. I was, I am
afraid, posing a little as the intelligent but respectful inquirer from
below investigating the great world, and she was certainly posing as my
informant. She affected a cynical coarseness. She developed a theory on
the governance of England, beautifully frank and simple. “Give 'um all
a peerage when they get twenty thousand a year,” she maintained. “That's
my remedy.”
In my new role of theoretical aristocrat I felt a little abashed.
“Twenty thousand,” she repeated with conviction.
It occurred to me that I was in the presence of the aristocratic
theory currently working as distinguished from my as yet unformulated
intentions.
“You'll get a lot of loafers and scamps among 'um,” said Lady
Forthundred. “You get loafers and scamps everywhere, but you'll get a
lot of men who'll work hard to keep things together, and that's what
we're all after, isn't ut?
“It's not an ideal arrangement.”
“Tell me anything better,” said Lady Forthundred.
On the whole, and because she refused emphatically to believe in
education, Lady Forthundred scored.
We had been discussing Cossington's recent peerage, for Cossington, my
old schoolfellow at City Merchants', and my victor in the affair of
the magazine, had clambered to an amazing wealth up a piled heap of
energetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, and a group of
daily newspapers. I had expected to find the great lady hostile to the
new-comer, but she accepted him, she gloried in him.
“We're a peerage,” she said, “but none of us have ever had any nonsense
about nobility.”
She turned and smiled down on me. “We English,” she said, “are a
practical people. We assimilate 'um.”
“Then, I suppose, they don't give trouble?”
“Then they don't give trouble.”
“They learn to shoot?”
“And all that,” said Lady Forthundred. “Yes. And things go on. Sometimes
better than others, but they go on--somehow. It depends very much on the
sort of butler who pokes 'um about.”
I suggested that it might be possible to get a secure twenty thousand a
year by at least detrimental methods--socially speaking.
“We must take the bad and the good of 'um,” said Lady Forthundred,
courageously....
Now, was she a sample? It happened she talked. What was there in the
brains of the multitude of her first, second, third, fourth, and fifth
cousins, who didn't talk, who shone tall, and bearing themselves finely,
against a background of deft, attentive maids and valets, on every
spacious social scene? How did things look to them?
7
Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious to put Evesham with
his tall, bent body, his little-featured almost elvish face, his unequal
mild brown eyes, his gentle manner, his sweet, amazing oratory. He led
all these people wonderfully. He was always curious and interested about
life, wary beneath a pleasing frankness--and I tormented my brain to get
to the bottom of him. For a long time he was the most powerful man in
England under the throne; he had the Lords in his hand, and a great
majority in the Commons, and the discontents and intrigues that are the
concomitants of an overwhelming party advantage broke against him as
waves break against a cliff. He foresaw so far in these matters that it
seemed he scarcely troubled to foresee. He brought political art to
the last triumph of naturalness. Always for me he has been the typical
aristocrat, so typical and above the mere forms of aristocracy, that he
remained a commoner to the end of his days.
I had met him at the beginning of my career; he read some early papers
of mine, and asked to see me, and I conceived a flattered liking for him
that strengthened to a very strong feeling indeed. He seemed to me to
stand alone without an equal, the greatest man in British political
life. Some men one sees through and understands, some one cannot see
into or round because they are of opaque clay, but about Evesham I had a
sense of things hidden as it were by depth and mists, because he was so
big and atmospheric a personality. No other contemporary has had that
effect upon me. I've sat beside him at dinners, stayed in houses with
him--he was in the big house party at Champneys--talked to him,
sounded him, watching him as I sat beside him. I could talk to him with
extraordinary freedom and a rare sense of being understood. Other men
have to be treated in a special manner; approached through their own
mental dialect, flattered by a minute regard for what they have said and
done. Evesham was as widely and charitably receptive as any man I have
ever met. The common politicians beside him seemed like rows of stuffy
little rooms looking out upon the sea.
And what was he up to? What did HE think we were doing with Mankind?
That I thought worth knowing.
I remember his talking on one occasion at the Hartsteins', at a dinner
so tremendously floriferous and equipped that we were almost forced into
duologues, about the possible common constructive purpose in politics.
“I feel so much,” he said, “that the best people in every party
converge. We don't differ at Westminster as they do in the country
towns. There's a sort of extending common policy that goes on under
every government, because on the whole it's the right thing to do, and
people know it. Things that used to be matters of opinion become matters
of science--and cease to be party questions.”
