In many ways I was disposed to regard the 1909 Budget as a fine piece
of statecraft. Its production was certainly a very unexpected display
of vigour on the Liberal side. But, on the whole, this movement
towards collectivist organisation on the part of the Liberals rather
strengthened than weakened my resolve to cross the floor of the house.
It made it more necessary, I thought, to leaven the purely obstructive
and reactionary elements that were at once manifest in the opposition. I
assailed the land taxation proposals in one main speech, and a series
of minor speeches in committee. The line of attack I chose was that the
land was a great public service that needed to be controlled on broad
and far-sighted lines. I had no objection to its nationalisation, but I
did object most strenuously to the idea of leaving it in private hands,
and attempting to produce beneficial social results through the pressure
of taxation upon the land-owning class. That might break it up in an
utterly disastrous way. The drift of the government proposals was all in
the direction of sweating the landowner to get immediate values from his
property, and such a course of action was bound to give us an irritated
and vindictive land-owning class, the class upon which we had hitherto
relied--not unjustifiably--for certain broad, patriotic services and
an influence upon our collective judgments that no other class seemed
prepared to exercise. Abolish landlordism if you will, I said, buy
it out, but do not drive it to a defensive fight, and leave it still
sufficiently strong and wealthy to become a malcontent element in your
state. You have taxed and controlled the brewer and the publican until
the outraged Liquor Interest has become a national danger. You now
propose to do the same thing on a larger scale. You turn a class which
has many fine and truly aristocratic traditions towards revolt, and
there is nothing in these or any other of your proposals that shows any
sense of the need for leadership to replace these traditional leaders
you are ousting. This was the substance of my case, and I hammered at it
not only in the House, but in the press....
The Kinghampstead division remained for some time insensitive to my
defection.
Then it woke up suddenly, and began, in the columns of the
KINGSHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN, an indignant, confused outcry. I was treated to
an open letter, signed “Junius Secundus,” and I replied in provocative
terms. There were two thinly attended public meetings at different ends
of the constituency, and then I had a correspondence with my old friend
Parvill, the photographer, which ended in my seeing a deputation.
My impression is that it consisted of about eighteen or twenty people.
They had had to come upstairs to me and they were manifestly full of
indignation and a little short of breath. There was Parvill himself,
J.P., dressed wholly in black--I think to mark his sense of the
occasion--and curiously suggestive in his respect for my character and
his concern for the honourableness of the KINGHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN editor,
of Mark Antony at the funeral of Cesar. There was Mrs. Bulger, also in
mourning; she had never abandoned the widow's streamers since the death
of her husband ten years ago, and her loyalty to Liberalism of the
severest type was part as it were of her weeds. There was a nephew of
Sir Roderick Newton, a bright young Hebrew of the graver type, and a
couple of dissenting ministers in high collars and hats that stopped
halfway between the bowler of this world and the shovel-hat of heaven.
There was also a young solicitor from Lurky done in the horsey style,
and there was a very little nervous man with a high brow and a face
contracting below as though the jawbones and teeth had been taken out
and the features compressed. The rest of the deputation, which included
two other public-spirited ladies and several ministers of religion,
might have been raked out of any omnibus going Strandward during the
May meetings. They thrust Parvill forward as spokesman, and manifested
a strong disposition to say “Hear, hear!” to his more strenuous protests
provided my eye wasn't upon them at the time.
I regarded this appalling deputation as Parvill's apologetic but quite
definite utterances drew to an end. I had a moment of vision. Behind
them I saw the wonderful array of skeleton forces that stand for public
opinion, that are as much public opinion as exists indeed at the present
time. The whole process of politics which bulks so solidly in history
seemed for that clairvoyant instant but a froth of petty motives above
abysms of indifference....
Some one had finished. I perceived I had to speak.
“Very well,” I said, “I won't keep you long in replying. I'll resign if
there isn't a dissolution before next February, and if there is I shan't
stand again. You don't want the bother and expense of a bye-election
(approving murmurs) if it can be avoided. But I may tell you plainly now
that I don't think it will be necessary for me to resign, and the sooner
you find my successor the better for the party. The Lords are in a
corner; they've got to fight now or never, and I think they will throw
out the Budget. Then they will go on fighting. It is a fight that will
last for years. They have a sort of social discipline, and you haven't.
