§ 1
I know that before the end of my Harbury days I was already dreaming of
a Career, of some great and conspicuous usefulness in the world. That
has always haunted my mind and haunts it now. I may be cured perhaps of
the large and showy anticipations of youth, I may have learnt to drop
the "great and conspicuous," but still I find it necessary to believe
that I matter, that I play a part no one else can play in a progress, in
a universal scheme moving towards triumphant ends.
Almost wholly I think I was dreaming of public service in those days.
The Harbury tradition pointed steadfastly towards the state, and all my
world was bare of allurements to any other type of ambition. Success in
art or literature did not appeal to us, and a Harbury boy would as soon
think of being a great tinker as a great philosopher. Science we called
"stinks"; our three science masters were _ex officio_ ridiculous and the
practical laboratory a refuge for oddities. But a good half of our
fathers at least were peers or members of parliament, and our sense of
politics was close and keen. History, and particularly history as it
came up through the eighteenth century to our own times, supplied us
with a gallery of intimate models, our great uncles and grandfathers and
ancestors at large figured abundantly in the story and furnished the
pattern to which we cut our anticipations of life. It was a season of
Imperialism, the picturesque Imperialism of the earlier Kipling phase,
and we were all of us enthusiasts for the Empire. It was the empire of
the White Man's Burthen in those days; the sordid anti-climax of the
Tariff Reform Movement was still some years ahead of us. It was easier
for us at Harbury to believe then than it has become since, in our own
racial and national and class supremacy. We were the Anglo-Saxons, the
elect of the earth, leading the world in social organization, in science
and economic method. In India and the east more particularly we were the
apostles of even-handed justice, relentless veracity, personal
cleanliness, and modern efficiency. In a spirit of adventurous
benevolence we were spreading those blessings over a reluctant and
occasionally recalcitrant world of people for the most part "colored."
Our success in this had aroused the bitter envy and rivalry of various
continental nations, and particularly of France, Russia, and Germany.
But France had been diverted to North Africa, Russia to Eastern Asia,
and Germany was already the most considered antagonist in our path
towards an empire over the world.
This was the spacious and by no means ignoble project of the later
nineties. Most of us Harbury boys, trained as I had been trained to be
uncritical, saw the national outlook in those terms. We knew little or
nothing, until the fierce wranglings of the Free Traders and Tariff
Reformers a few years later brought it home to us, of the commercial,
financial and squalid side of our relations with the vast congeries of
exploited new territories and subordinated and subjugated populations.
We knew nothing of the social conditions of the mass of people in our
own country. We were blankly ignorant of economics. We knew nothing of
that process of expropriation and the exploitation of labor which is
giving the world the Servile State. The very phrase was twenty years
ahead of us. We believed that an Englishman was a better thing in every
way than any other sort of man, that English literature, science and
philosophy were a shining and unapproachable light to all other peoples,
that our soldiers were better than all other soldiers and our sailors
than all other sailors. Such civilization and enterprise as existed in
Germany for instance we regarded as a shadow, an envious shadow,
following our own; it was still generally believed in those days that
German trade was concerned entirely with the dishonest imitation of our
unapproachable English goods. And as for the United States, well, the
United States though blessed with a strain of English blood, were
nevertheless "out of it," marooned in a continent of their own and--we
had to admit it--corrupt.
Given such ignorance, you know, it wasn't by any means ignoble to be
patriotic, to dream of this propagandist Empire of ours spreading its
great peace and culture, its virtue and its amazing and unprecedented
honesty,--its honesty!--round the world.
§ 2
When I look and try to recover those early intentions of mine I am
astonished at the way in which I took them ready-made from the world
immediately about me. In some way I seem to have stopped looking--if
ever I had begun looking--at the heights and depths above and below that
immediate life. I seem to have regarded these profounder realities no
more during this phase of concentration than a cow in a field regards
the sky. My father's vestments, the Burnmore altar, the Harbury pulpit
and Mr. Siddons, stood between me and the idea of God, so that it needed
years and much bitter disillusionment before I discovered my need of it.
And I was as wanting in subtlety as in depth. We did no logic nor
philosophy at Harbury, and at Oxford it was not so much thought we came
to deal with as a mistranslation and vulgarization of ancient and alien
exercises in thinking. There is no such effective serum against
philosophy as the scholarly decoction of a dead philosopher. The
philosophical teaching of Oxford at the end of the last century was not
so much teaching as a protective inoculation. The stuff was administered
with a mysterious gilding of Greek and reverence, old Hegel's monstrous
web was the ultimate modernity, and Plato, that intellectual
journalist-artist, that bright, restless experimentalist in ideas, was
as it were the God of Wisdom, only a little less omniscient (and on the
whole more of a scholar and a gentleman) than the God of fact....
So I fell back upon the empire in my first attempts to unify my life. I
would serve the empire. That should be my total significance. There was
a Roman touch, I perceive, in this devotion. Just how or where I should
serve the empire I had not as yet determined. At times I thought of the
civil service, in my more ambitious moments I turned my thoughts to
politics. But it was doubtful whether my private expectations made the
last a reasonable possibility.