He instanced education.
“Apart,” said I, “from the religious question.”
“Apart from the religious question.”
He dropped that aspect with an easy grace, and went on with his general
theme that political conflict was the outcome of uncertainty. “Directly
you get a thing established, so that people can say, 'Now this is
Right,' with the same conviction that people can say water is a
combination of oxygen and hydrogen, there's no more to be said. The
thing has to be done....”
And to put against this effect of Evesham, broad and humanely tolerant,
posing as the minister of a steadily developing constructive conviction,
there are other memories.
Have I not seen him in the House, persistent, persuasive, indefatigable,
and by all my standards wickedly perverse, leaning over the table with
those insistent movements of his hand upon it, or swaying forward with
a grip upon his coat lapel, fighting with a diabolical skill to preserve
what are in effect religious tests, tests he must have known would
outrage and humiliate and injure the consciences of a quarter--and that
perhaps the best quarter--of the youngsters who come to the work of
elementary education?
In playing for points in the game of party advantage Evesham displayed
at times a quite wicked unscrupulousness in the use of his subtle mind.
I would sit on the Liberal benches and watch him, and listen to his
urbane voice, fascinated by him. Did he really care? Did anything matter
to him? And if it really mattered nothing, why did he trouble to serve
the narrowness and passion of his side? Or did he see far beyond my
scope, so that this petty iniquity was justified by greater, remoter
ends of which I had no intimation?
They accused him of nepotism. His friends and family were certainly well
cared for. In private life he was full of an affectionate intimacy; he
pleased by being charmed and pleased. One might think at times there was
no more of him than a clever man happily circumstanced, and finding an
interest and occupation in politics. And then came a glimpse of thought,
of imagination, like the sight of a soaring eagle through a staircase
skylight. Oh, beyond question he was great! No other contemporary
politician had his quality. In no man have I perceived so
sympathetically the great contrast between warm, personal things and the
white dream of statecraft. Except that he had it seemed no hot passions,
but only interests and fine affections and indolences, he paralleled the
conflict of my life. He saw and thought widely and deeply; but at times
it seemed to me his greatness stood over and behind the reality of his
life, like some splendid servant, thinking his own thoughts, who waits
behind a lesser master's chair....
8
Of course, when Evesham talked of this ideal of the organised state
becoming so finely true to practicability and so clearly stated as to
have the compelling conviction of physical science, he spoke quite after
my heart. Had he really embodied the attempt to realise that, I could
have done no more than follow him blindly. But neither he nor I embodied
that, and there lies the gist of my story. And when it came to a study
of others among the leading Tories and Imperialists the doubt increased,
until with some at last it was possible to question whether they had any
imaginative conception of constructive statecraft at all; whether they
didn't opaquely accept the world for what it was, and set themselves
single-mindedly to make a place for themselves and cut a figure in it.
There were some very fine personalities among them: there were the great
peers who had administered Egypt, India, South Africa, Framboya--Cromer,
Kitchener, Curzon, Milner, Gane, for example. So far as that easier
task of holding sword and scales had gone, they had shown the finest
qualities, but they had returned to the perplexing and exacting problem
of the home country, a little glorious, a little too simply bold. They
wanted to arm and they wanted to educate, but the habit of immediate
necessity made them far more eager to arm than to educate, and their
experience of heterogeneous controls made them overrate the need for
obedience in a homogeneous country. They didn't understand raw men,
ill-trained men, uncertain minds, and intelligent women; and these are
the things that matter in England.... There were also the great business
adventurers, from Cranber to Cossington (who was now Lord Paddockhurst).
My mind remained unsettled, and went up and down the scale between
a belief in their far-sighted purpose and the perception of crude
vanities, coarse ambitions, vulgar competitiveness, and a mere habitual
persistence in the pursuit of gain. For a time I saw a good deal of
Cossington--I wish I had kept a diary of his talk and gestures, to mark
how he could vary from day to day between a POSEUR, a smart tradesman,
and a very bold and wide-thinking political schemer. He had a vanity
of sweeping actions, motor car pounces, Napoleonic rushes, that led to
violent ineffectual changes in the policy of his papers, and a haunting
pursuit by parallel columns in the liberal press that never abashed him
in the slightest degree. By an accident I plumbed the folly in him--but
I feel I never plumbed his wisdom. I remember him one day after a lunch
at the Barhams' saying suddenly, out of profound meditation over the end
of a cigar, one of those sentences that seem to light the whole interior
being of a man. “Some day,” he said softly, rather to himself than to
me, and A PROPOS of nothing--“some day I will raise the country.”