You Liberals will find yourselves with a country behind you, vaguely
indignant perhaps, but totally unprepared with any ideas whatever in
the matter, face to face with the problem of bringing the British
constitution up-to-date. Anything may happen, provided only that it is
sufficiently absurd. If the King backs the Lords--and I don't see why he
shouldn't--you have no Republican movement whatever to fall back
upon. You lost it during the Era of Good Taste. The country, I say, is
destitute of ideas, and you have no ideas to give it. I don't see what
you will do.... For my own part, I mean to spend a year or so between a
window and my writing-desk.”
I paused. “I think, gentlemen,” began Parvill, “that we hear all this
with very great regret....”
4
My estrangement from Margaret stands in my memory now as something that
played itself out within the four walls of our house in Radnor Square,
which was, indeed, confined to those limits. I went to and fro between
my house and the House of Commons, and the dining-rooms and clubs and
offices in which we were preparing our new developments, in a state
of aggressive and energetic dissociation, in the nascent state, as a
chemist would say. I was free now, and greedy for fresh combination. I
had a tremendous sense of released energies. I had got back to the sort
of thing I could do, and to the work that had been shaping itself for
so long in my imagination. Our purpose now was plain, bold, and
extraordinarily congenial. We meant no less than to organise a new
movement in English thought and life, to resuscitate a Public Opinion
and prepare the ground for a revised and renovated ruling culture.
For a time I seemed quite wonderfully able to do whatever I wanted to
do. Shoesmith responded to my first advances. We decided to create a
weekly paper as our nucleus, and Crupp and I set to work forthwith to
collect a group of writers and speakers, including Esmeer, Britten, Lord
Gane, Neal, and one or two younger men, which should constitute a more
or less definite editorial council about me, and meet at a weekly lunch
on Tuesday to sustain our general co-operations. We marked our claim
upon Toryism even in the colour of our wrapper, and spoke of ourselves
collectively as the Blue Weeklies. But our lunches were open to all
sorts of guests, and our deliberations were never of a character to
control me effectively in my editorial decisions. My only influential
councillor at first was old Britten, who became my sub-editor. It was
curious how we two had picked up our ancient intimacy again and resumed
the easy give and take of our speculative dreaming schoolboy days.
For a time my life centred altogether upon this journalistic work.
Britten was an experienced journalist, and I had most of the necessary
instincts for the business. We meant to make the paper right and
good down to the smallest detail, and we set ourselves at this with
extraordinary zeal. It wasn't our intention to show our political
motives too markedly at first, and through all the dust storm and
tumult and stress of the political struggle of 1910, we made a little
intellectual oasis of good art criticism and good writing. It was the
firm belief of nearly all of us that the Lords were destined to be
beaten badly in 1910, and our game was the longer game of reconstruction
that would begin when the shouting and tumult of that immediate conflict
were over. Meanwhile we had to get into touch with just as many good
minds as possible.
As we felt our feet, I developed slowly and carefully a broadly
conceived and consistent political attitude. As I will explain later,
we were feminist from the outset, though that caused Shoesmith and Gane
great searching of heart; we developed Esmeer's House of Lords reform
scheme into a general cult of the aristocratic virtues, and we did much
to humanise and liberalise the narrow excellencies of that Break-up of
the Poor Law agitation, which had been organised originally by Beatrice
and Sidney Webb. In addition, without any very definite explanation to
any one but Esmeer and Isabel Rivers, and as if it was quite a small
matter, I set myself to secure a uniform philosophical quality in our
columns.
That, indeed, was the peculiar virtue and characteristic of the BLUE
WEEKLY. I was now very definitely convinced that much of the confusion
and futility of contemporary thought was due to the general need of
metaphysical training.... The great mass of people--and not simply
common people, but people active and influential in intellectual
things--are still quite untrained in the methods of thought and
absolutely innocent of any criticism of method; it is scarcely a
caricature to call their thinking a crazy patchwork, discontinuous and
chaotic. They arrive at conclusions by a kind of accident, and do not
suspect any other way may be found to their attainment. A stage above
this general condition stands that minority of people who have at
some time or other discovered general terms and a certain use
for generalisations. They are--to fall back on the ancient
technicality--Realists of a crude sort. When I say Realist of course
I mean Realist as opposed to Nominalist, and not Realist in the almost
diametrically different sense of opposition to Idealist. Such are the
Baileys; such, to take their great prototype, was Herbert Spencer (who
couldn't read Kant); such are whole regiments of prominent and entirely
self-satisfied contemporaries. They go through queer little processes of
definition and generalisation and deduction with the completest belief
in the validity of the intellectual instrument they are using. They are
Realists--Cocksurists--in matter of fact; sentimentalists in behaviour.