“Why not?” I said, after a pause, and leant across him for the little
silver spirit-lamp, to light my cigarette....
Then the Tories had for another section the ancient creations, and again
there were the financial peers, men accustomed to reserve, and their big
lawyers, accustomed to--well, qualified statement. And below the giant
personalities of the party were the young bloods, young, adventurous men
of the type of Lord Tarvrille, who had seen service in South Africa,
who had travelled and hunted; explorers, keen motorists, interested
in aviation, active in army organisation. Good, brown-faced stuff they
were, but impervious to ideas outside the range of their activities,
more ignorant of science than their chauffeurs, and of the quality
of English people than welt-politicians; contemptuous of school and
university by reason of the Gateses and Flacks and Codgers who had come
their way, witty, light-hearted, patriotic at the Kipling level, with
a certain aptitude for bullying. They varied in insensible gradations
between the noble sportsmen on the one hand, and men like Gane and the
Tories of our Pentagram club on the other. You perceive how a man
might exercise his mind in the attempt to strike an average of public
serviceability in this miscellany! And mixed up with these, mixed up
sometimes in the same man, was the pure reactionary, whose predominant
idea was that the village schools should confine themselves to teaching
the catechism, hat-touching and courtesying, and be given a holiday
whenever beaters were in request....
I find now in my mind as a sort of counterpoise to Evesham the figure
of old Lord Wardingham, asleep in the largest armchair in the library
of Stamford Court after lunch. One foot rested on one of those things--I
think they are called gout stools. He had been playing golf all the
morning and wearied a weak instep; at lunch he had sat at my table and
talked in the overbearing manner permitted to irascible important men
whose insteps are painful. Among other things he had flouted the idea
that women would ever understand statecraft or be more than a nuisance
in politics, denied flatly that Hindoos were capable of anything
whatever except excesses in population, regretted he could not
censor picture galleries and circulating libraries, and declared that
dissenters were people who pretended to take theology seriously with the
express purpose of upsetting the entirely satisfactory compromise of the
Established Church. “No sensible people, with anything to gain or lose,
argue about religion,” he said. “They mean mischief.” Having delivered
his soul upon these points, and silenced the little conversation to the
left of him from which they had arisen, he became, after an appreciative
encounter with a sanguinary woodcock, more amiable, responded to some
respectful initiatives of Crupp's, and related a number of classical
anecdotes of those blighting snubs, vindictive retorts and scandalous
miscarriages of justice that are so dear to the forensic mind. Now he
reposed. He was breathing heavily with his mouth a little open and his
head on one side. One whisker was turned back against the comfortable
padding. His plump strong hands gripped the arms of his chair, and his
frown was a little assuaged. How tremendously fed up he looked! Honours,
wealth, influence, respect, he had them all. How scornful and hard it
had made his unguarded expression!
I note without comment that it didn't even occur to me then to wake him
up and ask him what HE was up to with mankind.
9
One countervailing influence to my drift to Toryism in those days was
Margaret's quite religious faith in the Liberals. I realised that slowly
and with a mild astonishment. It set me, indeed, even then questioning
my own change of opinion. We came at last incidentally, as our way was,
to an exchange of views. It was as nearly a quarrel as we had before
I came over to the Conservative side. It was at Champneys, and I think
during the same visit that witnessed my exploration of Lady Forthundred.
It arose indirectly, I think, out of some comments of mine upon our
fellow-guests, but it is one of those memories of which the scene and
quality remain more vivid than the things said, a memory without any
very definite beginning or end. It was afternoon, in the pause between
tea and the dressing bell, and we were in Margaret's big silver-adorned,
chintz-bright room, looking out on the trim Italian garden.... Yes, the
beginning of it has escaped me altogether, but I remember it as an odd
exceptional little wrangle.
At first we seem to have split upon the moral quality of the
aristocracy, and I had an odd sense that in some way too feminine for
me to understand our hostess had aggrieved her. She said, I know, that
Champneys distressed her; made her “eager for work and reality again.”
“But aren't these people real?”
“They're so superficial, so extravagant!”
I said I was not shocked by their unreality. They seemed the least
affected people I had ever met. “And are they really so extravagant?”
I asked, and put it to her that her dresses cost quite as much as any
other woman's in the house.
“It's not only their dresses,” Margaret parried. “It's the scale and
spirit of things.”
I questioned that. “They're cynical,” said Margaret, staring before her
out of the window.
I challenged her, and she quoted the Brabants, about whom there had
been an ancient scandal. She'd heard of it from Altiora, and it was also
Altiora who'd given her a horror of Lord Carnaby, who was also with us.
“You know his reputation,” said Margaret. “That Normandy girl. Every
one knows about it. I shiver when I look at him. He seems--oh! like
something not of OUR civilisation. He WILL come and say little things to
me.”
“Offensive things?”
“No, politenesses and things. Of course his manners are--quite right.
That only makes it worse, I think. It shows he might have helped--all
that happened. I do all I can to make him see I don't like him. But none
of the others make the slightest objection to him.”
“Perhaps these people imagine something might be said for him.”
“That's just it,” said Margaret.
“Charity,” I suggested.
“I don't like that sort of toleration.”
I was oddly annoyed. “Like eating with publicans and sinners,” I said.
“No!...”
But scandals, and the contempt for rigid standards their condonation
displayed, weren't more than the sharp edge of the trouble. “It's their
whole position, their selfish predominance, their class conspiracy
against the mass of people,” said Margaret. “When I sit at dinner
in that splendid room, with its glitter and white reflections and
candlelight, and its flowers and its wonderful service and its
candelabra of solid gold, I seem to feel the slums and the mines and the
over-crowded cottages stuffed away under the table.”
I reminded Margaret that she was not altogether innocent of unearned
increment.
“But aren't we doing our best to give it back?” she said.
I was moved to question her. “Do you really think,” I asked, “that the
Tories and peers and rich people are to blame for social injustice as we
have it to-day? Do you really see politics as a struggle of light on the
Liberal side against darkness on the Tory?”
“They MUST know,” said Margaret.
I found myself questioning that. I see now that to Margaret it must have
seemed the perversest carping against manifest things, but at the time
I was concentrated simply upon the elucidation of her view and my own; I
wanted to get at her conception in the sharpest, hardest lines that were
possible. It was perfectly clear that she saw Toryism as the diabolical
element in affairs. The thing showed in its hopeless untruth all the
clearer for the fine, clean emotion with which she gave it out to me.
My sleeping peer in the library at Stamford Court and Evesham talking
luminously behind the Hartstein flowers embodied the devil, and my
replete citizen sucking at his cigar in the National Liberal Club,
Willie Crampton discussing the care and management of the stomach over
a specially hygienic lemonade, and Dr. Tumpany in his aggressive
frock-coat pegging out a sort of copyright in Socialism, were the centre
and wings of the angelic side. It was nonsense. But how was I to put the
truth to her?
“I don't see things at all as you do,” I said. “I don't see things in
the same way.”
“Think of the poor,” said Margaret, going off at a tangent.
“Think of every one,” I said. “We Liberals have done more mischief
through well-intentioned benevolence than all the selfishness in the
world could have done. We built up the liquor interest.”
“WE!” cried Margaret. “How can you say that? It's against us.”
“Naturally. But we made it a monopoly in our clumsy efforts to prevent
people drinking what they liked, because it interfered with industrial
regularity--”
“Oh!” cried Margaret, stung; and I could see she thought I was talking
mere wickedness.
“That's it,” I said.
“But would you have people drink whatever they pleased?”
“Certainly. What right have I to dictate to other men and women?”
“But think of the children!”
“Ah! there you have the folly of modern Liberalism, its half-cunning,
half-silly way of getting at everything in a roundabout fashion. If
neglecting children is an offence, and it IS an offence, then deal
with it as such, but don't go badgering and restricting people who sell
something that may possibly in some cases lead to a neglect of children.
If drunkenness is an offence, punish it, but don't punish a man for
selling honest drink that perhaps after all won't make any one drunk at
all. Don't intensify the viciousness of the public-house by assuming the
place isn't fit for women and children. That's either spite or folly.
Make the public-house FIT for women and children. Make it a real
public-house. If we Liberals go on as we are going, we shall presently
want to stop the sale of ink and paper because those things tempt men
to forgery. We do already threaten the privacy of the post because of
betting tout's letters. The drift of all that kind of thing is narrow,
unimaginative, mischievous, stupid....”