The Baileys having got to this glorious stage in mental development--it
is glorious because it has no doubts--were always talking about training
“Experts” to apply the same simple process to all the affairs
of mankind. Well, Realism isn't the last word of human wisdom.
Modest-minded people, doubtful people, subtle people, and the like--the
kind of people William James writes of as “tough-minded,” go on beyond
this methodical happiness, and are forever after critical of premises
and terms. They are truer--and less confident. They have reached
scepticism and the artistic method. They have emerged into the new
Nominalism.
Both Isabel and I believe firmly that these differences of intellectual
method matter profoundly in the affairs of mankind, that the collective
mind of this intricate complex modern state can only function properly
upon neo-Nominalist lines. This has always been her side of our mental
co-operation rather than mine. Her mind has the light movement that
goes so often with natural mental power; she has a wonderful art in
illustration, and, as the reader probably knows already, she writes of
metaphysical matters with a rare charm and vividness. So far there has
been no collection of her papers published, but they are to be found not
only in the BLUE WEEKLY columns but scattered about the monthlies; many
people must be familiar with her style. It was an intention we did
much to realise before our private downfall, that we would use the BLUE
WEEKLY to maintain a stream of suggestion against crude thinking, and
at last scarcely a week passed but some popular distinction, some
large imposing generalisation, was touched to flaccidity by her pen or
mine....
I was at great pains to give my philosophical, political, and social
matter the best literary and critical backing we could get in London. I
hunted sedulously for good descriptive writing and good criticism; I
was indefatigable in my readiness to hear and consider, if not to accept
advice; I watched every corner of the paper, and had a dozen men alert
to get me special matter of the sort that draws in the unattached
reader. The chief danger on the literary side of a weekly is that it
should fall into the hands of some particular school, and this I watched
for closely. It seems impossible to get vividness of apprehension and
breadth of view together in the same critic. So it falls to the wise
editor to secure the first and impose the second. Directly I detected
the shrill partisan note in our criticism, the attempt to puff a poor
thing because it was “in the right direction,” or damn a vigorous piece
of work because it wasn't, I tackled the man and had it out with him.
Our pay was good enough for that to matter a good deal....
Our distinctive little blue and white poster kept up its neat persistent
appeal to the public eye, and before 1911 was out, the BLUE WEEKLY was
printing twenty pages of publishers' advertisements, and went into
all the clubs in London and three-quarters of the country houses where
week-end parties gather together. Its sale by newsagents and bookstalls
grew steadily. One got more and more the reassuring sense of being
discussed, and influencing discussion.
5
Our office was at the very top of a big building near the end of Adelphi
Terrace; the main window beside my desk, a big undivided window of
plate glass, looked out upon Cleopatra's Needle, the corner of the Hotel
Cecil, the fine arches of Waterloo Bridge, and the long sweep of south
bank with its shot towers and chimneys, past Bankside to the dimly seen
piers of the great bridge below the Tower. The dome of St. Paul's just
floated into view on the left against the hotel facade. By night and
day, in every light and atmosphere, it was a beautiful and various view,
alive as a throbbing heart; a perpetual flow of traffic ploughed and
splashed the streaming silver of the river, and by night the shapes of
things became velvet black and grey, and the water a shining mirror
of steel, wearing coruscating gems of light. In the foreground the
Embankment trams sailed glowing by, across the water advertisements
flashed and flickered, trains went and came and a rolling drift of smoke
reflected unseen fires. By day that spectacle was sometimes a marvel of
shining wet and wind-cleared atmosphere, sometimes a mystery of drifting
fog, sometimes a miracle of crowded details, minutely fine.
As I think of that view, so variously spacious in effect, I am back
there, and this sunlit paper might be lamp-lit and lying on my old desk.
I see it all again, feel it all again. In the foreground is a green
shaded lamp and crumpled galley slips and paged proofs and letters, two
or three papers in manuscript, and so forth. In the shadows are chairs
and another table bearing papers and books, a rotating bookcase dimly
seen, a long window seat black in the darkness, and then the cool
unbroken spectacle of the window. How often I would watch some tram-car,
some string of barges go from me slowly out of sight. The people were
black animalculae by day, clustering, collecting, dispersing, by night,
they were phantom face-specks coming, vanishing, stirring obscurely
between light and shade.
I recall many hours at my desk in that room before the crisis came,
hours full of the peculiar happiness of effective strenuous work. Once
some piece of writing went on, holding me intent and forgetful of time
until I looked up from the warm circle of my electric lamp to see the
eastward sky above the pale silhouette of the Tower Bridge, flushed and
banded brightly with the dawn.