I stopped short and walked to the window and surveyed a pretty fountain,
facsimile of one in Verona, amidst trim-cut borderings of yew. Beyond,
and seen between the stems of ilex trees, was a great blaze of yellow
flowers....
“But prevention,” I heard Margaret behind me, “is the essence of our
work.”
I turned. “There's no prevention but education. There's no antiseptics
in life but love and fine thinking. Make people fine, make fine people.
Don't be afraid. These Tory leaders are better people individually
than the average; why cast them for the villains of the piece? The
real villain in the piece--in the whole human drama--is the
muddle-headedness, and it matters very little if it's virtuous-minded or
wicked. I want to get at muddle-headedness. If I could do that I could
let all that you call wickedness in the world run about and do what
it jolly well pleased. It would matter about as much as a slightly
neglected dog--in an otherwise well-managed home.”
My thoughts had run away with me.
“I can't understand you,” said Margaret, in the profoundest distress. “I
can't understand how it is you are coming to see things like this.”
10
The moods of a thinking man in politics are curiously evasive and
difficult to describe. Neither the public nor the historian will permit
the statesman moods. He has from the first to assume he has an Aim, a
definite Aim, and to pretend to an absolute consistency with that. Those
subtle questionings about the very fundamentals of life which plague us
all so relentlessly nowadays are supposed to be silenced. He lifts his
chin and pursues his Aim explicitly in the sight of all men. Those
who have no real political experience can scarcely imagine the immense
mental and moral strain there is between one's everyday acts and
utterances on the one hand and the “thinking-out” process on the other.
It is perplexingly difficult to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, a
scheme essentially complex, to keep balancing a swaying possibility
while at the same time under jealous, hostile, and stupid observation
you tread your part in the platitudinous, quarrelsome, ill-presented
march of affairs....
The most impossible of all autobiographies is an intellectual
autobiography. I have thrown together in the crudest way the elements
of the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record of the subtle
details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations between Protean
values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the bleak lucidities of
sleepless nights....
And yet these things I have struggled with must be thought out, and, to
begin with, they must be thought out in this muddled, experimenting way.
To go into a study to think about statecraft is to turn your back on the
realities you are constantly needing to feel and test and sound if your
thinking is to remain vital; to choose an aim and pursue it in despite
of all subsequent questionings is to bury the talent of your mind. It
is no use dealing with the intricate as though it were simple, to leap
haphazard at the first course of action that presents itself; the whole
world of politicians is far too like a man who snatches a poker to a
failing watch. It is easy to say he wants to “get something done,” but
the only sane thing to do for the moment is to put aside that poker and
take thought and get a better implement....
One of the results of these fundamental preoccupations of mine was a
curious irritability towards Margaret that I found difficult to conceal.
It was one of the incidental cruelties of our position that this should
happen. I was in such doubt myself, that I had no power to phrase
things for her in a form she could use. Hitherto I had stage-managed our
“serious” conversations. Now I was too much in earnest and too uncertain
to go on doing this. I avoided talk with her. Her serene, sustained
confidence in vague formulae and sentimental aspirations exasperated me;
her want of sympathetic apprehension made my few efforts to indicate my
changing attitudes distressing and futile. It wasn't that I was always
thinking right, and that she was always saying wrong. It was that I was
struggling to get hold of a difficult thing that was, at any rate, half
true, I could not gauge how true, and that Margaret's habitual phrasing
ignored these elusive elements of truth, and without premeditation
fitted into the weaknesses of my new intimations, as though they had
nothing but weaknesses. It was, for example, obvious that these big
people, who were the backbone of Imperialism and Conservatism, were
temperamentally lax, much more indolent, much more sensuous, than our
deliberately virtuous Young Liberals. I didn't want to be reminded of
that, just when I was in full effort to realise the finer elements in
their composition. Margaret classed them and disposed of them. It was
our incurable differences in habits and gestures of thought coming
between us again.
The desert of misunderstanding widened. I was forced back upon myself
and my own secret councils. For a time I went my way alone; an unmixed
evil for both of us. Except for that Pentagram evening, a series of
talks with Isabel Rivers, who was now becoming more and more important
in my intellectual life, and the arguments I maintained with Crupp, I
never really opened my mind at all during that period of indecisions,
slow abandonments, and slow acquisitions.